 Undaunted
Cowardice
Bill Bonner
The
Daily Reckoning
Sep 13, 2004
The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Courage. It is fleeting, fragile,
extraordinary and lonely. Even in the best of circumstances,
courage is hard to come by. "Don't be economic girlie men!"
says Arnold to those of a pessimistic bent. We include ourselves...
"Fighting is like champagne.
It goes to the head of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool
can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.
I'm talking of something else. And my kind of cowardice is infinitely
worse than if I had run the first time I heard a cannon fired."
-Ashley Wilkes, Gone With the
Wind
Republicans hardly needed to
waste champagne in New York last week. America's many bubbles
had already gone to their heads. They looked out with crossed
eyes and saw a nation of heroes, every one of them getting rich.
Celebrating "A Nation
of Courage," the Grand Ol Party might as well have hosted
a swimsuit "beauty pageant" at an old folks home. At
best, the advertising for the event was mere fantasy. At worst,
it was a lie. Viewers and participants alike smiled and pretended.
But a man with his wits about him felt a little queasy.
If there was a single courageous
fellow at the Republican National Convention, he must have been
kept in the basement. Not a single delegate wondered about even
the most important questions a republic can face: war...
debt... taxes. Instead, all seemed happy to congratulate
each other... and not ask
any questions.
Republicans must have no respect
for courage. They think they can hand it out like cheap bumper
stickers or toss it about like campaign promises. They believe
it can be sponsored by a collection of timorous precinct volunteers
pussyfooting around with funny hats in front of TV cameras.
Even in the best of circumstances,
courage is hard to come by and - like investment profits - almost
never seen in the midst of a crowd. Instead, it is fleeting...
fragile... extraordinary... and
lonely. What makes courage worth celebrating is that it is as
rare and as delightful as a liquor store that still makes home
deliveries. It is uncommon... and
persists only until stamped out by regulators, legislators or
a bullet to the head. The idea of a whole nation of it is preposterous.
It sucks the meaning right out of the word, leaving it as hollow
as a convention delegate's head... as
if we could be a whole nation of geniuses or a whole classroom
of A students, all graded on a curve.
Men are born one by one. They
die one by one. And if they are lucky, somewhere along the way
they find a brief moment of grace and courage... and walk among the gods.
Von Choltitz, the German general
who refused to blow up Paris... Cpl.
Bauman, who refused to murder Jews in Poland... the unknown prison guard who refused
to allow a boy to die without the comfort of a sympathetic hand
- even when the boy was Louis XVII, son of the decapitated king.
Instances of real courage are
infrequent... and most
often involve people who refuse to go along with the winds of
popular opinion. Often, they are small acts of kindness that
never make the papers. But for every one of them, there must
be 10 million sorry souls whimpering empty slogans in some dark
corner of hell.
We read recently about a man
in California who had crashed on an airfield during World War
II. He was pulled from the burning plane by a black airman. Both
went to the hospital with severe burns, went on to their respective
battles and never saw each other again - for 40 years. Then,
again in a local hospital, the man spotted his savior in a wheelchair.
The black man was dying of
cancer. The other man asked if there was anything he could do
to help.
It turned out, there was. The
dying man had an unmarried daughter with a small son that he
took care of. Who would look after them when he was gone? So
the man took mother and child into his home... and has been a grandfather to the boy ever since.
The man will get no medals
for this. But he deserves at least a wink and a nod.
But the Republicans weren't
praising private acts of kindness. They were celebrating a long
series of public acts... mostly
of dereliction, cowardice, shirking, malingering and bogus patriotism.
"If any one of the hundreds
of thousands of CIA, Pentagon, USIA and other security professionals
on the public payroll had the cojones to get close to bin Laden's
group... they never would
have been able to pull off that 9/11 attack," a retired
spook commented after the Twin Towers came down. "No one
wants that kind of job anymore. It's too dangerous. Besides,
you could get diarrhea."
But instead of handing each
of the security chiefs a loaded revolver, along with a strong
hint that they should point it towards their own heads, a whole
new bureaucracy, with hundreds of thousands more security personnel,
has been set up. Bin Laden is still at large.
In Congress, of course, attacks
of courage are as rare as rabies. The U.S. Constitution clearly
gives Congress the responsibility to decide whether or not the
country goes to war... and
to raise the money for it. Instead, the politicos did neither.
By a vote of 98-0 in the Senate... and
420-1 in the House, the people's representatives decided to pass
the buck to the White House.
Even the Democratic candidate
for president - who earned three purple hearts in hot action
in Vietnam - couldn't find the heart or courage to stand up to
the post-9/11 war fever.
Mr. Kerry turned against the
war in Vietnam when the currents of opinion were at his back.
The justification for the War in Iraq is now the same "better
to fight them there than in our own backyard" - but Kerry
judges the wind to be blowing in the other direction. According
to the Democrats' campaign literature, their man has done almost
nothing since the 1960s except vote for more spending...
and he appears to be unable to
say or do anything different now.
Sometimes it takes courage
to go to war. Sometimes it takes courage not to. But it takes
a lot of thinking to figure out the difference. Dying is easier
than thinking, for most people. And for most people, probably
preferable. But a real coward doesn't bother to think...
and lets someone else die. As
near as we can tell, almost no one in either party has had a
single serious thought about the war. And none has had the courage
to ask: What's the war really about? Why is it worth dying for?
What do we hope to gain from it? When will it be over? At what
cost? Who will pay for it? How?
After 9/11, any elected politician,
coach or scoutmaster could have whipped the yahoos into a mood
for war; but it would have taken courage... and thought... to
resist.
Likewise, it would take courage
to face up to America's worsening financial situation.
Sayeth the governor of California:
"There is another way
you can tell you're a Republican. You have faith in free enterprise,
faith in the resourcefulness of the American peopleand faith
in the U.S. economy. To those critics who are so pessimistic
about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!"
This year, both parties have
shown a real genius for propaganda. If you dare to face up to
the realities of the U.S. financial system... you are an "economic girlie man." Real
men just take it as an article of faith that the "resourcefulness
of the American people" will somehow override the laws of
economics...
Except for a few cranks and
Don Quixotes such as Pete Peterson, Ron Paul and Laurence Kotlikoff,
no one in Congress, academia, the administration, the Republican
or Democratic parties, nor in the Federal Reserve has the courage
to face up to any of America's looming debacles.
Americans get poorer by $2
billion per day. Who even mentions it?
The American government has
run up $44 trillion worth of obligations - with no way to pay
for them. Who cares?
Americans now absorb as much
as 80% of the entire world's savings - not to build a profit-making
economy, but merely to maintain current levels of consumption
against a backdrop of slipping real incomes. Who warns them?
American workers now face stiff
competition from 3 billion foreigners who will work harder, longer
and for a fraction of the pay. Unless he tightens his belt, saves
furiously, and learns to produce higher quality goods and services...
the average American is going
to lose ground in the years ahead. Who has the guts to tell him?
U.S. householders owe more
money to more people than ever before in history. A financial
collapse will not just affect rich speculators... instead, like the hyperinflation in
Germany in the early '20s, it will reach down to the bedrock
of American householders... and
upset it badly.
Germany was so unsettled by
the financial calamities of the '20s it welcomed a whole new
team of scoundrels. Italy welcomed Mussolini largely because
the nation was bankrupt. The Argentine generals launched the
Falklands war in order to divert the public from its financial
catastrophes.
And now, the "Nation of
Courage" itself... lumbers
toward its own wussy ruin...
"I don't see how anyone
with an IQ over 70 can be anything but utterly pessimistic about
the long-term outlook for the U.S. economy... " writes Marty Whitman of Third Avenue Funds.
"Everybody's - and I mean everybody's - emphasis is on the
short-term outlook. Nobody, but nobody is focused on solving
real structural problems, organic structural problems that exist."
No. That would take courage,
the one thing the nation most needs and most hasn't got.
Sep 13, 2004
 Bill Bonner
The
Daily Reckoning
Editor's Note:
Bill Bonner is the founder and editor of The Daily Reckoning.
He is also the author, with Addison Wiggin, of the NY Times,
Wall Street Journal and international bestseller: "Financial
Reckoning Day:
Surviving The Soft Depression of The 21st Century" (John
Wiley & Sons).
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Inc Miami USA
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