Republic Of Fear (Redux)

We are a nation governed by fear. I try to resist it, but I too can get dragged down into its morass. Yesterday I was out and about with my family, and we decided to stop into a mall to kill some time before an event we were attending was starting. Why a mall? Because of the indoor play area, which is a perfect place to take toddlers if you want them to run around while getting out of the sun. There was a boy with a toy gun there who kept shooting it at other kids, something I would barely have noticed in my childhood, but which filled my with almost unbearable anxiety and dread. All the news of mass shootings had clearly had an effect on me.

Soon after that I heard reports of a pipe bomb that had been planted near the finish line of a run in New Jersey, which was thankfully discovered before it exploded. Later that day came the explosion in Chelsea. Soon on my social media feed the massive reservoir of fearful magma beneath America came bursting forth in the hot lava. And, of course, before hardly anything was known, Trump was trying to exploit it.

Fear has historically been a powerful force in American political history, but since 9/11, it has been given a massive steroid injection. Historically, this fear usually means rights are taken away, and people die. Fear of Native Americans led to the Trail of Tears, fear of white supremacy being compromised contributing to lynchings, fear of communism destroyed the lives of those targeted, fear of poor young people of color resulted in mass incarceration. The list goes on. The fear spiral in our case has lasted so long because politicians have failed so spectacularly to deliver a better world, and so must instead base their legitimacy on "protecting" the public from violence. (That's the thesis of the BBC's amazing The Power of Nightmares, which I consider to be the most important documentary of the post-9/11 world.)

Donald Trump has been so successful because he is the fear candidate. He has perfectly channeled the fears of white middle America, from a fear of Muslims to fears of African Americans, to fears of immigration, and to fears of national decline. He appeals to the white people who live in suburbs founded and based in fear, from their segregated housing to the local police forces who pull over any black people who dare surpass its borders. He certainly must have remembered how back in 2003 Dubya managed to use that fear to get broad public support for an invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

And in the midst of this orgy of fear, others are given much more to fear. Muslims have to fear being targeted by a growing wave of hate crimes. African Americans have to fear being murdered by the police in the routine course of their daily lives. Immigrants have to fear deportation or having their families ripped apart.

I do not see any horizon for the Republic of Fear. That too fills me with fear, because I am not sure how long a society can function or even exist in a state like this.

Brussels And The Power of Nightmares

David Ortiz's fearless and unifying response to the terror attacks in Boston is one we ought to emulate, not the fearful hate mongering clogging up the airwaves today

After the attack in Brussels yesterday we saw the ever more predictable response. (Note as well we didn't see this response after similar attacks in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Turkey.) Trump renewed his calls to ban Muslims from entering America and use torture. Ted Cruz, ever the eager Eddie Haskell trying to curry favor with the talk radio masses, proposed that law enforcement "secure" and "patrol" Muslim neighborhoods within our own borders. If there is a similar attack in this country I can expect that internment camps will be Republican orthodoxy within a matter of days.

Of course, this kind of stuff only helps the extremists who plan these attacks. As anyone except the American news media appears to know, terrorism is a tactic intended to provoke a disproportionate response that will hurt bystanders and thus get the people affected to support the cause of the terrorists, which they would normally find to be too extreme. "Carpet bombing," torture, and mass detentions plays right into the hands of terrorists. Of course, Trump and Cruz could care less, since fear is their biggest selling point, especially for Trump. When people are afraid, their lizard brains kick in and they become children, looking for mommy or daddy to protect them. Authoritarians like Trump know this, and feed off of it.

Keep in mind, however, that Trump and Cruz are merely less subtle practitioners of this dark art, which had been mastered by Dick Cheney and his crew of neo-cons. I've said it before and I will say it again: the most important political documentary of our times is the BBC's 2004 tour de force The Power of Nightmares. In three parts it tells parallel histories of neo-conservatism and Islamist extremism. The basic thesis is that after the failures of the political elite to improve the lives of their constituents, many of them turned to using fear of the other as a justification for staying in power.

Dubya and his handlers certainly understood this. Before 9/11 he was a semi-legitimate president whose one accomplishment was pushing through tax cuts for the wealthy that had little broad support. He exploited the attacks (which his administration had failed to prevent) to both gain popularity and re-election, and also to make the neo-con wet dream of invading Iraq to come true.

While Bush, Cheney, and their gang used the power of nightmares to advance an imperialist agenda under the auspices of "preserving freedom" and "expanding democracy," Trump and Cruz are more nihilistic. Cruz seems willing to say anything if it will appeal to the hardcore conservative base (hence his "New York values" comment). He knows that these people hate and fear Muslims, and speaks to them accordingly. Trump, I am more convinced, is not putting on an act. I really and truly think that he is a committed fascist, even if he wouldn't use that term. (More on that in a future post.) Like any good fascist, he wants to "cleanse" the nation and make it great through military conquest ("we're going to take their oil!") Increasing fear only helps him.

People who are usually level-headed can lose their minds in moments like this, driven by the imperatives of their fear reflex. If we are to break out of the fifteen year nightmare we have been living in, we must stop living in fear and stop looking for some authoritarian daddy figure to protect us. If not, the nightmare will just keep going on and on and on.

The Link Between Snowstorm Preparation and the "War on Terror"

Living here in New Jersey, I was prepared for the worst yesterday.  During my commute the snow was coming down really hard, and the train was so full that all the seats were filled and I stood in the aisle packed cheek to jowl with my fellow commuters.  The only other time I experienced this was in the aftermath of Sandy, when trains ran infrequently.  My wife didn't want to venture out with the kids in the snow, so I ended up walking about two miles home from the train station.  The snow wasn't fearsome, but I thought that if it was just the beginning, the night would be horrible.

It turns out that I had already experienced the worst of it.  It all ended up being a heavy snow, pretty nasty and inconvenient, but hardly the "historic blizzard" we'd been led to expect.  Despite that fact, all mass transit had been shut down and states of emergency declared.  You could say that this overreaction resulted from the storm changing its path, or a bad weather prediction, but I don't.  The stringent, top-down measures are also rooted in our country's mentality after 9/11.

When I was younger I can't remember snow storms getting this much pre-game hype, or extensive and drastic measures being taken BEFORE it was apparent what the storm was bringing.  Having grown up in Nebraska, I know from blizzards, but they usually didn't close the interstate down in the windswept western areas of the state until it was apparent that the roads were impassable.  Yesterday four states declared states of emergency before the storm even hit.  While I was on the train ride home yesterday I was told that trains would not running until Thursday, (they're already back now.)

Those actions reflect a tendency today by political leaders in this country to quickly take state action whenever there's a whiff of any kind of threat or crisis.  They do it because it enhances their power, and also because the public has been inured to accepting emergency measures.  Both come from the "War on Terror."  In the case of politicians, they can't fail to have noticed how 9/11 saved George W. Bush's presidency, which started off with questionable legitimacy and responded to an economic downturn with tax cuts for the rich.  (Of course, his poor handling of the Katrina disaster showed how not responding to a crisis well can kill a political career.)  Chris Christie was paying attention, and he parlayed Sandy into a positive public profile at a time when his popularity in New Jersey was slipping.  He used that event to create an image of a tough-talking leader in charge, and one able to reach across the partisan divide to cooperate with a Democratic president.  Disasters are great for executive leaders in that they get to look responsible, criticism of them becomes de facto bad, and they can wield much more power than in regular times.  When we hear news of drone strikes and NSA spying that should hardly surprise us.

As far as the people are concerned, they have been conditioned to accept greater authoritarian measures.  We take our shoes off at the airport, accept NSA spying despite Edward Snowden's revelations, and punish anyone at the polls who dares to challenge the PATRIOT Act for being "soft on terror."As I have written before, we are a society ruled by fear.  This fear now apparently extends to the weather, where a snowstorm or blizzard becomes "Snowmageddon" or somesuch thing.  Of course the media play a big role in this, mostly because they've realized that the public craves fear, from the bogus "knock out game" to hyping up weather events.

Others may see a bad weather forecast to blame for the overreaction to snow in the New York City area, I see the fear spiral at work once again.  At least this time it was fairly harmless, but I'm sure it will be used to gin up more wars, domestic and foreign, in the future.

Track of the Week: Radiohead, "Pyramid Song"

The recent revelations about government surveillance of telephone and internet communications have been sending my mind reeling with memories of the Bush administration.  It is easy to forget today that such an irresponsible and palpably incompetent person was given practically untrammeled authority from September of 2001 to about the summer of 2005 (Katrina finally broke the spell after months of severe screw-ups and the deterioration of Iraq).  Hardly anyone in the mainstream media was willing to criticize him openly between 9/11 and his infamous "mission accomplished" moment.  In fact, even the more liberal news outlets seemed to be doing his bidding.  It was a reporter at the New York Times, Judith Miller, whose articles gave creedance to false claims about Saddam's nuclear ambitions.  During the invasion of Iraq, MSNBC had an American flag in the border of their screen, and actually hired the likes of Michael Savage.  When the Dixie Chicks were brave enough to criticize Bush on the eve of war, it almost destroyed their careers.

During those dark days, my already deep love for the brooding British band Radiohead intensified.  Their paranoid, skittish music, dripped with dread, and seemed to speak to the insanity of the times.  Strangely enough, the two albums I clung to most, Kid A and Amnesiac, were released in 2000 and 2001, before the towers fell.  Somehow these two albums had prophesied the world of nightmares that was to come.

On September 11th and on many days in the coming years, I found myself listening especially to "Pyramid Song" from Amnesiac.  The album is willfully difficult, and not loved by fans, but this particular song is by far the band's best.  It's based around a jazzy, minimalist piano figure and Thom Yorke's voice at its most keeningly eerie. The spare, haunting accompaniment, which is made up more of soundscapes than melodies, evokes a passage from the world of the living to the world of the dead.  The last lines, "there was nothing to fear/ nothing to doubt" make it sound like a relief to be done with the pains and deprivations of living.  I found the song strangely comforting.  When I listened to it, I could escape a world gone insane and contemplate something higher, something better, or at least something else.  A world where George W. Bush and his nefarious henchmen could be allowed to exploit tragedy and spin lies into wars seemed well-worth escaping.

Twelve years later, things do not seem to be as horrifying insane as they used to be, but the paranoia and fear that drenched that world have not left us, nor the tendency by those in positions of authority to exploit those fears to grab more power for themselves.  On a night like this, I just want to listen to "Pyramid Song" and escape.

America's Empire is Bigger than President Obama

Today we received the news that the government has been using the Patriot Act to examine the phone records of Verizon customers.  This was upsetting, but hardly surprising.  Secret surveillance and the increasing reach of the national security state have been hallmarks of the so-called War on Terror for a dozen years now.  Although president Obama has stepped back from some of the most egregious policies of the Bush administration, such as extraordinary rendition and torture, he sends drones around the world to rain death from the sky and lets the NSA do all kinds of secret spying on American citizens.

It was not supposed to be this way.  Back in 2008 it looked to me like this former Constitutional law professor would get Guantanamo closed and pivot America away from the paranoia and destruction of civil liberties embodied by the Bush-Cheney years.  I was much too naive, and should have known better.

The one basic fact of our nation's politics during the last century has been America's status as an imperial power.  Every single president since McKinley has fought to maintain that empire, regardless of their political philosophy.  From the gunboat diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt to the CIA's Cold War assassinations to the more recent taxis to the dark side, upholding this empire has meant abuses of power and the open flouting of the law of nations.  It has meant building up a national security state removed from political oversight and transparency, and no president, liberal or conservative, has managed to tame it, or ever will.

Imperialism is an American political fact of life.  America's empire will only cease once it collapses or is forced into retreat.  No one man, including the president of the United States, will ever have the ability to dismantle it or deny its relentless demands.