"Get over it" arrogance

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
”Get over it” arrogance				January 26, 2005

In his inaugural speech last Thursday, President Bush proclaimed to the world the advent of Pax Americana. Whether the world likes it or not, Bush and his nationalistic neocons are out to impose upon it their own brand of freedom and liberty. That most of the world is not buying such malarkey is to be expected.

The reaction of the European press was especially harsh. One astute German commentator summed up Bush’s remarks as constituting a reimposition of the Monroe Doctrine.

Quentin Peel, a columnist for London’s Financial Times, conjectured that “Four years of Bush have simply proved that the US has a blinkered third-class president and an ideologically led second-class administration. An optimist would say that it couldn’t get any worse.”

Or could it? Replying to those at the inaugural festivities who were protesting Bush’s simplistic world view, the president’s fans came back with the even more simplistic “We won. You lost. Get over it.”

Challenged though the president’s sense of history might be, he would be well served to recall that the Romans tried the same stunt when they established their Pax Romana and wound up in a Middle Eastern morass similar to the one in which we now find ourselves in Iraq. They too met their own terroristic nemesis in the form of contrary Palestinian province that kept the Roman army tied in knots.

The Athenians had previously set out to make their world safe for democracy and had their clock cleaned by the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time-democracy Spartans in the Peloponnesian War.

Earlier in the 5^th century B.C., Xerxes the Persian, one of the most prideful bullies ever to cross the Hellespont, invaded Greece with a force of 5 million in great expectations of imposing his will on what he considered a bunch of weak-kneed city states. The Greeks, however, chose their battlegrounds carefully and shamed Xerxes’ forces at the pass at Thermopylae and sent them packing in defeat back to Persia after Greek victories at Salamis and Plataea.

Herodotus, the Greek historian who chronicled the Persian Wars, chalked the defeat of Xerxes up to one thing: hubris. That is, when excessive pride and reliance on great numbers and hence great power cause a leader to fall into the trap of a my-way-or-the-highway brand of political philosophy, he is doomed to fail. There is a counteracting force, called Nemesis, that will eventually bring him and his people to disastrous ends. Furthermore, Nemesis is a tool of the gods, who become understandably irritable when humans assume divine proportions and come to the conclusion that they are infallible and beyond mistakes.

While it would be unreasonable to expect any democratically elected majority not to set and advance its own agenda, no government can reasonably call itself representative if, because of the power it’s been granted, it assumes that it has a monopoly on rectitude or that voices in opposition to its policies must be silenced.

“We won. You lost. Get over it” so reeks of exclusivity and partisanship that the purveyors of such dynamic simplicity automatically place themselves on the road to the corrosive and suicidal ends associated with hubris.

That such doggerel seems now to have become the mantra of some stalwarts in the Republican Party is indeed unfortunate. It is even more unfortunate that the philosophy of exclusion has trickled down from Pennsylvania Avenue to our state legislature and the James City Board of Supervisors.

In a recent flap over the appointment of Jim Kennedy to the county Planning Commission, James City supervisor Jay Harrison hubristically reminded Andy Bradshaw that “There’s a Republican majority on the board. Get over it.” What Bradshaw and board member John McGlennon apparently have to “get over” is the fact that Harrison and his fellow Republicans don’t care to discuss issues of partisanship, private consultations concerning appointments and the dismissal of contrarian points of view from those in the minority.

What political motives lay behind the appointment of Kennedy are open to debate. On the other hand, there is little doubt that he has the experience and intellectual wherewithal to serve capably on the Planning Commission. The suggestion, however, that Bradshaw, because he was brazen enough to propose an alternative candidate, was playing dirty pool is not only misleading, but all too indicative of the “get over it” frame of mind in which the board seems to be mired. .

Rather than compare dissension on the Board of Supervisors, as Harrison did, to the raucous ramblings of the School Board, he might better have considered the more balanced, non-partisan nature of Williamsburg City Council, where allegiance to political dogma tends to be minimized.

That the world’s stage has been home to egocentric and hubristic bullies throughout its history is news to no one. What is worth noting is that dogmatic ideologues bloated to satiety with messianic zeal and overweening pride have always, as Herodotus well noted, come to inglorious ends.

In his determination that moderation and balance always trump extremism, Aristotle no doubt had the concept of Nemesis in mind. Sooner or later the haughtiness and hubris inherent in a Pax Americana or in “You lost. We won. Get over it” must be rectified and a return to a more reasonably balanced approach to governance effected.