Bush's Muse
The reaction to President Bush's visionary second inaugural ranged from Sixties folk-rock comparisons to journalistic befuddlement over exactly what policy changes were being proposed. Clearly, the man still isn't being understood.
It didn't seem difficult to me; his language was a blast of American ideals, in the world arena, the very thing that the rest of the world loves us for in the lucid intervals when it doesn't hate us for everything else. It's the "spirit of America" that I've been waiting a lifetime to feel genuinely stir in the sails of our foreign policy. There's still a gap between the talk and the walk, but I believe we're closing it.
If some people can't understand Bush, perhaps they should start with former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Based on what I've been reading, Sharansky's new book, "The Case for Democracy," ought to move to the top of the "required reading" stack, if you're going to talk seriously about current American foreign policy goals.
It's not that Bush had no ideas before he encountered Sharansky. It's more a matter of Bush finding in Sharansky an articulation of the world the way the President sees it.
"This is a book that ... summarizes how I feel," Bush told CNN. The way Sharansky explains it, his book gave Bush a historical context and political theory "for his instinctive feelings." Bush read "The Case for Democracy," days after it was published. He gave a copy to Condoleezza Rice and another to Tony Blair.
Not idly has Sharansky been called Bush's "muse." The connection is, on a personal level, the one that Pope used to define the connection between great poetry and the collective human mind: "What oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd."
Bush brought Sharansky to the White House in November and spent an hour with him in the Oval Office. Dubya has been called many things in his political life, but I bet Sharansky's summation of him was a first: "I told him: 'You are the real dissident. Politicians look at polls -- what is popular, what is not popular. A dissident believes in an idea and goes ahead with it ... even when there are so many people who disagree.' "
Sharansky's views on liberty and freedom are not newfound. He's been talking about them for 20 years. But he said he usually was regarded "as a guy who has spent too much time in a Soviet prison, so he is a bit crazy in the head."
From my limited experience on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the late 1970s, his point is valid. And you don't have to be a deep thinker to comprehend that democratic nations are more stable, and less warlike, than despotic ones, or that a people's sense of freedom is poisonous to extremism.
It didn't seem difficult to me; his language was a blast of American ideals, in the world arena, the very thing that the rest of the world loves us for in the lucid intervals when it doesn't hate us for everything else. It's the "spirit of America" that I've been waiting a lifetime to feel genuinely stir in the sails of our foreign policy. There's still a gap between the talk and the walk, but I believe we're closing it.
If some people can't understand Bush, perhaps they should start with former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Based on what I've been reading, Sharansky's new book, "The Case for Democracy," ought to move to the top of the "required reading" stack, if you're going to talk seriously about current American foreign policy goals.
It's not that Bush had no ideas before he encountered Sharansky. It's more a matter of Bush finding in Sharansky an articulation of the world the way the President sees it.
"This is a book that ... summarizes how I feel," Bush told CNN. The way Sharansky explains it, his book gave Bush a historical context and political theory "for his instinctive feelings." Bush read "The Case for Democracy," days after it was published. He gave a copy to Condoleezza Rice and another to Tony Blair.
Not idly has Sharansky been called Bush's "muse." The connection is, on a personal level, the one that Pope used to define the connection between great poetry and the collective human mind: "What oft was thought but ne'er so well express'd."
Bush brought Sharansky to the White House in November and spent an hour with him in the Oval Office. Dubya has been called many things in his political life, but I bet Sharansky's summation of him was a first: "I told him: 'You are the real dissident. Politicians look at polls -- what is popular, what is not popular. A dissident believes in an idea and goes ahead with it ... even when there are so many people who disagree.' "
Sharansky's views on liberty and freedom are not newfound. He's been talking about them for 20 years. But he said he usually was regarded "as a guy who has spent too much time in a Soviet prison, so he is a bit crazy in the head."
The gist of Sharansky's view is that the "free world" should encourage countries to democratize by linking international standing and aid to their record on human rights and freedom of speech. It was such linkage through the 1975 Helsinki Agreements that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he said.
From my limited experience on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the late 1970s, his point is valid. And you don't have to be a deep thinker to comprehend that democratic nations are more stable, and less warlike, than despotic ones, or that a people's sense of freedom is poisonous to extremism.
He acknowledged Bush faced an uphill battle for democracy in the face of the "realpolitik" that drives foreign policy. His advice to Bush: Ignore the skeptics and stick to your ideals. "Dissidents are always alone. ... You can only hope the logic of history is on your side. That is what happened in the Soviet Union and that is what I hope will happen in the Middle East."
Labels: Natan Sharansky
