During my high school years, I sang in the church youth choir. Those were the days of the Jesus Freaks, pre-fundamentalist charismatic apolitical fellowship volleyball and singing for the pleasure of salvation days. We frowned on pre-marital sex, but for us that meant petting, and possibly we were against abortion, but I cannot remember a single conversation about it. The times were completely different. To be a fundamentalist then meant you took the Bible seriously on spiritual terms. It was not a declaration of war against the World. It was just another way to say, I'm saved.
And I was saved, and it saved my life, if not my soul. I had a crappy childhood, which did not set me apart too far from the crowd, but it was miserable enough for me. I have no idea where I would have gone, what I would have become. I became a Christian, and I went to Bible study, to youth group, and I sang in the choir. I enjoyed it tremendously.
In the summer before my senior year, August 1974, the choir went on a two-week trip to the Midwest, to Chicago, Rockland (where the youth pastor had served early in his ministry), and Madison. We spent a year raising money for the trip, doing all the traditional church fundraising projects (the only one I remember is the pancake breakfast, but food always has been important to me). The drive from Billings, Montana, to Chicago is a long one, and we left in the evening. We had a big going-away potluck in the church gym, we loaded the bus around 7pm, and I sat at the window waiting to leave. Apart from waiting to start a thousand-mile bus trip across the nothern Great Plains, here is what I remember about sitting in the bus just after 7pm, August 8, 1974:
Richard Nixon resigned as President. Someone must have had a transistor radio, because I remember sitting on the bus in front of the First United Methodist Church in downtown Billings listening to the President announce his resignation. In those days, I was not very political, but I was a Democrat, raised by Democrats, and two years earlier I had stood in the sweltering heat of the airport concourse waiting for George McGovern to arrive (two hours late); I got to shake the Senator's hand, and I had known, on Election Night 1972, that the wrong person was President. A mistake made in 1968 being repeated four years later. I was glad that Nixon was resigning, not even dreaming, as few diid, that he would soon be pardoned by Ford and that justice would be sacrificed to political expediency (the price Ford paid for an office he could not achieve at the ballot box, neither the first nor last time the Presidency was taken illegimately).
Scooter Libby is not going to excape so easily. He not only has nothing to offer in exchange for his freedom, the Bushies are praying he'll be a sufficient scapegoat. They know he's sung to Fitz's grand jury, and they can only hope he's provided nothing tangible to tie in Rove or Cheney. He's a good soldier, and he'll do his years in medium security, and then he'll reap the rewards of his sacrifice (exhibit 1, Charles Colson; exhibit 2, G. Gordon Liddy; both with wealth and re-gained power despite their attempts to use the Constitution for asswipe). Scooter is going up the river, unless he panics and rolls totally on Turd Blossom and the Veep.
We can hope. This is not criminal at the level of the Nixon gang, but it's bad enough. It's crime that deserves a life ended in prison. As with Nixon, these crimes were committed in the serivce of power and war. The outing of Plame was done to push forward the lies and deception needed to promote the Iraq War. Joe Wilson knew this, and he acted to stop it, and the Bushies tried to silence him by attacking his wife. Stupidly, they did this despite knowing their acts were among the most heinous any government official could commit: Revealing the identity of a covert agent. Aka: treason. The ensuing cover-up, like all attempts to hide these kinds of abuses of power, spread the guilt even futher (o god, I can hardly wait until Garry Trudeau gives us Mark Slackmeyer screaming wild-eyed into his microphone "Guilty! Guiilty! Guilty!) until few in the Oval Office can be considered untainted. Maybe Fitz will only be able to indict a few; it's doubtful it'll lead to the ousting of the President, but to see Cheney go down in shame would be welcome.
But the price of our glee, of course, is the same price paid for the original lies: 2,000 dead American soldiers; 15,000 more wounded, many horribly; and perhaps 100,000 or more dead Iraqis. There is no happy ending to this story. Even a full measure of justice, with all the guilty held accountable and punished appropriately, the misery will continue. As I sit here at The Beanery in downtown Corvallis, I see the mother of a young woman who was badly injured in Iraq. Speaking at the Vigil on Wednesday night, this woman told of the pain and the nightmares her daughter continues to suffer. One woman and her daughter, years of pain before them, and can any mount of humiliation suffered by Rove or Cheney attone for that? Can they serve enough years in prison to balance the loss of life?
As I sat in that bus at 7pm, Thursday, August 8, 1974, I knew something momentous was happening. From this vantage point, I believe a seed was planted as I listened to the President resign in disgrace. It took me another ten years to wake up, but I finally began to understand that the only way to counter these abuses of power is to become part of the political process myself. To work for peace daily. To use my skills and energy and time and money to make the world a better place in any way I can. I can believe that others do not see things this way, trapped in their myopic views of power and force and fear. But I do find it amazing that they did not learn the lessons of Watergate. Perhaps, though, there is nothing for them to learn. The insane, of heart and mind, cannot be taught. They can only be healed -- and forgiven.