The Age of Vacuity

Let us return in time to those enchanted days before Muslim extremists hijacked commercial aircraft and flew them at several hundred miles per hour, fully loaded with people, jet fuel and America's destiny, into two tall Manhattan buildings, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania. Just for a moment, pretend it is September 10, 2001.

Are you there now? Okay, let me ask you a question: Are we at war? And if so, with whom?

If we are at war, why is Richard Clarke forced to run around like a man with his hair on fire in order to get even grudging attention from Condoleezza Rice, the nation's putative National Security Advisor, about al-Qaeda and the threat it poses? The Bush Administration, tough, macho, ruthless, has a different foe in its crosshairs: America's secondary school principals. Education is going to be held accountable so No Child Is Left Behind. Bush is the CEO President, after all, and his action list demands one high profile issue at a time, which he accomplishes in a methodical and efficient way, just as he learned to do when...okay, he never actually learned to do anything of the kind. But the way someone, probably the tubby guy with glasses and the nimbus of baby hair, told him that real executives get things done.

Bush is just happy to be President. All he really wants are three things: to relieve all rich people of the obligation to pay taxes, to go Poppy one better by invading Iraq again and toppling Saddam (this time), and to get reelected, something else Poppy couldn't pull off. Then call me a drinkin', snortin' ne'er-do-well, ya Poppy-injay!

Bush is not that interested in getting rich. Not really. You see what he makes, even today? Somewhere around $780,000, of which $400,000 is his Presidential salary. Which means he makes about $380,000 on his accumulations. Not exactly Big Rich by Texas standards, not at all. A man 60 years old, graduated from Yale and Harvard Business School, CEO of oil companies, an owner and president of the Texas Rangers, former Governor of Texas, beneficiary of many sweetheart loans from generous and probably bewildered older members of the Poppy-razzi, who couldn't quite believe what a colossal screw-up the Old Man's kid was - making less than a part-time plastic surgeon in the tonier sections of Dallas.

But before that mild digression, I was talking about Bush and the war on terror, and what Bush thought about on September 10, 2001. I think he was as indifferent to terrorism as he was to any other aspect of his new job. The conspiracy nuts have gone wild with Bush's Pet Goat moment, reading into it whatever they need to see. Such tea-leaf-reading is standard procedure in American hysteria. We're a spoiled people, and whenever anything goes wrong here, our entire sense of Self is thrown into disarray, and we become determined to find out Who Was Responsible. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Atta, and 18 other guys were responsible, that's all. KSM, the Gargling Informant, has "confessed" while in damp repose on his Jordanian waterboard. I think he was pissed off about his nephew Ramzi rotting away in SuperMax in Colorado, just like John Gotti did. And shit, the World Trade Center is still standing! Like Bush, the Sheikh is task-oriented, a box-checking freak. No Skyscraper Left Behind. So work yourself into whatever lather you want, and if you have Mommy and Daddy Issues, like most unbearably spoiled Americans, talk about "blowback" and spend your time figuring out how we deserved it.

Nah, Bush, on September 10, is indifferent to terrorist attacks. He sees them, if he "thinks" about them at all, as cyclical phenomena. The World Trade Center in 1993, the African embassies, the U.S.S. Cole. Timothy McVeigh, but he doesn't count. Too pale. Too local. Ditto the Unabomber. The reason is simple: there's not much point in thinking about them. You just get bummed out. If they happen, they happen. That's why the Bush Administration, which now proclaims, with astonishing chutzpah, its unique suitability to lead the War on Terror, paid no attention to field reports that Something Big was up. As Condi said, who ever dreamed they'd start flying planes into buildings? And if not that, they'd come up with something else we couldn't do anything about. In other words, the Bush Admin thought about terrorism in the same terms everyone else did. If it happens, it happens.

Think how easy it is. You want to blow a hole in the roadway of any American bridge? Drive a Ryder truck to the middle of the bridge, park, and detonate the load of fertilizer in the trailer. You want to freak America out and bring the consumer economy to a grinding halt? Pick ten big malls in exurbia and at Zero Hour, detonate ten car bombs in ten big parking lots. Does anyone seriously think that anything the Bush Administration, or any other political leadership, could do would have the slightest efficacy against things so simple?

It's an asymmetrical war, alright. An easygoing, freedom-loving, fundamentally lazy, essentially trusting American public, on one side, and guys with a huge sense of aggrievement, monomaniacal dedication and way too much time on the other.

America has been very lucky. Our principal foes, so far, have been a little on the dramatic side. Given to tactical histrionics. They plan for years because they think only something that plays well on TV can have a real impact on a populace geared to a 22 minute attention span, the length of a TiVo'ed sitcom. If it doesn't happen on TV, it isn't real. That's why the Iraq War can drag on forever. It isn't real. We never see it. That may be the result of Unintended Genius in prosecution of the war, to create a battlefield so dangerous, with no defined front, with nowhere Behind the Lines, so that no journalist can photograph the war as it happens.

The drama isn't necessary. America would be more effectively undone by the quotidian, by the sense we can't make our consumer rounds in complete safety. A burning skyscraper in America's richest borough is an image from a psychological distance. We can see that isn't us. It's happening to them. Unless, sad to say, them happens to be you.

So the Sheikh checked the box, eight years after his first attempt. And how about Clinton's War on Terrorism, huh? From 1993 to 2000, not a single attack within the United States by Muslim extremists, and his crack anti-terrorist operatives (the U.S. Border Patrol) foiled the Millenium Plot! Bush, so far, has kept America explosion-free for not quite 5 years. The American populace, which is not, in a broad-based sense, schooled in the scientific method or the interpretation of statistics, does not see the distinction between coincidence and causation, or the critical role played by just dumb luck. They think uploading Aunt Millie's phone bills into a vast database in Maryland will prevent a laid-off call center worker in Dearborn, Michigan from driving out to California and detonating a trunk full of Semtex in front of a Safeway in Culver City.

But it is a peculiarity of modern American life, as it is represented in public media, that no one requires anything to make sense anymore. Things get said and everyone pretends it makes sense. It's why we're all going crazy, at variable speeds. Reality is losing its integrity.

So thank goodness, so far, the world's terrorists, whoever they are, have chosen big impact scenarios, as they conceive them, as their attack of choice against America. We can survive those, blog those, make movies about those, attack each other about those, and live our lives around those. KSM & the Paradise Boys haven't quite figured it out yet. Their approach just sticks us with a lousy government, courtesy of an easily-manipulated American voting populace. That is the long term significance of their attacks against "symbols of American power." Those propel America into a narcissistic frenzy of Power Demonstration, the use of the army, navy and marines, the entire espionage apparatus, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, irrelevant wars, the wholesale rounding up of Arabs, the suspension of civil liberties and due process, the creation of a police state, the distortion of spending priorities, the dismissal of far more serious existential threats such as global warming and avian flu. All this for Something Which Has Already Happened, where 19 of the 20 perpetrators are already dead and the 20th, the Mastermind, is currently touring Eastern Europe courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

So, now we must endure the debate about who's tougher in the War on Terror. In other words, who talks tougher about something we've already let happen and are powerless to prevent from happening again. The America of September 10, 2001, is gone forever. We were curiously ready to say goodbye, I suppose. So ready that we collaborated with our government, with KSM, with our own fearful selves in letting it go.