Thanks to the latest round of Republican Talking Points, there is a new phrase being bandied about the airwaves and in newspaper quotes. The Democrats' latest attempt to rein in President Bush's eternal commitment of American troops to fight the Iraqi Civil War, is being described by politicians and pundits alike as "death on the installment plan". Say, doesn't that have a nice ring to it, though? Almost sounds like you heard it before? Well, maybe you did....
What an elegant phrase...it makes it sound as if the Democrats in Congress are like evil bankers who are trying to sell the poor unsuspecting president and the American people some kind of loan that will end up ruining them in the long run, with low minimul monthly payments, but which go on forever... "'Death on the Installment Plan'... Not for us! No sir! Remember who we are? We're the Bush Republicans! We don't live beyond our means... we're sensible!... we're old school Conservatives, remember?..."
Well, let's call a spade a spade. There is nothing conservative about the Bush Administration, or those who support or apologize for it. Democrats in Congress who are advocating short term approval of war funds based on improvements on the ground are not acting like predatory lenders. If anything, they are behaving more like prudent lenders, who only lend money to those who have proven themselves to be able to make the deal work for everyone. Doesn't sound like Bush, now, does it?
However, the use of this phrase has another meaning to me, since it is the translated title of a book written in the 1930s by the French author, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, originally titles, "Mort au Credit". Of course, no one today is crediting Celine for the use of his phrase. He died in 1961, but if he were alive today, I think it is safe to say that he would not appreciate having his title pirated by apologists for Bush and Cheney. By the end of his life, Celine knew better than to hitch his wagon to a popular war horse... and Bush and his Iraq "war" is today not favored to come in first in many races... perhaps only to the political graveyard... and of course Arlington Cemetary, for those he has dragged along.
A quick overview of Celine's own involvement in the grotesque politics of World War II France might shed some light on the matter. Celine was a medical doctor and a WW I veteran who had written a couple of entertaining and successful semi-autobiographical novels in the early 1930s. Having been wounded in the trenches in Belgium in '14, Celine never forgot the trauma of combat, and his two early novels reflect this. Both works are infused with a clear disaffection for war and other organized nationalistic bombast. They are, even after translation, masterpieces of pathos, comedy, and linguistic innovation. Celine went on to publish other novels, notably 1957's "Castle to Castle" (original title, D'une Chateau aux l'Autre").
In the late 1930s, Celine, always something of a paranoid, inexplicably began publishing tracts that had an antisemitic flavor. I like to think of this as the period after Celine was recognized as a talented genius, and unfortunately he convinced himself that whatever he wrote would be similarly acclaimed. I have never read these pamphlets, because I could not find them, although I have looked for them over the years, not because I desire to read antisemitic literature, but because I could never fathom how an author who had written two lengthy novels without one iota of anti-Jewish content could suddenly become notorious as a Jew hater and a Nazi collaborator.
But when I hear this phrase repeated, or recited, I should say, by persons who have no other apparent agenda than to save face for all the lame, lousy, foolish hysterical war advocacy and liberal-baiting that they have been doing for the last however many years, it makes me sick. Nothing could be further from the spirit of Celine's writing than the promotion of the Iraq Debacle.