Prior to the latest passing in the calendar of September 11th, I naturally assumed that I would concoct some profound elegy for the latest commemoration, made more deeply felt by the astounding coincidence that it has been five years and most of us have that exact same number of fingers per hand. (What are the odds of that?)
And yet, the date came and went, and any urgent thoughts I'd had on the subject were instantly quelled by catching clips of the bells-and-bagpipes ceremonies on this past Monday morning. I knew right then I had little connection with what most of the people who were "remembrancing" (as opposed to actually remembering) and thus had no will nor right to ventriloquize what they were feeling. Nor, strangely, did I have my usual urge to wax snarky about their invocations. It all just left me a bit perplexed. Suffice to say that they forgot to load me with the "candlelight vigil" chip before I left the factory. I sort of understand the sentiment; I have no idea whatsoever the point of it all is. But whatever. People have to get their cathartic moments in this life when they can.
So it made more sense to stand back, let the day pass, and take in the bigger picture. Because that's one thing we have simply not done as a people. We have allowed the debate to be hijacked by speculative demographic theories like "security milfs" and "NASCAR dads", thus personalizing the emotions of hand-wringing hysteria and ignorant fury into two handy cultural packages. This has proven to be remarkably useless, as far as dealing with the actual problem at hand, which is not to say that the true radical Islamic death-cultists -- and they are out there, mind you, they're just not lurking under every damned rock like Chimpco needs you to believe -- didn't need to be dealt with, just that we never really dealt with them in any lasting fashion.
Even if the Bushies had been honest about their little generational PNAC destabilization scheme up front, and even if we had all agreed on that rationale post-9/11, there's still simply no way to accomplish all that by ourselves on the margin, which is where this country and 90% of its inhabitants live financially. That is not snark; that is axiomatic. It is essentially irrefutable. A concerted effort by us and the rest of the world might have been able to find a way to get corrupt petrocracies peopled by hostile tribalists to start unfucking themselves, but it was never going to happen at the business end of a cluster bomb. It requires no selective parsing of "the Arab mind" to ascertain this; it's human nature.
So what Chimpco cynically provided to the people who thought they needed it (the way they think bells and invocations will do them any tangible good) was really just Reassurance Product™. "Buy our super new and improved Reassurance Product™, and not only will your whites be whiter, your colors brighter, and your cock larger, but you won't have to actually do or change anything about you or your lifestyle! Drive what you want to drive! Consume, my child! All will be well, just as soon as we set this Freedom Fire™ over in this here tinder box!"
Well, it turns out that while Reassurance Product™ provides hundreds of hours of mindless amusement, it doesn't really work all that well, because all along it was really nothing more than a cheap emotional balm. Matt Taibbi, whose weekly Rolling Stone column has truly been a must-read, gets it in spades:
For the most part, America looks pretty much like it looked before 9/11. We spend most of our time pounding Ding-Dongs and Sonic burgers, watching ESPN and surfing porn sites, while transnational corporations -- the silent allies of drug cartels and warlords in the dismantling of the traditional nation-state -- install turnstiles in Congress and steadily move our entire manufacturing economy overseas. Our culture is a parade of idiot reality shows where ordinary citizens eat caterpillars for money and Southern jocks drive moving billboards in a circle at 200 mph in front of euphoric crowds of a hundred thousand. In the intellectual north, our braver political dissidents dress in T-shirts with the face of George Bush morphed onto a pig's body and watch documentaries in which other intellectuals brag about being tricked by the Republicans into voting to invade the wrong country.
He's absolutely right, and I am becoming more and more convinced that the abject shallowness of our mainstream cultural artifacts are slowly but surely having an aggregate effect on our national psyche. When for several years running our most-viewed shows are interchangeable, disposable "reality" shows, karaoke competitions, D-list "celebrities" dancing, for fuck's sake, and forensic porn, this is a pattern. Even shows with actual skill and quality (Sopranos; The Wire; Deadwood), ghettoized to HBO but critically lauded nonetheless, have such caustic nihilism at their core that they bespeak a darker quantum mentality in play, despite their wildly divergent milieu. At worst, I might be chicken/egging the pattern here, but there is surely a connection or correlation, and I hate to think how a huge nation of nihilistic dim-bulbs hardwired to instant gratification are supposed to make sensible decisions for themselves, their children, and their communities and country.
The war on terror is frequently and cynically likened to World War Two, but obviously that's a tremendous misnomer, not only in terms of scope, objectives, tactics, and strategies, but even the citizens' approach is completely opposite of that war. We are alternately polarized and distracted to an unprecedented degree. There is no sense of national unity or purpose. Half the country feels that the current group veers crazily between corruption and incompetence, while the other half insists that the accession of Nancy Pelosi to Speaker of the House would hark the commencement of Taliban paratroopers storming the Mall of America. Neither side can even reason with the other, much less persuade or convince them of much of anything. That's the way it is -- and should be -- when one side is so profoundly, abjectly wrong, and refuse to even see it, much less admit it.
But in the meantime, as a nation we have said and done shockingly little in the way of correcting the disastrous paradigm. The vaunted necessity of "Homeland Security" has already devolved into a cynical pork farm, where earmarks for protecting popcorn facilities in Indiana take precedence over even a modest cenotaph at the World Trade Center. People still insist on driving gas-guzzling behemoths everywhere, though as the American auto manufacturers continue their precipitous health-care fueled collapse, that will change by necessity rather than choice or common sense.
This is a theme I've been barking about for some time, and it becomes more and more true, right on schedule. There is no getting around it; we have to rethink the paradigm. We would have had to anyway, even if 9/11 had never happened, even if every Taliban wanted to buy every American a Coke and vice versa. The realities of peak oil militate towards that scenario; the ancillary effects of using the Chinese for comparative advantage speed up the process, as the urbanized Chinese look across the Pacific and want all the same toys we enjoy.
The demographic, economic, and cultural trends of the countries possessing the majority of the precious just seal the deal. You basically have an area that doesn't produce anything but oil, with high birth rates and unemployment, thus a lot of bored, easy-to-radicalize teenagers. Ironically, Iran could be the exception to this rule (though they do have a relatively young population), if we ever get an adult back in the White House, who understands the nature of the game and puts an end to this unproductive pas de deux.
One thing that recently-deceased journalist-provocateur Oriana Fallaci actually had a point about was how this demographic trend was taking shape, both in the native countries and in the emigration patterns. But she, like most nativists, generally had the wrong end of the stick in the "they don't assimilate" rants. There are many benign ways to encourage assimilation, without trampling cultural and ethnic mores, without provocative schtick and useless inflammatory rhetoric.
Consider the oft-derided concept of "checkbook diplomacy", in the context of the Middle East. We spend roughly $5bn per year to keep Israel and Egypt from each others' throats, when you get right down to it. Skeptics, isolationists, and self-styled "taxpayer advocates" insist that this is five billion dollars that could be better spent building a wall adjacent to the Rio Grande or whatever. But we spend two billion dollars per week refereeing a civil war in Iraq, and have for quite some time now. And, contrary to the snide assertions of the heedless proponents in the initial marketing rollout, not only will it never pay for itself, but we'll never see so much as a fraction of return on investment. Oh sure, it will eventually stabilize somehow because it has to, because equilibrium -- even a false one -- is necessary for some business to resume. But cui bono from such stability, which oil company? It certainly won't be recouped by the people who actually bankrolled this mess -- that is to say, the U.S. taxpayer. And being bamboozled into doubling down in Iran or even Syria is not going to help.
So when you think about the money, never to be truly recouped, that's been flushed down that hole, you also have to consider (vis-à-vis the aforementioned demographic/economic/cultural trends) where all (or even some) of that money might have been better spent in alleviating those potentially dangerous trends. If we can spend $5bn/year on Israel and Egypt and count relative stability between the two as a tangible ROI, then we can perhaps stipulate that checkbook diplomacy, like it or not, has at least some practical application. The carrot is not cheap, but compared to the incredibly expensive, bloody stick that we can't figure out how to drop, it's a bargain.
We also know empirically that there is practically an inverse relationship between the empowerment of women and birth-rate associated quality-of-life metrics. That is, the more that women are educated and are granted civil and economic rights, the fewer children they have, the healthier those children are (far lower infant mortality rates), and the happier and more productive the communities are (lower crime rates). The grameen (microloan) programs in India and Bangladesh have borne this theory out; by providing women in villages with loans as small as five or ten dollars, a majority of them have been able to start small businesses, employ a few other people from the village, and bring their communities up incrementally.
Much of what constitutes the dreadful "reality" show ethos, when you distill it to its very essence, is the childish "what would you do for a million dallars" question, frequently accompanied by a nice round of truth-or-dare or some such. That's really all it is -- what would you do on camera for money? Eat bugs, roll around in horse manure, suck a filthy hobo's cock? Here's a suitcase full of money -- or rather, the chance of such. I've always said that Survivor and Fear Factor are for people who just don't have the guts for porn or Faces of Death, and I've never heard or read anything to dissuade me from that perception.
But let's utilize that particular "what would you do" dynamic for this "checkbook diplomacy" argument. Let us discuss the moral calculus for perhaps improving the world at large, even at the cost of alleviating the economic disparity between regional spheres. We have studiously avoided such a discussion, perhaps because even if we don't know all the numbers and history behind the paradigm, we intuitively understand the truth of it. When 5% of the world's population consumes 25% of the resources and generates 25% of the waste, and half the world's population lives on a dollar a day, something's gotta give. We may blindly hope to escape the consequences, perhaps simply by shuffling off the mortal coil before the long unwinding road -- and we may even inadvertently prove correct about such an assumption -- but at some point our children or grandchildren will be stuck with the bill.
So we need to seriously talk about driving smaller vehicles, about consuming and wasting less, about the moral and ethical vacuity of covetousness and jonesmanship. We need to at least discuss the ramifications of chronic boobism, of huge swaths of people leading the intellectual lives of farm animals, as Taibbi once brilliantly put it. We need to re-marginalize the marginal, instead of giving every dipshit with a crackpot idea equal time. Even if we never experience the horrors of 9/11 again -- and every one of us, liberal or conservative, religious or secular, obviously hopes that that is the case -- we have a responsibility as Americans to discuss how to return and maintain real prominence in the world, and we have a responsibility to the world (as they have to us and to one another) to try to bring along the people who want to be brought along, while being mindful of the consequences.
The real tragedy of the post-9/11 mentality is that we have never really had that national discussion, and as long as we continue to distract ourselves with bells and whistles and talk-show screamers, we won't.
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