2 Texans Down Under

Western Australia may be the world hot-spot this week for discussion of the health and viability of democracy in the United States.

Two guests of the Perth Writer’s Festival who present disturbing but dissimilar views of America in an election year have been prominently featured in the media across this nation.

One is Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America and other best-selling books, and the other is Cullen Murphy, author of The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America.

Wolf has outlined ten steps that have characterized fascist dictatorships in the past and says Bush, Chaney, and crew have led the country a long way down those steps and away from democracy.

Murphy, editor-at-large of “Vanity Fair” and former managing editor of “The Atlantic Monthly,” sees much to worry about in the country today: paranoia about immigration, excessive privatization of services traditionally provided by governments, arrogant foreign policy, an over-stretched military, and other facets of Rome before its fall.

He is, however, more optimistic than Wolf about America’s future, and it appears that most Australians are, too.

Any review of legal changes during the current administration offers considerable evidence for Wolf’s pessimism, and in my blog for last January 1, “Delayed, but not, I’m glad to say, detained,” I report on one citizen’s experience of unfairly losing some of the freedom we Americans expect to have, forever amen.

I haven’t yet seen a report of Wolf’s subsequent presentation, but during the first day of the Perth Festival, Murphy stressed his view that America has great capacity for self-critizism and renewal, and one observer, Mark Naglazas, reported that “everyone in the warmly appreciative audience agreed.”

So did two Australian speakers, including Don Watson, one of my favorite Aussie writers, who lauded “the American bedrock philosophies of freedom and individuality” and held out hope for my home country’s health as the end of the Bush era nears.

Wolf isn’t confident a fair election to replace Bush will even happen. If it does and if the result is a Democratic replacement, she worries about the corrupting effects of the arbitrary and un-checked powers now available to any US President.

“Dewy-eyed paens to America” characterized the first day of the festival, though, Naglazas says, and he has a short answer to some logical questions:

“So why all this good feeling about a country waging a war predicated on a lie? Where is all that good old-fashioned America bashing from a crowd who mostly look old enough to have lived through Vietnam? Two words: Barack Obama.”

Australians traded John Howard for Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister and, so far, more than 70 per cent are glad they did. It appears many Australians are counting on the US making a similar trade.