Editors of Newsweek oversaw the making a clever cover layout for their magazine's February 19th issue. A single head — ugly? rearing? — is implied by the respective right and left sides of the faces of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George Bush. It dehisces to reveal a title ("The Hidden War with Iran") and subtitles ("Skirmishes," "Threats," "Missed Signals," "Why the Standoff Could Turn Deadly"). The compound morally equates an American president and a foreign, fascist posturer, and on very sharp terms: these two men will blunder their way towards world's end, and the gentlemen at Newsweek seem to want the newsstand customer to remember that they warned everybody beforehand.
This isn't all fabricated. Armageddon has in both protocol and modest imagination followed a possible train of executive decisions. The original premise, however, was Soviet armor advancing on free Berlin and then Western Europe and then everywhere else, leaving Washington recourse in nuclear retaliation and redoubt in underground shelters. But presidents of the United States were photographed with their Russian counterparts for magazine covers because the Cold War superpowers were a) of comparable strength, and b) talking to one another, even if Moscow's man almost always lied.
Washington corresponds with Tehran via the Swiss, because Iran's nascent Khomeinists showed right away a lack of respect for diplomatic indemnity. It is not about two leaders who are simply rivals, submitting their quarrel to a duel and then summoning obliterative powers beyond comprehension. That version has been insinuated over the last forty years, and Newsweek's portrayal of two madmen is its clearest narration.
Today, halfway through President Bush's second term and in the opening months of a Democratic congressional majority, there are two lefts seen differentiated. The first body of the left includes the heads of Newsweek, entertaining useful and politic extracts of the nihilism of the second, fringe left. Lost on group one, especially in the fusion of George and Mahmoud, is the meaning of the eschatology of the twentieth century's latter radicals.
Capitol Hill reports that Jack Murtha's legislative move against Bush's foreign policy has been marginalized, in part by Democrats. Before any of this happened, though, Murtha was quoted while discussing his plan of subversion before an audience whose organizers are pretty up-front about their interest in etiolating American power while investing other place, like the carnival of the United Nations General Assembly, with transnational authority. The Pennsylvania congressman's excuse is that he is, at least professionally, non compos mentis, but the fundaments of those with whom Murtha was speaking are very real.
The calendar for the postmodern relativist begins around 1945 and solidifies around 1968. The time before that is by necessity prehistory, extraneous, irrelevant; how else can one abrogate tradition if the record through which one traces it isn't effaced? Next: what is said of the Sixties generation by those who live within its displaced chronology. There is a lot of vague attribution of "trying" things and attempting "change," most perceptibly the many acts of open disgust for a culture that tolerates open disgust of it. But the "movement" is one that is described as incomplete. So if the initiation, in the minds of the radicals, half-destroyed The Establishment, then the realization will — ?
A political assessment of the Democratic attempt on presidential control is, in a literal sense, correct: the far left wing of the party's moves to compel American retreat from a military front may deprive the Democrats of the White House and even the retention of Congress. But that falls short of explication, since its corollary invites a question: Why wouldn't they see this? And the answer is perilously close to They can see it, but they aren't concerned about elections. If the Sixties miscreant thinks history and his life to be coterminous, achievement is going to embrace immolation, and it is his face that belongs next to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's, inviting the apocalypse.