If all the soccer moms and baseball dads of this country, with their devout belief in timeless certainties, truly understood the Orwellian nightmare so cavalierly proclaimed here--the utter, arrogant, cold-blooded contempt for constitutional government, democracy, liberty, justice--well, I think we would have already had a new administration in office long before now.In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend—but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.
He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
But of course, the faithful just don't get it. Faith can illuminate, to be sure. It can also blind, and tragically so.
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