Shit Happens:
An Immoralist’s Take on 9/11 in Terms of Self-Organized
Criticality
Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though
it had an underlying truth.
— Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation
Momma used to say that life is like a box of chocolates: you never know
what you’re going to get.
— Forrest Gump (originator of the title phrase of this essay)
Toward a Nieztschean Anthropology
I happen to believe that a Nietzschean anthropology is possible . . . and
that it is one of the few ways out of our current malaise. Such an
anthropology would depart radically from the postmodernists’ fetishism of
texts (from what Pálsson imaginatively calls the textual life of savants), and
instead would adopt Nietzsche’s notion of humanity as a unitary phenomenon
in process of fundamental transformation. Also Sprach Zarathustra sings
with the dialectical tension of the antithetical yet mutually implicative
processes of untergehen and übergehen, of humanity as a dynamical system
always caught up in a going-under and a going-over. “Man is a thing that
will pass”. (But it was fun while it lasted. We really got blasted!)
--- Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay
(on this website)
Moreover, I believe that a rigorous interpretive or postmodern
anthropology would abandon its literary conceits (which, as I have
suggested, are more conceited than literary), would cease its own canonical
prattle of hegemonic discourse, globalization, and commodified identities
(jargon more stupefying even than the Thanksgiving turkey), and pursue a
starved, reckless, take-no-prisoners cultural analysis of the inherent
strangeness of our species.
--- Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An Anthropological Essay
Interpreting 9/11
Nature abhors a vacuum, but not nearly so much, it would appear, as does
culture. When those airliners ploughed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
they unleashed, in addition to that incredible destruction, an avalanche of
interpretations: anyone with breath to speak (and, in truth, a microphone in front of his
face to breath into) or ink/electrons to write immediately began to spew forth a great
torrent of words, a torrent not unlike the gruesome confetti of airborne pages settling
to the ground amidst the choking dust and ruins of the twin towers.
As with other bizarre and deadly events that have burst upon the American
public completely unexpected and almost lacking in precedent – Jonestown, Waco,
Oklahoma City, Heaven’s Gate, Columbine – 9/11 unleashed a mad jumble of
reactions. The mediocrities we anoint as our “policy analysts,” “commentators,” and
“spokespersons” of the conventional political and cultural spectra were caught totally
unprepared. As the endless video loops of the planes hitting the towers and the towers
coming down bored their way into the depths of consciousness of every viewer
caught, like a deer in the headlights, in the glare of the television screen, those
“commentators” realized they had to come up with another endless stream or loop, a
spiraling loop of words to fill in the senseless images of destruction and terror.
Twenty-four hour television news, day after day of newspapers with only one real
story, magazines rushing special issues into production – all that frenzied activity, like
the frenzy of victims and onlookers struggling to escape the scene in lower Manhattan,
struggling to survive, to draw the next breath, however choked with dust and filth it
might be, that frenzy led into the vast yawning maw of the American public’s need to
know, of their need to comprehend the incomprehensible, to fix on a pin this horrid,
unknown little monster that settled, on wings of fire and death, into the heart of the
nation.
With every conceptual and emotional bearing lost or destroyed, with the
gyroscope of common sense smashed and ripped from the control panel, our
“commentators” were like the rest of us, in free fall, in a free f’all, trying desperately
to sustain that endless torrent of words, to keep pace with the mindless, unstopping
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video loop of those planes and their stricken targets. And so their reports, their words,
were all over the place, as uncoordinated and confused as the scene of panic at Ground
Zero.
A day after the attacks Jerry Falwell was on his buddy Pat Robertson’s
cracker-barrel TV show, ranting about pagan abortionists and women’s libbers calling
down God’s wrath on America by their foul, unholy actions. According to Jerry, who
claims to be on a first-name basis with his Maker, the Big Guy figured, hey, things are
really getting out of hand down there! I’ll have to show those abortionists, those
fornicators, those ungodly liberals. But how? Shall I wipe out Los Angeles? Burn
Paris to the ground? Afflict the sinners with a terrible pestilence? Cause the oceans to
boil? Nah. Wait, I know! I’ll take out the World Trade Center! Divine logic! What
could be clearer to an all-knowing, all-powerful God? . . . And there are people,
plenty of people, who believe this absolute crap. After all, look who almost won the
election.
At the other extreme of the political and intellectual spectrum, but with equally
tactless timing, Susan Sontag weighed in, in a hastily compiled New Yorker piece,
with a message curiously similar to Falwell’s: it was our fault.
(www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?010924ta_talk_wtc )
Terrible as they were, the events of 9/11 should not have come as a surprise. America
has become corrupt and evil, not in the eyes of Falwell’s God, but in the all-seeing
intelligence of a superstar critic who can discern the sinister workings of a government
conspiracy in every line of a New York Times article. If we have eyes to see and a
brain to think with, we routinely wallow in guilt, good guilt, well-deserved guilt, the
sickening, consuming rot that gnaws every liberal’s entrails. How could we, meaning
we perceptive, well-intentioned, enlightened sorts, think otherwise? After all, it is
clear that lots and lots of people in the world hate us, and with good reason. American
bombs, land mines, economic embargoes and plain old-fashioned capitalist
exploitation have earned us the enmity of much of the Third World, those dark,
impoverished masses who, on rare occasions, tire of huddling and decide to strike
back. Attack the Great Satan. Hijack the planes. Aim them at the oppressive bifid
penile icon of America & Globalization. We are guilty. We deserved it.
Extreme views, to be sure, but then most views in the wake of 9/11 were
extreme: contortions of an everyday reality stretched well past the breaking point.
George Jr, who prior to the fateful day probably could not spell “Afghanistan” or
locate Kabul on a map, not only learned his geography in a hurry, but discovered a
deep appreciation for Islam as a religion of peace and forbearance. He and his senior
henchmen beat a path to the nearest mosque, where they listened piously to
proclamations by Islamic clergy of their love for peace and brotherhood. George Jr
even chimed in to underscore their sentiments, his Texas ballpark drawl resonating
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strangely in that exotic setting. Nearly simultaneously, Salman Rushdie, who has been
on the receiving end of some of that Islamic peace and forbearance, made the alarming
suggestion that, “Yes, This Is About Islam.”
( www.nytimes.com/2001/11/02/opinion/02RUSH.html )
That Rushdie, he sure knows how to hit a nerve. While George Jr and cohorts were
wrapping themselves in pious encomiums about Islam in preparation for going forth to
murder tens of thousands of Muslims, Rushdie had the bad form and unerring vision
to observe that “Death to the Infidels!” is not just a stock phrase from B-movies, but a
sentiment endorsed, if not always shouted, by a good many of the planet’s one billion
Muslims.
With the pot on a high boil and everyone reaching in with a stick to stir it,
these and many more conflicting interpretations rose to the top, forming an
impenetrable froth in which we all lost our way. It began to seem that Inspector Harry
Callahan was right, in The Dead Pool, when he observed that opinions are like
assholes: everybody’s got one.
The opinions that counted most in the tragedy and its aftermath, of course,
were the most extreme of all. Never mind Falwell, Sontag, Rushdie, that series of
closely argued essays in The New York Review of Books, or those really esoteric
academic interpretations that have begun to appear (Why, I even noticed a piece not so
long ago that tied everything in with Mohammed Atta’s “genital anxiety”!). Never
mind all those; the opinions that really mattered were those of George W. Bush and
Osama bin Laden.
George Jr and Osama: central casting could not have come up with a better
pair of opposing characters. George Jr, a hayseed Goliath as powerful as he is dullwitted; Osama, a mysterious poet-murderer who resembles conventional portraits of
Jesus, only cradling an AK-47 rather than a cross, and speaking in Arabic as flowery
as George Jr’s Texan is coarse. Utterly different characters, yet both seem convinced
to the marrow of the fundamental rightness of their causes. Not since Reagan have we
heard such Bible Belt slogans from the White House: echoing Ron’s obsession with
the “Evil Empire,” George Jr routinely and matter-of-factly refers to the “evildoers.”
He’ll git ’em; he’ll smoke ’em out of their holes. Yay-uh Brother! Shout Hallelujah!
Of course, it’s hard to know just what Osama’s pronouncements are, since
Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld have decided that even his words are a
terrorist threat and banned them from our national airways. Before their odious
censorship began, though, it was pretty clear that Osama’s views are as absolutist as
George Jr’s: America, Zionism, and globalization are all avatars of the Unbeliever, the
Infidel, the Great Satan that humiliates and murders Muslims everywhere. America
and its icons must be destroyed, wherever and whenever possible. Forget rules of
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engagement, forget articles of war, just git ’em, kill ’em all. Or however that
translates into Osama’s classical Arabic.
Although the most bitter of enemies, George Jr and Osama, along with much
of the world in the days following the attacks, appeared to share the view that 9/11
was a momentous, earth-shaking event. One of Bush’s first pronouncements after the
little coward came out of hiding that fateful day was that “the world has changed.” He
then signaled to the American public and particularly to his Pentagon and defenseindustry cronies that we were embarked on “the first war of the 21st Century,” a
global war against a new enemy, terrorism. Osama, in his videotapes, clearly saw the
event as a decisive strike, a culmination of years of more modest Islamist bombings.
For both men, the manifest enormity of the 9/11 attacks presaged correspondingly
momentous dramas that were to follow immediately: a global war against terrorism for
George Jr; a global Islamic jihad against the West for Osama.
Afflicted by the feverish gloom of the weeks following 9/11, most of us were
probably inclined to accept this highly dramatic version of things: the unthinkable had
occurred; the world had changed; the global ante had been upped precipitously;
endemic warfare was about to descend on us.
But what if none of that is true? What if 9/11, for all George Jr’s and Osama’s
dramatic pronouncements, for all the media frenzy, even for all the national paralysis,
what if 9/11 is something that just happened? Not the pivotal unfolding of a grand
strategy, the ultimate coup of an international terrorist conspiracy. And not the tragic
wake-up call for American military and “homeland security” forces to rear up and
take charge of a nation grown lax and soft under eight years of a Democratic
administration. What if 9/11 is none of those things, but instead is one of those
supremely unlikely events that catch us completely off guard, rivet our attention,
perhaps even change a number of things about our lives, but then eventually dissolve
into the mists of history, only to be replaced by other, completely different, completely
unrelated events?
That is precisely what I would suggest. Just as there was no Evil Empire
(another of Ron’s pre-Alzheimer’s delusions, abetted by acting in too many Bmovies), so there is no vast international conspiracy, no global terrorist threat, no
implacable “evildoers,” no “axis of evil,” themselves perhaps largely a product of
George Jr’s James Bond fantasies of going up against SMERSH and SPECTRE,
tinctured by his Masonic Lodge paranoia. And on the Islamist side, there is no Great
Satan, no world-dominating Infidel intent on mounting a modern Crusade to crush the
true believers, none of those dramatic entities conjured up by a super-rich Saudi
playboy-businessman turned visionary-murderer. All these ideological layerings on
the event of 9/11 are just that: residues of our desperate, flailing attempts, in the grip
of the utter confusion of our conflicting emotions of shock, anger, fear, hatred, to find
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relief in a web, largely already spun, of interpretations of uninterpretable chaos, of
answers to the unanswerable questions posed by The Event.
As Eco observes, it is those desperate attempts themselves that make the world
terrible by approaching events as though they were explicable.
It comes down to this: Do we, meaning here primarily we Americans, and
they, meaning here Muslims around the world, choose to accept George Jr’s and
Osama’s versions of 9/11? Do we sign up for George Jr’s hastily concocted war
against global terrorism, and turn a blind eye to his looting the national coffers as he
shovels more and more chips across the table to his murderous cronies in the Pentagon
and CIA? Do we sit by as George Jr and that notorious bigot, John Ashcroft, further
erode civil liberties and individual privacy under the noxious banner of “homeland
security”? And in the other camp, do Muslims around the world feel Osama’s call so
deeply that some wrap their bodies with high explosives and head for a bus stop or
crowded restaurant, where they set off an indescribable carnage? And do their
surviving relatives, friends and neighbors, chafing under the hateful oppression of the
likes of George Jr and that fat old Nazi, Ariel Sharon, then turn out in the streets,
flourishing larger-than-life portraits of the martyrs and celebrating their righteous acts
and their ascent to the Paradise of the Seventy Virgins?
I would urge that we follow neither path, because both start from and lead to
fundamental misunderstandings or, worse, misrepresentations of the nature of human
existence.
To begin to get a sense of what is involved in my proposal it is first necessary
to step back from The Event, and in doing so learn to regard 9/11 as a lens for viewing
the world and not as the already constituted object of our informed vision. We close
our eyes and in our mind’s eye see those planes smashing into the twin towers, again
and again and again. The power and immediacy of that image obscure the questions
that every thinking person must ask when he then opens his eyes: What are those
images connected to? What are the social processes, cultural values, and even
personality traits which lead into and away from The Event? How do those same
social processes, cultural values and personality traits influence our very perception of
that traumatic image, of what appears to be happening right before our eyes? In other
words, what is the nature of the association of before and after, of “cause” and
“effect”? Questioning the what and how of 9/11 in this way is to open an inquiry into
the structure and process of the event’s sociocultural context. It is to begin to conduct
a cultural analysis.
I would suggest that such an inquiry leads us to sweep aside almost all the
interpretations of 9/11 generated to date. George Jr and Osama, Falwell and Sontag,
Peter Jennings and the reactionaries on Fox TV, the flag wavers and the occasional
protestors, nearly all these figures and the reams of documents and miles of videotape
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they’ve produced are beside the point, useless and often pathetic posturings that
obscure the structural and processual realities of the event.
In pursuing the two major questions, the what and how of 9/11, a cultural
analysis – at least the one I conduct here – regards interpretations of the event, not as
alternative answers or explanations, but as themselves aspects of the problem to be
investigated. The what and how, the structural and processual, issues before us lead
into two discrete and traditionally segregated areas of inquiry. In taking up the
structural problem, we are led to consider the nature of values, here writ large as a
confrontation between Good and Evil. And in addressing the processual problem we
must examine the assumptions we bring to how things are connected, the nature of
connectedness, of cause and effect, of before and after.
These two concerns involve dissimilar literatures, seldom combined in a single
essay. In taking up the question of the nature of values, I draw on Nietzsche’s Beyond
Good and Evil and Geneaology of Morals, works cited often enough today but rarely
taken to heart by social commentators and never, to my knowledge, applied to the
events surrounding 9/11. In those works Nietzsche characterized himself and his
position as “immoralist,” as one who rejects conventional values, seeing in them the
very antithesis of what they purportedly represent. The present analysis is immoralist
in that sense: it regards 9/11 as the instrument for a fundamental rethinking and
Nietzsche-like revaluation of the conventional values paraded in the media. In
addressing the processual problem of how we understand the connection between 9/11
and its social context, I utilize work in complexity theory, specifically the centerpiece
of that theory: the concept of self-organized criticality.
As we proceed, I hope to establish that these highly dissimilar literatures,
Nietzsche and complexity theory, come together at a deep level to provide a radically
new understanding of the world.
Before and After, Cause and Effect
When catastrophe strikes, analysts typically blame some rare set of
circumstances or some combination of powerful mechanisms. When a
tremendous earthquake shook San Francisco, geologists traced the cataclysm
to an immense instability along the San Andreas fault. When the stock
market crashed on Black Monday in 1987, economists pointed to the
destabilizing effect of computer trading. When fossil records revealed the
demise of the dinosaurs, paleontologists attributed the extinction to the
impact of a meteorite or the eruption of a volcano. These theories may well
be correct. But systems as large and as complicated as the earth’s crust, the
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stock market and the ecosystem can break down not only under the force of a
mighty blow but also at the drop of a pin. Large interactive systems
perpetually organize themselves to a critical state in which a minor event
starts a chain reaction that can lead to a catastrophe.
— Per Bak and Kan Chen, “Self-Organized Criticality”
Unless one believes that values are somehow preordained, handed down from
on high, one must accept even implicitly that values, like organisms, seasons, and
everything else come and go, enter and leave the world, are born and die, created and
destroyed. Hence the question of connectedness or succession, of before and after.
Our conventional understanding of how events are connected is bound up in
the notion of cause-and-effect. Something happened, some event we can isolate and
readily identify, and that made something else happen, again some event that is clearly
what it is. A boy throws a rock; the rock hits a window; the window breaks.
Mohammed Atta manipulates the controls of an airliner in such-and-such a way; the
airliner impacts the tower; the tower collapses. Like all conventional understandings,
the notion of causality serves us reasonably well in the course of our daily lives; it is in
fact the basis for what we like to think of as our rational, scientific approach to life.
But like all conventional understandings, the notion of causality loses its efficacy and
begins to tear at the seams when it is pressed into service to account for aspects of
events that are part of the rough-and-tumble flow of everyday existence. Why did the
boy throw the rock? Was he aiming at the window? Did his hold on the rock slip as
he released it? Why did Atta board the plane that fateful day?
These questions, questions we regard as the real crux of the matter, are difficult
or impossible to answer within the tidy framework of cause-and-effect association.
And not because they are somehow “psychological,” and therefore less accessible than
the strictly “physical” questions about rocks, windows, and aircraft controls. They are
so difficult to answer because posing them introduces additional elements or agents to
an overly simplified situation. Unless we have contrived an artificial little experiment
and enlisted a boy to hurl a rock at a window set up in a laboratory, the boy throwing
the rock in the everyday world involves a host of other actors and considerations. Did
someone give him the idea to throw the rock? Whose house did the rock hit, and did
the boy have some grievance against that owner? Was the throw part of a larger event,
a game with other boys perhaps, or was the boy acting alone? Questions of this sort of
course mushroom when we shift our attention from the boy to Mohammed Atta.
The real world of boys hurling rocks and men hurling 757s is composed of a
great many individuals taking a great many actions for a great many reasons. It is a
terribly complicated world in which the interaction of ever-changing sets of agents and
events is the prevailing rule. It is, in short, what Bak and Chen, in the essay cited
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above, describe as a complex system. In such a system it is never possible to isolate a
simple cause-and-effect association between two elements that is very interesting. A
single element or event in the system is always influenced by an indeterminate number
of other elements and events, whose degree of influence is itself indeterminate. It is
not that the principle of cause-and-effect is invalid; far from it. It is just that there are
always so many causes with such varied and shifting effects that to single out one or
two for special attention is arbitrary or, and here we come to the nub of things,
politically or culturally motivated.
Whether other cultures put such faith in a mechanistic principle of cause-andeffect is an interesting matter for ethnographers to explore, but it is undeniable that
American culture, with its can-do, hands-on attitude, values that principle greatly. Far
too greatly. When we see something broken, we try to fix it. The first step in fixing it
is to figure out what went wrong, in short, what caused the problem. And the more
evident or spectacular the failure, so, we think, the more evident or spectacular will be
the cause of that failure. Some things, such as cancer, are slow, subversive problems
whose causes are murky, hard to figure out. But a broken bone or a gashed arm are
right there in front of us, and so, we believe, are their causes. Moreover, the greater
the injury, the more dramatic the event, the more blatant the cause.
This is precisely the mind set responsible for the public reaction to 9/11. From
out of nowhere, flames and exploding debris rained down on the heart of the nation.
Such public, visible devastation must have a correspondingly dramatic explanation.
These things don’t just happen. There must be some fiendish genius behind it, a
genius who commands a legion of unbelievably fanatical, evil followers. How else to
explain it? How can such a thing happen?
One thing of which George Jr and his henchmen, along with the media moguls
of New York City, are not guilty: when the unthinkable happened blocks from their
own bases in Washington and Manhattan, they did not turn to complexity theory.
Their patriotic outrage readily seized on an explanatory scheme that was ready-tohand: American common sense, with its unquestioned assumption of linearly scaled
cause-and-effect association. Things happen for a reason, and when big things happen
there must be big reasons behind them. But as Bak and Chen demonstrate in their
masterful essay, that’s simply not how things happen at all. They introduce an entirely
different way of thinking about events, one that might have had a tremendous
influence on American reactions to 9/11, at home and abroad, if only George Jr and
the rest of the Washington and Manhattan power brokers had been better read and,
well, a whole lot smarter.
In fairness to George Jr and crew, though, thinking through this matter
involves more than simply modifying one’s assumptions about causality: it requires
adopting a fundamentally new concept of the nature of a system, in this case, of the
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system that is American society. How can a trivial event trigger a dramatic change in
a large system, whether that system is, in Bak’s and Chen’s examples, the earth’s crust
and the stock market, or, here, American society? Why isn’t cause-and-effect linearly
scaled? Why should the gnat bother the elephant?
The answer complexity theory offers to these difficult questions is remarkably
counterintuitive. We are used to thinking of large-scale, enduring organizations as
stable. After all, in order simply to become an enduring, large-scale organization, a
system by definition has had to get its very involved act together and keep it together
for a long time. That’s what “stable” means. Isn’t it? Well, as it turns out, no. What
Bak and Chen are saying is that any system composed of a considerable number of
elements which have interacted among themselves for an extended period has worked
itself into a state of delicate balance. “Stability” is not the unswerving course a
juggernaught sets through the ocean swells of history (America as a “ship of state”); it
is rather the quavering, step-by-step maneuvers of a high-wire artist attempting to
cross an abyss. The slightest thing – a tiny slip, a gust of wind, a tremor along the
cable – can spell disaster.
In a stunning reversal of common sense, complexity theory proposes that the
“natural” state of any highly organized system is not stability in the conventional
sense, but criticality or, specifically, self-organized criticality. A system’s interacting
elements make a series of accommodations to one another, accommodations that are
always in the nature of a compromise: move just enough this way, but not so much as
to disturb some other relationship extending in another direction. Criticality is very
much a boundary phenomenon, a creature of the periphery. If a system’s internal
accommodations are strong, unambiguous, and rigid, then it simply ossifies, freezing
into a simple crystalline structure that loses its dynamism and interest. Conversely, if
its accommodations are sporadic and ineffective, its elements cease their patterned
interaction and the system dissipates. The “happy medium” of an organized, dynamic
system is thus not particularly happy, for the inherent order of that complex system is
not a placid, established regularity but a state of tension operating at the very edge of
chaos.
When applied to the self-organized system that is American society and to the
event of 9/11, the concept of criticality puts things in a perspective very different from
that promulgated by George Jr and the media moguls. 9/11 was not an intrusive
calamity, a sudden eruption of terrorist-sponsored chaos that threatened a wellestablished, God-fearing, law-abiding, solid-as-a-rock America. That America is a
fiction, an ideological fabrication which its masters and, in truth, most of its citizens
tell themselves to keep a vastly more awful truth at bay. The event of 9/11 was
internal, not intrusive, and an example not of the intervention of foreign “evildoers”
but of the simple if counterintuitive truth that social arrangements are perpetually
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about to come unstuck. Our lives, yours and mine, are strung along a razor’s edge of
circumstance. On either side of that razor’s edge there awaits an abyss, an abyss
where there resides, not Fate, but just one-of-those-things.
(Beyond) Good and Evil
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not
become a monster himself. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss
also looks into you.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
I have said that 9/11 is a lens for viewing the conventional values we bring to
that event and, in the process, for revaluing them in a manner that follows Nietzsche.
The view I present here is that the principal reactions to 9/11, George Jr’s and
Osama’s, and through them the public response of America and the Islamic world, are
hopelessly, obscenely wrong. The millions of American flags plastered on shop doors,
office windows, and car bumpers throughout the country, and the postcard to bannersize photos of Osama sold in kiosks throughout the Muslim world are tokens of a
willful and grotesque refusal to look deeply and searchingly into the abyss of The
Event. When one does conduct such a search, then one discovers ready-made values
that disguise monsters and, just perhaps, a set of radically different values that rise
from the ashes of convention and stereotype.
Why has it been so difficult for social commentators to see this? Forget about
the political dim bulbs and the vacant, tarted-up faces of TV news anchor men and
women – their ilk can only be expected to seize on the most shallow and crude
explanations. When disaster strikes, when the monster peers up out of the abyss, they
intuitively head for Oscar Wilde’s last refuge. But why have much smarter people
dared to go only a little further in examining 9/11? Why have thinkers of Sontag’s
caliber stopped with knee-jerk radicalism, using 9/11 and the U. S. government’s
totalitarian response as just another segue into a familiar critique of American foreign
policy? Why have professional students of society and culture – and here I am
thinking of my own tribe, cultural anthropologists – not plunged into the depths of
cultural analysis which 9/11 demands? At least for this last question, I think I have the
answer.
The core of the problem for cultural analysis is that popular discourse – that of
George Jr and Osama, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings – is steeped in values and valuejudgments. That discourse is mired in convention, in stark stereotypes of good and
evil which are assumed to be self-evident. In confronting the event of 9/11, our
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politicians and media personalities apply those stereotypes unquestioningly; for them
and their constituencies those stereotypes capture what social life is all about. But
cultural anthropology, throughout its brief and unimpressive intellectual history, has
studiously avoided discussing values as values and has maintained a strict silence
regarding those ultimate values, “good” and “evil.” We will soon need to take a close
look at the phenomenon of cowardice and at specific acts of cowardice in this inquiry
into 9/11; but even at this juncture it intrudes. For cultural anthropology, and most
contemporary informed or “intellectual” cultural criticism, has played the part of the
coward.
Cultural anthropologists and their academic cousins have avoided any direct
engagement with values, and with the danger and personal turmoil values carry with
them, through a bizarre combination of segregation and denial. Segregation has been
accomplished through the doctrine of cultural relativism: “they” have their own,
distinctive set of values which make perfect sense within their cultural universe and
which are not subject to “our” Western evaluation of them. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns
of Culture encouraged three generations of cultural anthropologists and the educated
American public to adopt the liberal, self-congratulatory posture of cultural relativism.
In a shameless misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s concepts of Apollinian and
Dionysian, as developed in Homer’s Contest and The Birth of Tragedy, Benedict
introduced the wholesome, feel-good attitude that has dominated professional and
popular thought about other cultures: “they” are miniature, self-contained worlds
whose inhabitants, once “enculturated,” think and behave in a manner entirely
consistent with the standards and beliefs of their fellows. If Zuni are the embodiment
of tranquil solidarity, Kwakuitl of unbounded competitiveness, and Dobuans of
continual paranoia, it is because their respective cultural values have fashioned them
in those ways. What appear extreme behavior and belief from outside one of their
societies are seen to be perfectly explicable and “natural” when put in their proper
social context. It is only we fallible outsiders, meaning Westerners, whose own
cultural precepts place blinders on our vision, who adopt the heinous perspective of
“ethnocentrism” and judge those pristine others by our own corrupt selves.
That classical formulation is now in tatters. “Cultures” were never segregated,
internally consistent complexes of values and beliefs, but were always unstable
arrangements of conflicting values held by diverse assortments of individuals. And in
the seventy years since Benedict’s work appeared, waves of migration, world war,
nation-building and global consumer capitalism have swept away even the vestiges of
those supposed “primitive worlds.” From the standpoint of a searching cultural
analysis, the relativism of Patterns of Culture is an intellectual cop-out: by claiming
that “their” values are right for “them,” however bizarre and repugnant they may seem
12
to “us,” we are spared the difficult but necessary next step of interrogating their values
in terms of our own and, far more critical, our values in terms of theirs.
Postmodernist cultural anthropology, with its signature technique of
“deconstruction.” has carried Benedict’s intellectual cop-out several steps further,
while claiming, of course, that it overturns all her thinking. Under the dubious banner
of “anti-essentialism,” postmodernists dispute the claim that a human group or
“culture” maintains a core set of beliefs and values basic or “essential” to its existence.
Instead, they regard every belief or value as simply a reaction to some other belief or
value, an interpretation of an interpretation, a text commenting on another text.
Postmodernist anthropology thus absolves itself of having to confront even Benedict’s
segregated values by denying their relevance altogether: the urgency and fateful
consequences of values simply drop out of the picture. It is a shame and a scandal for
cultural anthropology, the field whose dual techniques of ethnography and cultural
analysis promised to lay bare the fundamentals of human life. In a world riven by
ethnic hatred and warfare, a world of violence unimaginable when Patterns of Culture
appeared, postmodernist anthropologists have closed ranks, a tiny group of smart,
well-protected academics, modern courtiers really, engaged in private games of hyperreflexive word play while the world seethes in blood.
The niceties of intertextual interpretation would be lost on Mohammed Atta
and his band of fanatics, as they would be on Israeli storm troopers who rain death and
destruction on Palestinian concentration camps from their American-made attack
helicopters and tanks, as they would be on Serb artillery men who shelled civilian
apartment houses in Sarajevo month after month while the world stood by, and as they
would be on the roving gangs of Hutu butchers who hacked to death an average of
10,000 of their Tutsi countrymen every day for ninety days, again while the world
stood by. In all these cases, values were obviously of the utmost importance, a matter
of life and death. Cultural anthropology’s refusal to grapple with them reveals more
than a flawed analysis; it reveals a failure of nerve. It is an act of cowardice.
For the immoralist to pursue a cultural analysis of 9/11, he must first disavow
the heritage of Benedict and the postmodernists, must recognize and avoid the
condition of moral paralysis induced by their cowardice. In doing so, however, he
does not thereby place cowardice beyond the purview of analysis. What does it
matter, after all, whether a few pale and trembling academics draw back from the
searing flames of conflict? There is a larger issue. The immoralist cannot discount a
possible role for cowardice in the unfolding saga of 9/11 because it may well prove
central to the event. That is precisely what I would suggest.
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America the Bullyful: Scale and Perspective
In the hours and days immediately following the attacks, as I sat transfixed
watching non-stop TV coverage, even then, in the rush of emotion, a troubling thought
took root and began to grow: Having been struck a quick succession of stinging blows,
America, its president and its people, was behaving like a coward. A particularly
repugnant sort of coward. America was behaving like a bully.
The bully uses its size and strength to intimidate its smaller and weaker
fellows, and gets used to pushing them around. Gets used to liking it. But the bully’s
obnoxious behavior doesn’t flow from its strength, just the opposite: despite its fearinspiring might, the bully knows itself to be weak inside. It is afraid. And when, on
occasion, one of its victims stands his ground and dares to strike back, the relatively
minor blow he manages to inflict is enough to send the bully squalling home with a
bloodied nose, a blackened eye. George Jr’s blustering pronouncements, once he
came out of hiding that fateful day, were the self-pitying howls of the bully who can
dish it out but can’t take it. How dare they commit these unspeakable acts of terror?
Those evildoers! The world has changed! Boo-hoo-hoo.
What is the bully’s revenge? The bully gets its friends together (assembles a
great “coalition”), arms them to the teeth, and sets out with them in tow to smash the
upstart, to grind him into the dust, to make sure he or his kind never again dares to
fight back. The whole world must rise to its defense; it is a moral imperative,
unquestioned, absolute. Of course, the bully doesn’t call it “revenge,” or address the
obvious question of why such massive force is required to subdue a weak and
scattered resistance. That question doesn’t arise because the enemy has committed the
unforgivable sin: not only has he harmed Americans, and in some number, but he has
attacked them in the very heart of the nation, in its financial towers and its military
bastion. He has sullied everything we stand for, the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. These are the bully’s shrines, its icons of its own perceived greatness:
buildings crammed with cutthroat deal-makers who pursue the all-mighty buck with a
single-mindedness rarely seen on the planet; buildings crammed with foul-tempered
generals, trying to focus through their perpetual alcoholic haze on whom to kill next.
And George Jr stares into the cameras and asks in the unctuous tones of a small-town
preacher, “Why do they hate us so?”. Why, indeed.
The immoralist insists on viewing 9/11 entirely in terms of scale and
perspective, aspects of The Event rarely touched on in all the media uproar. Scale:
Americans died; but how many, and how were those numbers arrived at and modified?
Perspective: how do we weigh the value of a life, and hence the negative value of a
death? I should note at the outset that in pursuing the immoralist’s approach the
cultural analyst or, specifically, cultural anthropologist, adopts the harsh, clinical
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manner of the pathologist. In earlier essays, and later in this one, I air the unhappy
(and unpopular) thought that cultural anthropology, when it is practiced with any
intellectual honesty, has much in common with the medical discipline of pathology.
Practitioners of both attend in intimate detail to a diseased organism, attempting
thereby to determine the precise nature and course of its malignancy. As I said, not a
happy thought, and far from the smile-button certitudes of relativism and the cerebral
silliness of postmodernism. And a thought that goes against the grain: All along
we’ve proceeded as though America had sustained a traumatic injury inflicted by an
outside agency (those evildoers), but what if the news is far worse? What if 9/11 is
actually an early and isolated eruption of a grave internal condition, of a terminal
disease?
The workings of that disease, its symptomatology, manifest themselves in the
matter of scale, as that unfolded in the hours and days following the attacks. Just how
major was the devastation? Americans indeed died, but in numbers reported more in
the manner of hysterical ravings than any sober appraisal. In the first hours following
the attacks on the twin towers, news anchors gave the most alarming estimates of
casualties. I vividly recall Peter Jennings, ashen-faced, in shirt sleeves, his hair hat
barely in place, ominously announcing that some 40,000 people worked in the towers
on any given weekday, and another 10,000 or so were regularly in the subway stations
beneath them. Could the attacks have killed in minutes 50,000 or so Americans?
Roughly the American death toll for the entire Vietnam War? The suggestion, made
right there on network news, was staggering, unthinkable. And yet there was
Jennings, delivering those numbers with a horrified restraint, a grim speculation that
only drove their significance deeper into our minds.
Americans are long accustomed to receiving their news and evaluating its
significance in terms of the “body count” – another revolting NewSpeak contribution
to our language by our recently bombed friends at the Pentagon. How many were
killed in that tornado that hit southern Illinois last night? Only three, you say? Well,
we won’t be hearing much more about that story! Oh, what’s that? Estimates have
just been revised upwards to twenty dead? Well, now that’s more like it! Look for
detailed coverage on CNN. Our initial reaction to events and the considered
assessments which follow are so often tied to this grisly, stupid numbers game. Live
by the sword numbers, die by . . . It is a matter of scale.
In the first hours following the attack, Jennings et al calibrated the scale of
horror at a staggering level: how could all of us viewers not feel we were suddenly
plunged into a nightmare? As it turned out, of course, those reports were grossly
inaccurate speculation. For as the hours wore on and authorities realized that long
streams of victims had escaped the burning towers, choking, blackened, but alive, the
15
numbers, that holy grail of the American conscience, began to come down, and
sharply.
By the time Rudy, the nation’s mayor, began his series of press conferences,
the numbers had dropped into four figures. The scale of horror had to be drastically
recalibrated. In a matter of hours, we were asked to contemplate, to get our bruised
sensibilities around, not carnage on a scale of the entire Vietnam war, but, and the
comparison was made repeatedly by Jennings et al, of Pearl Harbor. Far, far worse
than Pearl Harbor, they reiterated – and almost all civilian deaths! (We shall return,
unhappily, to this matter of civilian vs. military deaths.) The scale shifted, new
numbers called for new touchstones of horror, new analogies to the depraved evil of
Those Others out to destroy America. For a long time, weeks and weeks, the numbers
remained up there, 7,000, 6,000, 5,000 – Pearl Harbor numbers. Then those, too,
began to erode as the debris cooled and authorities continued their grim tabulations,
their official body counts. Four thousand, three thousand: the well-conditioned
American audience, following the body-counters’ results, became unsure as to quite
what was the appropriate level of disbelief and outrage?
Of course no one said it, in fact, hardly anyone dared even think it (how many
immoralists are out there, anyway?), but one began to sense in the air the vaguest
feelings of, well, betrayal and disappointment. When Jennings and the others came on
the air to announce the smaller numbers, they seemed uncomfortable, embarrassed
even, at letting their audiences down, at having been found out in yet another act of
media hype. A part of us, of our collective soul, was relieved that the extent of
suffering had not been so great, but another, larger part resented having been misled
once again by the opinion-makers who, we all know, manipulate not just “facts” but
our very sense of emotional well-being. We know they do it routinely, but we don’t
like having that manipulation thrown in our faces, don’t like being stampeded into
near-hysteria, then being told a few weeks later, “Guess what? We seem to have been
a little off on what we told you earlier.”
As I write, nearly a year after the attacks, the body count from the World Trade
Center has decreased to fewer than 2.800, and Americans find themselves caught in a
whipsaw of emotion: we hadn’t wanted 50,000 people to die horribly in that inferno,
but when we were fed those numbers, conditioned as we were from decades of TVwatching, we experienced a growing ambivalence as the numbers declined drastically.
“Hey, wait a minute! You said . . .” “No, we didn’t really mean that. We thought the
death toll might go that high, but, you understand, in the heat of the moment . . .” The
TV anchors’ accounts began to drift from outrage to apology, making it difficult to
sustain our patriotic fervor. All the little Stars and Stripes fluttering defiantly from the
windows of our pickup trucks and SUVs began to fray, discolor, and, one by one, to
16
disappear. All the flag posters and decals plastered on every surface began to blister
and peel away from the desks and doorways of America.
Thanks to the pillars of our society – the corporations, the media, the
government – the numbers game, the matter of scale, has become so much a part of
our outlook on daily life that we can’t ignore it, often can’t even recognize it. Our
acceptance of their decades-old strategy of playing the numbers game on us has, with
9/11, created an undertow or backlash: we aren’t accustomed to counting down in
situations of national emergency. The Threat to America, to our daily lives and the
sanctity of all things, is always couched in “escalating” (more NewSpeak) numbers:
the Russkies are building more missiles; they’re basing more of the infernal things in
Cuba; Ho Chi Minh (that old evildoer!) is ordering more North Vietnamese regulars to
meddle in the righteous little civil war going on below the 17th parallel. When the
numbers decline precipitously, that shift of scale induces an acute case of vertigo in
the American consciousness, a vertigo that affects our whole orientation to The Event
and, just perhaps, opens the way for the cultural analyst to investigate, or dissect, the
fundamentals of American values.
The difficult matter of perspective is at the heart of any discussion of values:
how do we weigh the value of a life, and hence the negative value of a death? As
we’ve noted, cultural anthropology has contributed little to this fundamental problem,
and has thereby left the door open to every sort of charlatan to fill the nation’s airways
with shallow, doctrinaire pronouncements of what is good and what is evil. And the
charlatans – George Jr and Osama principally among them – have been glad to oblige.
Even a cursory inquiry into the perspectives at work in 9/11 reveal that the
values at issue are far more complex than a simple confrontation of good and evil,
global capitalism and Islam, American democracy and religious fanaticism. While the
antagonists instinctively cloak themselves in these “universal” values, the immoralist
proceeds to lay those values open for inspection, in fact, to lay them out on the
dissecting table. What, to begin with, is the actual source of America’s horror at 9/11?
We have seen that it is not the sheer numbers, for those have been deflated. The most
important aspects here are that American lives were taken by surprise acts of human
violence in a public, even sacred place. Change one or more of those elements and the
horror dissipates. What we are accustomed to thinking of as an unbidden, visceral
reaction of pure emotion (the horror! the horror!) is a complex, conditioned response
that owes everything to a whole set of culturally specific beliefs and practices.
Notable among these last is the recent phenomenon of television saturation of any
event that begins to measure up to the specifications identified above. We don’t watch
history unfolding on TV as much as we witness its fabrication and attend to its
production values.
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Here is the cornerstone of our hallowed set of American values (that fool and
bigot John Ashcroft can go on and on about these, even in doggerel verse): the
production value of human life in and of itself is slight; what matters is that American
lives are at stake. That this crucial perspective shapes our feelings and actions is
beyond dispute. How else do we account for the half-hearted, episodic response by
the American public and media to the genocides committed by the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia and the Hutu in Rwanda? Those systematic and prolonged atrocities
involved the murder of more than a million people in each case, and yet no flags
fluttered from the windows of American cars, no expeditionary force of our Green
Berets and Army Rangers was dispatched, no great coalition of libertarian nations was
assembled to stanch the crazed blood-letting. Instead, the years have passed and Pol
Pot has been allowed to die a peaceful death in his retirement villa in the south of
France, an unrepentant old villain to the end. Couldn’t we have spared a single Cruise
missile to erase that abomination from the face of the earth? Jimmy Carter, Prince of
Peace and King of Wimps, even used the U. S. veto power at the U. N. to prevent the
Khmer Rouge’s delegation from being expelled. Wouldn’t do to rock the diplomatic
boat.
The element of surprise is also critical to our perspective on events. When a
madman appears out of the blue at a school or synagogue and guns down a dozen
people with his NRA gun show special, there is a great deal of public agonizing to go
with the intense media coverage. The litany begins immediately: What’s wrong with
our schools/families/cub scout troops (take your pick) that something so awful could
occur? Where did we go wrong? How could this have possibly happened in our great
society? And yet it is not uncommon, and barely remarked on at a national level, if a
dozen children and young people are gunned down on the streets of Los Angeles over
a period of a month or two. The individual acts are a surprise, certainly, but their
statistical regularity is not; we already expect that sort of routine atrocity and so
discount it in our moral calculus of events. Bill Maher captures this perspectival
element of American values perfectly in one of his HBO stand-up routines: “And then
there’s Memorial Day coming up, and we hear some government agency announce
that 500 or so people will probably die in accidents over the weekend. And we think,
‘Yeah, that sounds about right.’”
These last two examples also illustrate the importance of the element of a
public or sacred place as the site of the event. The streets of south-central L. A. are
certainly public, but are not a place where the great majority of Americans can
visualize themselves spending a lot of time. But all Americans have first-hand
experiences of schools, post offices, the workplace, and religious institutions, and tend
to regard them as somehow inviolate, as deserving of a hands-off approach where
mayhem is contemplated. This completely irrational supposition deserves extensive
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analysis in its own right. Erving Goffman has made a brilliant study of this aspect of
American values in Relations in Public, where he emphasizes the remarkable extent to
which we large, powerful animals are able to curtail aggression in public places. The
madman’s attack on people assembled in a public building violates the unspoken
taboo we observe in close interaction with our fellows and thereby triggers our horrorstruck reaction.
9/11 provides a tragic confirmation of Goffman’s thesis. The most alarming
aspect of the attacks was not their targets – after all, the World Trade Center and
Pentagon were “naturals” for terrorists – but their weapons: hijacked domestic
airliners. Apart from elevators in high rise buildings, perhaps the most tabooed public
space in American society is the airliner. Crammed together for hours at a stretch and
with no avenue of escape, its passengers are bound by the most strict, if unspoken
rules of deportment. Foremost among those rules is to avoid giving any indication that
you might be inclined to violence. And though we never puzzle it through, that taboo
extends to the airliner itself. When the hijacker jumps up from his seat and begins
yelling and brandishing a weapon, he violates the principal taboo – and in the process
effectively paralyzes his fellow passengers, who cannot let themselves believe that
public order has been breached so egregiously. But when the hijacker then proceeds
to turn the plane itself into an instrument of aggression, the effects of that ultimate
violation of public order are, as we know, devastating to the psyche.
Consider for a moment a different scenario. Mohammed Atta and his gang
manage to acquire two ocean freighters and secrete aboard them several surface-tosurface missiles. Perhaps a few of Saddam’s notorious old SCUDs, though it would
be laughable to think that those relics could be targeted precisely enough to hit a
particular building. Atta and his crew position the freighters a couple of miles
offshore of Manhattan and the Maryland coast. Then, on the morning of September
11, they launch their cargo. The effect of the missile strikes is identical to that
produced by the airliners: the towers collapse; the Pentagon is severely damaged. To
be sure, these hypothetical attacks are calamities of unprecedented magnitude. But
without the element of the hijacked airliners, do those disasters quite equal in public
horror and outrage what actually occurred on that day? I think not, and for the reason
that the hypothetical attacks are in fact much more probable, and much more
explicable, than the actual attacks. After decades of Cold War and Star Wars
indoctrination, the American public is conditioned to the idea that enemy missiles may
rain down on us at any time. Being conditioned, we have tucked that particular
nightmare away in a place in our collective psyche we reserve for the host of other
nightmares that accompany contemporary existence. But our reservoir of terror
contained nothing like the particular nightmare Osama and Atta devised; we were
emotionally unprepared and reacted accordingly.
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Horror Stories
The quality of “naturalness” rounds out this inquiry into the perspectival aspect
of American values. Statistical regularity and routine of the sort discussed above
invest even social events with something of the inevitability we associate with natural
occurrences. Unless we are personally affected by a Memorial Day traffic accident,
Maher’s comment captures exactly our detachment from individual violent events and
our willingness to regard those events as part of the natural order of things: You say
500 people will meet a violent death this weekend? Yeah, that sounds about right.
When disaster strikes through an actual occurrence in nature, from a flood,
earthquake, tornado, or hurricane, even the element of surprise is not enough to place
the disaster on the same level of public trauma as 9/11. And if the victims of natural
disaster are not American, if the unthinkable strikes far from the prying eyes of even
CNN, then our level of involvement becomes minimal. Such is the importance of
perspective in our supposedly uniform and uncomplicated value system.
Take earthquakes, for example. Which major earthquakes come to mind?
Which do you know anything at all about? Faced with these questions, the great
majority of Americans immediately think “California,” and many of those (certainly if
they happen to live in that state) recall the devastating Northridge quake in the Los
Angeles area and the notorious “World Series quake” which disrupted that famous
game and threatened to destroy at least one of San Francisco’s landmark bridges.
They were indeed terrible, and terrifying, events, but unless you were an unfortunate
home owner, landlord, industrialist, or, worst of all, insurance agent in those locations,
the chances are very good that you were not severely affected. For how many lives
did those notorious “killer quakes” extinguish? Like the years of their occurrence
(1994 and 1989), the death tolls of the two quakes have slipped from memory, long
since lost in the blizzard of horrifying facts generated daily by an obliging and
ghoulish media. Yet considering the phenomenal devastation, considering block-afterblock of collapsed buildings and miles of twisted roads, we remember, or think we
should remember, that the death tolls were alarmingly high. The numbers are 57
(Northridge) and 63 – 68 (San Francisco). One hundred twenty-five, maximum.
Hundreds of hours of TV coverage, hundreds of pages of newspaper articles, hundreds
of hours of official “fact-finding” investigations, all over those 125 deaths. American
lives are indeed a precious commodity!
And American collective memory is indeed an incredibly selective device. In
describing that faculty, we should actually refer to an American “collective amnesia,”
so quickly and thoroughly are even the most dramatic events expunged from memory.
If pressed, the man in the street might recall that decades ago (the sixties? the
20
seventies?) there was an enormous earthquake in Alaska. Anchorage, perhaps? But
Alaska, state or not, is a distant wilderness; who could have been around to get killed,
anyway? As it happens, and here even the most astute must refer to the U. S.
Geological Survey or some other official source for the details, the death toll of the
1964 Anchorage quake was exactly that of the combined Northridge and San
Francisco quakes: 125. Even so, confronted by a single killer quake whose mortal
damage equaled the combined fatalities of the two worst earthquakes most of us can
recall, we remain quite unperturbed. It was all so far away and so long ago.
It is about at this point, I submit, that American “collective memory,”
“collective amnesia,” or whatever we want to call it, fades away to the vanishing
point. We could stop a thousand people on the streets of American cities and towns
and glean only the most jumbled, anecdotal reports of other major earthquakes. “I
think there was a bad one in Turkey a few years ago.” “Didn’t Iran have a big quake
sometime after that hostage crisis thing?” And so on.
Wait a minute, though. Aren’t we still talking about human life, and the
tremendous value we deeply caring Americans place on human life? And in the case
of the Anchorage quake, aren’t we talking about American lives that were lost in that
disaster? But American or not, isn’t it one of our fundamental values that we regard
all human life as precious, even sacred (hence George Jr’s and John Ashcroft’s
revulsion at the whole topic of human cloning)? Does the memory of a hundred-plus
lives tragically snuffed out just evaporate from our sensitive collective conscience?
The immoralist’s response here can only be deeply cynical (which, remember,
translates as clinical). The wonder is not that so much has been forgotten; it is that
even a tiny fraction of the American public remembers as much as it does about those
long ago or far away horrors. To begin to grasp the significance of this observation,
when you’re conducting those man-in-the-street interviews about major earthquakes
and your respondents have finished giving their fumbling answers, ask them one last
question: What about Tangshan?
The response you’ll get to that question, virtually without exception, will be
looks of incomprehension. What or where or who is “Tangshan”? The response you
will almost certainly not get would go something like this:
In the pre-dawn hours of July 28, 1976 an earthquake of approximately 8.0
magnitude struck west of the city of Tangshan, an industrial center of about one
million people. The quake occurred within a densely populated triangle made up of
Tangshan to the east, Beijing about one hundred miles to the northwest, and Tientsin,
the third largest city in the Republic of China, about fifty miles to the southeast of
Tangshan. Seismic stations in the vicinity had reported a heightened level of activity
in the preceding weeks, which was not particularly unusual since that area near the
Gulf of China is an active site in the subduction zone of the Pacific plate. And seismic
21
prediction, as anyone knows who has listened over the years to the southern California
dialect of seismobabble, is worse than useless: it makes you crazy with the dread of
something awful that will happen sometime, somewhere. But it did happen in
Tangshan, and it was over very quickly. Even an 8.0 quake lasts less than a minute.
Of course, there are the aftershocks, which can be deadly themselves. In the main,
though, one minute separates the victim from lying at home in a deep sleep and being
crushed in a lethal chaos of falling mortar and timber, a minute during which the very
ground beneath him heaves like an angry wave. When it was over Tangshan, that city
of one million, was reduced to rubble. Observers later reported that only a handful of
buildings remained standing. A handful, out of thousands. Everything else was gone.
How many people died as a result of that minute of chaos? What, we body counters
want to know, was the death toll?
The answer to that question would not satisfy the legions of official body
counters who have been busy for months after the World Trade Center attacks, busy
tabulating and cross-checking death certificates, busy interviewing family and friends,
busy setting up an elaborate administration to divvy up the millions of dollars of
donations that have poured in to help heal the wounds of the nation itself, of America,
in this time of its gravest crisis. The answer to that question is that nobody knows
how many people died that early morning in Tangshan.
The Chinese authorities were reluctant to release any information at all for
weeks after the event, were reluctant even to admit a major disaster had occurred. In
their wisdom, these leaders, the murderous old men in Beijing who would later order
the massacre at Tiananmen Square, refused humanitarian aid and technical assistance
from other countries. In truth, they or their subordinates were probably overwhelmed
at the devastation they found when the first squads of rescuers and soldiers arrived.
Still, the authorities, the commissars, felt this chaos reflected somehow, not just on
their administrative competence, but on the very legitimacy of their political system.
Marxist-Leninist doctrine is strictly determinist and unilineal; it does not like to
acknowledge a world in which things just happen. There is supposed to be a scheme,
a direction to History, known to the enlightened, to the Party. Old Karl, sitting in the
British Museum, itching his carbuncles, liked to pen masterful essays on the meaning
of historical events. Specific, identifiable causes were at work in processes of change,
and Karl was just the person to sort them out, to hold them up on a pin for the world to
see. Old Karl would not have liked to contemplate a world in which shit just happens.
Old Karl would not have been a fan of complexity theory. Old Karl would not have
liked to hear the news coming out of Tangshan, a hundred miles from the glorious
capital of the People’s Republic of China.
After months of silence, amid mounting speculation by geologists and aid
organizations around the world, the Chinese authorities released a provisional death
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toll: 240,000 – 250,000. A quarter of a million human lives, most of them snuffed out
in a minute. By the time the Chinese authorities came forward with this figure,
however, the scientific world and a few media sources were trying to come to terms
with even more alarming figures. By then, the quarter million tabulation seemed to be
what it was: a ludicrous and calloused attempt by the Chinese authorities to conceal
the extent of the devastation. The expert consensus that took shape in the West during
those months was that the death toll had been in the range of 500,000 to 650,000. Not
a quarter million human lives, but half a million. Or more, a lot more.
After all those months had passed, though, it was old news in the U. S. and
other western countries. Particularly since there were only a few grainy photos of the
disaster released through the China News Agency, it was impossible to fashion it (and
“fashion” is the apposite term here) into a media event. Without that coverage and
with foreign news crews barred from the scene, there was not the opportunity for Dan
Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings, outfitted in their tailored safari jackets, to
speak to us in grave terms of the tragedy against a background of collapsed buildings.
Scale and perspective. These factors combined to erase the unprecedented
catastrophe of Tangshan from the American conscience. The fact of that erasure,
however, forever puts the lie to the sanctimonious posture our politicians and other
public figures adopt regarding the fundamental value of human life. The next time
you see George Jr’s smirking face on TV proclaiming his reverence for human life and
his deep sense of loss over the 2,800 or so dead at the World Trade Center, look
deeper into the abyss that yawns around him and you may discern the restless stirrings
of half a million ghosts long since forgotten by this great humanitarian. The smirking
face, those phantoms, the moral vertigo that scene induces in any truly thinking,
feeling person – doesn’t it make you want to puke?
Regrettably, the immoralist cannot allow himself the indulgence of that
unbidden, natural reaction. In his pathologist’s dissection room, the nausea he feels
deep within him has become an insupportable luxury, a conceit for those who would
rather parade their supposed virtue than get to the core of the rot that infects them and
their society. And there are always more cases, more stricken beings, waiting their
turn at the table. There is, for example, Mazar-e-Sharif.
Earthquakes in China, floods in Bangladesh, mud slides in the Andes – all
these disasters and too many others have taken lives by the tens and hundreds of
thousands. And while we Americans who cherish human life above all else may find
it embarrassing to have our neglect, our willful amnesia, thrown in our faces in these
cases, we might retort that those are, after all, natural disasters. For all the horrifying
loss of life, no human agency was directly involved. We were all spectators before the
wrath of Nature (or God, if you are twisted enough to believe that a Christian God
presided over Tangshan). We reserve our solicitude and our capacity for moral
23
outrage for those events that are caused by people acting in unconscionable, horrible
ways. As believers in Good and Evil (and, yes, that stinking old corpse also waits its
turn on the dissection table), we may regret the loss of life in natural disasters, but we
abhor and oppose, with every red-white-and-blue fiber of our being, the calculated,
cold-blooded taking of human life. We despise the Evildoers. Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not kill. Mazar-e-Sharif.
Until George Jr and Donald Rumsfeld launched their Holy Crusade against the
Evildoers in Afghanistan, Mazar-e-Sharif was one of those utterly unknown places,
the back of the beyond, so remote and inconsequential that the producers of Survivor
would not have given it a second look as a location for their next series. That
unknown place, a city of around two hundred thousand, burst upon the American
public with the discovery of the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, following
the bloody revolt of Taliban prisoners and its bloodier suppression by our noble allies,
the troops of the Northern Alliance, three months after 9/11. The shock that an
American youth nurtured at the very bosom of the nation – Marin County, California –
would turn his back on his family and country to become an Islamist soldier trained by
the Chief Evildoer himself, Osama bin Laden, was compounded manyfold by the
death during that prison revolt of the CIA operative Mike Spann.
The morality play/palsy built around this bizarre juxtaposition of characters
soon dominated the media. It was just the sort of personal narrative they and their
audiences thrived on. First CNN showed us The Prison Interview: there was Spann,
young, clean-cut, corn-fed healthy, crouched on a blanket thrown on the ground,
interrogating Walker, emaciated, disheveled, shackled, a Charles Manson stand-in
kneeling before his CIA captor. Next CNN brought us scenes of The Prison Uprising,
a suicidal last-ditch stand by captured Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Then, news of
The Death. The valiant young CIA officer had been killed by those fanatics, and who
knew what part Walker himself might have played in this heinous deed? A few days
later, in the tasteless protocol of American television, we were taken to Spann’s home
town in Arkansas: ribbons wound around everything in sight; an entire town
consumed by grief for its fallen son; the distraught family; the mayor’s impassioned
comments about Spann’s patriotism and Walker’s treachery. The viewing public was
incensed by the stark drama of it all. Spann the Good, who died for his country in an
alien, God-forsaken place (not at all like Arkansas), versus Walker the Evil, who
renounced his family and home and betrayed his country. Then cut to John Ashcroft,
our moral champion, anointed as such at Bob Jones University, declaring in ominous
tones his views on the traitor and Walker’s just deserts. The nation was caught up in
this made-for-TV drama. The government would see that justice was done. CNN’s
Nielsen ratings climbed back toward the dizzying heights reached during the days
following 9/11.
24
For the American public, this morality play effectively ends the story of
Mazar-e-Sharif; that city of two hundred thousand is relegated to its previous
obscurity. Walker the Evil is transported, in the cruelest fashion, his wounded body
lashed head to foot to a stretcher with duct tape, back to the United States. The
remains of Spann the Good are returned with the greatest reverence to his home and
family, where a hero’s funeral awaits. Back in the U. S., away from the godless
horrors of Mazar-e-Sharif, we expect that events will take a less cathartic turn. The
total absence of law and order in Mazar-e-Sharif and the extreme actions that
encouraged will, we are depressingly confident, give way to the overprotectiveness of
the American legal system. While we may yearn for the turncoat to get what’s coming
to him, we are all too familiar with the role that wealthy parents and their high-priced
lawyers inevitably play in such situations. We are still digesting the bitter pill of the
O. J. trial. And so the intense violence of those ten or twelve days in Mazar-e-Sharif
yields to months of tedium and unending legal hijinks, during which our righteous
anger over a traitor’s complicity in the death of a noble son gives way to our heartsick
feeling that something is deeply wrong right here at home.
Right here at home. The phrase captures exactly the habitual turn of the
American mind and conscience away from events in foreign lands to matters
immediately at hand. It is the narcissism of empire: what happens there really has
meaning only to the extent that it affects life right here in America. It always has to be
about us. Mazar-e-Sharif, that city of two hundred thousand people, becomes a mere
stage setting for what really matters, the saga of Good versus Evil enacted by Spann
and Walker (the city may as well have been featured on the next Survivor series, after
all).
The immoralist, however, his cynical/clinical eye trained on the entire picture,
on American culture and Afghan society, refuses to regard Mazar-e-Sharif as just
another sound stage thrown up on a lot at Universal Studios to provide the setting
necessary for our action heroes – Arnie, Sly, Bruce, Spann, Walker – to strut their
stuff before an audience of millions. Having previously conducted detailed
examinations of America’s imperial narcissism, the immoralist brushes aside the
pathetic little melodrama of CNN’s Walker-Spann fable, regarding it as the surfeited
diversion of a silly, corrupt people headed, like all empires before them, for the trash
heap of history (and, yes, just plain old “history,” not old Karl’s “History”).
Mazar-e-Sharif. What could possibly interest us about the place itself, apart
from its use as a stage for American melodrama? As Dan, Tom and Peter explained it
to us between laxative commercials, Mazar-e-Sharif was the most provincial of
provincial capitals, a depressed and depressing place in the extreme north of
Afghanistan, only 35 miles from the Uzbekistan border (and Uzbekistan’s location and
spelling were other questions on the world geography quiz George Jr would have
25
flunked pre-9/11). Why, it was the merest historical accident, a relic of 19th century
conflicts between imperial Britain and imperial Russia, that Mazar-e-Sharif became
part of the gerrymandered nation of “Afghanistan” at all. Most of its residents were
ethnic Mongols of Central Asian origin, Hazaras, easily distinguished (and easily
discriminated against) by members of Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group, the
Pashtuns, speakers of an Indo-European language and not the Turkic language of the
Hazaras. To round out the improbable diversity of this backwater region, the Hazaras
were Shiite Muslims, while the Pashtuns, and especially their notorious political
movement, the Taliban, were fervent Sunni Muslims.
Diversity, whether ethnic, linguistic, or religious, does not sit well with
fanaticism. When all three types of diversity were present and when fanatics as
extreme as the Taliban were busily shoring up their Islamist regime, the “stage” of
Mazar-e-Sharif was set for disasters infinitely more horrible than the Walker-Spann
melodrama.
In 1997 and 1998 the American public heard next to nothing of Mazar-eSharif; to revert to our man-in-the-street yardstick, not one American in a thousand
could have told us who, what, or where “Mazar-e-Sharif” was. The vindictive old
fools in the Congressional Republican leadership were too busy attending to Bill
Clinton’s impeachment, happily paralyzing the entire United States government to
punish a furtive blow job in the Oval Office. Even when Clinton took hasty aim at
Osama bin Laden with a couple of Cruise missiles after the embassy bombings in
Kenya and Sudan, our Republican statesmen were unanimous in their denunciation of
his blatant attempt to deflect public attention from what really mattered to the Free
World: that blow job. Dan, Tom and Peter were all over that. So curious were they
about the fabled blue dress, they had no air time to inform their viewing audience of
incidental reports in 1998 by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and
by the independent organization, Human Rights Watch. Of those reports we heard
nothing.
Those reports documented two related atrocities committed in Mazar-e-Sharif
in 1997 and 1998, each involving thousands of victims. But not American victims.
Not Spann and Walker, the living embodiments of Good and Evil. And hence not
really news. Scale and perspective. The first atrocity was perpetrated in May 1997 by
the Hazara militia, Hezb-i-Wahdat, against some two thousand Taliban fighters. It
was the kind of warlord violence we have grown accustomed to hearing about in news
of Afghanistan: greedy, violent men forever fighting one another with arms and
slogans supplied by the United States, Russia, Iran, Pakistan – any world or regional
power will do and is happy to oblige. The second atrocity occurred in August 1998,
when the Taliban took dreadful revenge on Hazara fighters and civilians in the streets
of Mazar-e-Sharif.
26
Accounts of the first massacre are vague, owing in part to the fact that they
conflict with all the subsequent “spin” on events in Afghanistan, which depict the
Taliban as the ultimate bad guys, the Evildoers. But in May 1997 Taliban fighters
were the victims of some sort of treachery on the part of their old rivals, the Hazara
militia. The predominant version is that one of the Hazara leaders negotiated a
peaceful surrender of Mazar-e-Sharif to a Taliban leader whose forces were laying
siege to the city. On the basis of that understanding between warlords, some 2000
Taliban fighters entered the city as an occupation force. It was a trap. Once in the city
Hazara snipers, firing from prepared positions, cut them down. When the slaughter
was over, some five hundred Taliban survivors were rounded up and shut in metal
storage sheds, crammed together like cattle. They were left there. The May sun beat
down on the closed shed; the Taliban suffocated and died. By some accounts this
event is the origin of what later became a signature of later atrocities committed by the
Taliban: “death by container.” The Hazara, of course, later became identified in Dan,
Tom and Peter’s reports as part of the “Northern Alliance” and its U. S.-sponsored
campaign to retake the strategic city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The television cameras
scrubbed these butchers clean of the blood of thousands of human beings.
Predictably, the Taliban were not so forgiving. By August 1998 their forces in
the North were stronger, aided in great measure by equipment and even military
personnel from Pakistan, our soon-to-be ally and champion in the war on terrorism.
The Sunday Times has pieced together an account of the nightmare that
engulfed Mazar-e-Sharif when the Taliban entered the city from the west on
the morning of August 8. They were intent on avenging a massacre of some
2,000 of their own men in 1997, when the Hazaras and other fighters turned
against them. There ensued what one witness called “a frenzy” of vengeance
killing. The Taliban fighters swept through the city, firing heavy machine
guns mounted on pickup trucks. One man described how the streets were
covered with bodies and blood. The Taliban, he said, forbade anyone to bury
the corpses for six days. . . Men not murdered on the spot were “stuffed into
containers after being badly beaten,” said another witness. He saw the doors
opened on a container after all the men inside had died from suffocation [the
corpses were blackened from the intense heat, partially roasted alive]. He
also testified that some containers were filled with children who were taken
to an unknown location after their parents had been killed. Human Rights
Watch has obtained gruesome confirmation of the Taliban’s penchant for
death by container. It quotes a man who was detained by the militia and saw
container trucks filled with victims leaving the Mazar-e-Sharif jail several
times every day. Once he watched as the Taliban opened the container doors
27
to find three prisoners alive and about 300 dead. The Taliban drove the
trucks to a desert site known as Dasht-e-Leili and ordered porters to dump the
cargo of corpses in the sand. (“U. N. Report Details Taliban Massacres,” by
Michael Sheridan. www.afghan-info.com/research–articles/no–mercy.htm)
Other witnesses confirm that children not killed were often grotesquely
mutilated, with both hands hacked off by these glorious defenders of Islam.
And how many died, we ghoulish American body-counters want to know?
During that week in August the U. N. and Human Rights Watch estimate the death
toll at between 5,000 and 8,000. With thousands of others injured or maimed for life.
Two or three times the death toll at the World Trade Center; an entire city reduced to
rubble. And barely a whisper of this atrocity in the American media, which three
years later would be turning over every stone in Mazar-e-Sharif, looking for a story
line.
In great measure this willful ignorance of the city’s recent history may be
attributed to the elements of scale and perspective we have been discussing, elements
that determine whether a particular event will be identified as “news,” and thus worthy
of our purported sensitivity and respect for human life. But specific political
considerations also played a role in our national failure to act or even speak out about
the latter atrocity: at the time the Taliban were more or less on our side, supplied by
our allies the Pakistanis and by our own CIA. The Great Satan of the Soviet Union
might have been dispatched years before, but in its place we had to face Iran with its
Islamist militants:
The detailed evidence of Taliban atrocities will embarrass western
policymakers who still see the fundamentalists as useful players in a modern
“great game” to keep Iranian and Russian influence out of Afghanistan and
so ensure that the huge oil and gas riches of central Asia remain a prize for
western multinationals. Ten diplomats from Iran were among those who
died, prompting Iran to mass 200,000 troops on its border with Afghanistan
to bolster demands for the killers to be handed over for trial. (“U. N. Report
Details Taliban Massacres,” by Michael Sheridan,
www.afghan-info.com/research-articles/no-mercy.htm )
The ridiculous little melodrama of Spann and Walker was still three years in the
future; for the time being political expediency dictated that no great fuss be made over
the thousands of men, women and children tortured and murdered in Mazar-e-Sharif.
When the news crews finally arrived in the city, their lenses did not capture those
28
thousands of phantoms, howling for revenge from the invisible abyss that engulfed the
safari-jacketed reporters.
The vicissitudes of recent history are nothing, however, to the staggering
incongruity between Mazar-e-Sharif as modern and ancient city. Up to now, we have
examined the workings of the elements of scale and perspective on contemporary or
recent events: the World Trade Center attacks themselves; the Tangshan earthquake;
the immediate political history of Afghanistan. It is crucial to acknowledge that those
subjects are framed in an encompassing discourse of modernity, according to which
Afghanistan is everything the United States is not. We are central, rational, developed,
powerful, up-to-date; They are peripheral, superstitious, undeveloped or tribal, weak,
behind-the-times. Every pronouncement on every network news program employs
these oppositions as unquestioned foregrounding to the breathless, breaking stories
about to be imparted to the eager viewing audience. Slouched on our living room
sofas or seated in the ergonomic rockers of our home media centers, we here at the
center of civilization gaze with condescension and dismay at scenes enacted by people
whom history forgot, tribal savages locked in an ages-old war of all against all.
The irony is staggering. Were our perceptions not tied to the minuscule
calibrations of the nightly news, we might be free to consider for a moment, before
buying in to all the 9/11 rhetoric, that introducing a different time scale completely
alters the accepted reality. Two millennia ago the tidy oppositions we deploy to
distinguish Us from Them would not only be inapplicable; they would be completely
reversed. In the first to fifth centuries AD Mazar-e-Sharif and its sister city Balkh lay
at the major crossroads of the ancient world: the Silk Road that connected Persia and
eastern Europe with China; and the important trade route between Central Asia and the
civilizations of the Indus Valley to the south. The two cities were near the center of
Koshan civilization, which thrived on the wealth of goods and diversity of peoples that
flowed through it. What would the cosmopolitan rulers of this opulent kingdom have
thought of the inhabitants of the unknown island later to be called “Manhattan” or of
the forests of western Europe, all of whom were primitive villagers or nomads running
around in skins? Surely their versions – and they must have had something like them
– of Dan, Tom and Peter would have spoken with contempt of those savages crouched
in their distant, uncharted lands. Like Mazar-e-Sharif before it, the World Trade
Center stood at the financial hub of a global civilization. Those buildings in
Manhattan, however, existed for the merest instant of recorded time. And if bin Laden
and Atta had not taken aim at them, do we seriously believe, when we stop to apply
any rationality at all to the situation, that they would have withstood whatever
onslaughts future millenia might bring?
The sands of time shift, and keep right on shifting, despite the evangelical
rhetoric of a dull-witted Texas politician. Shift happens. Everything George Jr says is
29
predicated on the idea – and perhaps it is actually his belief – that this thing he calls
“America” will go on and on, fighting off attacks by Evildoers, standing as a
monument to the freedom-loving peoples of the world. How can he and millions of
his countrymen ignore the lessons that even the most general survey of history
teaches? One does not have to sign on to complexity theory to take in at a glance that
the phenomenon of the island of Manhattan, with its twin 110-story towers, is a
stupendously improbable creation, a piece of “self-organized criticality” lifted whole
cloth from the textbooks, a disaster waiting to happen. The wonder will be if the nowdiminished Manhattan endures a fraction of the time that Mazar-e-Sharif and Balkh
flourished. If, as pundits never tire of announcing, the 1900s constituted the
“American century,” are there four or five more such centuries? Will descendants of
the martyred firemen and policemen gather at Ground Zero on September 11, 2501 to
hold up photos of the departed and stare forlornly at the cameras? Or, as seems
increasingly likely, will the shrine at Ground Zero have long since vanished, along
with the ground itself, prey to a force, global warming and melting polar ice caps,
infinitely more destructive than anything Atta could manage with a couple of
airplanes? “Manhattan” may well become a synonym for “Atlantis” and meld with
that rich body of folklore.
Nietzsche and the Revaluation of Values
Scale and perspective: these elements count for everything when one initiates a
dissection of what is advertised at the outset as a whole and essentially healthy body –
the body politic of post-9/11 America, its men and women standing tall, proudly
waving the stars and stripes, proclaiming an inviolate and innate set of values.
Following Nietzsche, I have suggested – and it cannot be well-received in the current
social climate – that our most fundamental values, those of Good and Evil, are
constructions, pathological growths really, on a body of cultural processes which must
be examined for the complex entities they are. There is nothing simple or innate about
even our most deeply held values or our most instinctive response when those values
are violated: for example, the national outrage at the events of 9/11. I shall shortly
follow Nietzsche further, taking the next step in the procedures of the pathologist’s
operating theatre, and inquire what ideals or values might take the place of the
diseased and spent notions of Good and Evil.
Before taking that next step, however, I want to present an additional case, one
I hope will prepare you for what is to come. When I propose with Nietzsche that we
abandon the very notions of Good and Evil, does that not elicit in you, particularly
given your patriotic fervor in the wake of 9/11, a sharp protest, even a sense of
30
betrayal? It is one thing, you might object, to invoke past earthquakes in China,
Afghanistan’s political history, the ancient world of two millennia ago, and future
global warming in support of a cold-blooded (again, cynical/clinical) argument that
judgments of good and evil are spurious – untenable simplifications imposed on a
complex and shifting reality. But, you might continue, it is quite another thing to
advance that same argument in an immediate person-to-person situation in which one
human being acts horribly toward another. We might parade the statistics coming out
of the massacres at Mazar-e-Sharif, and certainly those are gruesome enough, but
when we contemplate the horror up close of a Taliban fanatic hacking off the hands of
children in the name of God, doesn’t that stir a revulsion that is as real and visceral as
it gets, that is well beyond any contrived interrogation, any cultural analysis of values?
My response to this excellent and impassioned question is, I think, consistent
with Nietzsche’s critique of “fundamental” values. The revulsion, the up-close horror
you feel is real, but does that powerful feeling fit naturally into a world you believe to
be populated by good and evil forces, good and evil individuals? Specifically, are
there “evil acts” involving a malignancy of spirit, a cruelty of intent, and a viciousness
of execution which in combination leave no room to question the nature of those acts?
Is Evil a force loose in the world, a hideous thing that takes control of a person and
places his actions beyond the pale of properly human behavior?
Despite the folk
appeal of this notion (and if you want empirical confirmation, check out the sales of
Stephen King’s books or the endless series of horror movies), the immoralist must ask
if anything is ever quite so absolute, so rigidly determined, so predictable? Or, to
borrow again from my infelicitous title, is Evil loose in the world or does shit just
happen?
I suggest the answer to this question regarding the irreducibility of up-close
and personal evil turns out to be a paradox: it is precisely when we think we have
isolated the irreducible core of evil in the actions of a single individual that the notion
of Evil as a force loose in the world disintegrates. To invoke once more the analytical
tools deployed here, the scale and perspective at which individual acts of violence
occur are far too fine-grained and diverse to extrapolate to the cultural construct we
may hold of Evil, whether that be George Jr’s evangelical-tinged notion of “evildoers”
or some dark, ultimately Romantic notion of absolutes that reside in human behavior.
I linger over these points because I think the most difficult thing for us to do is
to confront the truly hideous cruelties people inflict on other people and not derive
from that grim encounter a lesson which we then apply to society as a whole.
Interpreting those actions, as Eco has said, as though they possessed an underlying
truth. Evidence of this nearly irrepressible tendency to interpret and of its pitiful
failure is to be found in the public rhetoric that surrounds any eruption into daily life
of the murderous and bizarre. When the first reports of Jonestown, Oklahoma City,
31
Waco, Heaven’s Gate, and Columbine burst on our television screens, the immediate
commentary, the first serving of pabulum by Dan, Tom and Peter, was to ask how
such a monstrous thing could have happened. Are there, they wanted to know, deep
and dark secrets regarding the psychology of cults, something that might explain how
their members lose all sense of human worth? Then our anchor men trot out on screen
the first of many psychologists hastily assembled by network staffers and invite them
to pontificate on the psychology of cults. Or they cut to another talking-heads
collection of psychologists, sociologists, and educators who stand ready to enlighten
us about violence in our schools and the tremendous stress American schoolchildren
are under today. Or, finally, when we come to the events of 9/11, they round up
hordes of individuals who have somehow come to be identified as “terrorism experts,”
and ask them to ramble on about the background of the attacks and to second guess
everything that led to them. A child watching TV during those traumatic weeks might
reasonably conclude that the job is worth considering for the future, a real hedge
against the growing unemployment problem. “Mom, when I grow up, I wanna be a
terrorism expert.” But what can these blowhards possibly tell us about the individual
experience of terror?
Danielle. Danielle van Dam was seven years old and lived with her parents in
a comfortable suburb of San Diego. On the evening of February 1, 2002 Danielle’s
father (her mother was out with friends) put her to bed. In the morning she was gone.
Disappeared from her own room on the second floor of the family home in the middle
of the night. The police were called. A search was begun, which soon radiated out for
miles as the days passed without a sign or word of Danielle. In the investigation
neighbors were questioned. One neighbor in particular, David Westerfield, aroused
suspicion and came under close police scrutiny. Westerfield, tall, balding, paunchy,
was a forty-nine year old engineer and divorced father of two grown children.
Westerfield lived just two doors from the van Dams. He owned an RV, which he kept
parked beside his house. A portrait of suburbia. Danielle disappeared on a weekend.
That weekend Westerfield took his RV out into the nearby desert on a camping trip.
The coincidence alerted the police. But three weeks passed without an arrest and
without any sign of the little girl, despite massive search parties organized by
sympathetic San Diegans. The distraught parents made tearful appeals on television.
Westerfield, who continued to deny any knowledge of the kidnapping, was arrested.
Forensic tests on his home and RV had identified items stained with Danielle’s blood.
A week later a search party investigating a backroads area near El Cajon, only thirty
miles from the van Dam home, discovered the body. It had been thrown into a trashstrewn ravine and was blackened by weeks of exposure to the sun, so that initial
reports said it had been partially burned. It still bore Danielle’s necklace. The police
have not disclosed what injuries had been inflicted on the little girl.
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As I write, Westerfield has been found guilty and faces the death penalty.
Evidence collected from his home included numerous items of child pornography.
Westerfield, middle-aged, the father of two, was a pedophile, living a quiet life in a
quiet suburb of one of America’s golden cities. Apparently there was little in his
background to arouse suspicion. His neighbors had no reason to be wary of him.
There was even the bizarre report that on the evening of Danielle’s disappearance
Westerfield encountered Danielle’s mother and her friends at a local bar, and enjoyed
a dance with the mother. That report, understandably, has not been emphasized in the
local news stories; it does not fit well with the image of the grief-stricken family.
Evidently this neighbor, this familiar adult, somehow entered Danielle’s
upstairs bedroom that night, persuaded her to be silent or silenced her, then carried her
off to his own home or RV. Two days and three nights passed before Westerfield was
again seen at his home. What took place in that RV out in the desert during those
interminable hours? Before the violated body of the little girl was disposed of, tossed
out like a piece of trash? The questions well up in anyone hearing the story. Why
would any human being do such a thing? How did he manage to steal a child away
from her own bedroom, with a parent at home? And the most horrible question of all:
What did he do to her? Lurking behind these questions, of course, is our suppressed
imaginings of the horror experienced by the little girl. What could that possibly have
involved? What were her experiences, her desperation, her terror? Could anything be
worse than that?
Coming to grips with these questions, the revulsion and outrage we feel lead
naturally into a familiar mode of expression, a long-standing cultural construct: the
killer, this sickening pedophile, is Evil incarnate. He is an inhuman monster, waiting
like the predator he is for the time to strike. Evil is loose in the world, and it struck
that awful night in the suburbs of San Diego.
Faced with unspeakable horror, we instinctively grasp at the response Eco
laments: we interpret. We insulate the unspeakable, or have it insulated for us, by a
torrent of words and images. Confronted by the sudden and completely unexpected
eruption of the horrible in the midst of ordinary domestic life, we respond,
paradoxically, by claiming that it has always been present. We summon up absolutes:
Good, Evil, Innocence, Monsters. It is exceedingly strange, a defining quirk of
conventional thought. Since by definition we have very limited experience with the
extraordinary, our reaction to it, our proposed explanations or interpretations, should
be tentative, cautious, hedged about with disclaimers. In American homes, unlike
those in Mazar-e-Sharif during those awful days of August 1998, children are not
routinely kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. With Danielle’s horror story, we are on
extremely uncertain terrain, which would seem to dictate caution. Instead, we give not
a passing thought to such a clinical approach, and wade right in with all the self-
33
righteous fury and bombast we can muster. Our response to the horrible is shouted
from the evening news, complete with obscene close-ups of the grieving parents; it is
splashed in headlines across our newspapers; it is writ in the stony visages of
prosecutors and district attorneys clamoring for death as retribution.
The immediacy of horror, here Danielle’s ordeal, there the story of 9/11 itself,
blinds us to the exactly contrary truth: the stories of Danielle and of 9/11, like all
horror stories, are shot through with coincidence and uncertainty. They are webs of
circumstance in which we become ensnared. They are things that just happen.
Consider. Westerfield, now reviled as a pedophilic monster, lived an
apparently unexceptional life. He received a technical education, held a professional
job, married and raised a family. He was almost fifty years old on the weekend
Danielle died. What are we to say about this newly discovered monster, and by
extension about the fabric, the connectedness of daily life, when we survey all the
nights he stayed at home, perhaps indulging in lurid fantasies as he poured over his
child pornography, perhaps just watching Regis Philbin on TV? We really don’t
know. And if we ever come to know, if Westerfield unburdens himself of details of a
secret life, that confession will be a consequence of the horrific exception which that
Friday night in February represents. From his home two doors away did Westerfield
watch for Danielle to come home, for her playing in her yard? Weeks or months
before striking, did he note the location of her upstairs bedroom, monitor the nightly
routines of the van Dam family members? Did something out of the ordinary happen
that evening to set him off? Did he plan his act carefully over a period of days and
weeks, or did he suddenly decide, on impulse? Were there other occasions, other
nights, when he almost left the house to carry out his horrible plan? And if so, what
stopped him? Was it a material fact, a light turned on or off in the van Dam home, a
figure glimpsed walking past a window? Or did something else, something
unknowable, something barely perceived even by him, arrest his plans on those
previous nights? To what, if not circumstance, do we attribute the event?
Here we must ask ourselves the question dozens of the van Dams’ neighbors
are doubtlessly asking themselves as they lie awake in their own suburban beds,
sleepless from dread: Had this monster fixed on Danielle from the start, or did he train
his perverted gaze on their own children, thinking those unspeakable thoughts about
them? And if Westerfield had done that, if his imagination had wandered, which
children did he take particular notice of, what tentative plans did he make to pay a visit
on one of them on some future Friday night?
Outside the van Dams’ home, where a candlelight shrine to Danielle
attracted respectful passers-by, another mother, Lisa Winans, thought of the
van Dam family and all it had endured.
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“They’ve got a long, long road ahead of them, but I’m sure having this
man in custody makes them feel better,” said Ms. Winans, 37, whose two
sons are 10 and 11. “You think, oh, you live in a nice neighborhood and
think you know all your neighbors; you think something like this could never
happen here. But it can. It can happen anywhere.” (“Grim Guesswork Led
to the Body of San Diego Girl.” By Nick Madigan. New York Times, March
1, 2002)
In these and a plethora of similar speculations we are effectively thrown back
on the classic opening of the 1950s radio show featuring Lamont Cranston as the
Shadow: “Who knows what Evil lurks in the hearts of men? Ba-dum, ba-dum, badum [spooky musical score]. The Shadow knows!” But, typically, we don’t. And if
we were at all honest with ourselves, we would not willfully ignore all those months
and years of not knowing when we raise our voices with the mob (and its televised
incarnation in the personae of Don, Tom and Peter) to vilify an individual as Evil
incarnate, a monster beyond the pale of humanity. Couldn’t it be, despite all our
theatrics and portentous oaths, that David Westerfield’s visit to the van Dam home
was something that just happened?
A very odd thing about all this is that the possibilities, all too real possibilities,
get scarier as we distance ourselves from the immediate circumstances of the van Dam
family and their disturbed neighbor. If Westerfield lived an ordinary life in an
ordinary neighborhood for years, what, as Lisa Winans perceived, are we to think of
the thousands of other people living their own ordinary lives in that suburb? Of the
millions of people scattered around the megapolitan sprawl of San Diego and its
satellite cities? Recall, too, that five years before Danielle’s murder another of those
suburbs, barely ten miles from the van Dam home, was the scene of the Heaven’s Gate
suicides. There, in Rancho Santa Fe, a city of 5,000 identified in the 2000 Census as
the wealthiest community in the U. S., thirty-nine people put on their jump suits and
running shoes and extinguished their lives, anticipating rebirth aboard the Mother Ship
concealed behind the Hale-Bopp comet.
Venturing further afield, what are we to think of the tens of millions of
seemingly ordinary men and women going about their lives in the suburbs of
America? How many of their homes shelter monsters-in-disguise, monsters-inwaiting, whose fantasies keep returning to that special night to come when they will
take the fateful next step from ogling dirty photos or children at play in the school
yard to taking one, taking one and doing all the things to that child they have dreamt
of for, oh, so long.
............
35
Dissecting the van Dam case in this way should make it difficult to return to
the conventional, reflexive posture we assume when confronted by horror that strikes
unannounced, whether at the heart of domestic life or at the heart of American
financial and military institutions. The mob will doubtlessly continue to howl for the
blood of the villain, the Evildoer, but are you quite so ready now to add your voice to
theirs? Are you quite so ready to attribute the horrors you witness or hear about to a
specific, identifiable cause, whether that be a twisted sexuality or a fanatical religious
belief? Can you still propose Evil as the root of those horrors when on close
inspection “evil” turns out to be so disguised, so episodic, so hit-or-miss? If Evil is
indeed a factor when things come badly unstuck, as our President assures us it is, why
are its hosts so difficult to tell apart from our friends and neighbors? How was
Westerfield able to live out most of his life as an ordinary man, and how was Osama
bin Laden able to command American military support as a valuable ally against the
then-current Evil Empire?
There is a book, cited earlier in this essay, that sheds a great deal of light on the
nature of evil in American society. Fittingly, it is one of the most frightening books
ever written. Its author is not Stephen King, Anne Rice (all those vampire stories), or
Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal), nor even Franz Kafka, although the
author’s works have been likened to Kafka’s. The book is Relations in Public and its
author is Erving Goffman. In prose utterly lacking in dramatic expression, in all the
flourishes we have come to expect of “horror stories,” Goffman sets out his terrifying
thesis: Although we exclaim over the rupture of public order when a murder or, still
more, a massacre is committed, the wonder is that such events are so rare, that public
order is so orderly. Human beings are large, powerful mammals capable of doing
great harm to their fellows, particularly when crowded together in the unnatural
confines of urban life – elevators, city streets, high-rise apartments . . . airliners. But
they rarely do. Take a half dozen primates of any other species, individuals unfamiliar
with one another, and shut them up in an elevator together. The result would be
pandemonium. But we humans spend our entire lives in that monkey house, routinely
subjecting ourselves to potential violence at the hands of strangers without any avenue
of escape.
How do we accomplish that? Not by having evolved a distinctive “human
nature” full of righteous sentiments and disdain for the occasional throwback, the
Evildoer. No, public order, Goffman maintains, is created and maintained by means
of the sheerest gossamer of ritualized behaviors – checks and balances people learn to
enact as an actor learns his part in a play. And what keeps the whole performance
from coming unstuck? What keeps the gossamer of human interaction from shredding
under the heavy use we make of it? What keeps our monkey house from erupting in
bedlam? Goffman’s unsettling answer, delivered to a nervous American public at the
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end of the tumultuous 1960s when tears were appearing everywhere in that fabric,
was: very little. A drunk on a city street, a disgruntled employee at the office, or, now,
a suspicious-looking character boarding an airplane, and the elaborate fiction the rest
of us live by is ruptured, perhaps for a moment, perhaps for an afternoon, perhaps, as
for many New Yorkers, for a lifetime.
Goffman’s thought lacks the smile-button certitudes of George Jr’s mouthings;
its cold, antiseptic breath reaches us straight from the pathologist’s clinic. For George
Jr, “America” is that freedom-loving, robust (lots of baseball playing!) organism
which would enjoy perfect health were it not for the scheming of fanatics like Osama
bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. For Goffman, America, and all of modern society, is
perpetually in the most fragile health, subject at any moment to virulent attack from
any number of seemingly innocuous sources. Although Goffman’s work pre-dates
complexity theory, his vision of society as a system of delicate checks and balances at
the edge of chaos meshes nicely with that theory’s concept of self-organized
criticality. The correspondence suggests a way for social thinkers to avail themselves
of the intriguing work being done in complexity theory – so much better than
continuing to debate the same old platitudes about the rightness and stability of
American society. Goffman reminds us that that stability is a balancing act performed
along a razor’s edge.
We have seen that American values are shot through with contradiction, their
inherent messiness making a farce of the bombast of our politicians and pundits. It is
nonetheless disturbing to find that what might be called the “cornerstone value” of
American society, the fundamental value of human life, is subject to the same swarm
of contradictions that plague other aspects of our culture. I approached this problem
earlier from the vantage point of comparing other tragedies – the Tangshan
earthquake, the Mazar-e-Sharif massacres – with the World Trade Center attacks, a
comparison that demonstrated the unhappy truth that the loss of human life is
something we readily dismiss or forget. But the Mazar-e-Sharif case in particular
raised an issue that returns full force with a consideration of Danielle’s fate: how do
we fit human suffering, particularly suffering at the hands of others, into our vaunted
system of values?
A part of the answer here is that Americans play their usual numbers game
with death: What was the body count? A drunk’s car killed a mother and her child on
a city street last night? Well, that’s a sad thing. But what’s that? You say a drunk in
another city hit a school bus, killing a dozen children? Well, we’d like to hear more
about that on the evening news, and doubtlessly we shall. When Dylan Klebold and
Eric Harris rampaged through Columbine High School on April 20 of 1999 (Hitler’s
birthday), killing thirteen in addition to themselves, the nation was stunned, the media
in a feeding frenzy. But today, if a child takes a gun to school and kills another child,
37
that episode scarcely makes the national news. Particularly if that child is from southcentral Los Angeles and the killing is “gang-related,” well, that’s strictly local news,
and not a lead story at that. In 2001 the Los Angeles police classified as gang-related
346 homicides. About one a day. As routine as the daily newspaper itself. And for
the first few months of 2002, the rate of such killings has about tripled, as police were
transferred from such nonessential duties as patrolling schoolyards to providing
“homeland security.” The murder of children by children has become mere
background noise, a static hiss that intrudes on our existence but has long ceased to
register as a message in itself.
More important than the numbers is the shock value of an event, which is
closely tied to our complex and readily exploited sense of horror. A child killed by a
hit-and-run drunk driver provokes a local and temporary outrage. A child, such as
Danielle, abducted from her home and tormented by a pervert for hours or days before
being murdered and thrown in a roadside gully commands the sympathy of a nation.
Here we encounter a fundamental feature of an American value system, of our
discrimination between good and evil acts. To the extent that we believe that a death
involved great pain in a highly traumatic situation which occurred without warning, so
we attribute a large component of suffering to that event and experience a
corresponding sense of outrage. Many children suffer from painful, wasting diseases
that destroy them over a period of weeks or months, but those deaths lack the
terrifying context and the unexpected cause which are essential aspects of our
heightened response to traumatic death. Disease is an evil, but it is decidedly not the
Evil we can point a finger at, not Evil in the corporeal, villainous form of a David
Westerfield or an Osama bin Laden.
It is true that our national media, led by Dan, Tom and Peter, are a pack of
shallow-minded jackals and apologists always on the prowl for the latest sensation.
But we really can’t blame them for the tremendous disparity in the attention they give,
say, to a child wasting away from a mortal illness and to Danielle’s nightmarish death.
We can be repulsed, and rightly so, at the sight of the jackals feasting on the parents’
pain, but at the same time we must recognize that the news crews did not entirely
invent the notion of “news.” To suggest that, as is often done by critics of the media,
is to attribute too much intelligence, too deep a wisdom, to those overpaid
mouthpieces, for to invent the news would require that Dan, Tom and Peter first
articulate, from a mass of contradictory experience, a consistent set of American
values and then proceed to act on them. They aren’t that smart. And besides, the task
is an impossible one.
anchor man 1 n phr college students fr 1920s The student having the
lowest academic standing in the class 2 n phr (also anchor, anchor person)
38
A television news broadcaster who has the principal and coordinating role in
the program (Dictionary of American Slang, 3rd edition)
Etymologies are often misleading, but this one is right on the mark.
Juxtaposing the tragedy of Danielle van Dam with that of the World Trade
Center attacks begins to teach another lesson: if it is impossible to specify the cause of
a violent act, if the seemingly well-defined boundaries of an event twist and turn and
erode under close examination, it is also impossible to measure and compare the
suffering caused by different acts. Our instant repugnance for acts of cruelty, the
horror we experience at their occurrence, is as close as we come to possessing a
Kantian categorical imperative; the experience of horror is that elusive thing-in-itself
which resists interpretation and explanation. The experience is a subjective there-ness,
which we either feel or we don’t. Having that experience, knowing the sickening
sensation of watching the first TV images of the planes hitting the towers and hearing
the reporters’ stricken descriptions of dozens of people hurling themselves from the
top of one of the buildings, or listening to the first reports of the discovery of
Danielle’s scorched body in that trash-strewn ravine, provides no basis for
comparison, no grounds for interpretation. Those experiences are just there (or not,
and we wonder deeply about those who experience the “not”).
It would be an act of the greatest dishonesty, of the most abominable casuistry,
to presume to construct a calculus of suffering and the horror we feel for it. Suffering
is not a quantity, but something akin to an absolute quality of experience. Do you
disagree? Then tell me, do you have an equation that can weigh relative suffering,
relative horror? Do you possess some magisterial or God-given power to assign one
value to Danielle’s suffering and another, presumably much higher value to that of the
nearly three thousand people who died at the World Trade Center?
What are the
terms of that equation of yours? The number of dead bodies? The hours of agony?
The psychological trauma, however that may be quantified? And do you have in that
equation a mysterious, sneaky coefficient, something like a moral equivalent of
Einstein’s cosmological constant that measures pure, undiluted horror?
Following Nietzsche, the immoralist renounces any claim to authority by this
morality of body-counters, who would tabulate the most intense human experiences
just as they sum their ledgers. That practice complements the utilitarian philosophy of
John Stuart Mill which Nietzsche despised. Mill’s maxim to conduct oneself so as to
promote the “greatest good for the greatest number” would here simply add the
corollary to avoid the greatest suffering for the greatest number. Both principles are
based on dual premises, first that good and evil exist as absolute qualities (for Mill, the
source of that absolute knowledge was the imperial British crown), and second that
39
good and evil can be quantified (in keeping with the emergent ethic of an industrial
nation-state).
The immoralist rejects both premises. “Good” and “Evil” are not absolute
moral qualities. As we have seen, they are not even consistent interpretations of
behavior. Long before Ruth Benedict, and to much greater effect, Nietzsche perceived
that “the good” is simply a residue of the habits of the herd, of that dross of humanity
he characterized, in a phrase that does not endear him to politically correct moderns,
as “an infinite succession of zeroes”. The salient feature of those habits is that they
are restrictive, negative, life-denying: the morality Nietzsche excoriated is a doctrine
of “Thou Shalt Not”s. It is the repressive covenant of the stupid, the weak, the
cowardly, of all who are unwilling to consider, with him, what humanity might be
capable of in overcoming itself.
If “the good” is constituted in this way, it follows that “Evil” is simply what
the cowardly fear. Far from being an absolute quality of experience or even a
consistent set of behaviors, “Evil” takes the form of a rag-tag collection of
boogeymen, some traditional, some fabricated on the spot by our xenophobic
politicians and preachers. The exemplars of Evil may be near at hand and easy to fear
and hate, such as the media’s construction of David Westerfield as pedophilic monster
or George Jr’s and John Ashcroft’s images of those loathsome Evildoers, Osama bin
Laden and the “American Taliban,” John Walker. Or its exemplars may be classical
figures whose subsequent reputations have been dramatically rehabilitated: Jesus,
sentenced as a criminal by Pilate and reviled and stoned by the Jerusalem mob; or
Socrates, condemned to die for his immoral acts by the George Jrs and John Ashcrofts
of a democratic Athens.
To broach the analogy of Osama to Jesus, which has been done by several
commentators in the months following 9/11, is to reveal the fragility of moral
judgment and its inherently unpredictable history. If the criminal and rabble rouser
Jesus has been deified and his true nature obliterated (we know what Nietzsche said
about the last Christian), who can legitimately denounce those Muslims around the
world who view Osama as a new prophet? And who can predict what transformations
will be wrought on the persona of Osama and the events of 9/11 by future centuries of
Islamic thought? No one. Things happen.
Although the Jesus-Osama analogy may be used to inflame the endless talkingheads debates among network pundits – to strike a spark which is immediately
extinguished by those stupefying bores on 20/20, 48 Hours, The Larry King Show, and
The O’Reilly Factor, its real value is that it demonstrates the inadequacy of any
universal morality, based as that morality is on notions of inherent “good” and “evil”
qualities of a person or event.
40
With the rejection of an absolute or universal morality, does the Nietzscheinspired immoralist then embrace a cultural relativism of the sort pioneered by Ruth
Benedict or, perhaps being more fashion-conscious, a continental postmodernism
whose incomprehensible texts unquestionably establish the death of Language, if not
of Truth? No, to both counts. Benedict’s classic Patterns of Culture is an intellectual
scandal which has gone mostly unrecognized by generations of cultural
anthropologists. As noted earlier, her application of Nietzsche’s Appolinian /
Dionysian opposition completely misrepresents that concept, making of it an either-or
phenomenon: Culture A is Appolinian; Culture B Dionysian. Nietzsche’s principal
argument in Birth of Tragedy is that the opposing forces are co-present and interactive,
the tension between the antitheses providing the genius of Greek drama. That
egregious error is, however, a slight misstep in comparison with Benedict’s
expropriation of Nietzsche’s work to support her relativistic thesis.
However one wishes to characterize Nietzsche’s thought – and its
rehabilitation has been slow in coming in Anglo-America – the last thing one should
attribute to it is relativism. Far from embracing a democratic thesis of “different
strokes for different folks,” Nietzsche made the backbone of both Beyond Good and
Evil and Genealogy of Morals the principle of an “order of rank.” Certain individuals
are manifestly superior to others; ideals of equality and love of neighbor are tawdry
little idols embraced by those who would deny the inherent order of things.
Nietzsche’s insistence on an “order of rank” as a fundamental principle in
human relations raises a most important question. But not the question of how the
politically correct, righteously multicultural, stridently anti-hegemonic pomo is to get
around this embarrassment, to explain away his master’s elitist indiscretion (How did
Nietzsche ever become associated with postmodernism? The only plausible answer:
through its adherents willfully misreading him as flagrantly as did Benedict). No, the
critical question Nietzsche’s insistence on an “order of rank” raises for his philosophy
is: How, having repudiated any conventional morality with its tainted concepts of
“Good” and “Evil,” can one then insist on a standard by which human actions are
measured? If the project of the “revaluation of all values” necessarily begins with
discarding existing values, what will take their place?
Beyond Good and Evil and Geneaology of Morals offer up a revolutionary
proposal: to abandon morality in favor of aesthetics. Nothing less. For the immoralist
“good” and “evil” are tainted, inherently hypocritical notions to be cast aside in favor
of values of the “noble” and “beautiful” versus the “common” and “ugly.” Persons
and their actions are to be judged by the nobility or commonness of character they
exhibit; and their creations or productions by their beauty or ugliness. It is a
staggering, difficult, and deeply unsettling proposal, and one that has scarcely begun
to be assimilated even by Nietzsche’s supposed admirers (the last Nietzschean . . .).
41
Today Nietzsche’s work is embraced by those whose positions (to the extent one can
decipher them) are directly contrary to his own: social democratic intellectuals who
delight in applying their “anti-hegemonic” critique to a political system which acts
contrary to their own fastidiously correct values of egalitarianism and
multiculturalism.
If our postmodern intellectuals make a hash of Nietzsche, our political and
media personalities go about their business totally ignorant or uncaring of his ideas,
ideas that have put an indelible stamp on twentieth-century thought. Imagine George
Jr or John Ashcroft approaching the microphones, staring into the television lights,
and saying, “In declaring war on terrorism, our course of action will be to pursue the
noble and beautiful.” Those two dim bulbs would not know where to begin in
approaching Nietzsche’s thought, and to the extent they understood anything of it they
would brand it subversive and “un-American.” And indeed it is.
The WTC Attacks
In taking up Nietzsche’s proposal the cultural anthropologist must adopt the
role of cultural pathologist elaborated earlier: presented with a diseased body, the
pathologist / immoralist disregards the conventional ooh-ing and ah-ing around him
and looks long and hard at the thing laid open on the table before him.
The World Trade Center attacks is that thing before him. But the thing is
brought to his pathologist’s clinic with a lot of attendant baggage, swathed in
bandages, already tarted up with ludicrous prosthetics meant to embellish and distract
from the corpse. He must first strip those away, to lay bare the diseased thing itself.
What are those bandages, those prosthetics? He is told that a band of fanatical
evildoers has destroyed a cultural icon, a prominent symbol of America and all it
stands for. He considers that suggestion as part of a preliminary diagnosis. After all,
he must know what manner of thing he is dealing with and what has happened to it.
He considers the suggestion, and finds it wanting. When did the World Trade Center
become a prominent symbol of American culture? The Statue of Liberty, only a
couple of miles away and an easier target for Mohammed Atta and his pilots, is just
such a symbol. Why was that not the target? Or, ranging further afield, why did those
pilots not target the Golden Gate Bridge, DisneyLand, historic downtown
Philadelphia, or a dozen other sites that are far more prominent national cultural icons
than a couple of skyscrapers erected in the nineteen seventies?
He is then told that the symbolism of the World Trade Center is of a more
conceptual nature, that the twin towers represent the global dominance of American
capitalism. This strikes him as a contrived explanation. From what he knows of the
subject laid out before him, much of the office space in the towers was occupied by
municipal government agencies and auxiliary financial services. Although it
42
presented a more difficult target, could not Atta and Co. have directed their planes
right next door and destroyed the Stock Exchange, indisputably the heart of our
capitalist system? In the same vein, would the hijackers not have used O’Hare Airport
to strike at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where the agricultural products and
natural resources of the Third World, the fruit of the blood and sweat of countless
oppressed laborers, are bought and sold by soft, fat men who have never worked a day
in the fields or mines?
Noting that his subject has come to him disguised in too many suspicious
bandages, he considers its origins more closely. Searching his memory, he recalls that
the twin towers had anything but a noble beginning, that they were the result of shady
deals put together by corrupt politicians and sleazy real estate developers. He recalls
that many New Yorkers, probably a majority, and much of the national public
originally regarded the towers as ostentatious, as a ridiculously disproportionate blight
on New York’s skyline, and as a colossal failure of urban planning. In short, people
found the towers ugly.
Recognizing the emotionally charged, not to say hysterical reaction to his
subject, the immoralist realizes he must examine his own personal response to the
attacks. He considers that his own background may make him either a very good or
very bad choice as a cultural pathologist assigned to the case. Having spent his entire
childhood in rural areas of America’s heartland and having rarely visited New York
City, he realizes that he completely lacks whatever complex of urban sensibilities New
Yorkers and other urbanites bring to the tragedy. And being a long-time resident of
southern California, and at that an area of southern California outside the immediate
orbits of Los Angeles and San Diego, he acknowledges within himself a certain lack
of interest, even antipathy for New York City. The human anthills and decaying
concrete canyons of cities of the Eastern Seaboard have always repelled him; he
knows he could never trade the open skies and soaring mountains of the American
West for whatever those cities might have to offer. And whenever he has thought
about the matter, which has been seldom, he realizes that the World Trade Center
exemplifies for him all the negatives he attributes to the urban East: the greed, the
corruption, the crowding, the meaningless bustle. The ugliness.
The immoralist asks himself whether he is qualified to proceed with his
investigation. Perhaps he harbors too many prejudices to render a professional
opinion? In considering that issue, he harks back to his one significant personal
involvement in the attacks: in the days following 9/11 a very old and very dear friend,
an artist living in Soho just blocks from the twin towers, cannot be reached. All the
phones, of course, are out. What has happened to him? Several days later, when he
finally hears from his friend, their telephone reunion is punctuated by a telling
comment his friend makes, a comment that rivets itself to all subsequent thoughts our
43
immoralist has about the World Trade Center attacks. This friend, like the immoralist
himself, is something of an Angry Old Man, a refugee of the failed cultural revolution
of the sixties. The friend says, “I know why they hit the Pentagon, but why in the
world did they attack the World Trade Center?” Just days after the event, with his
Soho apartment still off-limits and uninhabitable, with the smoke and stench still
hanging over the city, this Manhattanite of decades was baffled by the terrorists’
choice of targets. Rather than patriotic rage, what he felt, as debris rained down a few
blocks from Ground Zero, was a consuming puzzlement and deep sadness that so
much death and destruction seemed to have such an unfocused, almost random cause.
His friend’s reaction to the attack encourages the immoralist in his own
puzzlement, his own detached examination of the thing before him. If the World
Trade Center meant little to him personally, if at least some New Yorkers found the
choice of targets incomprehensible, and if, as he suspected, his own previously
indifferent attitude toward the Center was mirrored in the attitudes of millions of
Americans, then whatever could have been Atta and Co.’s motivation?
At this juncture in his investigations the immoralist considers a most curious
feature of the history of the attacks: Islamist terrorists simply have a thing about the
World Trade Center. They set off a car bomb beneath it in 1993, and succeeded in
terrorizing the city and the nation though the actual damage was not extensive. And it
would not be surprising to learn that over the years the FBI has foiled other Islamist
plots against the twin towers. Reflecting that the actual symbolic value and functional
importance of the towers are far less than those claimed by the media, the immoralist
is left with the disturbing thought that much of the motivation underlying the attacks is
an irrational fixation.
Along with a horde of immigrants from all over the world, Muslims from
Saudi Arabia and Egypt come to New York City and see for the first time the two
obtrusive structures that dominate the skyline. If a few of those Muslims have an
Islamist bent, it is a simple matter for them to identify the aggressive ostentation of the
towers with their vision of America as an ungodly and oppressive giant. The
immoralist notes the implications of this line of thought: these Islamist terrorists,
portrayed by our national leaders and the mainstream media as diabolically clever
conspirators, evil-doing geniuses who concealed their elaborate plot from our entire
intelligence community, were at bottom merely star-struck yokels, fresh off the plane
at Kennedy, gawping at – and despising – the grotesque opulence of the twin towers.
Atta and his fellow conspirators were the very opposite of John Le Carré or Ian
Fleming characters; they were merely frustrated, rootless young men of the
ideologically charged Middle East, one step removed from the proverbial camel
jockey, and, with all of that, carrying an enormous chip on their shoulders. Like kids
playing in a sandbox, they wanted to knock down the tallest thing around them.
44
The immoralist notes that on this matter Islamist activists have believed their
own press, even when that press is the biased Western mass media: both describe the
plot to hijack airliners and use them as weapons as the work of diabolical genius. The
media and the Islamists want to believe they are dealing with Dr. No rather than a
bunch of disaffected camel jockeys. The immoralist doubts this grand vision of his
subject. He recalls that in the media frenzy surrounding the Columbine High School
massacre, portions of Eric Harris’s diary were published in which the disturbed youth
thought about hijacking a plane and crashing it in New York City after completing his
grisly work at Columbine.
If there isnt such place [a foreign government without extradition:
Afghanistan?] then we will hijack a hell of a lot of bombs and crash a plane
into NYC with us inside firing away as we go down, just something to cause
more devistation. (USA Today, December 5, 2001; one doesn’t apply sics to
the text of a psycho killer.)
Atta and some of his associates, living in the United States at the time, must have
come across these reports. Perhaps the reports influenced their thinking on how best
to strike at the Great Satan.
The immoralist, something of a movie-goer, also vaguely recalls at least two or
three movies in which terrorists hijack a plane in order to strike at an American target.
He does not believe that Atta and Co. necessarily saw those movies; they probably did
not share his own affection for the cinema. But the combination of the Columbine
media event and those movies does leave him the distinct impression that the idea or
scheme of using planes as weapons was in the air. A solitary terrorist genius didn’t
have to think it up.
As a cultural pathologist, the immoralist is charged with dissecting and
analyzing a diseased organism with the end in view of contributing to the treatment of
future occurrences of the disease. Even his preliminary observations of the World
Trade Center attacks lead him toward the conclusion that George Jr and John Ashcroft
have got things hopelessly, and probably deliberately wrong. Their elaborate plans for
a global war on terrorism do not fit the facts of the case he sees before him, in which a
small band of fanatics with relatively minimal backing attack a couple of buildings
they hate for their own highly idiosyncratic reasons. Still, he does not doubt for a
moment that hundreds of millions of people around the world have a deep antipathy
for America; unlike George Jr, he does not get that whipped-puppy look on his face
and ask in an incredulous tone, “Why do they hate us so?”.
The immoralist is sure they have their reasons, some of which are obvious to
him and, he thinks, to any intelligent observer. Nor does he doubt that a tiny fraction
45
of those hundreds of millions of disaffected souls are intent on acting on their beliefs:
it is hardly surprising that Al-Qaeda and similar organizations attract thousands of
individuals who would do harm to America at any cost to themselves. But the
existence of those organizations and the actions of their members are hardly the grand
conspiracy depicted in George Jr’s call to arms. The immoralist is led to a contrary
view, one consistent with the teachings of complexity theory rather than with George
Jr’s simple-minded worldview. In performing his assigned task of isolating a cause of
the World Trade Center attacks, the immoralist reaches the preliminary conclusion
that its cause was an improbable combination of ideas and events, a web of
circumstance that took shape in a way no one, even the attacks’ perpetrators, could
precisely have foreseen. His preliminary conclusion is that shit happens.
When he outlines his thinking to a few people, both within and outside his
profession, he is met with the sharpest rejection. The immoralist recognizes that his
acquaintances’ strongly emotional reaction to his ideas are in fact a part of the
symptomatology of the disease he seeks to understand. He notes that his critics keep
returning to a common point: “Never mind,” they say, “about the exact political and
psychological causes of the attacks, the thing all of us must keep in mind is that
thousands and thousands of people died horribly in a cowardly action that threatens
the very fabric of our society. Don’t you have any basic human compassion for so
much suffering?”. When this accusation is leveled at him, the immoralist’s features
change; for the barest instant, a sad, bitter smile plays across his face and is gone.
Thousands of deaths, indeed. During the course of his career the immoralist has
witnessed so much death, has seen so much disease and suffering. And he knows that
his personal experiences are nothing compared to the human death and suffering
around him. He was not among the first relief workers to reach Tangshan; he did not
witness the massacres at Mazar-e-Sharif; he was not on the killing fields of Cambodia;
he did not visit blood-soaked villages of the Rwandan countryside; he was not huddled
in a Sarajevo apartment as the shells rained down day after day.
The immoralist recognizes immediately that when his critics demand that he
mourn thousands of lives lost, they mean thousands of American lives. He recognizes
this, and the stench of his countrymen’s hypocrisy assaults his every sensibility; it is
far worse than any he has had to endure when bent over a rotting corpse in his clinic.
As he knows from long and bitter experience, this American hypocrisy is far more
selective and insidious than simple xenophobia. The pompous bigots who proclaim
their grief do not concern themselves nearly so much with the thousands of American
children and youth who die by the gun every year. Quite the contrary, they are content
to cheer Charlton Heston on as he proclaims from the presidential podium of the
National Rifle Association that only death will pry the gun from his fingers. Death or,
as it has turned out, Alzheimer’s. Tough luck, Chuck. Nor, the immoralist notes, have
46
those righteous mourners been so vocal over the years as cigarettes have killed more
than 400,000 Americans every year. Quite the contrary. They have returned those
great defenders of tobacco and The American Way, Jesse Helms and Strom
Thurmond, to Congress again and again, until at last even those statesmen’s massive
doses of growth hormone were not enough to keep them from lapsing deeper into their
prolonged senility.
With this stench of hypocrisy in the air, the immoralist refuses to join the
chorus of mourners of the victims of the World Trade Center attacks. He recognizes
that nearly every human death, particularly a tragic death, devastates individuals
closest to the deceased. He knows the suffering of survivors is real; he has
experienced it himself. And he knows that that suffering is a fundamental residuum of
human existence; it may be, as proposed earlier, as close as we come to absolute
value. The immoralist therefore acknowledges that grief is a profoundly personal
emotion, and for that very reason questions its extension to the public at large. How,
he asks, can a deeply private experience be transformed through media coverage into a
collective outpouring of grief? The emotion simply does not work that way; but he
notes that the emotion of grief can be made to work on a collective level.
The immoralist recognizes that, while private grief is outside his field of
expertise, its public transformation is very much a part of the cultural pathology he
routinely studies. The people who died in the attacks led entirely private lives; not one
among the nearly three thousand could be described as a public personage. The World
Trade Center attacks was hardly an event comparable to the assassination of John
Kennedy. There a young, charismatic president, his beautiful and elegant wife, and
their lovely children represented a national First Family; Kennedy’s tragic death was
experienced as an actual death in the family by many Americans. Absent a public
personage, however, the grieving survivors of the WTC attacks transformed
themselves and were transformed by the media into pathetic stand-ins for an
individual of real national stature. The jackals of the media were only too happy to
oblige: they feasted on every outpouring of human grief; they encouraged and reveled
in the construction of Princess Di-style shrines in which photographs, memorial cards,
and the jumbled debris of a consumer culture combined to form a 21st Century
wailing wall.
When he examines this phenomenon of collective grief more closely, the
immoralist notes curious aspects to the actual victims singled out for special regard:
policemen and firemen. If individuals of national stature were not among the victims
to mourn, the media, taking its lead from the nation’s mayor Rudolph Guiliani, fixed
on the bravery and sacrifice of police and fire fighters called to the scene minutes after
the first attack. Guiliani regularly appeared at his frequent news conferences sporting
an NYPD or NYFD cap; George Jr toured Ground Zero and mounted a carefully
47
prepared pile of rubble with firefighters in full regalia surrounding him. It was one of
the definitive photo ops of the whole ordeal.
Curious, indeed. When Americans were forced to move beyond their usual
preoccupation with the body count – the enormity of the WTC casualty toll – they
fixed their attention, not on individual cases of a particularly tragic nature, but on
municipal job categories. The New York City police and fire departments became
stand-ins for individual martyrs. As a “law and order” mayor, Guiliani’s hero worship
was not surprising, but the public’s unquestioning acceptance of that hero worship
was. Mindful of Nietzsche’s insistence that our admiration should be directed towards
the noble and beautiful and away from the common and ugly, the immoralist asks
where the New York City police department fits in that scheme. Stripping away the
bandages and cosmetics, the answer is clear. These heroes venerated by Guiliani and
the media were of the same police force which a few years previously had shocked the
nation with its brutal treatment of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. In August
1997 our heroes arrested Louima on what turned out to be a mistaken charge. After
beating him in their police car, they took him to a station house. In an interrogation
room they continued to beat him, and ended by shoving a broken broomstick up his
ass, tearing his intestines and rupturing his bladder. Louima was two months in
hospital. That repugnant act took place in the context of a number of incidents in
which New York’s finest gunned down several unarmed immigrants in the streets. In
one such incident, in February 1999, New York City police killed the unarmed West
African immigrant Amadou Diallo, riddling his body with a hail of forty-one bullets.
Were some of the very officers who took part in those incidents among those who
answered the emergency calls on the morning of September 11, 2001? If so, what is
the objective cultural pathologist to think of their deaths? That they were selfless
martyrs to be venerated? Or an ugliness happily obliterated? Is that human scum the
best the nation’s mayor and the nation itself can do to make (and market) our national
heroes? If so, what does that say about the American character?
The American character: a nation which venerates its policemen. It is a
distressing prospect, and for the immoralist an indication of how deeply rooted is the
pathology afflicting the body of America. In Nietzsche’s perspective, the herd
becomes so fearful that it begins to worship those who control it and lead it to physical
or spiritual destruction. Cowards, who are themselves bullies, turn in their fear and
trauma to greater cowards, greater bullies: the police. Nietzsche would have despised
the NYPD as he did the authors of the New Testament: the flock must have its
shepherd; it cannot for a moment pretend to live as a group of self-willing, selffulfilling individuals who have no need of shepherds or policemen. Mindful of recent
American history and his own status as cultural refugee of the sixties, the immoralist
observes that the nation has come a long way – down – from the general
48
condemnation of Massa Daly’s police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention to the
post-9/11 glorification of New York’s killer cops.
The immoralist asks himself: What kind of person becomes a cop? His
experience answers: a doughnut-scarfing sadist who delights in his control and
debasement of the weak. He reflects that the sixties’ metaphor was only partly
correct: Cops are not pigs; they are a mongrel cross, vicious and treacherous, of pig
and attack dog, content to root in the filth of their personalities until their masters
unleash them on a defenseless public. Noble / common; beautiful / ugly: the aesthetic
polarities of post-9/11 America are not difficult to discern. The police, our heroes.
The heroes of America the Bully, Land of the Jailed, Home of the Cowardly.
Do you find the immoralist’s depiction of the American character overly
harsh? Do you find it more than a little paranoid (a residue of that sixties’ radicalism,
perhaps) to describe America as a police state? Surely, you might object, things are
not so bad as the immoralist’s “Land of the Jailed” accusation would suggest? If that
is your happy belief, your morality, if you cherish the idea that America is a land
where freedom reigns, then what are your thoughts regarding the number of your
fellow Americans who have run afoul of the some 700,000 armed police who patrol
every street and neighborhood of our fair land? As a liberal-minded citizen (in other
words, an educated sheep), you may well think that police across the country are too
active and too brutal in “minority” neighborhoods. You may feel that far too many
young black and Hispanic men acquire police records as a consequence of their
Driving While Black/Hispanic, Walking While Black/Hispanic, Breathing While
Black/Hispanic. You are public-spirited; you would like to redress those wrongs. But
apart from the unfortunate conditions of our inner cities, where the majority of young
black men have experienced a criminal arrest, surely the country as a whole is not
similarly blighted.
That poses a factual question. How many of us are criminals in the eyes of the
law? Perhaps one in several thousand? After all, there are some 285 million
Americans, and over 211 million of us over the age of eighteen (an arbitrary cut-off,
since The Law is happy to convict twelve-year olds of murder). Thus even one
criminal among every ten thousand adults would make for a national criminal
population of over 21,000. A group the size of a small city. Think of the number of
jail cells, penitentiary blocks, policemen, assistant district attorneys, judges, jailors,
bailiffs, courthouses, parole and probation officers, counselors of every stripe (“anger
management,” domestic violence, substance abuse), and, a multitude unto itself,
criminal defense attorneys, which would be required to process that population of
21,000. Taking all those specialists together, it would not seem implausible to
estimate that ten such ancillary persons, ten other Americans, would spend their lives
administering that population: 231,000 of us, or one American adult in 913 would be
49
bound up in the criminal justice system by this estimate. In addition, each of our
“criminals” has close family and friends whose lives are transformed, and often
shattered, by the arrest of a son or daughter, a father or mother, a spouse or lover, a
best friend. There must be three or four such persons, at a minimum, for every
“criminal” arrested. Another 63,000 to 84,000 people to add to the swelling numbers.
But there is a very serious problem with these estimates, however plausible
they may seem to that mythical beast, “the average American.” The estimates, already
alarming, are not even close: they are off by a factor of over 300! The number of
Americans in jail or prison and on parole or probation is higher than one in every
10,000 adults. Would you believe it is higher than one in a thousand? That would be
sobering news to most of us. Suppose some alarmist were to suggest to you that the
number of Americans in such circumstances is closer to one in a hundred? Wouldn’t
you reject that suggestion as completely outside the bounds of reason? As an
irresponsible claim by a trouble-maker? And we don’t want any of those around as
our Homeland Security forces root out the terrorists among us! If one American adult
in a hundred had a criminal arrest record and if ten Americans spent their vocational
lives dealing with that underclass, that would mean that criminals and their
administrators accounted for more than one of every nine adults in the nation. Those
figures are indeed alarming, to the extent that they seem preposterous on the face of
things. America is not that kind of place. America is not a police state.
In fact, those estimates are erroneous. America is not that kind of place; it is
much worse. The actual figure is that one of every thirty-two adults in America has an
active criminal record. One in every thirty-two, or some 6.6 million persons in
America today are either in jail or prison, on parole or probation. We inhabit the Land
of the Jailed, and we listen to the inspiring strains of “America the Beautiful” from
behind bars.
One in every 32 adults in the United States was behind bars or on
probation or parole by the end of last year [2001] – a record of 6.6 million
people, according to a government report released Sunday.
The number of adults under supervision by the criminal justice system
rose by 147,700, or 2.3 percent, between 2000 and 2001, the Justice
Department reported. In 1990, almost 4.4 million adults were incarcerated or
under supervision [thus in the twelve-year period from 1990 through 2001,
that number increased by fifty per cent].
“The overall figures suggest that we’ve come to rely on the criminal
justice system as a way of responding to social problems in a way that’s
unprecedented,” said Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing
50
Project, an advocacy and research group that favors alternatives to
incarceration. “We’re setting a new record every day.”
Almost 4 million people were on probation, 2.8 percent more than in
2000, while the number of people in prison grew 1.1 percent to 1.3 million . .
. More than half of those on probation – 53 percent – had been convicted of
felonies, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
Experts noted the recent trend of arrests declined for murder, rape and
other violent crimes. Many of those on probation were convicted of using
illegal drugs or driving while intoxicated, the report showed.
. . . Texas had more adults under correctional supervision than any other
state: 755,100. California was second with 704,900. Texas also had the most
adults on probation, 443,684, followed by California at 350,768.
Whites accounted for 55 percent of those on probation, while blacks made
up 31 percent, statistics show. On the other hand, 46 percent of those
incarcerated were black and 36 percent were white. (Jonathan D. Salant,
Associated Press, August 26, 2002)
The numbers are more than staggering; they defy belief. As do their horrific
implications. Based on our previous assumption that three or four immediate family
and friends are deeply affected by each arrest, there are right now some 20 to 26
million persons suffering through the trauma of being dragged through the American
system of criminal “justice.” These figures represent 10 to 12 per cent of the adult
population. Similarly, the numbers of police, jailors, prosecutors, judges, lawyers, and
so on swell proportionately to some 66 million: an enormous standing army, now
augmented by a new and rapidly expanding Homeland Security force. America a
police state? Unquestionably. In fact, as the internal war on terrorism accelerates the
country approaches the limiting definition of a police state: anyone not in jail is a
policeman.
The business of America is not business; the business of America is
imprisonment. It is an alarming and tragic situation. The facts throw a harsh light on
the hypocritical cant of our “law and order” politicians, chief among them George Jr
and John Ashcroft. Take special note in the press release quoted above that Texas
leads the nation in the percentage of its criminalized population: one in twenty adults
has been dragged in handcuffs into the system. As governor of that punitive land,
George Jr acquired experience that would serve him well in the White House; he
instituted a practice of lock ’em up and kill ’em. We’ll get ’em; we’ll smoke ’em out.
They’re wanted dead or alive. His experience serves him well in shifting to the war on
terrorism: the same countrified rhetoric, the same school yard bullying, just different
victims.
51
There is really very little in our national literature that addresses the enormity
of our situation. For one thing, that situation has changed so rapidly that most of us
are living in a past when convicts and parolees were a scandalous rarity. We have
been caught off guard, comforting ourselves with platitudes from the last century
while construction crews work overtime to build huge new “detention facilities”
across the land. While C– law students with a vindictive streak – nasty little control
freaks – swell the packs of assistant district attorneys which flourish in every one of
our courthouses. America as a police state is generally treated as liberal metaphor, as
political posturing, and not as a set of facts for the cultural pathologist to examine.
The best comprehensive treatment of a police state on a par with America does not
come from one of our sociologists, and certainly not from the toady leaders of
American journalism, who are far too busy mourning the victims of the unspeakable
tragedy of 9/11. The one existing detailed account of a criminal justice system
comparable to our own is The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary
Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (its intriguing sub-title is rarely cited in the
U. S.).
Like its counterpart in Stalinist Russia, our Gulag is a sewage disposal system
on an immense scale. Millions of victims are fed through it every year, fed in at one
end as individuals with thoughts and creative expression, spewed out the other end as
a pile of human sewage, infused with the ineradicable stench of John Ashcroft and
George Jr. That stench spreads throughout the entire society and comes to define
America as a historical people. The millions of victims support tens of millions of
police, jailors, spies, executioners. And the victims have other tens of millions of
family and friends, who find themselves caught between the tragedy of their loss and
the realistic fear that they too may be swept into the yawning maw of the sewage
disposal system which has already destroyed their families. If one does not wish to be
jailed as a criminal, one becomes, at least in one’s soul, a policeman. That principle is
soon established as the driving force of the entire society, and a totalitarian state is
born.
Between Solzhenitsyn’s Russia and George Jr’s Amerika there is little
difference apart from cosmetics – the masks and prosthetics our cultural pathologist
regularly encounters and discards. And such differences as exist are not flattering to
our society. If Stalin’s feared minions and secret police plied their gruesome trade
under a blanket of hushed secrecy, our police have acquired a high-profile status as
persons of interest and admiration. We have taken that bizarre next step in the process
of subjugation, in which our persecutors become our folk heroes. Just consider for a
moment the number and popularity of our cops-and-lawyers television programs (the
various versions of Law and Order; NYPD Blue; the “reality TV” show Cops and its
several clones; and old stand-bys such as Nash Bridges and Walker, Texas Ranger).
52
We are an incredibly perverse and incomprehensible people, for we persist in making
heroes of the very pigs and attack dogs who labor tirelessly to build the next Gulag.
That bizarre piece of hero worship finds its culmination in Mayor Giuliani’s
and the media’s valorization of the New York City Police Department for their role in
9/11. Media and everyday life; reelity and reality: the tail does not even have to wag
the dog now, for dog and tail have become indistinguishable. The fallen heroes of
9/11, remembered with posters, caps and T-shirts emblazoned with “NYPD,” are
synonymous in the public mind with the TV heroes, Andy Sipowicz and Diane
Russell, of NYPD Blue. Solzhenitsyn’s wretched zeks could only stare in disbelief at
the spectacle of Americans worshipping their tormentors.
In a similar vein, the immoralist puzzles over the adulation given firemen as a
group. Their individual deaths were tragic, and an obvious source of great suffering
for their families and friends. But how was the cultural transformation accomplished
whereby those individual tragedies became a source of national admiration for New
York firemen as a group?
Again, the immoralist can only conclude that the event was lacking in
genuinely heroic personalities of national stature. Yet the enormity of 9/11 demanded
a national catharsis; the catharsis required a symbolic object; the flock turned again to
its shepherds.
Subsequent events have proved embarrassing, although the media has not
lingered on this seamy side of our firemen-heroes. For the first couple of months the
New York firemen, common-as-dirt clock-punching municipal workers, performed the
role of self-sacrificing heroes assigned them by the media. They toiled around the
clock at Ground Zero; they appeared in prominent places (standing shoulder-toshoulder with the Nation’s Mayor at press conferences; presiding over the closing of
the New York Stock Exchange on at least one occasion); and bestowed elaborate rites
on the grisly remains they managed to wrest from the smouldering wreckage. But
then the facade crumbled. We next saw our heroes, not in the glorious battle dress that
adorned the cover of Newsweek, but in cheap, ill-fitting suits marching up courthouse
steps surrounded by a phalanx of lard-ass lawyers, themselves garbed in far more
expensive tailoring, intent on grabbing some of the 9/11 public loot for themselves by
filing suit against the city for the respiratory problems they had developed as a result
of their long hours at Ground Zero. How noble of our firemen heroes! How beautiful
their characters! How definitive of the cultural pathology the immoralist continues to
dissect.
53
Final Things and Fantasies
Stripping away the bandages, cutting through the prosthetics, removing the
masks which obscure the pathology that is 9/11, the immoralist comes at last to the
naked thing itself, and to the horrible question that thing poses: What is the value of
those lost lives? He stands at his dissecting table unsupported by the illusions of his
countrymen, without their simpering hypocrisy regarding the fundamental value of
human life, without their puerile fascination with global conspiracies, without their
need to make heroes of the lowest orders of humanity. Faced with the thing itself, the
immoralist sees that his subject – all those lost lives – possesses no nobility, has
created nothing of beauty. The victims were a haphazard assortment of municipal
workers, bureaucrats, money-changers: a succession of zeroes. His subject lacks the
aesthetic significance which Nietzsche insisted is the only valid criterion for
establishing value. Considered in these terms, those three thousand lost lives mean
little.
With this stark conclusion weighing on him, the immoralist’s mind races.
Thoughts he had in the first hours and days following the World Trade Center attacks
come rushing back. Remember, he has come to believe that catastrophe strikes
anywhere, without warning and without the possibility of coherent explanation. If that
is so, then the tumult of his thoughts throws up scenarios he cannot dismiss: a jumble
of “What if?”s. What if Atta’s New York City targets had been different? The
Museum of Modern Art, perhaps? Or the New York Public Library? The Museum of
Natural History? New York University? Or, widening the scope of things just a bit,
suppose Atta and his cohorts had targeted places the immoralist associates with
worthwhile human endeavor – not exemplars of the Nietzschean quest perhaps, but far
better undertakings than anything the World Trade Center represented. Suppose the
planes had hit the Santa Fe Institute, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study,
Chicago’s Art Institute, the California Institute of Technology, or M. I. T.? Had these
been the targets, then certainly George Jr and John Ashcroft would not have reacted
with quite the xenophobic fury they spewed out when the Pentagon and twin towers
were hit. After all, George Jr and Ashcroft are themselves common, ugly
personalities, and as such they mourn the loss of the common and ugly while secretly
gloating over the destruction of the noble and beautiful. But in the immoralist’s
world, the brilliant minds and talents and, far more tragically, the youthful genius
found in those few places he respects would be a vastly more devastating loss to the
world than the grubbing inhabitants of the World Trade Center. If we follow the
immoralist in his reckoning of value, shouldn’t we breath a collective sigh of relief
that Atta and his cohorts, self-deluded fools that they were, selected targets which are
insignificant in any scheme of things that matter?
54
In this vein, the immoralist speculates on what someone with Atta’s hatred and
fanaticism might have done if equipped with a time machine rather than airplanes.
Suppose he or a similar fanatic could take the life of Einstein in 1904, before the
young patent-office clerk authored the extraordinary quartet of papers in 1905 which
launched modern physics? Suppose this time-traveling fanatic could assassinate the
young V. S. Naipaul in 1955, when that impoverished Trinidadian immigrant to
London struggled to write his first novels? Suppose the fanatic were to visit the young
Picasso, van Gogh, Beethoven? Speculative, even fanciful, but the mere mention of
these outlandish possibilities underscores the immoralist’s Nietzschean perspective on
things. Value does not reside in the herd with its suffocating closeness and
mindlessness; it resides in the solitary individual whose quest for truth and beauty
takes him far from the confinement of the masses. That rare individual creates; the
herd merely exists. Adopting this perspective drives home the urgency of the hard
question the immoralist poses: What is the value of the lives lost in New York City on
9/11? When we have exhausted our sensibilities watching the grotesque interviews
with family members, when we have seen far more than we care to see of the wailing
walls of photos and memorabilia, when we have finished gagging, for the time being,
on George Jr’s pious bilge, can we say that any of that second-hand grief, that
warmed-over patriotism can begin to measure up to the loss we and the world would
endure if deprived of Einstein, Picasso, Naipaul?
The immoralist’s thinking along these lines has a far less speculative side.
Rather than continue weighing fanciful scenarios, he considers it of the utmost
importance to determine what, if anything, of true value was lost in the World Trade
Center attacks. Pursuing that investigation immediately leads him to observations
which are both alarming and surprisingly little-discussed in the media. In the
thousands of hours of TV coverage and in the thousands of pages of 9/11 journalism,
very little has been said of the irreplaceable art destroyed in the inferno. The
American public is forced to endure endless interviews with the bereaved, endless
speeches by dim-witted politicians, endless images of the smoking ruin, but rarely if
ever afforded a look at the real treasures forever lost to the world on that September
day. Among these: an enormous tapestry by Miró entitled World Trade Centre which
hung in the mezzanine of Two WTC; a looming twenty-five foot sculpture by Calder
which stood outside Seven WTC; two pieces, one a painting the other a thirty-foot
sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein. These major works, gone forever, were among the
relatively few pieces of art publicly displayed. The privately-owned works were far
more numerous in that bastion of global capitalism; these were kept behind closed
doors for the covetous pleasure of their owners and their clients.
There were, for example, the Rodins of Cantor Fitzgerald. The firm of Cantor
Fitzgerald is a money-changer on a scale unimagined by Jesus when he was applying
55
the scourge to its earlier incarnations in the Temple of Jerusalem. As the premier
trader of government bonds in the world, Cantor Fitzgerald, founded by B Gerald
Fitzgerald, occupied three floors near the top of One World Trade Center and
employed about a thousand people. On its uppermost floor, the 105th, the firm had
created a magnificent “museum in the sky.” The museum included dozens of works by
Rodin (Fitzgerald had been the most important private collector of Rodin in the world)
as well as a large collection of American and European paintings, sculptures and
photographs. Atta’s hijacked plane slammed into the building just below the Cantor
Fitzgerald floors; some seven hundred employees were killed. It was by far the
greatest loss of life sustained by an individual firm. The museum and its entire
contents were also destroyed: works of art kept from the public eye, reserved for the
gloating enjoyment of bond traders, a store of loot assembled through rampant
capitalist greed, were at last released to a grieving world as a heap of smouldering ash
and fragments, treasures consigned to the mass grave which awaited the ruins of
Ground Zero.
Cantor Fitzgerald and its chairman, Howard Lutnick (who escaped death while
taking his son to kindergarten that fateful day), have in the months following 9/11
brought public attention to themselves by producing a series of tasteless and offensive
TV commercials. In these, Lutnick and various Cantor Fitzgerald survivors reflect on
the horror they experienced and their pride in returning to the bond markets the very
Thursday following the Tuesday disaster. Sure, hundreds of our friends and coworkers died, but, by God, we were back trading two days later! Aren’t we the
greatest money-changers the world has ever seen! One wonders: What would Jesus
have thought of Atta’s applying the scourge to this nest of vermin?
Extending a macabre line of thought, the immoralist ponders a hypothetical
trade based on Nietzsche’s revaluation of values: rather than going on and on about
the lost lives of parasitic bond traders, what if it had been possible to selectively
increase the death toll at the twin towers while proportionately decreasing the number
of works of art lost in the disaster? Suppose a high-level meeting had been scheduled
for September 11 which attracted to the upper floors of the twin towers all the top
executives of Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and a dozen other larcenous corporations?
And suppose at the same time every piece of art on site had been removed for
inventorying or whatever – a total collection conservatively valued at $100 million by
art historians involved in the specialized business of insuring art collections. Think
about it. Deeply. Would you sacrifice a bunch of thieves and liars, whose unchecked
greed has brought great hardship to thousands of families, to save hundreds of works
of art released from corporate monopoly and spared a fiery destruction? Would you
trade Ken Lay for a Calder? Would you? The immoralist can only answer, “yes” –
and in a New York minute. (But don’t worry about our CEOs: those trapped rats,
56
scurrying up to the observation deck, would still have a sporting chance: they could
deploy their platinum parachutes.)
What is the value of all those lost lives? To begin to answer that question
honestly, which never even gets asked in the knee-jerk comments of politicians and
pundits, is to open a searching analysis into the nature of value itself. In that analysis
there can be no assumptions, no “Of course this-and-this are the case . . .” to cloud the
issue. Principal among those assumptions – the one everybody trots out right away –
is the fundamental value of human life. There are, however, two fundamental
problems with this “fundamental value.” First, in applying a Nietzschean perspective
one recognizes an “order of rank” at work in human affairs, an order which
distinguishes the worth of an Einstein or Picasso from that of a lying, thieving CEO.
Second, there can be no established value to human life because humanity itself is
anything but established: from the species’ beginnings to the present day and into the
foreseeable future, humanity’s one constant has been the transformation of its
physiology, its mind, its social organization, its culture, its very being. “We” are a
from-something-else to-something-else proposition. Man is a thing that will pass.
Only a fool – and, as we have seen, there are plenty of those – would insist on an
inherent moral order of things.
Counterterrorism
George Jr’s declaration of war on an abstraction, “terrorism,” is as senseless
and dishonest as his predecessors’ earlier declarations of war on other abstractions:
poverty, crime, drugs, the Evil Empire. Such acts are an alarming and depressing
indication that the spirit, if not quite yet the institutions, of totalitarianism dominate
the thinking of both American policy makers and the American public. Those “wars”
are conceivable only if one pretends that the lives of poor people, of criminals, of drug
addicts, and, now, of “terrorists” are a thing apart from the healthy, whole body of
American society. Pretends that those “deviates” are not members of our own families
(and we don’t declare war on our family, even though we may live in a perpetual state
of warfare with them!). Pretends that what “they” are is not intimately bound up with
what “we” are. The totalitarian “we” is constituted through those declarations of war,
thus enabling the most stupid and dishonest among us to tighten the noose on
whatever sort of diversity, of human difference and creativity, seems at the moment to
threaten that “we.”
The immoralist’s inquiry exposes the futility and repugnant ugliness of this
view. In his pathologist’s clinic, he observes that the body of America laid out before
him is anything but healthy and whole. It is covered with festering sores. Hence the
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pathologist asks why, when a Mohammed Atta applies a pin prick to one of those
sores, we should be surprised when a foul-smelling pus oozes out?
Let us be ruthlessly logical here. George Jr has declared war on “terrorism.”
The American bully, stung by a bee (Atta’s pin prick) howls like the spoiled child it is,
then hurls its obese bulk at whatever has dared offend and challenge it. Battalions are
mobilized, reservists called up, fleets reassigned. And on the home front, because the
front is now our homes, a great Department of Homeland Security is created. That
new Department promises to expand many-fold the powers of the police in a society
which, as we have seen, is already an embryonic police state. “Terrorists” lurk among
us, in Oregon towns and Buffalo suburbs, as well as in Afghan caves and Philippine
jungles.
What are the results of this “war” being waged on two fronts? Several
thousand Afghans are killed, among them hundreds of “foreign fighters.” A few
hundred captured fighters – not “prisoners of war” but “unlawful combatants” without
any protection by the Geneva accords – are transported to the other side of the world
to squat in wire cages hastily assembled at the U. S. base in Guantanamo, Cuba. And
what of Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and most of their chief lieutenants?
Disappeared without a trace. Our arch-villains remain in hiding and with each day
recede further from the public’s imagination (which is now focused on Iraq and the
stock market). What of the coterie of oily sheiks who sponsored Al-Qaeda and made
all the carnage possible? Despite several crowing press releases about cutting off
those funds, George Jr has barely scratched the surface of the vast Arab wealth
supporting the Islamist cause. And on the home front? Hundreds of arrests, months of
detention in solitary confinement without charges and without visitors. Two or three
fish are netted, principal among them Zaccarias Moussaoui and offered up for the
usual ludicrous trials. Is this what we have to show for our “war on terrorism”?
These are the flailing, bellowing, and mostly futile actions of an enraged bully.
And worse than ineffective, they are dangerous. For two reasons. First, they
demonstrate to the world yet again the inability of the U. S. government to mount an
effective response to crisis: the world witnesses the bully thrashing around, wasting its
enormous resources, accomplishing little, and, most alarming, becoming obsessed
with trifles along the way (shuffling cabinet responsibilities to make room for the
Department of Homeland Security; hauling the FBI and CIA on the carpet to stir the
ashes of intelligence on terrorism). All this simply reminds the world that this is the
same government, the same bunch of vindictive old men – the “leader of the Free
World” – which went into a coma for more than a year over that horror of horrors: Bill
Clinton’s blow job. Out there in the world they’re still shaking their heads and
laughing over that one: Bill brought eight years of peace and prosperity and an
astounding budget surplus, that’s all well and good, but how, we repeat, how can we
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ever forgive him for that nastiness in the oval office? What will we tell the children?
It is beyond ridiculous. The world witnesses this puritanical frenzy, takes it all in, and
waits for it to surface in the future, when a delusional American government will again
make a fool of itself.
Second, terrorists and would-be-terrorists around the world (and there are
doubtlessly tens of thousands of them) take in the spectacle of America’s rampage and
grow stronger. It is precisely what they expected from the bully they despise. Donald
Rumsfeld and Colin Powell can crow about American victories all they want; their
words find a mocking audience in the cities and villages of the Middle East and
Central Asia. The might of the U. S. military destroyed the weak little Taliban regime
in Afghanistan (while failing to capture most of its leaders), and returned that blighted
land to its earlier chaos. How will the U. S. nation-building effort proceed there, as
the months and years pass and political assassinations multiply? Already the
American media and government have grown tired of Afghanistan and its unsolvable
problems; Saddam and Iraq (The Sequel) are now the hot topic. Meanwhile, in the
villages and hillside encampments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, thousands of armed
men bide their time. The bully’s rage spent, they will return to their old ways.
To the limited extent the cultural pathologist can recommend prophylactic and
therapeutic treatment for his diseased subject, he reviews the U. S. response to 9/11
and finds it hopelessly inadequate. That response does not begin to ameliorate or cure
the disease he sees laid out before him. A “war on terrorism” is a mere ideological
posture.
What is required, our pathologist concludes, is counterterrorism.
Counterterrorism is just that: it turns the actions and tactics of terrorism back on itself.
It does not mount a full military campaign, reorganize government departments,
convene military tribunals, or conduct mass arrests and endless detentions. Those are
the predictable, wasteful, and ineffective acts of a totalitarian regime.
Counterterrorism responds in kind to the injury inflicted. It is an eye-for-an-eye
justice, an age-old system of pure revenge which has not quite been crushed under the
accumulating weight of law books. Counterterrorism is swift and merciless, as swift
and merciless as the attacks that precipitate it. And very tightly focused: it identifies
the precise nature of the attack on itself and responds in kind.
As Hannibal Lecter, quoting Marcus Aurelius, advised Clarice Starling, “Ask
of each thing what it is in itself. What is its nature?”. The Afghanistan campaign took
months to get underway, and although George Jr was praised for his deliberation, it
was a pointless waste of time. Within hours of the attacks, the U. S. government and
soon thereafter the world knew the national origins of the hijackers (most of them our
dear old friends and allies, the Saudis), the pivotal role of Osama bin Laden and his
Al-Qaeda organization, and the motivating cause of Islamist activism. That is the
nature of the attacker; that is the nature of the thing in itself. And the nature of the
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attacked, of course, is large, prominent public buildings of both symbolic and
instrumental importance to a nation.
The American response, its counterterrorism, comes within days of the attacks.
George Jr does not first get on TV and mourn the dead, does not praise Islam while
denouncing its fanatics, does not call for the guilty to come forward. The world has
seen that self-righteous face of America and heard its whining voice too often and
finds them pathetic. No, events take quite a different course.
Within days of 9/11 the two most prominent Wahabi mosques in Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, and Pakistan are simultaneously obliterated, each targeted by a brace of Cruise
missiles or the notorious “smart” bombs. For years the Wahabites, with enormous
financial support from wealthy Saudis, have been indoctrinating Muslim youth with a
virulent version of Islam, exhorting them to destroy the infidel. They now reap the
whirlwind they have sown. On the same day, the corporate headquarters of Osama’s
father’s Saudi construction firm becomes a plume of smoke and a pile of rubble, along
with two or three of that firm’s major public works in Saudi Arabia. In a city we have
already visited, Mazar-e-Sharif, the famous “Blue Mosque,” reportedly containing the
tomb of the Prophet’s son-in-law, meets the same fate. In Islamabad, the headquarters
of Pakistan’s notorious secret police force, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency,
which for years has openly supported the Taliban and Osama, is obliterated. At the
end of that fateful day, the Saudi air force, now a hornet’s nest of activity, issues an
alarming communiqué: their radar has detected a single Cruise missile, coming in
unusually high and on a direct course to impact the holiest of holies, Mecca! There
are only seconds to react; some in the sacred site below turn their eyes up to await the
infidel’s wrath. But there is no devastating explosion in the vast central plaza of the
shrine; instead the warhead impacts and releases an enormous cloud of leaflets,
reminiscent of the gruesome cloud of confetti which swirled around the collapsed
towers days before. A few stunned clerics pick up leaflets as they settle to the ground.
The leaflets are inscribed with a message, in the most flowery classical Arabic of
course: Fuck with the bull and you get the horn!
Immediately following this air-mail delivery, George Jr is back on TV to
announce that the U. S. government now expects that the leaders of Al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, along with the most important financial contributors to those organizations,
will be delivered to American authorities. Dead or alive, it matters little, as George Jr
made clear in his infamous “We’ll smoke ’em out; we’ll get ’em” speeches. Along
with those criminals, the U. S. expects a reparations payment in the amount of fifty
billion dollars, to be provided by the Saudi government and its wealthy citizens who
have supported the Islamist cause. Failing the actual cash, a fifty billion dollar credit
in U. S. purchases of Saudi oil will be taken. These conditions must be met in two
weeks. If not, the next deliveries to Mecca, Medina, Saudi royal palaces, and every
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Taliban stronghold will not contain leaflets. George Jr notes that the Saudi palaces are
on this list because the ostensible target of United Airlines flight 93, which crashed in
Somerset County, Pennsylvania, was the White House. An eye for an eye.
Counterterrorism. As president, he is not about to stand by while American landmarks
and American lives are lost. And he is not about to send U. S. troops half-way around
the world to attempt to track down a bunch of fanatics who have gone to ground.
Local authorities are far better suited to that on-the-ground guerrilla operation; U. S.
strikes are intended to encourage them to round up and deliver the killers. And the
killers and the money had better be delivered. If not, more very bad things will
happen. Fuck with the bull and you get the horn.
Multiple Realities, Superabundant Order
George Jr’s actual conduct of his war on terrorism demonstrates that he has
signed on to the going version of reality – signed on to it without knowing it or even
beginning to think about it, since he is much too dim-witted to do either. He actually
believes that everyday life makes sense and can be controlled. Effects follow
naturally from causes, so that individuals in the know – meaning the conniving lowlifes who become politicians – can anticipate cause-and-effect sequences and, the most
important part of all, jump into the mix to manipulate events. Common and
comfortable as this way of thinking is, we have seen again and again that it is false.
One thing leads to another often through sheer coincidence, so that the enormous
number of events which shape an individual’s life comprises a vast web of
circumstance. It is not that everything happens by chance, making life wholly
unpredictable from one moment to the next; it is rather that chance enters into a
sufficient number of events to make any large-scale prediction and control impossible.
Human life, even in such supposed bastions of peace and tranquility as the United
States, is conducted on the edge of chaos. To say that we live in “equilibrium” does
not mean that things have arranged themselves into a (perhaps God-given) stability.
The true meaning of social “equilibrium” is that a great many individuals, acting on
the basis of conflicting intentions (intentions which regularly conflict even within a
single individual), construct a society that is perpetually about to fly apart: a volatile
and dangerous entity.
The curious, thoroughly paradoxical twist to this circumstantial vision of
reality is that it is the very opposite of saying that life is nonsensical, that nothing
make sense, that everything is random. It is impossible to arrive at clear and definitive
interpretations of events, not because things don’t fit together, but because things are
interconnected in such a myriad of ways that no single pattern embraces all the
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possibilities, all the realities of social life. The entropic view of life, as proposed, for
example, by Claude Lévi-Strauss in a morose passage toward the end of Tristes
Tropiques, is directly contrary to the more recent take on things offered by complexity
theory. Meaning is not a precious commodity which one derives after sifting through
a plethora of inanimate “facts;” meaning, in the sense of ordered relations among
elements, is superabundant, at least as common as those inanimate facts themselves.
Remarkably, order spontaneously erupts from any dynamic combination of randomly
distributed elements. A primordial cloud of ionized gas coalesces into vast clusters of
galaxies, each a dynamic entity with its internal process of life and death. Many stars
in those galaxies are born with embryonic planets circling them. And on at least one
of those planets (and how can there not be a multitude?) simple chemicals have
combined to form molecules of incredible complexity, including DNA. That single
molecule in turn has sparked the continuing evolution of uncounted millions of
species. One of those species is even in the process of transforming itself, its very
nature, through the use of a technology it has created from nothing. Human life and
the societies it forms are a seething multiplicity. There is no correct, authoritative
interpretation out there, waiting to be discovered by the perceptive social
commentator, because there are a multitude of interpretations, all locally valid to some
extent, all impinging on and modifying one another. The awful danger, to return to
the passage from Eco with which this essay began, is that people pretend to establish a
single interpretation as the underlying truth of an event, and thereby render existence
terrible.
It is an exceedingly difficult thing to admit to ourselves. Particularly when we
confront tragedy, and most particularly when we confront tragedy on the grand scale
of the WTC attacks, we want to believe that things happen for a reason. “It was his
time to go.” “It was God’s will.” “It was the diabolical scheme of evildoers” (which
translates, in the idiom of the previous examples: “Satan caused this to happen”).
George Jr and his ilk nourish (or say they nourish) the illusion that this land of ours is
a wonderful place which would go on being wonderful if it were not for extremists
who seek to disrupt its normal functioning for their own selfish and misguided ends.
The worst sort of these agitators and militants is the terrorist, a true foreign devil: dark,
penetrating eyes; a villainous beard; strange clothing; fanatical, heavily accented
speech. Even if our various wars – on poverty, crime, drugs – sometimes make it
difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys (since they are usually part of our own
families and communities), the war on terrorism is a pure exercise in Us versus Them.
That is a lie. A lie, or at the very least, a terrible, damaging mistake. Osama
bin Laden was once our staunch ally, a valiant freedom fighter defending the noble
Afghan people from the Evil Empire of Soviet communism (and if you don’t believe
that, just watch Rambo III in which Sly joins up with the mujahadin and reprises his
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role of War Hero; we now see what John Walker got for trying the same thing!).
Mohammed Atta and his crews lived among us, a tiny splinter element of a vast ArabAmerican presence in our cities. At the same time, American political, economic, and
military aggressions have penetrated every corner of the Islamic world. Muslims
everywhere are force-fed a daily diet of TV coverage of American jets and American
tanks, commanded by Israeli storm troopers, murdering thousands of defenseless
Palestinians. Tens of thousands of Muslims and other disenfranchised peoples of the
Third World would give their lives to avenge those and other American atrocities.
And millions of their compatriots would witness with approval those acts of revenge.
It is ludicrous to believe that even a totalitarian regime, such as the United States is
becoming, can stem that tide of vengeance.
Our already grotesque “defense” budget could be swollen several times over;
our new Department of Homeland Security could induct thousands more internal
policemen, thousands more Chekists; our satellite surveillance and its monitoring
could be increased manyfold: terrorists would still strike their targets. It is not
unlikely that a terrorist’s bomb, plane, or satchel filled with anthrax spores will kill
hundreds and perhaps thousands of Americans in the future. The vast reservoir of
hatred American governments and corporations have created piles up on the banks of
our privileged and delusional nation; who can doubt that it will spill over or break
through here and there? Shit happens. The Palestinians have huddled in their
concentration camps for decades, waiting every night for the bomb or missile to strike.
That is the true meaning of terror, not the childish rubbish George Jr peddles with his
“war on terrorism.” The urgent question then is not whether George Jr can fashion
America into such a thoroughly totalitarian regime that it becomes possible to monitor
everyone’s doings and thereby interdict a terrorist before he carries out his plan. That
would be impossible to accomplish, and its mere attempt – which is now well
underway – would destroy whatever Nietzschean nobility and beauty may reside in
this land of malls and military bases. The urgent question is whether America will
continue to act the enraged bully, lashing out at every puny insult to its selfish
existence, or, by some miracle, pursue another course?
Things don’t happen for a reason. Things just happen.
— Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan), Proof of Life
June – October 2002, slightly revised June 2010, unpublishable anywhere.
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