DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Hold on to your underpants
By Tom Engelhardt
Let me put American life in the "age of terror" into some kind of context, and
then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere,
even toward Yemen.
In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the US
and, so the US Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than
11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On average, a
staggering 443,600 Americans can expect to die every year from illnesses
related to tobacco use, and 5,000 from food-borne
diseases. In 2007, an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect and
the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, including 126
from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27
from avalanches, and one from a dust devil.
As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a US carrier in
either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009,
planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French
flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over
the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional
commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February
killing 50, the first fatal crash of a US commercial flight since August 2006.
And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds,
managed a brilliant landing in New York's Hudson River when disaster might have
ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to
terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with
propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was
killed.)
The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day,
2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept
Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324
traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008.
Had the 23-year-old Nigerian set off his bomb, it would have been certain death
for the people on board, and a tragedy for those who knew them. It would
certainly have represented a safety and security issue that needed to be dealt
with. But it would not have been a national emergency, nor a national security
crisis. It would have been a single plane knocked out of the sky, something
that happens from time to time without the intervention of terrorists.
And yet here's the strange thing: thanks to what didn't happen on Flight 253,
the media essentially went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed plot and
its ramifications actually grew for two full weeks after the incident until it
had achieved something like full-spectrum dominance, according to the Pew
Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the days after
Christmas, more than half the news links in blogs related to Flight 253. At the
same time, the Republican criticism machine (and the media universe that goes
with it) ramped up on the subject of the Barack Obama administration's terror
wimpiness. The global air transport system plunked down millions of dollars on
new technology which will not find underwear bombs, the homeland
security-industrial-complex had a field day, and fear was further embedded in
the American way of life.
Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the
United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in
significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E coli
bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder and the weather present the sort of
potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing
your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much.
The few Americans who, since 2001, have died from anything that could be called
a terror attack in the US - whether the 13 killed at Fort Hood or the soldier
murdered outside an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas - were far
outnumbered by the 32 dead in a 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech, not to
speak of the relatively regular moments when workers or former workers "go
postal". Since September 11, 2001, terror in the US has rated above fatalities
from shark attacks and not much else. Since the economic meltdown of 2008, it
has, in fact, been left in the shade by violent deaths stemming from reactions
to job loss, foreclosure, inability to pay the rent and so on.
This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can't
seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.
Institutionalizing Fear Inc.
The 9/11 attacks, which had the look of the apocalyptic, brought the fear of
terrorism into the American bedroom via the TV screen. That fear was used with
remarkable effectiveness by the Bush administration, which color-coded terror
for its own ends. A domestic version of shock-and-awe - Americans were indeed
shocked and awed by 9/11 - helped drive the country into two disastrous wars
and occupations, each still ongoing, and into Bush's "global war on terror", a
term now persona non grata in Washington, even if the "war" itself goes
on and on.
Today, any possible or actual terror attack, any threat no matter how
far-fetched, amateurish or poorly executed, raises a national alarm, always
seeming to add to the power of the imperial presidency and threatening to open
new fronts in the now-unnamed global war. The latest is in Yemen, thanks in
part to that young Nigerian who was evidently armed with explosives by a
home-grown organization of a few hundred men that goes by the name al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula.
The fear of terrorism has, by now, been institutionalized in our society -
quite literally - even if the thing we're afraid of has, on the scale of human
problems, something of the Will o' the Wisp about it.
That fear has been embedded in what once was an un-American word, more easily
associated with Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany: "homeland". It has replaced the
words country, land, and nation in the lexicon of the terror-mongers. The
"homeland" is the place that terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can violate.
In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its own official government agency: the
Department of Homeland Security, the second "defense" department, which has a
2010 budget of US$39.4 billion (while overall "homeland security" spending in
the 2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has grown up a
little-attended-to homeland-security complex with its own interests,
businesses, associations and lobbyists, including jostling crowds of
ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats.
As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an amorphous state of mind has
manifested itself in the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of
factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear Inc and now insure that
fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic. These would
include:
The imperial presidency: The Bush administration used fear not
only to promote its wars and its "war on terror", but also to unchain the
commander-in-chief of an already imperial presidency from a host of restraints.
The dangers of terror and of al-Qaeda, which became the global bogeyman, and
the various proposed responses to it - including kidnapping ("extraordinary
rendition"), secret imprisonment, and torture - turned out to be the royal road
to the American unconscious and so to a presidency determined, as former
secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and others liked to say, to take the
gloves off.
It remains so and, as a result, under Obama, the imperial presidency only seems
to gain ground. Recently, for instance, we learned that, under the pressure of
the Flight 253 incident, Obama has adopted the Bush administration position
that a president, under certain circumstances, has the authority to order the
assassination of an American citizen abroad. (In this case, New Mexico-born
Islamic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, who has been linked to the 9/11 plotters, the Fort
Hood killer, and Abdulmutallab). The Bush administration opened the door to
this possibility and now, it seems, a Democratic president may be stepping
through.
The 24/7 media moment: 24/7 blitz coverage was once reserved for
the deaths of presidents (as in the assassination of John F Kennedy) and public
events of agreed-upon import. In 1994, however, it became the coin of the media
realm for any event bizarre enough, sensational enough, and celebrity-based
enough to glue eyeballs. That June, O J Simpson engaged in his infamous
low-speed car chase through Orange County followed by more than 20 news
helicopters while 95 million viewers tuned in and thousands more gathered at
highway overpasses to watch. No one's ever looked back. In a traditional media
world that's shedding foreign and domestic bureaus and axing hordes of
reporters, radically downsizing newsrooms and shrinking papers to next to
nothing, the advantages of focusing reportorial energies on just one thing at a
time are obvious. Those 24/7 energies are now regularly focused on the fear of
terrorism and events that contribute to it, like the plot to down Flight 253.
The Republican criticism machine and the media that go with it: Once
upon a time, even successful Republican administrations didn't have their own
megaphone. That's why, in the Vietnam era, the Richard Nixon administration
battled the New York Times so fiercely, and - my own guess - that played a part
in forcing the creation of the first "op-ed" page in 1970, which allowed
administration figures like vice president Spiro Agnew and ex-Nixon
speechwriter William Safire to gain a voice at the paper.
By the George W Bush era, the struggle had abated. The Times and papers like it
only had to be pacified or cut out of the loop, since from TV to talk radio,
publishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own megaphone ready at hand.
This is, by now, a machine chock-a-block full of politicians and
ex-politicians, publishers, pundits, military "experts", journalists,
shock-jocks and the like (categories that have a tendency to blend into each
other).
It all adds up to a seamless web of promotion, publicity and din. It's capable
of gearing up on no notice and flogging a subject to death - none more popular
than terrorism and Democratic spinelessness in the face of it. The machine
ensures that any failed terror attack, no matter how hopeless or pathetic, will
be in the headlines and in public consciousness. It circulates constant
fantasies about possible future apocalyptic terror attacks with atomic weaponry
or other weapons of mass destruction. (And in all of the above, of course, it
is helped by a host of tagalong pundits and experts, news shows and news
reports from the more liberal side of the aisle.)
The Democrats who don't dare: It's remarkable that the sharpest
president we've had in a while didn't dare get up in front of the American
people after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm down. He didn't, in
fact, have a single intelligent thing to say about the event. He certainly
didn't remind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight 253, they stood in
far more danger heading out of their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into
a bar on the way home for a beer or two.
Instead, the Obama administration essentially abjectly apologized, insisted it
would focus yet more effort and money on making America safe from air terrorism
and widened a new front in the "war on terror" in Yemen (speeding extra money
and US advisors that way). And when the din from critics didn't end, it pushed
back, as Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote, by claiming "that they were
handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did". It's
striking when a Democratic administration finds safety in the claim that it's
acting like a Republican one, that it's following the path to the imperial
presidency already cleared by George W Bush. Fear does that to you, and the
fear of terror has been institutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of
society.
9/11 never ends
Fear has a way of re-ordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number
of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil
keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine
produces is the dark underside of the charming Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover,
"A View of the World from 9th Avenue", in which Manhattan looms vast as the
rest of the planet fades into near nothingness.
When you see the world "from 9th Avenue", or from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time
"news" channel, you see it as phantasmagoria. It's out of all realistic shape
and proportion, which means you naturally make stupid decisions. You become
incapable of sorting out what matters and what doesn't, what's primary and
what's secondary. You become, in short, manipulable.
This is our situation today.
People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on
this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pin-prick terror events
blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth
9/11 when it comes to American consciousness.
So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media
morphs into its 24/7 national-security-disaster mode, the pundits register red
on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he
is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland
security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and
nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco
merchants, even that single dust devil and say:
Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national emergency.
Note
The figures on the 2010 Department of Homeland Security budget and "homeland
security" spending in the 2010 budget were provided by the National Priorities
Project.
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