Page 3 of 3 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Living through the age of denial
By Tom Engelhardt
did change - and of just how terrible, how craven but, given our previous
history, how unsurprising the response to it actually was.
Those dates - 1945-2001 - 56 years in which life was organized, to a
significant degree, to safeguard Americans from an "atomic Pearl Harbor," from
the thought that two great oceans were no longer protection enough for this
continent, that the United States was now part of a world capable of being laid
low. In those years, the sun of good fortune shone steadily on the US of A,
even as American newspapers, just weeks after Hiroshima, began drawing
concentric circles of destruction around American cities and imagining their
future in ruins. Think of this as the shadow story of
that era, the gnawing anxiety at the edge of abundance, like those memento mori
skulls carefully placed amid cornucopias in seventeenth-century Dutch
still-life paintings.
In those decades, the "arms race" never abated, not even long after both
superpowers had a superabundant ability to take each other out. World-ending
weaponry was being constantly "perfected" - MIRVed, put on rails, divided into
land, sea, and air "triads", and, of course, made ever more powerful and
accurate. Nonetheless, Americans, to take Herman Kahn's famous phrase,
preferred most of the time not to think too much about "the unthinkable" - and
what it meant for them.
As the 1980s began, however, in a surge of revulsion at decades of denial, a
vast anti-nuclear movement briefly arose - in 1982, three-quarters of a million
people marched against such weaponry in New York City - and president Ronald
Reagan responded with his lucrative (for the weapons industry) fantasy scheme
of lofting an "impermeable shield" against nuclear weapons into space, his
"Star Wars" program. And then, in an almost-moment as startling as it was
unexpected, in 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev almost made such a fantasy come true, not in space, but right here on
planet Earth. They came to the very "brink" - to use a nuclear-crisis term of
the time - of a genuine program to move decisively down the path to the
abolition of such weapons. It was, in some ways, the most hopeful almost-moment
of a terrible century and, of course, it failed.
Thanks largely, however, to one man, Gorbachev, who consciously chose a path of
non-violence, after four decades of nuclear standoff in a fully garrisoned MAD
(mutually assured destruction) world - and to the amazement, even disbelief, of
official Washington - the USSR simply disappeared, and almost totally peaceably
at that.
You could measure the era of denial up to that moment both by the level of
official resistance to recognizing this obvious fact and by the audible sigh of
relief in this country. Finally, it was all over. It was, of course, called
"victory", though it would prove anything but.
And only then did the madness really began. Though there was, in the US, modest
muttering about a "peace dividend", the idea of "peace" never really caught
hold. The thousands of weapons in the US nuclear arsenal, which had seemingly
lost their purpose and whose existence should have been an embarrassing
reminder of the Age of Denial, were simply pushed further into the shadows and
largely ignored or forgotten. Initially assigned no other tasks, and without
the slightest hiccup of protest against them, they were placed in a kind of
strategic limbo and, like the mad woman in the attic, went unmentioned for
years.
In the meantime, it was clear by century's end that the "peace dividend" would
go largely to the Pentagon. At the very moment when, without the Soviet Union,
the US might have accepted its own long-term vulnerability and begun working
toward a world in which destruction was less obviously on the agenda, the US
government instead embarked, like the Greatest of Great Powers (the "new Rome,"
the "new Britain"), on a series of neo-colonial wars on the peripheries. It
began building up a constellation of new military bases in and around the oil
heartlands of the planet, while reinforcing a military and technological might
meant to brook no future opponents. Orwell's famous phrase from his novel 1984,
"war is peace", was operative well before the second Bush administration
entered office.
Call this a Mr Spock moment, one where you just wanted to say "illogical". With
only one superpower left, the American Age of Denial didn't dissipate. It only
deepened and any serious assessment of the real planet we were all living on
was carefully avoided.
In these years, the world was essentially declared to be "flat" and, on that
"level playing field", it was, we were told, gloriously globalizing. This
official Age of Globalization - you couldn't look anywhere, it seemed, and not
see that word - was proclaimed another fabulously sunny era of wonder and
abundance. Everyone on the planet would now wear Air Jordan sneakers and Mickey
Mouse T-shirts, eat under the Golden Arches, and be bombarded with
"information" ... Hurrah!
News was circling the planet almost instantaneously in this self-proclaimed new
Age of Information. (Oh yes, there were many new and glorious "ages" in that
brief historical span of self-celebration.) But with the Soviet Union in the
trash bin of history - forget that Russia, about to become a major energy
power, still held onto its nuclear forces - and the planet, including the
former Soviet territories in Eastern Europe and Central Asia open to
"globalizing" penetration, few bothered to mention that other nexus of forces
which had globalized in the previous century: the forces of planetary
destruction.
And Americans? Don't think that George W Bush was the first to urge us to
"sacrifice" by spending our money and visiting Disney World. That was the story
of the 1990s and it represented the deepest of all denials, a complete shading
of the eyes from any reasonably possible future. If the world was flat, then
why shouldn't we drive blissfully right off its edge? The SUV, the subprime
mortgage, the McMansion in the distant suburb, the 100-mile commute to work ...
you name it, we did it. We paid the price, so to speak.
And while we were burning oil and spending money we often didn't have, and at
prodigious rates, "globalization" was slowly making its way to the impoverished
backlands of Afghanistan.
A fierce rearguard action for denial
This, of course, brings us almost to our own moment. To the neo-cons, putting
on their pith helmets and planning their Project for a New American Century
(meant to be just like the old 19th century, only larger, better, and
all-American), the only force that really mattered in the world was the
American military, which would rule the day, and the Bush administration,
initially made up of so many of them, unsurprisingly agreed. This would prove
to be one of the great misreadings of the nature of power in our world.
Since what's gone before in this account has been long, let me make this - our
own dim and dismal moment - relatively short and sweet. On September 11, 2001,
the Age of Denial ended in the "mushroom cloud" of the World Trade Center. It
was no mistake that, within 24 hours, the site where the towers had gone down
was declared to be "Ground Zero", a term previously reserved for an atomic
explosion. Of course, no such explosion had happened, nor had an apocalypse of
destruction actually occurred. No city, continent, or planet had been
vaporized, but for Americans, secretly waiting all those decades for their
"victory weapon" to come home, it briefly looked that way.
The shock of discovering for the first time and in a gut way that the
continental United States, too, could be at some planetary epicenter of
destruction was indeed immense. In the media, apocalyptic moments - anthrax,
plagues, dirty bombs - only multiplied and most Americans, still safe in their
homes, hunkered down in fear to await various doom-laden scenarios that would
never happen. In the meantime, other encroaching but unpalatable globalizing
realities, ranging from America's "oil addiction" to climate change, would
continue to be assiduously ignored. In the US, this was, you might say, the
real "inconvenient truth" of these years.
The response to 9/11 was, to say the least, striking - and craven in the
extreme. Although the Bush administration's "war on terror" (aka World War IV)
has been pictured many ways, it has never, I suspect, been seen for what it
most truly may have been: a desperate and fierce rearguard action to extend the
American Age of Denial. We would, as the President urged right after 9/11, show
our confidence in the American system by acting as though nothing had happened
and, of course, paying that visit to Disney World. In the meantime, as
"commander-in-chief" he would wall us in and fight a "global war" to stave off
the forces threatening us. Better yet, that war would once again be on their
soil, not ours, forever and ever, amen.
The motto of the Bush administration might have been: Pay any price. Others,
that is, would pay any price - disappearance, torture, false imprisonment,
death by air and land - for us to remain in denial. A pugnacious and disastrous
"war" on terrorism, along with sub-wars, dubbed "fronts" (central or
otherwise), would be pursued to impose our continuing Age of Denial by force on
the rest of the planet (and soften the costs of our addiction to oil). This was
to be the new Pax Americana, a shock-and-awe "crusade" (to use a word that
slipped out of the President's mouth soon after 9/11) launched in the name of
American "safety" and "national security". Almost eight years later, as in the
present presidential campaign of 2008, these remain the idols to which American
politicians, the mainstream media, and assumedly many citizens continue to do
frightened obeisance.
The message of 9/11 was, in truth, clear enough - quite outside the issue of
who was delivering it for what purpose. It was: Here is the future of the
United States; try as you might, like it or not, you are about to become part
of the painful, modern history of this planet.
And the irony that went with it was this: The fiercer the response, the more we
tried to force the cost of denial of this central reality on others, the faster
history - that grim shadow story of the Cold War era - seemed to approach.
Postcard from the edge
What I've written thus far hasn't exactly been a postcard. But if I were to
boil all this down to postcard size, I might write:
Here's our hope: History surprised us and we got through.
Somehow. In that worst of all centuries, the last one, the worst didn't happen,
not by a long shot.
Here's the problem: It still could happen - and, 64 years later,
in more ways than anyone once imagined.
Here's a provisional conclusion: And it will happen, somehow or
other, unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we surprise
ourselves and the United States ends its age of denial.
And a little ps: It's not too late. We - we Americans - could still do
something that mattered when it comes to the fate of the Earth.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of
The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The
World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just been
published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered, it is an
alternative history of the mad Bush years.
(On this piece, my special thanks as well to Christopher Holmes for help above
and beyond the call of duty.)
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