Don't Look Back

Seer. n. 1. One that sees. 2. A clairvoyant. 3. A prophet.

From Tiresias to Nostradamus, from Cassandra to Jeane Dixon -- a seer for every age. I'd like to propose adding another name to the long list of prophets: Bob Dylan. On the basis of what, you ask? The following, a stanza from his song "Clothes Line," off the 1967 Basement Tapes:

The next day everybody got up
Seein' if the clothes were dry.
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed,
Mama, of course, she said "Hi!"
"Have you heard the news?" he said, with a grin,
"The Vice President's gone mad!"
"Where?" "Downtown." "When?" "Last night."
"Hmm, say, that's too bad!"
"Well, there's nothin' we can do about it," said the neighbor,
"It's just somethin' we're gonna have to forget."
"Yes, I guess so," said Ma,
Then she asked me if the clothes were still wet.

Thus our latter-day Tiresias anticipates -- by forty years! -- the present moment, the moment wherein the public shrugs its collective shoulders and, taking the advice of the Obama administration, decides to "move forward," to "look ahead, not behind," in other words to just forget about the madness of Dick Cheney.

And how did that madness most forcibly manifest itself? In two contexts: in the treatment of war prisoners held in our detention facilities across the world and in the illegal surveillance of American citizens by the National Security Agency.

Madness, indeed, that, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, Dick Cheney -- a walking allegory of rashness -- rushed to "take the gloves off," to "turn to the dark side," in other words to utilize torture. An understandable misstep taken taken in the heat of the moment, you say? If so, why, despite the fact that no intelligence of value was produced by this coercive interrogation (as any expert on torture could have predicted -- torture being a notoriously unreliable method of eliciting truth), and, despite the fact that the torture the Bush administration authorized, once revealed in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs, incited countless young Arab-Muslim men to fight and kill hundreds of American soldiers -- why, in the face of these hard facts, and against all reason, does Cheney continue to defend this policy today? To defend the manifestly indefensible? Our ex-Vice President, now the world's foremost proponent of torture. Madness.

Again, Dick Cheney, as leader of those implementing the NSA warrantless wiretap program, become Eavesdropper in Chief! Why worry, America, that Uncle Sam is listening in on your phone conversations? That he is perusing your email? That he has set up a peephole camera in your privy? After all, he's doing this to protect you, not violate you! As long as you are doing nothing wrong, what do you care that a benevolent government (a kind of big brother, as it were) is keeping a close eye on you? Ought you not to be grateful?

The above argument is that of an incorrigible peeping tom representing himself as a guardian of public safety and virtue. Insanity.

And yet, again, what is the public response to this madness? "Well, there's nothing we can do about it . . . It's just somethin' we're gonna have to forget." It's embarrassing for America to admit that, for eight years, our country was run by a man who ought to have been fitted for a strait-jacket, whose "undisclosed location" should have been a rubber room. It is particularly embarrassing for the mainstream media, which, rather than admit its error in taking this monomaniac seriously for so long, continues to give both him and his daughter Liz (who appears to have inherited the lunatic gene, is like her father an outrageous, pathological liar) as much air time as they wish.

Yes, that is the most insane thing of all: that not only do we not prosecute Cheney for his many crimes against humanity and the Constitution, but the media continues to be willfully blind to his madness, to take him seriously as a statesman!

Do I exaggerate? On August 31, 2009, the venerable Wall Street Journal, without apparently an ounce of irony, opines that, if the war on terror continues (as it surely will, this "forever war"), then the best man to serve as the next Commander in Chief may well be -- you guessed it -- Richard B. Cheney.

As Mr. Dylan might put it: Mama, spruce up the tricorn hat.