It is difficult to get used to the idea that the mainstream media no longer report any news. My habit is to turn on the television in the morning to find out what is going on in the world, and what I am getting instead is chauvinistic posturing, paranoia, contrived interviews and military press briefings. The live footage of the Trade Center towers coming down spoke for itself. No lies there. It was immediately followed by a strange kind of news blackout. It rolled down the street toward us and engulfed us in an opaque cloud of fiction. What started out as an understandable patriotic rally has blossomed into a non-stop Yankee Doodle stage review with a dark underbelly of military censorship. Today you glean what is going on more from the great gaps between the lines than from the scripted material on the tv screen. The government has rightly perceived that information is a weapon. I don’t mean the vacuous argument that bin Laden’s thugs might use Arab broadcasts to pass deadly messages to their evil henchmen in the United States, but more tangibly that public opinion is what constitutes the legitimacy and stability of those in power, here and also in Pakistan, Egypt, Israel and Iraq. What we think or do not think is what allows our presidents to sleep peacefully. For this reason we are being spared the enemy’s point of view, lest we consider it viable. Reports from liberal dissidents, pacifists or Muslim news sources are received by the networks, decontaminated like White House mail, and recontextualized before they ever make it into American living rooms.

Like the word “terrorism”, the definition of “propaganda” is widening to include whatever perspectives Dubyuh & Co. wish us to eschew. The news networks are as committed to the agenda of their corporate bosses as is the government. They do have to acknowledge facts which would reach us in any case from other sources. I think I will live to see the day when world government is effectively monolithic and the internet is monitored and controlled. But right now information is slippery and everywhere. I get the news from the BBC and links to Arabic perspectives, then I watch to see whether Cokie Roberts is going to be allowed to pass the love along to us average Americans. So far, except for Middle Eastern editorials, she reports the main stories, albeit heavily spun and quickly followed by the “commentaries” that tell us how these things are to be interpreted. And every day or so they trot out the Prez to deliver a five minute sound bite of simplistic pap.

More worrisome than just having our intelligence insulted is the current spate of “fast track legislation” authorizing wiretaps and e-mail surveillance. Power in WWII Europe boiled down to controlling the movement of populations and armies, for which purpose thousands of miles of barbed wire were employed. This chilling interest in the movement of information between people is creating a new electronic barbed wire that will be harder to remove.

Given that it is fueled by public opinion, I’m more optimistic that this ill-conceived crusade will fizzle out soon. Firm resolve occurs naturally among Greeks and Turks and Afghans and Vietnamese who have a history of expelling invaders. Our firm resolve is brand new and too noisy. We don’t have a clue what hard times are like. For most of us a pledge to stay the course is a bit vaporous since we don’t know what the course is, or what it will require of us. Our allies remain publicly supportive, but this isn’t really their affair. They are beginning to cautiously verbalize the reasons for their reticence in getting all pro-active and gung ho with us. They don’t know, for example, what Bush exactly plans to do. Neither does Bush. He seems to have something vaguely in mind when he crosses his eyes slightly and talks about smoking ‘em out of their caves and getting ‘em on the run (some movie fragment from the windswept recesses of his brain according to which the subterranean Army of the Taliban has squirreled away the shadowy minions of al-Qa’eda in mountain caverns filled with bats and radio sets where, like Goldfinger, they direct their evil empire). But when he tells us that this is going to be a “new kind of war”, and then fails to elaborate, it appears that he doesn’t actually know what kind of thing he’s getting us into. This bothers our European friends. What are we all going to do after we capture Kabul? After we butcher the Taliban? Exactly what?

I hope to kiss a duck it is a new kind of war. It is a war without substantial enemies or definable targets. The enemy is the vast substrate of North African and Middle Eastern body politic, a ubiquitous broth of anti-American sentiment spanning halfway around the globe. It isn’t even the thinking of specific persons as much as a small part of the thinking of all persons. It is eerily like the Aids virus, holistic, homogeneous, insinuated into the DNA of the Muslim World. You don’t “find” something like that.

If George Bush were a doctor (I know. It’s scary, but try to imagine it.) here is how he would treat chicken pox: He would get mad at the spots. Wherever he found them he would go after them and drop tiny little bombs on them. Having in his experience no concept of such invisible entities as “underlying disease”, he would continue to attack symptoms until the illness ran its course or the patient turned on him. The poisonous soup from which terrorists materialize is the only thing we have the ability to treat, and then only if the infection is reversible. Like frogs from medieval slime, the people we call terrorists are simply stimulated nodes, motivated blobs of human resentment, evolutionary sequelae, congealed from the vast animosities we have ignored. We can’t kill them, because they immolate themselves on arrival. We can’t stop new ones from appearing, because we can’t acknowledge the “nowhere” from which they come. We can’t send the Special Forces in to flush them out, because they are virtually every disenfranchised towelhead from Gibraltar to Bangladesh. Why should we be responsible for the inept societies of these murderous malcontents? Because their misery has reached toxic levels. Because they are starting to blow up our skyscrapers. Because we are breaking out in spots.

But I digress. I was talking about this morning’s news. Information-wise, you take what you can get. First there was some general introduced by Martha Raddatz, who wanted to show us the new 15,000 lb. bomb they were using in Afghanistan. It’s called a “daisy-cutter”. They used it to defoliate the jungle in Vietnam. It goes off three feet above the ground and annihilates everything for 600 yards in all directions. They’re planning to use it to clear big holes in Taliban infantry so they can send the Northern Alliance in to capture Mazar-e-Sharif for us. They showed a video clip of it, blasting trees right off their stumps over a huge area. I guess they thought school kids would enjoy that while they were finishing their corn flakes. “We’re using it to kill people,” the general smirked.

Right after that somebody announced a conference on the prevention of gun violence among teen agers. The idea was to find ways to send the message to our children that guns are not the way to solve problems or to feel better about themselves. Conferees were encouraged to put their thinking caps on and try to identify some of the possible sources of adolescent aggression. Organizers hoped to explore alternatives to gang rivalries and other inappropriate behaviors.

11/10/01

Certain perennial realities prevail among the species to which we belong, on the planet where we live.

Aggressive males tend to dominate their social groups, whether these be small family structures, larger tribes or entire societies. Dominant males in small groups are called alpha males. Dominant males in larger groups are called warlords. Queens are women who have become dominant males. Warladies, if you will. The largest societies, in order to work around the complex and bloody competition for dominance, evolve into polite democracies. Regardless of the form taken by the battle to be top dog, however, the winner is always the alpha male and the alpha male is always a warlord.

Families, groups, tribes and nations exist in contradistinction to other groups etc. You can not be who you are, without a repudiation of who you are not. You can not love who you are without hating who you are not. Groups exist to the extent that they seek the death of other groups. That one’s existence is vouchsafed by the death of others is the social contract. We cooperate with one another, not to purge the need for murder from among ourselves, but to move it to the next collective level. Every society is a necropolis. There is no society in which death is not worshipped. Death is the mother of civilization.*

At any given time, although many of us are gentle and compassionate and gifted and intelligent, the people who run this world are murderous sons of bitches. There are no philosopher kings. Only the ruthless become kings.

Sometimes a society succeeds in dominating other societies to such an extent that its citizenry is largely sheltered from the fang and claw at the frontier. Far from the military and corporate battlefields, safe in the belly of their beast, legions of gentle Teletubbies frolic at the mall, play their violins, walk their dogs and enter their addresses into their palm pilots. Dutiful second graders recite the Pledge of Allegiance while similar children on the other side of the world are getting blown to pieces with daisy cutters. Terrorist children.

Sometimes you wake up from the dream that everything is okay, and you see that it isn’t. Sometimes you wake up in your nice fluffy American bed and realize that you belong to a tribe as savage as any the world has ever known.

* I refer the reader to the books of the neoFreudian Norman Brown for a
thoroughgoing discussion of civilization and death. His stuff is best read
when you are young and tough. It is not a vision for the squeamish, nor is
it a vision you can deny. If you can not bear to look at the extent to which
the love and fear of death rules our lives, you are living in a dream,
like a Zacky Farms chicken.

11/14/01

Everybody is happy today in Kabul. Women are coming out from under their burqas and guys are shaving off their whiskers, turning on their tvs and playing their boom boxes. The departure of sharia is almost universally a welcome thing. Not even the occasional piles of corpses of lingering Taliban and collaborators spoiled the festive mood.

The Taliban retreated to Kandahar without argument, sparing everybody a bloody fight in Kabul. Our military is not disposed to return the courtesy. The Taliban have not put down their weapons or surrendered or handed over their terrorists, so we are in hot pursuit, doing what we do best, butchering retreating soldiers from the air. Euphoric Americans will now do their victory dance, in the honest belief that we are back in the drivers seat. Having revenged ourselves on somebody, the wrong guys to be sure (not the Saudi hijackers or the State of Florida where they received their training, but a nasty enough batch of control freaks who abhor, like characters out of some goofy Jonathan Swift novel, the legs of women and the flying of kites), we are now closer to the belief that nobody could possibly have the temerity to blow Chicago off the map with a Russian suitcase bomb. Soon we can take a Nyquil and go back to sleep.

When the magician is releasing white doves with his right hand, you want to keep an eye on his left hand, down under his coat tails where the flimflam takes place. Sure enough, yesterday Bush invoked his all-purpose war powers to sign off on secret military tribunals allowing the seizure of foreign nationals accused of terrorism, sabotage, witchcraft or whatever, together with related conspirators and supporters, providing for secret trials without constitutional protections and fast dismissal of appeals, followed by summary executions. The person who will decide who will be seized, tried and killed, not surprisingly, is President Bush. It must be just like being governor of Texas all over again, only big time, global, top secret. He’s like a kid with a new guillotine.

I’ll stick with my forecast and bumper sticker from a year ago. The bumper sticker: George Bush - If You Like Him You Deserve Him.
The forecast: A lot of people are gonna die.

12/12/01

This is just a wild guess, but I’ll bet that for hundreds of years it never occurred to any esquimo that he might actually go out in a flimsy kayak with a sharp stick and kill a whale. Probably one day, after a number of foolhardy and disastrous attempts, some hunter got a lucky shot and stuck his harpoon into just the right place and bagged himself a monster. Imagine the zeal this must have inaugurated, to replicate that technique, to assimilate it and make the unimaginable killing of whales something that a man could do at will. Once you know it can be done, once you get the first aircraft to fly the first hundred feet, once you get the immovable boulder to wiggle the slightest bit, once you discover that Achilles has a heel, that Polyphemus has an eye, once you see that the effort is not futile, it is only a matter of time until success is commonplace.

Psychologists tell us that a thing called ‘occasional reinforcement’ is the most powerful force tethering people to antisocial behavior. If a shoplifter is caught every time he filches something off a shelf, he might stop doing it. If he is never caught, he might outgrow it or weary of it. But if he gets away with it one time in ten, two times in five, a sort of gambling fever kicks in, a compelling gamesmanship added to the motive of basic acquisitiveness to create an irresistable urge to break the rules, ignore the authority and snag the prize. It is difficult to get people to change behavior as fun and challenging as this. Severity of the penalty for failure only enhances the game, raises the bar. The prize remains worth the risk.

Modern “terrorism,” modern strikes against. the edifices of power, no longer need much in the way of state sponsorship or massive organization. Tim McVeigh materialized out of a militant gun culture, an ambient outrage at government heavy-handedness, to plan and execute the destruction of a huge federal building at a cost of $5000 plus himself. Similarly, the next attackers we read about will not need to acquire their box knives and flight schedules from al-Qa’eda or anybody else we might identify and crush. The problem is that there are too few of them for us. We are underwhelmed.

This is what has our leadership scared. They are much more scared than the rest of us, and with good reason. It is not only that these operations are too homegrown to detect, or that they are carried out by people who aren’t deterred by fear. That fourth plane was headed for the White House, and was intended, among other things, to zero in on Dubyuh’s own personal butt. In promulgating the assassination of foreign leaders our CIA (Bush Senior et.al.) affirmed the fairness of taking out the top guy. Like pharoahic plagues, the rules of warfare we promote become the enemy’s rules as well. Dubyuh oks U.S. production of anthrax in August, anthrax arrives in congressional mail in October. Clinton goes after bin Laden, bin Laden goes after Bush. Who has not dreamed of a world in which presidents and emperors and generals go somewhere and duke it out mano à mano between themselves, without requiring a lot of dead infantry to settle their squabbles? The targeting of kings has the wonderful potential of making future wars much smaller and more specific in scope. They might boil down to nothing more than world leaders and a few evil organizations and their bodyguards and their hit squads. No need for these condottieri to involve the public in their disputes, or to disrupt the economy or to inflict the dread of their personal enemies on other people. I sleep a hell of a lot more peacefully out here in Arizona than the people in that overdecorated bedroom off the end of the North runway of the Washigton DC airport. As far as I’m concerned, an attack on George Bush is not an attack on civilization itself. Let him do what the rest of us do and call a cop.