Since the American hostages in Iran were released within hours of President Reagan's inauguration, we have been engaged in false wars of all kinds. If the use of the word "war" in the War On Drugs and the War On Terrorism has become more common, we only have to thank a cadre of determined spinmeisters employed by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (the think tanks, Christian Coalitions, PNAC, Federalist Society, etc.) and paid by billionaires who are, themselves, American fascists.
No matter what twisted logic one may use to justify this state of affairs, for thirty years our nation has been acting out unsane propositions. From the heights of Carter's Camp David accords we have fallen to the nadir of killing bin Ladin with technologies and prescedents which are, themselves, immoral; We The People have too often been bathing in the blood of innocients while ignoring the consequences of our own actions.
The wicked witch is now dead. It is time to wake up from the evil spell we cast on ourselves in our latest adventure in unsanity -- the "new normal" of 9-11. President Obama is doing his best to show us the path back to sanity. But that journey will be a long one, and we are only at the beginning.
The morning of September 11, 2001, I arrived on site as usual without having listened to the news. I walked toward my cube when I noticed people with portable TVs and radios over which they were hunched. I asked one of them what was going on. He looked at me and said, "Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center. Who could have done such a thing?". Reflexively I replied, "Osama bin Ladin". He sat back and asked, "Who?".
That few people were tracking bin Ladin before that attack is no surprise. Only wonks like me who opposed the Reagan Administration's covert wars all over the world (carried out by a network of evil I have come to call Reagan's Curse over the years) and have followed the key players over the years would recognize the name back then. I gave him a quick summary of the history and the Peter Bergen interview and the first bombing of the World Trade Center.
A couple of other people overheard our conversation and came out of their cubes to ask more about him. I explained briefly that bin Ladin was a criminal mastermind who was trying to bait the United States into a "holy war". More people came up. The reaction? "Nuke 'em!" "Kill that sonuvabitch!" "Turn that sand into radioactive glass!" "Let's just go take our oil and kill everything that gets in our way." The blood lust spread like wildfire in the small group that had gathered. As I learned over the next few days, it spread like wildfire across the nation.
I understood the emotion, but disagreed with the actions, "If we take that bait, he wins. We would have to compromise so much of who we are that he will have succeeded in his real goal: to demonstate that America is morally bankrupt and only wants to get its way without reason or need."
You can guess how far that argument carried on that day. I wasn't some prophet foreseeing Our Doom, I was steeped in the fundamentals of United States foreign policy as practiced by decades of Administrations -- basically until that very day. On that day, those principles were still respected in our government and our media. Oh, what a difference ten short years can make!
Today, watching President Obama honor the dead in New York without fanfare, that conversation haunts me. We took the bait. We lowered our standards and destroyed our own economy in the pursuit of blood lust. We allowed detention without habeous corpus, torture, kidnapping, pre-emptive military actions... We have become unsane together to a breathtaking degree these past 10 years.
The new normal indeed. Looks susiciously like a very old normal. Primal. Unthinking. Capable of evil unspeakable accepted as normal.
That Killing Feeling
On a moonless night in Pakistan, our Special Ops soldiers carried out mission in which these technologies:
- Wiretapping of phones, Internet connections
- Accessing personal information and using associative programs to connect them with everyone they've ever known, whether they are themselves under suspicion or not
- Satellite technology to provide real-time support including thermal imaging of people within the compound
- AWACs and other support aircraft outside Pakistani air space helping a mission which violates that air space
- ad naseum
Using these principles:
- Pre-emptive war doctrine (Bush II)
- Assassination protocol
- ad naseum
Feel free to add to these lists in the comments
carried out a killing in Our name.
That we can feel these violations of our former ethics "for this case" are somehow justified indicates how jaded we have become as a people. Osama bin Ladin was not a nation; his followers are not an army. We elevated him to that status. We crossed that line to redefine "war" to include kidnapping, assassination and murder of innocient people. We allowed that new definition to ride and grow.
Now the wicked witch is dead. Now it is time to tear down this edifice of unsanity we have erected to our shame. All the paraphenalia and weird rationalizations we used to enable this mission and its results must now be refuted and torn down. Our common weal and its future depend on it.
Being The Path Instead Of Walking The Path
President Obama is showing us the way. He is not glorifying the killing, its methods or its violation of our founding principles. We The People demanded this hunt for bin Ladin, and it had to be carried out for We The People to wake up from the spell. He pursued Our will and achieved what We asked the Government to do. But he is careful to let the craving for blood justice and its ultimate climax speak for itself. He announced the action without hoopla. He has given no press conferences. He has released the minimum details of what happened. bin Ladin was given a proper funeral in a way which does not leave a grave to be enshrined or mark a memory of someone We do not want remembered. He has carried out Our will without commenting on what he may wish We wanted instead.
He has also been careful to show what honor can be had in the midst of this horror. The rituals of bin Ladin's religion were followed. But that symbolism was also used to send a message to bin Ladin's fellow criminals: your death will mean nothing to us. You will have no grave to mark your passing. Your soul will wander the earth until Judgement Day instead of going to Paradise. In this he also respects the Muslims around the world who might have had sympathy for bin Ladin in some degree and sends a message of the flavor of justice the United States will seek in the killing of anyone in the al Queda network tagged by bin Ladin's personal information trove.
It is a sobering message both ways. It is a call to turning away from this "war" and to a common future of peaceful coexistance. A future envisioned by Us before 9-11 and which We yearn to have back again.
Now it is up to Us to wake up from this evil spell and survey the wreckage of the nation We had been building together -- work We have largely abandoned in the ten years since I stood in a small crowd of fellow citizens and heard their cry for blood justice on a bright and clear September morning nearly ten years ago. Our common weal is tattered and our sense of obligation to, or compassion for, fellow citizens is at a low ebb. We are poorer than we were then. We are facing retirement without any government help on the horizon. We are now facing Ourselves for what We have commanded be done in Our name.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out in her excellent reporting this week, bin Ladin believed he had accomplished his stated purpose:
One month after the September 11th attacks, in October 2001, Osama bin Laden gave an interview to Al Jazeera. In that interview, he explained the effect of the 9/11 attacks as follows: quote, “The losses on Wall Street amounted to 16 percent and they said that this was a record loss that had never happened since the market opened more than 230 years ago. Such a huge collapse had never happened before.
The capital in circulation in this market amounts to $4 trillion. If we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion to find out the losses that their shares suffered, we find that it is $640 billion. This is what they lost in one hour. The daily gross national income in the United States is $20 billion.
On the first week after the attacks, they did not work at all because of the psychological shock. Even to this very day, some people do not go to work because of the enormous shock.”
'The Rachel Maddow Show' for Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
May 3, 2011
His role as social critic and mass murderer is a strange refraction of Charlie Manson's unshakable faith that American's soul is hollow and the raging lust and rage within us only needs the opportunity to shred the veneer of civility we pretend to share:
To sum it up briefly, Manson believed that division in the white population would eventually lead to a civil war between the two sides (conservatives and the liberal civil rights advocates). Once this war had decimated much of the white population, militant blacks (who had stayed out of the civil war) would sweep in, take over the nation, and cast out or kill most of the remaining whites. After a decade or so of mass poverty, blacks would realize they could not govern themselves. Manson and his group of followers would then emerge from hiding and the black nation would beg them to take over. Manson would then return the nation to a white dominated aristocratic society in a complete 360 circle back to slavery.
Monticello in http://www.tigerdroppings.com/...
Their perception contains a germ of truth. Their unsanity lay in their solution -- that their adversary would destroy itself and that the criminals would come to power as a consequence. The symmetry of the criminals becoming powerful so they can make their opponents criminals is a powerful thing in symbolism. Too powerful for our own good. Their actions of unsanity belie the truth of whatever criticism they find to hook vulnerable people and reel them in to a life of bloodletting. With such ideas human beings have visited horror on their fellow human beings in the most vicious and evil ways imaginable. They blame us for making them carry out those actions while fantasizing that they will be the victors in the end and be able to rewrite history in their hand.
Note the pattern: let the enemy destroy themselves and then take power for the criminal and their followers. The pattern is unsane. The end is a fantasy. The means are evil. The blame is deferred to anyone who opposes them.
We The People are now infected with these memes. Manson's fantasy in reality became the Southern Strategy and the Culture War and now the Tea Party conceit. Racism defeated overtly in the legislative arena became racism by other names. It takes time for poison to be purged from any body politic. While it is being metabolized, it's effect is still poisonous.
Osama's fantasy in reality has led to, and is now leading to, the deaths, maiming and misery of millions of people. We blame him for what we have done, are doing and are about to do. That's not reality, but we are unshakable in that faith since the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
But contemplate it we must. Maybe not this week with all the media atwitter. Maybe not this year with the Presidential campaign heating up. It will take decades, perhaps, for the reality to seep through. Poison takes time to metabolize and be completely purged.
But We did act in some ways as these criminals thought We would. Manson's civil war did not come, but the racism he saw in us lives on decades later. bin Ladin's suspicion of what collapsing the Twin Towers would do to our national psyche was played out even better than he could have hoped but the readiness of fellow Muslims en masse to rise up he fantasized. He was unsane.
At some moment in each of our lives, each of us should ponder that. In that pondering lies the way back to sanity.
The Blood Cycle
A well-known phenomenon in human societies is the cycle of drawing first blood and seeking vengence for it -- which means "second blood" is another society's "first blood", which requires vengence -- and on and on ad naseum. Since Reagan's Curse was given, and We The People came to accept it, we have come to tolerate evil in many forms now rendered mundane.
The concept of the banality of evil came into prominence following the publication of Hannah Arendt's 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was based on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem. Arendt's thesis was that people who carry out unspeakable crimes, like Eichmann, a top administrator in the machinery of the Nazi death camps, may not be crazy fanatics at all, but rather ordinary individuals who simply accept the premises of their state and participate in any ongoing enterprise with the energy of good bureaucrats.
Normalizing the Unthinkable
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death (sanitation, food supply) in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of defense intellectuals and other experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public. The late Herman Kahn spent a lifetime making nuclear war palatable (On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable), and this strangelovian phoney got very good press. ~
In an excellent article entitled "Normalizing the unthinkable," in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists of March 1984, Lisa Peattie described how in the Nazi death camps work was "normalized" for the long-term prisoners as well as regular personnel: "[P]rison plumbers laid the water pipe in the crematorium and prison electricians wired the fences. The camp managers maintained standards and orderly process. The cobblestones which paved the crematorium yard at Auschwitz had to be perfectly scrubbed." Peattie focused on the parallel between routinization in the death camps and the preparations for nuclear war, where the "unthinkable" is organized and prepared for in a division of labor participated in by people at many levels. Distance from execution helps render responsibility hazy. "Adolph Eichmann was a thoroughly responsible person, according to his understanding of responsibility. For him, it was clear that the heads of state set policy. His role was to implement, and fortunately, he felt, it was never part of his job actually to have to kill anyone."
Triumph of the Market
by Edward S. Herman
published by South End Press, 1995
The only way a blood cycle based on lust ends is how lust of all kinds ends: when the reality of getting what our reptilian brains think we want is consummated. The aftermath includes an element of dissappointment: reality never matches fantasy. All those messy details. They ruin a good fantasy every time. But maybe next time it will be the perfect thing! Maybe next time it all the cosmic tumblers will fall in place and give me that one perfect moment where reality and fantasy truly merge. Well, maybe twice. Well, maybe...
In that unsatiable, incremental expansion of desire over reason unsanity lies. We become maladjusted -- ignoring facts which challenge our desire while seeing "facts" which can only be seen by those who share the fantasy. The only way back is through adjustment of our emotional maps of the world to the demands of a very real world which doesn't care about our little fantasies.
Now that we are witnessing the aftermath of getting what our reptilian brains wanted, it is strangely hollow.
Walking The Fire Path: President Obama
We had a hired hand on the farm who went to Viet Nam and returned to work for us when he got back. The happy-go-lucky person he was was gone. My little brother constantly asked him breathlessly, "How many people did you kill?" and other questions that ring oddly like the questions reporters are asking now. We want the video. We want the photos. We want the virtual reality video game where we can kill bin Ladin and dance in his blood.
That hired hand, I found out years later (he never answered any of those questions but remained stoically silent), had been sent into Cambodia while only a week short and was sure he was going to die, as was the superstition among draftees at the end of their tours. His unit got into a fire fight in which he ended up rescuing several comrades by climbing up a bamboo observation tower firing at the enemy and miraculously not getting shot in such an exposed position. His unit was called "the wolf pack" and used their pins in the end of a gun butt to stamp their emblem on the foreheads of those they slew as a message to the Viet Cong.
We put him through that. We put him there. Then we wanted him to tell us all the details. He came home, got divorced and roamed from job to job. Mutual friends told me it was years before he could sleep through the night.
Blood lust is lust. When fantasy become reality, that reality never satisfies. Instead, it disappoints. When our fantasies are forced on other human beings against their will, it poisons their very soul.
President Obama is mindful of Our shame. He cannot do anything about it, but he can use it as a teachable moment. This killing of a criminal whom We raised up to Adversary is not a joyful event for the sane. The sane do not gleefully lift the severed head of the fallen and dance in their blood. Instead, a quiet funeral without fanfare and a body slipped into the sea of obscurity. No press conferences where reporters still pumped with blood lust ask questions like "Did we shoot him in the eye or above the eye?".
Obama did not start this blood cycle. His predecessors made the mistake of declaring it a "war" instead of an international law enforcement effort. That error will haunt us for decades to come. Obama is carrying out the will of the People while making sure not to glorify or enable more of our unsanity.
Today he lays a wreath at ground zero, with no speechifying. He will not hold press conferences to gloat or be perceived as gloating. He will adminster the efficient "rolling up" of the al Queda network worldwide based on the information gathered in bin Ladin's compound, and much of that will be done by other governments who will commit atrocities and evil even beyond the atrocities and evil We The People now allow in Our name. Our military industrial complex will be unleashed and more crimes against humanity will be committed in the days and weeks to come. Right now our dogs of wars are circling the planet and carrying out Our will.
We have no choice now. The rules We have allowed these last ten years are in full effect and full flower. This hunt for anyone who farted in bin Ladin's presence will now roll out with frightening efficiency. We will not see much of that in our media.
As we go through our rituals, people are dying or worse all over the world.
Can this be the last gasp of an era of shame so we can get on with the 21st century?
Decompressing
I saw a documentary that I can't find a link to right now about archeologists studying the ancient tribes of Israel. They discussed their discoveries at Jericho: bones of men, women, children, pets and livestock hacked and smashed to death. The horror of the fall of Jericho isn't what they told you in Sunday School.
One of the archeologists told us that the tribes had a way to deal with the reality that their warriors would become unsame in the act of killing so viciously and cruelly. The returning beserkers would have to live apart from the rest of the tribe for at least two weeks so the "blood lust would drain away and they could rejoin the tribe". What wisdom there is in that practice.
We are constantly unsane about something. We just can't put emotional energy into very many things and get on with a life worth living. In blood feuds, there is a phenomenon where new members of the tribe/gang/mafia have to carry out a killing -- directly and without assistance. They have to experience the killing in its ghastly reality. To be effective, they will have to become inurred to the natural revulsion this experience triggers in us. They will have to become hardened to the act itself.
This social adaptation to the reality that we will ask our citizens to commit unsane acts has taken many forms. Our hired hand was at the Los Angeles airport within a day of being in the shit. No cooling off period. No place to go to heal and contemplate and forget. Instead, we deal with PTSD and gather for memorials and have other ways to try to heal from such shared madness.
Now that the wicked witch is dead, we Munchkins need to take time to draw apart and decompress. Reality was cold, efficient and oddly anticlimatic. It usually is, when we don't color it with our crayons of desire, soften it with layers of rationalizations the logic of which runs in circles but never connects, and grow up. Of course it's an anticlimax. It's only in fantasy that killing another human being is glorious. The reality is ugly and our natural revulsion is evolution at work.
President Obama is letting us decompress, each in our own way. He is honoring the dead and their families; the emergency responders and frightened citizens; the people in the military industrial machine who carried out this act of Our vengence as We commanded them to, and did so with the sense of Us at their backs. He is leaving the back-slapping to others (and those are legion on the media).
A international head of a criminal enterprise is dead by Our hand. He and his followers have slaughtered innocients. Our war machine has slaughtered many more innocients in our pursuit of him (along with some sidetrips in empire-building). When all is said and done, a few months from now, We will have acted out our Righteous Vengence. And then reality will set in. Reality only provides cold facts, and our overwrought torrent of counterfacts will only stave off the inevitable. One day will we have to explain this madness to our grandchildren. Maybe it will be there, under the questioning of a child, that our sanity will finally return.
The rest of the "facts" beyond what reality has given us we color and layer and ritualize upon them. Over time, the colors will change and soften. The layers will fall away. The rituals will merge into other rituals of our common weal.
But the innocient dead are still dead. Their kith and kin must still heal from that. We must heal from our part in many of their deaths. No one can do that for us. Those who need to bask in the bloody details or justify what Our soldiers did in Our name down to meaningless details and endless hair-splitting -- well, that's their way through. We put those soldiers there to end the blood cycle, once and for all, between a madman and our nation. We expected those soldiers where trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
Herein lies is exactly the difference between the military and law enforcement in a sane society. We sent the military, and parsing their actions for purity of procedure is pointless and insulting to them. You don't send in the military unless you expect them to kill somebody. If you want to capture and try them, use law enforcement. That's the difference.
Returning
We have to make that journey back to the tribal comfort of our common weal ourselves, each in our own way. As ancient as the blood ritual is in human societies, so is the path back. The warriors are in the shit for us, and when they come back they will need time to come back to us. This isn't a normal day at the office. It is killing -- the art and science and practice of it. They killed bin Ladin. They are now hunting down and killing anyone for which he left a trace in his personal effects, combined with the supercomputers and databases we have unlawfully and immorally accumulated over the years. Doesn't change the fact the military has to finish the job We told them to do and that they already have the data.
Those leads will lead, and I'm sure already have led, to sensitive allies with us. Enter diplomatic opportunity for leverage I'm sure Secretary Clinton will exploit in full measure. Enter more entanglements and secrets to cover secrets. Enter more temptation by power players all over the world to perpetuate the horror -- er, maintain the jobs provided by selling the tools of killing all over the world and to all sides.
We The People will have to demand this market be curbed or eliminated. We The People will have to demand that private information stay private except in open, public court where justice can have a chance at working. President Obama must carry out Our will when it is clear, and for ten years We have made this goal clear: kill bin Ladin.
His Administration will do their efficient best roll up the al Queda criminal network worldwide. Our military will kill any targets they are given with lethal efficiency to send a message to our potential adversaries. Our public servants will continue wrapping this bloodletting adventure up, as is their duty to do. While it plays out, more innocients will be killed. The cycle of blood must play out now that an end is in sight.
We have demanded that Terrible Swift Justice be visited upon Osama bin Ladin. It has. And it was terrible -- fills those in that criminal network with terror. That's what We wanted, and the Administration has delivered.
Now there will come a moment, a cusp, at which further money or talent being used for this "war" will be politically difficult. The sense that that moment is coming will draw it nigh and make it real. Neocons are already fretting about it all over the place. A turning point is coming as sanity returns where bloodlust drains away.
But for most of us, the blood cycle has come full circle already. After Sunday night, we are done with it. The wicked witch is dead. Now is the time to wake up, look around and hold our loved ones tight. Whether that cycle was righteous, let the pundits and elite debate. Many fellow citizens gripped by the blood lust nearly ten years ago are finally starting to release their grip on it and let it go. Whatever may have happened in the bloodletting, most of us will want to put it behind us. Our Will is ready to change, finally, as clouds of fear part to let the sun shine again.
Laying Wreaths Instead Of Wearing Laurels
President Obama is wise in this time of reality shock, of cognitive dissonance, of waking up after a very bad passage of bloodletting. He is not playing to our fantasy nor is he challenging our unsanity. He is awaiting Us to say what Our Will is going to be. He is an effective administrator, a public-minded public servant and a careful listener to all sides in our fractured political discourse. He will hear Us. The question is, what will We say?
He leaves that to Us collectively and individually. A President cannot do that for Us. He can only strive to be listening when We are ready to speak again. As a fellow citizen, he bears the same burden we all share in this country. As First Citizen, he watched the horror play out in real time and ordered it to be done. A terrible task for any sane person. Whatever his personal feelings in that moment, he carried out Our will. Now all that matters is that the deed is done.
And We The People did it. No question. No evading that now. We wanted bin Ladin dead, and by Our hand he now is.
May we heal now. May we honor the innocient dead, the fallen heros, and our children's children. May we tear down this edifice of avarice and unsanity that stands in the way of our better future. May this cycle of bloodlust and bloodletting end here.
Let the future interrupted by Reagan's Curse and 9-11 begin again.