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Edited on Thu Feb-01-07 06:42 AM by WilliamPitt
This is a long-ass post. Back out now if you aren't up for a pile of words.
The important part first:
I flipped over the "bomb threats" in my city yesterday, posted a half-dozen deranged and ill-constructed threads, and proceeded to be rude and obnoxious to a lot of people who posted replies. I'm truly sorry I did that; when I was writing that stuff, I was whacked on adrenaline, 100% in emotional-reaction mode, didn't make any kind of coherent explanations for my feelings, and lashed out like an ass.
When I finally got wise and fled the keyboard, I blazed out to my bar intending to get galactically shithoused...ah yes, the self-destructive reaction. I wound up, however, nursing a single pint in the corner of the bar for hours (mmmm, warm IPA), listening to the sound of the tension-knots in my back unfurl themselves, coping with the jitters that come after an eruption of adrenaline, and wondering just exactly what in God's name caused this whole absurdity to get so deeply under my skin.
I owe an explanation for my rudeness...and if I write it, I can lock it down in my mind. This is long, and I apologize for that as well. In (hopefully) some semblance of order:
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1. What on this good Earth was I afraid of? Those silly Lite-Brite things? Hah!
But...
Most of you watched the TV footage and read the stories in the press, and saw those silly-assed Lite-Brite things with the middle finger up. That was enough to freak me out? I might as well stay in bed, right? Am I that easy to bulldoze? Maybe, but that wasn't the whole deal.
First of all, the media here in Boston didn't show any images of those goddam things for HOURS. All I heard was that three, then four, then six, then nine "packages" with wires and electronics had been found strapped to bridges, overpasses, hospitals and other spots (read: critical infrastructure, the stuff you take out when you really want to do damage) all across the city. One of them was a few blocks from my place, so I had the bomb-squad/fire trucks/cops party right under my nose.
If they had shown one picure in the media around here, just one, of these damned Lite-Brite things, I'd have felt immensely better. I see them now, hours later, and shake my head. They didn't show us, because the need-to-know school of public info disbursement is the rule with this stuff, which rots because a little info in this case would have eased a lot of tension. I offer this to explain the racheting-up of worry around my town, and within me. We didn't see a picture of the Lite-Brite thing for hours...
...and in that stretch of time (which felt for the world like those hours after the planes hit the buildings but everyone was waiting for the next shoe to drop), I entertained a whole galaxy of bad thoughts.
2. First impressions, as the newsfolk read off the locations where these things were being found (without showing pictures of them): if I really wanted to hit a city hard, I'd go for the infrastructure. Had those things been bombs, a main rail line across the river, two bridges, two main highways and a major hospital would have been cashiered. That means civilians can't get out, and aid can't get in. It's an old, effective tactic of war; the French Resistance guaranteed the success of the Normandy landing by blowing up roads and rail spurs the night before the landings, thus denying Nazi forces access for a counter-attack.
Hitting the WTC was an attack on our economic infrastructure. Hitting the Pentagon was an attack on our military infrastructure. Both symbolic, true, but also effective. Destroying the (actual or symbolic) infrastructure of a society paralyzes that society, and these things were attached to several important points of Boston's infrastructure...and yeah, I think about this stuff. It's as old as war itself.
So I saw that, sans Lite-Brite pic, and got very tense.
3. There's a weird dissonance in the thinking here on DU, and in the progressive/liberal arena in general, I ran headlong into it today, and that was part of why I flipped. Please bear with me, and I hope I do not offend in the process.
On the one hand...
One of the arguments I put forth in the anti-Iraq-invasion book I wrote in the summer of 2002, an argument that anyone with a functioning brain was making at the time, and is making now, is that our occupation of Iraq is manufacturing terrorists. "The greatest recruiting poster in history for al Qaeda" is a line I've written a thousand times, a line I have read times beyond count. So have you, I'm quite sure, because it is accurate and sensible.
A ten year old girl in Baghdad gets blown sideways out of her kitchen by a bomb, a mother gets blasted in an air-raid in Falluja, a father has menstrual blood smeared on his face in a cement cage in Abu Ghraib by leering US troops looking to humiliate his faith, a son gets dropped by a US sniper in Baquaba...and the families of those slain people are going to pick up a gun and volunteer so they can die to kill. That's the Iraq civil war in brief, augmented by thirty years of US-sponsored sectarian oppression. The "foreign fighters" and "Iranian agents" we hear about are a dot compared to the simple power of revenge, despair and woe we have unleashed.
This idea that we are creating terrorists by killing civilians in Iraq is pretty much axiomatic by now, proven in blood by the bombings in London, perpetrated by people seeking their pound of flesh from a member of the "Coalition of the Willing" that perpetrated the invasion and occupation. We're creating that which this "War on Terra" ostensibly seeks to destroy, and London was the first instance where our creations left the nest.
But on the other hand...
We all have great sport on DU dogging the astonishingly ham-fisted fear-tactics deployed by the keepers of the color chart in DC. Deservedly so. You know the litany by heart:
The Brooklyn Bridge is going to be bombed, the Statue of Liberty is going to be bombed, dirty bombs and exploding shoes, your hair gel is a threat to this airplane, line up, shut up, watch what you say, break out the plastic sheeting and duct tape, the proof might be a mushroom cloud, uranium from Niger, mobile bioweapons labs, Powell is an honorable man, fight them there so we don't have to fight them here, but oh yeah, please go shopping...
When DU started, it was meant pretty much to be an organizing spot to counteract the outrageous Bush v. Gore decision that started this whole mess. After 9/11, however, it became so much more (for me, anyway). It became a sanity-preserver, and a gold-plated bullshit detector. We watched the country fall into a years-long swoon, a protective crouch, we watched the manipulations and the lies and the terror-warnings blasted out to change the political subject.
We held each other together, day after day, and at least in this small space, we made sure that everyone on DU knew that Oceania has not always been at war with Eurasia. Seeing through lies is power, and though we were surrounded by lying media and crooked leaders, though we felt powerless, we were strengthened by our ability to cut through the fog.
Thus, the dissonance...
We argue, on the one hand, that the Iraq occupation is manufacturing terrorists, and that this process is a dire threat to our national security.
But at the same time, the cynicism that has been ground into us makes us slap aside and catcall pretty much any and all "terror warnings" that come down the pike.
We are absolutely right about the former, and absolutely right about the latter. But these two things cannot exist together.
The terrorists we're manufacturing aren't going to the beach, or going camping at the local KOA. If we believe that Iraq is creating terrorists, that means they are out there somewhere. That means, in the long view, that sooner or later those terrorists we have manufactured will get themselves here. That means, wretchedly, one of these days, a terror warning isn't going to be fear-mongering crap. It's nice to win debates against pro-war nitwits with the former argument, and it is empowering to strive past the fear-shround with the latter argument...but the two won't stay in separate corners forever.
In 2002, a reporter asked the governor of New Jersey what "Red Alert," a new thing for us, would actually look like on the streets and in the towns of America. The governor replied succinctly: it means you stay in your home, you don't go outside, and if you do, you'll be considered an enemy combatant. The simple phrase for what the governor described is "martial law."
On top of all the other reasons I was against the invasion, this was the most important. If we invade, I argued, we will plant ice and harvest wind. The fact that it hasn't happened yet is remarkable (and is a testament to the tactical minds involved, who are patient enough to let us wreck our standing in the world all by ourselves, who haven't attacked again because they want no sympathy to rise again for us), but it won't last.
So.
Is thinking like this fear-mongering? Is it being a sucker? Or is it playing the tape to the end?
If we believe in that terrorism-manufacturing argument, then the ultimate conclusion is clear. You can't argue that we are put in danger by the Bushies because they are creating terrorists, and then comprehensively disdain the idea that those terrorists we create might actually attack.
My greatest fear for years has been that one of these goddam warnings won't be crap, that the chickens will come home to roost. And that's the rub, the thing that lit me up yesterday. We had, today in Boston, a dry run for the last day of Constitutional law in America.
Spool out the scenario that looms over us all, because we accept the terror-manufacturing point: nine real live explosions hit the critical infrastructure in a major city, and we're nationally at Red Alert. That's martial law, the absolute suspension of habeas corpus, the absolute suspension of posse commitatus, troops in the streets, the Founding Documents stuffed into a file folder along with all the rights and protections attached, and God only knows if and when we'd ever see them again.
That's what scared me today.
1. All I heard for hours was reports of nine "packages" strapped to critical infrastructure in my city, packages that had wires and electronics inside according to the limited reports, and I didn't see the actual things until much later;
2. While I have correctly joined in the disdain and outrage for all the fake-ass "terra" warnings we have been subjected to for the sake of political expedience, I have also fought to convince people that we are creating terrorism with our Iraq occupation, and that puts us in danger. If we aren't worried, why did the ports thing wig us out so much? It is my dissonance, too.
3. My greatest fear, since this all started, has been the day when something else blows up here, the day when the curtain comes down on our republic, the day when "Red Alert" supplants the Constitution. I cannot make the argument that Iraq endangers us all without enduring the dread borne from my absolute belief in the correctness of that premise.
4. I went through several hours today wondering if today was that day I had been dreading. I've written about it, spoken about it and worried about it since the summer of 2002, and for a time today, I thought it was upon us. I had no data to contradict that fear, because the damned Lite-Bright pics didn't pop for hours. All I saw was an attack scenario elegant in its simplicity: hit the infrastructure, paralyze the city, and watch the chaos. My adrenaline kicked, and I was off to the races.
So yeah, I feel dumb, and I acted like a jerk, and while I'm glad to have a full-fear reaction in my file of life experiences for the wisdom it provided, I'm going to make sure it was a one-time thing.
But I also don't want to forget the other stuff, or push it away because it is awful to contemplate. A sucker falls for the fear, but a sucker also whistles past the graveyard. I have been yelling about the threat to us all posed by this Iraq occupation for years. I believe that threat is absolutely real. I'd be a damnable hypocrite if I'd been saying these things only to frighten, only to win elections. I'd be that which I despise and oppose.
It's real, and in my town today, I endured a dry run through the harvest of what Bush has sown. It was nonsense, and the Lite-Brite thing is silly...but damn if I don't welcome, just a little bit, this feeling of foolishness. It beats the tar out of the alternative, and I can tell you that with total honesty, because I watched the shadow of that alternative do its thing a few blocks from my home.
The dissonance I describe weakens us. We must live without fear, but we must also steel ourselves for the consequences of the actions of these fools. Chicken Littles can go to Hell, but it takes a special kind of blinders to ignore the table that has been set for us.
Sorry I wrote so much, and again, I'm sorry for my behavior.
One last thought, however, specifically for those having a ball with the Lite-Brite things.
Put on, for a moment, your most clever thinking-cap, and think about one ubiquitous thing in America. It's everywhere, so obnoxious and widespread that you don't even see it anymore. You glass your eyes past it, your awareness bounces off it, but it is all around you, especially so if you live in a city.
That ubiquitous thing?
Advertisements. Billboards. Blinking shit to draw your eye. Signs, signs, everywhere signs. You've been swimming through it your whole life, and can ignore it at will now. It's invisible, but all over the place, both there and not there.
If I was a clever bastard, how would I disguise a bunch of bombs?
Packages? Bags? Suitcases? Boxes? Those things make people nervous now, especially if they're just sitting unattended in the middle of a public space. They get seen, they draw attention.
But a clever little advertisement is something you've seen a billion times, and completely ignored.
Those goddam Lite-Brite things were strapped to bridges and highways for weeks, in ten cities, and it wasn't until yesterday that they got noticed. They were there but not there, right in front of people but invisible, hiding in plain sight.
And to any Boston bomb-squad sergeant, that little black block underneath the lights looks way the hell too much like a nifty little brick of C-4 for comfort...with wires attached...strapped to critical infrastructure. They don't have the luxury of taking shit like this lightly.
Yeah, I think like this. Thank God the bomb-squad guys do, too. Seeing those Lite-Brite things might make you laugh at the absurdity of it all...but they hid right in front of the citizens of ten cities for a long time. Food for thought, and thanks for slogging through all this.
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