Perspective Break
I'll delay the vision thing RE Open Republic, Phase II to reflect
on Ellen Dana Nagler's excellent post, Letting
the Terrorists Win. She says that we let the terrorists win every time we
factor their threat into our planning, and she catalogues the moments in her
life when she altered her behavior because of terrorist activity: London in
the early 70s, Paris in the summer of '86, winter, 1991 and January, 2002.
And Tuesday.
Ellen's is a candid, revealing and courageous essay. She describes her mother's
way of looking at the world:
In her heart, where she receives the world as a fearsome thing and shrinks
from encounters with it, she is letting the terrorists win.
And the pressures she felt in London during the IRA bombings in the early 70s:
I avoid Grosvenor Square and the American Embassy, which for some reason
seems to be on the list, or at least on the list in my head.
The List in My Head
Ellen is teaching us by example, admitting the habits of perception she's not
proud of but which might inform our own behaviors and perhaps free us from
hatred and terror in our hearts, which is truly terrible, while confronting
terror objectively, which is terrific. What we're really reacting to, she's
saying, is the list in our heads.
This is a recurrent theme for me, having placed myself in so many precarious
circumstances, first as a clueless, grandstanding young man and later as a habit
useful in combat. Here's a repeat of something I published last August:
About that Face Slap
What if our 9/11 tragedy wasn't? I hate to sound harsh about our losses, but
has it occurred to anyone else that running airplanes into buildings might not
have been the logistical masterstroke of the century?
I'm suggesting that there was an operational hole in our hijacking prevention
system and that some passionate Arabs got lucky and managed to kill some of
us. I've got about 2500 hours in a Boeing 707, and I'm sure that a couple hundred
hours in Microsoft Simulator would be enough for the average person to switch
off a 767 autopilot, turn left and crash into the Twin Towers. The fact that
they did some actual flight training in a Cessna seems irrelevant.
There's almost 300 million of us. On 9/11/01, those Arabs killed a little over
.001% of us, fewer than die from smoking every week. Instead of panicking, we
could have started locking cockpit doors, continued to keep guns off airplanes,
and we'd have plugged that loophole.
Perhaps 9/11 was more spectacle than significant. Of course, there's a war
on terror, but we're the foot soldiers in that war, and we should acknowledge
that some of us are going to get hurt. It's a war, fer chrissake! I've
been traveling a lot lately, and as most of us know, the airport precautions
are more charade than anything else. We all understand that we're not significantly
safer than we were before. Feeling safer is not the same as being safer.
What we might have done in the middle of September 2001, if tough-mindedness
were part of our national makeup, would be to say,
"OK, you motherfuckers, you got lucky once. We're not changing how
we live our lives, but we're changing how you live your lives,
starting with Saudi Arabia, which is the obvious catalyst for this foolishness.
We're going to do the thing you can't stand us to do: Freeze your assets,
dictate what we're willing to pay for oil, and spend those saved billions
on energy independence and telecommuting technologies. Any company that resists
that initiative will be exposed for its un-American activities. Now you guys
fix that Taliban problem or we'll get really nasty and put an embargo on bizjets."
That kind of thinking arises from my sense that we spend most of our lives
flying into large mountains
avoiding small bullets. I learned that lesson when I saw a guy do that very
thing in Viet Nam, so clanked was he about the idea
of someone shooting at him that he ignored the reality
that airplanes and mountains are a bad combo.
Yeah, yeah, I know, we can't dictate market forces. But if OPEC can, we can.
Of course we'd only do that if we had confidence in the resilience of the American
people and if national security were more important to us than oil company profits.
Our homeland security problem is that the American Oil Industry benefits from
high prices as much as the Sheiks of Araby, as ex-CIA Mideast specialist Bob
Baer points out in Sleeping
With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, cited
by Salon,"the real war we should be fighting is not in Baghdad."
Small Minds, not Small Government
Maybe we got it wrong. We thought the Bushies were about small government,
but perhaps it was only about their small mandate. Maybe they were fixated on
what everyone seems to ignore: without extraordinary measures, they're unlikely
to get more votes than last time. The opportunity the Bin Laden family handed
the Bush family was to paralyze our culture so ordinary electoral logic would
not apply.
"Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,'' Bush told [Mitch] Daniels shortly
after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.
– Miami Herald , Nov. 29, 2001*
These cynical points have been made by smarter people than I. I'm just riffing
on the role of our cultural aesthetic and high tolerance of cynicism. The political
cynicism we're seeing is related to the cynicism of public companies and TV
evangelists and the media. Our cultural taste no longer reflects the high personal
values most of us hold, regardless of our politics. Instead, we're gripped by
the opportunistic economic aesthetics of large groups, where anything goes as
long as it increases stock values or electoral votes or collection plate revenues.
Buzzing the Machine
This recurrent theme reminds me of an enjoyable lunch conversation I had on
this topic with Jeff Jarvis at Etech
in early February. The bright San Diego sun was smiling on our grateful faces
and I lobbied for this notion that we somehow need to separate one's personal
fate from one's actions, that the battle plan must be consistent and smart,
not hostage to a few casualties. I believe our nation's battle plan is to live
according to the Bill of Rights, even if it costs some of us our lives once
in a while.
Today Jeff writes,
...we have to remember that these are pathologically insane and evil
beasts and it's impossible to guess how low they will stoop.
If we were lucky enough to have intelligence inside their devil's cult, then,
yes, we might have foiled their plot. But that's obviously hard to do.
If we were lucky enough to have stopped one of them for speeding and locked
them up, then we might have foiled their plot. But that's like counting on
a lottery ticket.
What matters now is learning the lessons we can learn -- and to that extent,
the hearings are valuable -- to protect us as best we can.
But I find the blame game going on now unseemly and divisive and unproductive
and distracting and just a little bit tasteless.
I saw people die that day not because of anything we didn't do but because
of what a bunch of soulless murderers did do. Let's never forget that.
It's us against them, not us against us.
This is where Jeff and I diverge in how to wage war well. Rage hampers your
ability to function in combat, and we are in combat. One prevails by
respecting the enemy, not in seeing him as inhuman. Further, I'm convinced that
no one is soulless, though many on both sides are deluded by fundamentalist
leaders and happy to kill in their personal quest for meaning. Just as our vets
have been to Viet Nam and met and hugged and wept with their former enemy, someday
Iraqis and Yanks will sit down in Baghdad over sweet tea and grieve for the
lost days of their youth, seeking to maim each other.
Though we're not at war with with ourselves, we must be antagonistic to our
own errors. NFL teams review the game video and fighter pilots the gunsight
film and grade each others' landings because they've got past the idea that
discovery is blame and that criticism is personal. The military has a lot at
stake so it's pretty comfortable with the idea that perfection is the absence
of mistakes: their only hope is to get the mistakes out in the open and learn
from them. If George Bush were a warrior, he'd get this, and he'd never have
allowed Rumsfeld to fire General Shinseki for his foreknowledge
that it would take more troops and money to occupy Iraq than the White House
wanted to consider.
Kicking the Dog
The Iraqi war was a catharsis, not a strategy, the equivalent of kicking the
dog after a bad day at the office. Does my analogy belittle the agony of all
those families? Think about it rationally: our problem was in witnessing all
that agony all at once, so dramatically, and dwelling on it for months. It built
a dangerous list in our heads. Every life is precious but most end badly, with
tubes and machines and grieving relatives around us. Multiply the affect surrounding
those individual deaths times 3,000 and it's probably the same as 9/11.
Living fully and free is more important than a specious guarantee of domestic
tranquility. The list of blessings in an open heart trumps the list of threats
in a timid head. Our spirit is destined to celebrate the universal dignity of
life and keep the hope that tomorrow, everywhere, can be a renaissance of understanding.
12:14:58 PM 
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