- I wanted to avoid this topic just as I want to avoid
everything concerned with what has become known as "9/11" ...America's
penchant for nicknames and short-forms holding even in its nightmares.
But we do not always get to do the things we want, and ignoring this is
something like ignoring a monstrous iceberg that's drifted into the harbor.
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- On that date this year, a dense, almost impenetrable
fog will descend over the entire United States. All thinking will stop.
Television networks will proudly sport logos designed just for the day,
and they will broadcast spots from advertisers pretending not to be selling
anything. Hours of toe-crinkling, stomach-churning sentiment will be broadcast
from politicians with the morals of gangsters.
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- There will be a moment of silence in the casino lounges
of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Thousands, with casual-wear pantsuits bulging
over the tops of barstools, will pause to reflect on the meaning of 9/11
between frenzied rounds of feeding slot machines. Elvis impersonators and
chorus girls will bow their heads. The $8-an-hour student in the big fuzzy
mouse-suit at Disney World will stop a minute from shilling for expensive
rides and eats.
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- Fundamentalist television-preachers will pause from the
work of building media empires to pose in leather arm chairs and shake
blubbery jowls, squeezing out a few more stage-tears for dear old America,
confident that the moment's diversion won't hurt the flow of money from
lonely, loopy folks living through television sets.
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- Footage of smoking, crumbling towers will be replayed
a thousand times on television stations with nothing else to attract advertisers.
And it will be watched, especially where the option on the dial is one
of those politicians reciting his pathetic lines for the twentieth time
in a day. The replay button on a million video machines will be hit with
trembling anticipation like that felt replaying a favorite horror flick.
A billion terrible drug store photos, snapped on trips to New York, will
be taken down from closet shelves to be thumbed and smudged over once again
by friends and family.
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- Recently a Canadian friend I had not seen for a while
recounted her experience of flying into New York right at the time of the
attack. I tell part of her story because it offers perspective on that
day's events and what has been learned from them.
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- Through the back window of her cab, she actually saw
the second plane strike the World Trade Center. In the logjam of traffic
in which she was trapped, crowds of people got out of their cars to gawk,
large numbers of them furiously snapping pictures.
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- Of course, such behavior, had there been a more far-reaching
crisis, would have been exactly the opposite of what was called for. People
were holding up the flow of traffic away from the city to catch photo-album
memories.
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- A second riveting scene was her going to a bar in the
evening for a drink in the airport-area hotel where she would be trapped,
surrounded by soldiers, for days (this only after her cab returned to the
airport following hours of effort at getting into Manhattan). The television
broadcast pictures of American warships off the coast with commentary about
how they were equipped with cruise missiles. The men in the bar cheered
loudly, just as they would at a football game, fists and forearms pumping
like the response to a touchdown. My friend could only put her head down
and despair over the notion that she was caught in the middle of a war.
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- The scene is interesting for several reasons. The football
game reaction to the warships was a replay of the mindless, gut reaction
to the military witnessed so many times in my lifetime. It is precisely
the reaction that permits a government, often serving special interests
and questionable ideology, to become mired in the affairs of others, often
to an extent at odds with the interests of most individual Americans.
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- It was obvious that the attack was the work of people
who destroyed themselves as well as their victims. The applicability of
warships, with cruise missiles no less, missiles whose only purpose is
to destroy targets on the ground or sea hundreds of miles away, to this
situation could not have meaning beyond a reassuring show of strength.
And yet people cheered. At the time, there was no certainty about what
group might be responsible for the destruction.
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- Many of them still cheer over what has been accomplished
in Afghanistan, that is, the killing of thousands of innocent people, the
scattering of the genuine terrorists to the four winds, the toppling of
a stable but unpleasant government, and putting in its place an unstable
but equally unpleasant government.
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- The displaced government blew up ancient statues and
abused women. Members of the new government murder prisoners, suffocating
them by the hundreds and dumping their bodies into mass graves on the desert.
They also devote time to shooting and blowing up one another. They still
abuse women. In the last year, despite the photo-op casting off of the
burqa, nine women have immolated themselves in protest over ghastly arranged
marriages - a far greater number than occurred under the Taliban.
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- I was reminded of audience reaction to the Sylvester
Stallone Vietnam movie, First Blood. This was a fantasy that re-assured
American mass audiences they might have avoided the despair, frustration,
and disgrace of Vietnam had there only been people like the star making
decisions. This star, a kind of living, plastic action hero figure, possessed
the cunning to defeat every trap and the vision to avoid all confusing
complexities - every trap and complexity, that is, except those of going
into Vietnam in the first place.
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- American foreign policy, and particularly the quixotic
interventions it has entailed, over the last sixty years has been based
on wishes and fantasy rather than facts, on how Americans - at least the
financially and politically influential portion of them - would like to
see the world rather than how the world is.
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- To an extent that would surprise many people who regard
America as advanced and pragmatic, this is, in fact, a society where fantasy
plays a huge role. There are the fantasies of adults who behave like children.
There are the paranoid fantasies of Christian fundamentalists who speak
in tongues, heal cancer with a thump on the forehead, and find signs of
devil worship in corporate symbols or children's books. There are many
strange cults like those of Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, the Aryan
churches, or the recent oddity of sanctifying gibberish from a second-rate
science-fiction writer. Always there is the escapism of Las Vegas, Disney
World, and Hollywood, and the powerful fantasies of advertising that keep
the economic engine at full throttle.
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- In many ways, this attachment to fantasy plays a role
in foreign affairs, in the way America sees the world and how she understands
her place.
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- In the Middle East, a place under great stresses including
rapid modernization contemporary with the continued existence of ancient
tribal cultures, something has been occurring much like the gradual build-up
of pressure from the slow, almost imperceptible movement of tectonic plates.
Under these stressful conditions, America's myopic views and careless policies
themselves provide additional sources of stress. The accurate, dreadful
message delivered on September 11 is that this way of treating events has
become dangerous to Americans whereas before it was dangerous only to those
who were the victims of American policy.
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- And it is that message that America has ignored for the
last year. All American efforts and tens of billions of dollars have been
directed at two main objects. One is the distortion of traditional arrangements
and freedoms at home plus many relationships abroad to help shape a Fortress
America. The other is to intensify the very same policies, attempting to
destroy people and places abroad viewed as especially unfriendly to the
effort.
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- I don't believe that any number of attacks and invasions
can alter such a fundamental and growing problem. There are simply too
many people adversely affected by American policy. You cannot use force
to make vast numbers of people submit, unless you are prepared to impose
indefinitely the kind of terror Stalin or Hitler imposed on society. And
you cannot maintain a fortress society in a globalized world.
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- John Chuckman encourages your comments: <mailto:jchuckman@YellowTimes.org>jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
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