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A Texas Thanksgiving

George W. Bush: America's First Postmodern P resident?
by The PERSPECTIVE Staff

No Choice is Never the Best Choice
Harvard Right to Life Misinforms and Manipulates
by Lizz Thrall and Matt Gline

Divine Intervention
The Bush administration rewards its Evangelical base
by James Honan-Hallock

Voice of a Generation
PERSPECTIVE Interviews Tom Hayden
by Colin Reardon

Partial Truths
Why the Partial-birth Ban is Wholly Wrong.
by Jason Abaluck

Gay Rights Gone AWOL
Harvard chooses ROTC over equal rights
by Ryan Thoreson

Introspective
A Fish By Any Other Name
by ES Fish

Introspective
Reflections from the Fence
by Brad Hershbein

The Back Page
Putting the "Marx" back in MAtRiX
by Patrick Taylor Smith

After a fruitless search for weap-ons of mass destruction, a fu-tile attempt to link Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda, and a reluctant concession that numerous intelligence claims about Iraq were either unreliable or outright bunk, many Americans are beginning to question President Bush's ability to get his facts straight (read: tell the truth). But for anyone who has witnessed this administration's treatment of the scientific community over the last three years, the President's repudiation of reality in Iraq should not have come as a surprise. Whether through its screening of appointments to Federal Scientific Advisory Committees; its suppression of scientific findings regarding the environment and sexual health; or its deliberate interference with important medical research, the Bush Administration has shown a stubborn resistance to any science that contradicts its conservative agenda.

Red flags must have gone up among scientists when, in late 2000, the then president-"elect" told the New York Times that he believed "the jury is still out" on evolution. But, he added, he "doesn't really care about that sort of thing anyway." Less than a year later, the man who has on more than one occasion proclaimed Jesus Christ to be his favorite philosopher showed just how much he doesn't care about science when he put severe limitations on federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells. Paradoxically, the President justified his obstruction of stem-cell research, which holds the potential to discover new treatments for diseases ranging from Parkinson's and Alzheimer's to childhood diabetes, by claiming to protect the "miracle of life." Of course, the one time that ending life is acceptable is in order to satisfy the vengeance of others through the "miracle" of capital punishment. By this logic, Bush must be well on his way to sainthood. Not only has he "protected" the miracle of life by blocking research into treatments for life-threatening illnesses, he also presided over the miracle of capital punishment 152 times as governor of Texas.

If his ban on stem cell research carried strong religious overtones and raised serious doubts about his administration's support for science, then Bush's policy on sexual health has embodied a full departure from scientific reality that positively reeks of moral fundamentalism. Last year, in a move that was eventually retracted due to public backlash, Administration officials modified the National Cancer Institute's website to include a long-debunked myth asserting a link between abortion and increased risks of breast cancer. With a similar truth-denying flair, Bush has helped push through Congress more than $100 million dollars in grants for abstinence-only education programs over the last three years. In 2001, the Administration abandoned the use of performance standards, which had evaluated the efficacy of sex education programs based on the proportion of students who had sex after completing the program and the pregnancy rate among female program participants, instead instituting new standards that polled the "attitudes" of students immediately following completion of the program. The change was made despite the fact that a scientifically-valid study on teenage sexuality had found that "adolescents' sexual beliefs, attitudes, and even intentions are . . . weak proxies for actual behaviors." Apparently, empirical evidence, like evolution, is the sort of thing the president "doesn't really care about."

So what does our president care about? Well, for one thing, condoms. The Bush Administration currently stands accused of pressuring the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Agency for International Development (USAID) to remove content from their websites about the effectiveness of condoms in protecting against STIs and AIDS. Even worse, much of the $15 billion promised by Bush for fighting AIDS worldwide will go not toward fighting AIDS, but toward fighting condoms. In fact, 90 percent of the funds will be available to American-based abstinence-only groups for use in their global campaign against condoms. The "War on Terror" may have a big price tag and a nebulous enemy, but it pales alongside the absurdity of a billion-dollar crusade against latex tubes that prevent life-threatening diseases and unwanted pregnancy.

To be fair, God is not the only one who has commanded George W. Bush to oppose facts. Enter: the oil lobby. In the same way that the Bible tells Bush that stem cell research undermines life while the death penalty protects it, so Exxon-Mobil compels him to deny the existence of global warming and proclaim in the same sentence that "my administration's climate change policy will be science-based." Never mind that there has never been a study free of industry ties that has seriously questioned the existence of global warming. The Bush Administration has armed itself with an arsenal of pseudo-science and gone to war against scientific reality itself. First, Bush stymied the Kyoto Protocol. If that wasn't enough, the Administration effectively ousted the scientist whose research helped raise awareness of global warming from the international panel on the subject, prevented the EPA from including a section on global warming in its annual Draft Report on the Environment, and tried to convince the American people that loosening regulations on CO2 emissions would actually decrease pollution. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Illogic 101...

With all this rejection of truth and construction of alternative realities, Bush might well be said to be America's first postmodern president. Just as Jefferson brought to the White House the ideas of Enlightened objectivity, so Bush embodies the subjectivism necessary to construct a postmodern dialectic and synthesize conflicting narratives. Right? Wrong. Such a claim gives Bush and his coterie of Evangelicals and economic elites (far) too much credit. While the Bush Administration may be ostensibly postmodern in its rejection of science, it certainly is not postmodern in its rejection of every other moral, political, and economic framework other than its own. This worldview, which legitimizes a foreign policy defined by the mantra "with us or against us," is also the basis for the Bush administration's unapologetic denial of science. In the end, what is most troublesome is not the possibility that our leaders are abandoning scientific facts in favor of radical relativism. The real danger-especially if Bush is reelected-is that American leadership will remain so mired in its own absolutism that it becomes divorced from reality itself.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu