10/9/2001
Been doing some reading, and only getting madder about this war with every step. I don't necessarily have much more to say about it, but some of what I've been reading, everybody ought to be reading.
Here is a great article on what our government has been up to in the Middle East and what it's up to now, by the author of The God of Small Things.
Here is a review of the effects of the food drops we've been using to cultivate a humanitarian image--largely for the benefit of observers in the West, it begins to seem. Actual Arabs, for the most part, are likely to hear that the real infusions of food have been interrupted by our munitions while we drop token morsels randomly into the biggest minefield on the planet.
This article, which I skipped at first because of its title's apparently cheap, throwaway 1984 allusion, turns out to be much more thoughtful and earnest than that: it is an incisive comparison of the world of 1984 to our own government's policies in the last month.
Further to that, here's a closer look at the brand new Secretary of Watching You Very Closely who might soon have, among other things, the power to try potential terrorists without due process and execute any "terrorists" he might find--within thirty days of their conviction.
Another dose of the history of our involvement--our decades-long, utterly failed involvement--in the Middle East before now. How we created bin Laden, how one by one we built up almost all the Arab despots we later opposed, and how, like Neville Chamberlain might, only worse, we pulverized Afghanistan by deliberately drawing the Soviets to war with it. Why? Because we wanted to hurt them, in any way and at whatever cost, by giving them their own Vietnam. For this noble end the sacrifice of somebody else's miserable little country was not too great.
Here's a taste of what could easily hit us next. Please note: this country has precisely one plant making the dubious anthrax vaccine. That plant, in Lansing, was privatized a few years ago, and has narrowly avoided being shut down by the FDA. The dubious vaccine might be a bit more dubious than we thought.
And this just in: remember those hellish weapons of globally unprecedented devastation we keep securely rooted all over our own soil? Sort of a lurid piece, but the facts are good. Pay attention to the socioeconomic point at the end of the article, for flavor: even though these behemoths supply only a smallish part of our national power, even though three or four well-placed meltdowns could very likely annihilate the whole country, the authorities will not shut them down. But what they will do is cover their owners' asses against insurance claims that might arise in the event of meltdowns. This tells you two things: first, that the owners who will not protect us while they can are nevertheless making plans to protect themselves, which means they've thought of the possibility and regard it as worth planning for; and second, that a substantial number of Congressmen are making personal profits from the continued operation of these plants.
My intent in these last two notes is not to be alarmist, exactly. But I think I am beginning to realize what's happening with me this month, what the sight of those towers burning did to me. My politics have been dragging themselves through a painful reversal in the last year or two anyway, and I've been feeling strangely on the fence, and unqualified to speak, during that process. Even before that, though I have always been opinionated, I was never political; I felt I was both above such fleeting matters, and too far beyond the ken of American politics-as-usual to be heard.
Suddenly I am full of politics. The sense that very real things are going badly wrong has been growing in me for many months, a sense I know I was always partly hiding from anyway. But more powerful than that, only in the last maybe four months, I have begun to learn about things that can be done, things that are being done, and I have begun to dare to feel empowered to step into the real world of politics, with an agenda.
The last barrier, maybe the tightest bond keeping Americans quiet and routine as a rule, is detachment. We have a mighty reverence in our culture for strength, and over the years strength has come to be symbolized by unflappable calm, and later by outright flippancy, in the face of frightening things. From Zorro to James Bond, the heroes we are fed with are too mighty to be contented with merely dispatching villains. They must dispatch them with perfect comic timing, having uttered some droll quip just before striking. Why? Because they are unimpressed. They have seen it all before. They are untouched, untouchable, forever unmoved.
How hard do we try to emulate these sphinxes ourselves? The Onion, in its only funny response to the attack, pleaded: are sarcasm and cynicism really out of style now? Well, it's a sincere question. We don't know what to do without our faux worldliness. For the Onion, it's the loss of their business plan; for westerners at large, it's the loss of our sense of identity.
We are children of peacetime. We Americans live in the most secure country that has ever been. Perhaps understandably, we have always felt--based on our own experiences--that it was safer yet than it actually is. In the back of our minds we know we have not earned our security, that we are not a nation of James Bonds; our unwritten rule of remaining unimpressed in the face of all things is our best attempt to deny that, to claim the safety as our natural right. We have been aping worldliness, pretending to be dangerous, dressing ourselves up in the costumes of whomever we imagine to be strong.
But we've had a punch in the nose now, a horrible blow delivered effortlessly by men who are happy to die for reasons we don't yet understand. We can't exactly ignore that. But only slowly do our habits of thought and feeling let us go. For many of us our whole lives have passed without any event that justified a wholly unguarded reaction, a personal response to worldwide events. We have never allowed the world outside to alter the course of our lives.
Just now I was about to write something rude about people who could remain unmoved through the fall of the Towers. But it is more genuine to say: if you could watch that unmoved, it's because you're not really understanding that it happened. Why should you? It's one more flare of orange on the TV. I've seen a thousand and I never really felt any of them either.
Except some of us were here and we saw it. I saw the nearer tower looking like a crushed cigarette. And I just ran through an employee file on a smiling man named Sal who had a wife and a very young son and whose termination code in the database reads DWT.
I hope Quinn will not be too disappointed that I'm filling Ambiguous with unambiguous material. She linked to my original writeup of the attack precisely for its "ambivalence." And it was ambivalent, and atmospheric and slow and muted. New York was a different place, a stricken place, and ambivalence was perhaps the only reasonable response to that.
That account began and ended with the struggle to believe in what I knew to be true. How do you know when belief has settled in? Not only does the attack seem unreal, everything in life seems unreal since then.
But this weekend the people on the radio told me we were firing missiles into Kabul--and I believed them.
So these recent essays are a continuous progression, after all. Ambivalence was the fitting reaction, not to the attack itself, but to life in its wake. Ambivalence is no longer appropriate. My country is killing civilians. My country has a long record of killing civilians, which is really the bulk of the reason that we wound up the target at last. And despite tacitly announcing that we have been put at even greater risk by this misbegotten war, the unelected administration is hellbent on killing a whole lot more civilians.
The already-oppressed civilians we are blowing apart are as real as our own hapless secretaries knocked out of the sky. On both sides people are dying precisely because some warlord, who represents nobody legitimately, wants to make a point to the world at large.
Let me steal a page from one more excellent article: "True patriotism means taking responsibility for our government's actions."
So here we are dropping bombs on innocent citizens, unwillingly subject to vile leaders, whom we are not hitting, and who shelter the enemy, whom we cannot find, who is the leader of the organization which we cannot prove attacked us, with a method they probably wouldn't repeat, and putting our own citizens at increased risk, which we fight with restrictions, which cannot protect us, on our own freedoms, which were not the target of the attacks, and a war we have not declared, on nations we will not specify, and with goals that cannot be measurably achieved, for a "president" who was not elected.
Four years? Can we still be planning to sit quietly through four years of this man's occupation of the White House? Out of indecision? Out of politeness?