Understanding Bushs Power - Road to the Middle Class

KHAJURAHO, India -- The villager leads me onto the concrete roof of his house in the village of Khajuraho, and points. Over there live the Brahmins, over there the warrior caste, and on the edge of town live the Untouchables. Unlike the metro Indians, he’s not ashamed of the caste system. It is just the way things are. He’s proud of the concrete roof he’s built for his house. It’s much cooler than the traditional clay tile roof, so everyone in the village is doing it.

What about Bush, he wondered? I told him that Bush had won a famous victory. Bush is strong man, he agreed, appovingly.

Yes. There’s a culture divide in India too, between the educated elite influenced by government teachers and the BBC World Service and the traditional culture in the village. In the sturdy country, where the roads groan with the traffic of trucks, cars, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, tractors, livestock, and people, things are looking up, and farmers are turning into small businessmen, trading junk to the tourists, running tiny retail establishments, getting ahead. Their children, they report, speak English and Hindi, as well as the local dialect. India may not be shining, as the Hindu Nationalist BJP party suggested, but it is certainly bursting and bustling, feeling its new power and prosperity.

In the countryside, they still understand that life is a struggle, that a strong man means something, that there is no substitute for power. But the metro elites have forgotten about the ubiquity of power. That is why they hate Bush. The newly elected president, with the mandate he never got in the election of 2000, is a man who understands and uses power.

He and his team understand, for instance, that the solution of the Palestinian problem is not about finding the right peace process, but about achieving victory and confirming that victory in a peace agreement. That is something that the BBC World Service with their "sadlys" and their "surelys" just don’t get.

Michel Foucault understood the half of this disconnect from understanding power when he wrote that the ancien regime flaunted its power while the bourgeoisie hid its power behind the faceless walls of the prison and the bland bureaucrat. But the post-bourgeois western elite seems to have forgotten that there was ever a need for power. Just as the Khajuraho villager accepts the caste system as the way things are, the educated elitist experiences the power structure of the welfare state as the natural order.

That is why, back in 2001, the Democrats forgot President Kennedy’s injunction: Don’t get mad, get even.

Instead they riled up their supporters into an orgy of Bush hatred, and then led them to a humiliating defeat at the hands of a man who was supposed to be too stupid to be president. It is hard to imagine the full cost of this strategic mistake. Soldiers who have been recruited, trained, and inspired may not be willing to return for another campaign.

But for Bush and company, everything has paid off. They have a comfortable majority in the Senate, big enough to allow them to pick off enough Democrats to enact their agenda. And the demonstration of Bush as a "strong" man has got to have beneficial results in the macho culture of the Middle East.

It was a famous victory.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Understanding Bush's Power

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