An Extended Editorial - Part 1

Rod Amis - Unbound

NEW ORLEANS - 5 September, 2002: On 16 September, 2001, after omitting to do a Glass House for our first issue following the tragedy, I had this to say:

I am unbelievably sad. There are so many reasons I feel this way besides the horrific loss of life that occurred in my country this week.

• I am saddened too by the prospect of more war, more suffering and bloodshed.
• I am saddened by the bigotry being displayed on our streets by people who believe that all people of Middle Eastern or Asian descent should be beaten to assuage their own rage over the atrocity.
• I'm saddened that people like the Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson can use this tragedy to promote their own form of narrow-minded hatred.
• I'm saddened because -- in the current climate of outrage and hectoring for vengeance -- my fellow-countrymen will both sacrifice the personal freedoms they once cherished and defended, trading "security" for privacy and also succumb to the type of xenophobia and brutality we once attributed to the enemies of democracy, peace and freedom.

Most importantly, I am saddened because many who feel the same fear and loathing as I do are probably being cowed into not expressing their misgivings for fear of being accused of being unpatriotic or worse -- and that is a chilling prospect. The dragon's teeth are being sown.

Those of us who know history, and it seems there are very few extant in my country these days, are faced with the dilemma of following our conscience and our principles or buckling under to the popular will.

Jefferson saw this, even as he advocated for the "will of the people" and stood against Hamiltonian federalism. But the problem of this dichotomy in the American impulse is even more consequential today.

We need only look at the problem of perception.

What we take for "pride," at this moment of crisis and pain and outrage, could easily (and perhaps justifiably) be taken by those outside of the United States as another example of our own chauvinism. Our cries of vengeance can be taken as self-absorbed and neo-imperialistic arrogance.

The questions are begged:

How many candlelight vigils have we ourselves held for the countless dead of other countries? Are we righteous now ... or merely self-righteous?

And, again, there is the question of our need, our willingness, to go to war.

• For how long?
• Against how many countries?
• To what end, other than retribution? and
• Are we willing to expand it into the third World War?

The Mouthpiece Media, of course, are asking none of these reflective questions as they quote Public Opinion Polls and give us the Talking Head bombast of the Congress (the Congress concerned with the impending 2002 midterm elections.) But we, as citizens, fathers and mothers, have a duty to ask ourselves such questions before being so anxious to sacrifice the lives of young men and women for a sense of "justice."

One year later, I feel little necessary to recant in those words. If anything, events seem to have borne out those initial impressions all-too-well. Our Attorney General, Mr. Ashcroft, seems as bent as anyone in the current administration in Washington of shearing away what used to be considered inalienable rights. He claims he is doing it for our protection. He thinks that the cable guy or the sanitation engineer carrying away our refuse should feel proud to spy on the details of our lives for the protection of the nation. It reeks of the kind of abuses and paranoia President Reagan once referred to as symptomatic of an "evil empire."

Signs of light appear from the most unlikely sources: G. Gordon Liddy, of all people, thinks this tendency is horrifying; Colin Powell attempts to moderate the excesses of the inherited hawks in this coterie of frustrated Cold Warriors; I read with hope Zbigniew Brezinski's recent editorial in the New York Times this past Sunday. Among other salient points, Mr. Brezinski said:

The rather narrow, almost one-dimensional definition of the terrorist threat favored by the Bush administration poses the special risk that foreign powers will also seize upon the word "terrorism" to promote their own agendas, as President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee of India and President Jiang Zemin of China are doing. For each of them the disembodied American definition of the terrorist challenge has been both expedient and convenient.

When speaking to Americans, neither Mr. Putin nor Mr. Sharon can hardly utter a sentence without the "T" word in it in order to transform America's struggle against terrorism into a joint struggle against their particular Muslim neighbors. Mr. Putin clearly sees an opportunity to deflect Islamic hostility away from Russia despite Russian crimes in Chechnya and earlier in Afghanistan. Mr. Sharon would welcome a deterioration in United States relations with Saudi Arabia and perhaps American military action against Iraq while gaining a free hand to suppress the Palestinians. Hindu fanatics in India are also quite eager to conflate Islam in general with terrorism in Kashmir in particular. Not to be outdone, the Chinese recently succeeded in persuading the Bush administration to list an obscure Uighur Muslim separatist group fighting in Xinjiang province as a terrorist organization with ties to Al Qaeda.

For America, the potential risk is that its nonpolitically defined war on terrorism may thus be hijacked and diverted to other ends ...

Therein lies the problem with using terms like "Axis of Evil" and focusing only on the religious dimension of the problem of terrorism and leaving out the political dimension. That has been one of the great failures of the Bush administration in our view.

One year after the tragedy, America continues to present an over-simplified version of the dynamic at work in an extremely complex world. It's bad geopolitics and its bad policy because it places those inclined to be our friends and support us in the uncomfortable position have having to explain untenable statements. It's counterproductive both nationally -- in terms of defining what is and is not "national security" -- and equally so internationally -- because it keeps us in bed with some of the most repugnant regimes on the planet.

Our friend, Mr. Muzharraf of Pakistan, can hardly be called a friend of "democracy" as he abrogates what's left of a Constitution in Pakistan and firms his grip on power. His treatment of former-Prime Minister Bennazir Bhutto this past week -- denying her the right to even participate in the upcoming election -- can't be defined as encouraging a free and open election.

The on-going debacle in Chechnya, an issue we've covered extensively in these pages, certainly doesn't make Mr. Putin a supporter of freedom and self-determination in our book. [The series referenced in the preceding link is from 1999 and 2000.] And now, as Brezinski points out, Putin can use the "T" word to justify that barefaced, iron-fisted slaughter.

The tendency here is to have an international focus, but let me turn to the effects on the United States mindset for a moment. Last week, in preparation for the anniversary of the tragedy, various teaching organizations in this country were engaged in a debate about what should or should not be the topic of classroom discussions on September 11th. Here's an excerpt from another New York Times article:

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, came under so much fire for a suggested lesson plan on tolerance that it has removed the material from its Web site. Yesterday, a Washington research group released curriculum written largely by conservatives, including William J. Bennett and Lynne Cheney, to counter what it called "the dangerous idea of moral equivalence" and "the usual pap about diversity" in other lesson plans.

"If the enemies of open, democratic societies had used force to impose this historical and civic ignorance upon us and our children, we would consider it an act of war," reads one essay in the collection, by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. The foundation's materials advise talking to students about history and civics, as well as "President Bush's exemplary conduct" after Sept. 11, and having them read Ronald Reagan's statement to the nation after the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger as a tribute to American values.

The teachers' union and other groups whose lesson plans have come under attack say their curriculums were a response to requests from teachers and parents who say their children are still suffering emotionally from the attacks.

"For some kids, school may be the only place they have where they can find a listening ear," said Jerald Newberry, director of the Health Information Network for the union, which produced the lesson plans.

The criticism to the lessons on tolerance, Mr. Newberry said, is thinly veiled bigotry. "If you boil down the concerns of the opposition, what I would call the far right, ultimately it boils down to is: `I am not comfortable with my child being in school with someone who's different. I want to keep my child surrounded by people who are identical to me. The world is getting too diverse, and I'm scared.' " -- Lesson Plans for Sept. 11 Offer a Study in Discord -- New York Times, August 31, 2002 By Kate Zernike

Nothing, not even mourning, in the United States, escapes the glare of Spin and our ideological divisions. We do ourselves a disservice to pretend otherwise. Our divisions are deep and as politically and culturally motivated as those of the people around the world to whom we hold our example as a "Shining City on a Hill". The grave error we make is failing to look in that dark mirror in front of us and ask the question about the "fairest of them all". We don't want to hear the answer because it would contradict a mountain of rationalizations and self-congratulations.

The flags aren't on every street corner as I write this, that -- like much we do in this land -- has been replaced by plans to build something else where the fallen towers used to be and legal action against Saudi Arabia. But every organ of the Mouthpiece Media (MM) shall be bending over backwards to help us relive the trauma, explore our feelings and celebrate ourselves (yet again! As though it weren't a daily preoccupation) next Wednesday. They will wrap themselves in mantles of piety (no commercial announcements) in some cases, or feature corporate sponsors who will get acknowledgement without the cloying plethora of commercial breaks. Ad agencies are working out, you've read I'm sure, how to have their major clients like Boeing sponsor a show without appearing to be "crassly commercial". It's the appearance, after all, and not the intent that matters to our Mall Culture. "Let's make it tasteful".

---

IN THE DAYS AND WEEKS immediately after 11 September, 2001, we were all inculcated with the mantra of the MM that "Everything has changed." Therefore, as we prepare to be engorged by the their newest pile of pabulum, I believe it only fitting that we now ask how everything has changed and how (or perhaps whether) we have changed at all.

If the foregoing and latter part of this editorial is any evidence, the ideological and psychological divides between us have certainly undergone little noticeable change.

Has everything -- not just the lines at the airport(s) or our willingness to vilify the Arab world more openly -- actually changed? ("Sand nigger" and "rag head" are not new terms in the American lexicon, after all; they were uttered a lot during the Gulf War and also in reference to certain New York City cab drivers.)

We can safely assert that the United States no longer feels that the broad oceans which have separated and insulated it from the rest of the world seem less an impregnable barrier providing our safety than it did before the tragedy.

But we can only assert this if we forget the gun emplacements on the Marin headlands overlooking the San Francisco Bay during World War II or the period of Japanese internment. Those surely were not the reactions of a people who felt that those oceans made them impenetrable. Nor were the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s. Nor the Cuban missile crisis and the "duck and cover" exercises that every grade school child on the east coast of this country was forced to endure during the early 1960s. Paranoia strikes deep, as the song goes. Paranoia about the "homeland" is something only new to the present generation, not to the nation in general.

There was paranoia in the United States, fear and trembling, before there was Pokemon or Britney Spears.

It is rather the illusion of impregnability that is a new historical phenomenon, engendered by the chest-beating bravado of the Ronbo years and the self-assurance of ushering in a New World Order and "The End of History" during Bush I and Clinton. But you cannot end history, or its grievances and consequences, simply by saying so. Not even if you an American. David Bowie was right to sing, "I'm afraid of Americans", but we must understand that he was being ironic and a bit droll when he rejoined "God is an American".

Have we changed? Other than our mewling and, again, MM-inspired plaint "Why do they hate us?" and the disingenuous, self-serving answers so immediately provided by the MM, the Administration propaganda machine and the talk shows, our depth of understanding of the world beyond these borders does not seem to have been disturbed. We still can't find most places we mean to bomb into the Stone Age or occupy with our armed forces on a map.

CONTINUE TO PART TWO

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