Reflections on the "New American" Revolution
Sunday, September 11, 2005
9/11 and Manipulation of the USA
In late November 2002, a retired U.S. Army general, William Odom, told C-SPAN viewers: "Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism. And it does whip up fear. Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few." Variations on a simple dualism -- we're good and people who don't like us are bad -- had never been far from mainstream American politics. But 9/11 concentrated such proclivities with great intensity and narrowed the range of publicly acceptable questioning. "Inquiry into the nature of the enemy we faced, in other words, was to be interpreted as sympathy for that enemy," Didion wrote. "The final allowable word on those who attacked us was to be that they were 'evildoers,' or 'wrongdoers,' peculiar constructions which served to suggest that those who used them were transmitting messages from some ultimate authority." On the say-so of those in charge of the government, we were encouraged to believe that their worldviews defined the appropriate limits of discourse. Four years after 9/11, those limits are less narrow than they were. But mass media and politicians still facilitate the destructive policies of the Bush administration. From Baghdad to New Orleans to cities and towns that will never make headlines in the national press, the dominant corporate priorities have made a killing. Those priorities hold sway not only for the Iraq war but also for the entire "war on terrorism." While military spending zooms upward, a downward slide continues for education, health care, housing, environmental protection, emergency preparedness and a wide array of other essentials. Across the United States, communities are suffering grim consequences. "Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war," Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967. The same statement is profoundly true in 2005.
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