The Sheep Look Up
Created | Updated Mar 15, 2003
OK. None of us wants to be out here for long. We go for this in one take, right?
...We're rolling, Mike. It's all yours...
...A derelict lot a block away from the courthouse in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. A place that epitomises the decline of a once-great nation. But this day will come to symbolise far more than that. Nuremberg has been chosen by the World as the venue for this trial largely because of the associations of its name.
Following Powell's untimely death, there are no high-office survivors of the regime that will be judged here. It's a hundred years ago this month that the Wall Street Crash marked an earlier slide in America's fortunes. Judge Mbana referred to the centenary in her opening address this morning, and expressed a hope that America and the World will recover their confidence in the 21st Century as they did in the 20th.
She acknowledged too that America's wounds may take longer to heal this time. The disbanding of the Republican Party is only a first step.
Resentment is running very high in this part of the world. The Mayor has just moved to ban newsmen of European extraction from the county. Even as I speak, the hastily-evacuated staff of the French Embassy are en route to Emperor Chirac Airport.
Nowadays, the memory of a string of wars twenty years ago is receding. Few now consider Middle-Eastern aggression to be the Bush regime's greatest crime. The worst excesses were arguably provoked by extreme provocation in the form of wave after wave of terrorist attacks. Even the insane escalation during the last days of Israel appears some way down the charge-sheet here.
Top of that list instead is America's defiance of international initiatives to protect the environment. The mass destruction wrought by institutional corruption around the turn of the Millennium will attract reparations for decades to come. Since the League of Democratic Nations snubbed Ford's and Exxon's applications for indemnity, this once-mighty economy has been drained by the staggering costs of the clean-up.
Journalists don't feel comfortable in this place, and Europeans still less so. Always mistrustful of outsiders, America's current hostility towards its cousins is intimidating and ugly. Judge Mbana's closed today's proceedings with a sympathetic word for the ordinary folk of this land, acknowledging that modern Americans are paying dearly for their erstwhile leaders' sins. In the final analysis, she noted, their suffering adds to that of millions of victims of Bush and his henchmen worldwide.
Perhaps America as well as the Rest of the World will find catharsis through this New Nuremberg. Nobody seeing this town, this state, this nation will doubt that its people need it.
Michael Tetsunabe, for the BBC, in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania...
