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Sept. 20, 2001 -- Mt. Shasta, Calif. (APJP) -- That the nation caught a massive case of War Fever in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is about as surprising as a sunrise. Everyone had, and still has, a lot of anger and outrage, and war fever is a society's way of cleaning out the emotional toxins that a horrible thing like the attacks create.
I'm not immune; nobody really is. I'm angry that someone would cold-bloodedly massacre thousands of innocent people just to make a political or religious point. I want to see whoever planned the attack pay (the ones who did the actual attacking are all dead and beyond the reach of justice, which is frustrating). I want the perpetrators brought to justice. No political belief, no religious belief can justify the murder of thousands like that, and no political system or religion that thinks there is justification is worth a shit.
But I believe, at my deepest level, that without proof of guilt, if we go killing people without knowing we have the right people, then we have thrown away any meaning we could hope to attach to the deaths of those in the towers and at the Pentagon, and have merely joined the terrorists in adding to the carnage.
No matter how angry I feel, I cannot allow myself to use the anger to become the equal of the terrorists. I need to be able to look in the mirror and call myself human.
Grief? In all honesty, I grieved more for an 18 year old kid here who got killed in a highway accident this week than I did for all the thousands who died. The kid had a name. He had a face. He had a voice. He left a gap in my existence. The others are an abstraction.
But I'll never forget that day. Or the horror I felt, and still feel. Perhaps that is grief.
In the days immediately following the attacks, I failed to run around screaming that we should reduce one of several proposed targets to rubble. That was the preferred word among people who had the War Fever: rubble. Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. Tit for tat.
Rubble for rubble. Senseless murder for senseless murder.
Of course, if you aren't jumping up and down and screaming for blood, people notice. And when you ask, reasonably enough, just who they plan to take vengeance against, they tend to get very angry.
I got mail, of course. One lady wanted to know why I couldn't support "The President" now, of all times. That, at least, was a reasonable question.
Two reasons, basically: He isn't "The President" but a cheap sham, and second, because I have little confidence in the leadership abilities of the junta that is propping him up.
There are a lot of people who have agreed with me on the subject of Putsch and the judicial coup of last December, and quite a few of those people, swept away by patriotism, rallied around him. Many have since been swept right back by common sense, and the realization that national crisis or no, Putsch is still an inept and illegitimate toady put there with the express function of dismantling American freedoms and rights.
Still, at least one major Putsch-bashing website shut down, explaining that they felt that what they were doing was inappropriate in this time of grave national emergency. I expect to see them back on line, a bit red-faced, in a couple of weeks.
The yahoos on Usenet are, under the best of circumstances, in deep need of tranquilizer shots, and of course, they came totally unstrung, gibbering and howling and ranting. The Nazis blamed the Jews. The dittoheads blamed the liberals. The Waco brigade blamed Janet Reno.
I got called a coward for refusing to agree that bombing villagers with high-powered ultra-modern technology is brave. How dare I?
One guy, who under the best of circumstances is not a poster boy for mental hygiene, snarled that he wanted to know what role I had in the "bombings". I carefully explained to him that I was piloting the airliner that smashed into the Pentagon, and that I jumped clear just in time. I believe that truly idiotic questions deserve truly idiotic answers.
Still, humor during War Fever is dangerous, and I found myself wondering if that remark might get me a visit from guys with shiny black shoes and guns.
If adversity brings out the best in Americans -- the help and support that poured into New York City, the courage and leadership shown by Giuliani, the bravery of the hundreds of cops and firemen who died trying to save their fellow citizens -- War Fever brings out the worst. A guy in Arizona killed a Sikh, assuming him to be some sort of "Ay-rab". As the cops hauled him off to jail, he was yelling, "But I'm a patriot!"
Putsch made his fatuous remark about how the terrorists only attacked because they resented our wealth -- the classist whine of a weak and over-privileged child. That was followed by his invocation to a crusade -- the last thing the world wants to see, full on war between the world's two biggest religions -- and rootin' tootin' remarks about bringing the bad guys in, "dead or alive". I'm surprised he didn't start trying to talk like the Duke.
Then there was that vicious lunatic Jerry Falwell. This supposed leader of Christianity, already notorious for some really, really stupid remarks in the past (who can forget the time he accused Tinky Winky, the asexual Teletubby toy, of being gay?) decided, two days after the tragedy, to tell Americans that they basically brought God's wrath upon themselves by harboring homosexuals, the ACLU, and liberals. In a way, his awful behavior crystallized the nature of the conflict between America and the adversaries who attacked. It isn't rich vs. poor like Putsch claims, and it isn't revenge for real or imagined insults of the past. It's part of a war between rational faith and secularism, and the personality disorder known as fundamentalism.
In a few paragraphs, with searing, painful, hateful language, Falwell demonstrated that there was little difference between the domestic version of fundamentalism and the foreign variety. It worries me that rational Christians haven't rejected that loathsome little nut. Has fundamentalism gained so much prevalence among our religious population that its adherents can no longer think at all for themselves?
There were the Chicken Hawks, demanding that others make sacrifices they themselves were unprepared to make. I enraged a few of the more rabid hawks on Usenet by inquiring as to when they planned to enlist. That, it would seem, is a very politically incorrect question to ask.
But they will keep on doing what cardboard patriots always do and use the flag to try and gag others. They are a disgrace to everything America stands for as far as freedom and liberty goes, but they use patriotism as a weapon to shut off anything that disturbs their little minds.
Senator Feinstein of California disgraced herself by supporting a bill that essentially permits the government to conduct warrantless searches of email and other private correspondence on the web. Senator Hatch of Utah (Afghanistan West) thought it was a good time to promote the worthless Star Wars scheme, and oh, by the way, could we give the rich a tax break because they are losing their asses on the stock market due to national jitters? Trent Lott displayed his confederate animosity to our secular and free nation by warning that Americans should prepare to give up some rights.
However, there were bright sides. Congresswoman Lee was the sole voice in dissent on the $40 billion Congress pushed at Putsch to make the problem all better. As Congress abdicated its function of debate and deliberation, she was the sole voice of courage -- and a great deal of courage it took, too. (The House passed it 434-1, and the Senate, 98-0. If I recall correctly, those were the same margins by which the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed. That worked out rather well, didn't it?)
Putsch himself provided a bright shining moment by going to a Mosque and pleading for people to not harass or harm Moslems, or any other ethnic minority. After years of watching Republicans cold-bloodedly pander to the lowest and meanest of our hatreds and fears, it was good to see him stand against a tide of hatred, and demand that we behave like human beings.
And Rush Limbaugh amazed me twice. He amazed me by condemning Trent Lott for suggesting we needed to give up some rights, arguing that we can be strong and reasonably secure without sacrificing our freedoms. And then he roundly condemned Falwell, arguing that no matter how much he disagreed with liberals, gays, the ACLU and so on, we are all still Americans, still humans, and have the exact same right to believe what we believe and be a part of this great country.
Twice in two days I agreed with Rush Limbaugh without reservation. In the 15 years that I've listened to that man, that brings the number of times I've agreed with him in such a manner to, um, two.
Putsch showed a little courage and compassion, and Rush stood up for the rights of his foes.
One of the more rational conservatives on Usenet mentioned that he used to do scenarios and evaluations of what might happen in the event of a limited nuclear exchange. In the course of such, they imagined scenes in which New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia would all be gone, with 15 million dead and tens of millions more sickened and burned.
Why, he asked, didn't they pay more attention to the emotional and psychological aftereffects? Compared to what he was envisioning, the World Trade Center was just a "pin-prick". And here America was, thrashing about in the throes of War Fever and financial panic.
Part of it is that we could, to a degree, fathom the carnage of Tuesday's attack. One can walk around the entire disaster scene in less than an hour. That makes it so much more real and immediate. We can't comprehend the horror of a nuclear war, and should such a calamity ever occur, I suspect the nation would be silent, shocked, unable to come to grips at all.
Part of it is in the fact that it's the first time since the Civil War that we've had anything like this. Rex Babin, the editorial cartoonist for the Sacramento Bee, had a striking panel in which he had the images of the fleeing Vietnamese children, including the badly burned, naked little girl, running through a Manhattan intersection with the World Trade Center collapsing behind them. To me, the message was clear and unequivocal: the horrors of war had come to American soil. To hundreds of readers, Babin was using the catastrophe to make some sort of anti-Vietnam war statement. I don't quite understand that reasoning, but I suspect it reflected a general unwillingness to accept that yes, It Can Happen Here.
Finally, for all that Putsch calls it an act of war, it isn't, really. An act of war involves a visible enemy with armies and a capital city and a flag, a real enemy that we can shoot back at. Terrorists belong to no one country, are invisible, retreat to the shadows, and are hard to fight. Londoners, who survived the blitz in which much of London was destroyed, were more profoundly shocked by the bombing of a department store, Harrods. An enemy is something you can see, something you can strike back at. Terrorists, by design, are not. Their goal isn't to anger, but to frighten.
I don't know how we will end the terrorist threat. But I think we'll bring a lot of ingenuity and courage to the table, once we get over the initial shock.
If this past week brought out the worst in some of us, it brought out the best in others, and we cannot know our full measure without seeing both.
I worry about the future. Any rational person would.
But I watch the body politic move along, hissing, biting, scratching and howling, angry and joyous, sad and elated, and I can't help but think that we'll come out of this a little stronger, a little better. I think America will grow up a bit.
I worry a bit more about the future. But I worry a bit less about America's place in that future. I think we'll be all right.
Copyright © 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, American Politics Journal Publications, Inc.
