Abstract

STATE OF THE UNION, 2004

The article looks back at past state of the union addresses in the United States as of 2004. In the 1960s and 1970s of the last unlamented century, there was a New York television producer named David Susskind. He was commercially successful; he was also, surprisingly, a man of strong political views which he knew how to present so tactfully that networks were often unaware of just what he was getting away with on air. I do not recall how, or when, we began our "States of the Union" programs. I would follow whoever happened to be President, and I would correct his "real" state of the union with one of my own, improvising from questions that David would prepare. In some ways, looking at past states of the union, it is remarkable how things tend to stay the same. Race-gender wars are always on our overcrowded back burners. There is also--always--a horrendous foreign enemy at hand ready to blow us up in the night out of hatred for our Goodness. Now in the year 2004, when we have ceased to be a nation under law but instead a homeland where the withered Bill of Rights clings to our pseudo-Roman columns, Homeland Security appears to be uniting our secret police into a single sort of Gestapo with dossiers on everyone to prevent us from being terrorized by various implacable Second and Third World enemies. Where there is no known Al Qaeda sort of threat, we create one, as in Iraq. Years later, audiences still want to know who will let them out of the Enron-Pentagon prison with its socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.