The Silence of the Lambs
Written February 2001

Conventional wisdom holds that the exact moment at which Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 election was the instant he gave a calm response to a debate question, "How would you view the death penalty if your wife were raped?" He answered that that he would still oppose it, on principle. What kind of man gives a dispassionate reply to a visceral question like that, the talking heads asked ruefully, leaving no doubt that this bloodless one was not the brave leader of the Free World we would want. The nation nodded in agreement.

Now, Dukakis seems prophetic . more in tune with the country than it realized. Twelve years later, regard the complete 'calm' with which the country has greeted the molestation of its most sacred process.

Predictably, this has been a week of paeans to 'orderly transition' . Bush himself mentioning it in his inaugural address. Like Mr. Dick of David Copperfield, he has an unerring knack of putting his finger on the nub of the matter. To have accomplished a coup without raising any commotion . and without needing any overt enforcement . surely such is a peace deserving of note!

Individuals across the land will continue to wonder if they are alone in being beset by a continuing sense of unreality. From election night to Gore.s capitulation, outrage was the only emotion that provided some assurance that one had not fallen through the Looking Glass. In fine Goebbelsian tradition, George W. Bush & Co. kept speaking of 'recount after recount after recount', all the while blocking even the first count of the votes in question, through a mix of mob action and legal maneuvering which might have won plaudits from Palermo. But was the outraged shared? We watched with a helpless mystification as the news media and the Democratic Party let their untruths pass without challenge. "That's a lie", we waited for them to thunder -- and in vain did we hope. Finally we had the spectacle of Al Gore having to plead for time from the Democratic elite, to fight for what, after all, was ostensibly a common ideal - a genuine electoral outcome.

I grew up in India, a country routinely described in the media as made up of a fatalistic, often quiescent, generally supine, populace, where extraordinary political transgressions might be countenanced with stoic acceptance. I remember, as a student, hearing the judgment of the Supreme Court of India, upholding a retroactive law passed by a rubber-stamp parliament, changing the rules after the election of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had been vacated by a lower court. Then too, a handpicked Chief Justice delivered, abetted by three other cronies, overriding a brave, lone, dissenting judge.

The shocked silence that followed the midnight .constitutional. coup on June 26, 1975, was used by Indira Gandhi to exult: the fact that the country was calm, she claimed, showed that the people were behind her. But India did not go quietly into that night -- censorship had been clamped, and over 100000 people put behind bars.

That was then. But could it happen today . with the Internet and email everywhere? Looking at the recent American elections, one has to conclude that it can and it has, that technology is no automatic friend of democracy; that television and Internet may, in good measure, have helped turn 'people' into 'audiences'. Terms like quiescent, fatalistic, stoic and supine may now apply as much to the American populace as to those of other countries whose pretensions to the democratic spirit are so frequently debunked in the American media with some preening. Continuing prosperity and the appurtenances of modern consumption only seem to have made the people less interested -- let alone involved -- in the political process. How else to explain the lack of participation, the absence of vehement protest, belying the polls even?

Corazon Aquino, Boris Yeltsin and Lech Walesa all made their careers leading popular demonstrations to prevent subversions of democracy in their countries. True, the perpetrators of those heists were more clearly identifiable. Is the need for genuine political leadership any less because the popular mandate was manipulated in solemn robes, inside august buildings, under high-minded etchings? The peace so widely extolled by the political elite, including Al Gore (gracious and cautious to the bitter end) is one born of indifference, helplessness, or both.

So much for the leadership. What about the people? Mahatma Gandhi, who could be presumed to know a thing or two about popular upheaval, foresaw this complacency -- asked if he would advocate civil disobedience against a national government as he did against foreign rule, his reply was an emphatic Yes, "Real (freedom) will come, not by the acquisition of authority by the few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when abused."

Historians of the future will be struck by how smoothly the country rolled along its path through it all. Presently we hear our media pundits and politicians hail this equanimity with words like 'the strength of our democracy', 'bi-partisanship', and 'the closing of ranks'. But then maybe there is something to celebrate too in the resilience of a family, where the battered wife daubs some rouge under her black eye and goes to work as usual.

The true revelations of this election lie not so much in the evidence found as in the evidence missing. As Sherlock Holmes might say, "The dog was silent at the nighttime . that was the curious incident". Or, if you prefer the modern, "The Silence of the Lambs", fits too. At his inaugural, with the trademark squint that accompanies his most acute observations, George W. Bush declared, "Citizens, not spectators". 'Prudently', he had saved this catechism for after the swearing-in. He need scarcely have worried. After fifty-some years of the-news-as-entertainment, the American people have no doubt that what is asked of them is not their views, but their viewership.

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