Long Sunday: Desiring "9/11"

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Desiring "9/11"

The US desired September 11th.

I don't mean that the US desired the specific attacks and losses. But, the US did desire the shock, the horror, the rupture. It may be more accurate then to say that the US desires "9/11" meaning that the series of events and articulation of meanings captured by the term "9/11" are an object of intense US desire.

I say this because were it not the case that the US desires "9/11" the Bush administration would not have been able to mobilize a very specific set of meanings and emotions in accordance with the term. I say this because were it not the case that the US desires "9/11" journalists, in print and on television, would not continue to sacralize the term, speaking in hushed voices, in awe with continued shock before the horrors of the day. I say this because were it not the case that the US desires "9/11" we would not continue to have feature films ("United 93" and Oliver Stone's upcoming "World Trade Center") about it.

So, what does the US desire when it desires "9/11"?

Simplicity, meaning, and righteousness.

The events of September 11th, 2001 were complicated. They were complicated in terms of the position of the United States in the global arena, by Europe's past decades in dealing with terrorism, by US policies in Afghanistan and the middle east, by the details of the design of the World Trade Center, by the plans of response, and myriad other matters. Despite these complications, "9/11" locks in a simple set of meanings: good/evil.

With this simple binary in place, the US knows who it is and what it stands for. Rather than having to deal with and acknowledge the complexities of economic globalization, the environmental crises facing the entire world, the extremes of religious nationalism and mafioso capitalism facing every country, the US could find its bearings with a very simple moral compass. This moral compass the right and the left. The right can be on the side of its Christian God, civilization, and Israel. The left can be against militarism and religious fundamentalism. The right can avoid facing up to the split within its ranks between neoliberal economics and social conservatives who would want to restrict market forces in areas of entertainment and information. The left can avoid dealing with political divisions around race, the economy, the environment, and development. It can avoid the hard questions of formulating alternatives to the neoliberal economic project that is rapidly moving the world into never before imagined extremes of privilege and poverty.

"9/11" fulfills the desire for righteousness. For some, embracing the status of the US as a victim of terrorist violence justifies renewed efforts in self-defense: never again. For others, hatred of militarism makes our work so much more satisfying than it was in those trivial and trivializing days of cultural studies. Now we really are political. Now we are doing something important. In fact, we on the left can embrace the identity of a victim in ways we could barely imagine under identity politics. Given the assualt on the academy, we are all victims now.

"9/11" is an object of American desire. It's not surprising, then, that filling desires for simplicity, meaning, and righteousness makes us all feel a little uneasy, guilty. As Lacan teaches, guilt alerts us to the fact that we have given way on our desire, we have failed to keep it open, we have filled it or are filling it. We are all, left and right, uneasy about the exploitation of September 11th--uneasy because we know we rely on it, we enjoy it. We really hate it when the other side exploits "9/11": they are getting more mileage out of it than we are.

Breaking out of the trap of "9/11" will require shedding (traversing) our fantastic investments in simplicity, meaning, and righteousness. All of them. Even the accusation that the other side remains invested in them. We can't treat--or condone the treatment of--"9/11" as something sacred, as a key turning point or event.

"9/11" is a fantastic object of US desire. We have to give it up.

By Jodi | July 4, 2006 in Afflicting the Comfortable, Events, Fascism, Psychoanalysis | Permalink

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Comments

Very nice piece.

Don't you think, though, the desire was just as much for complexity as simplicity? Perhaps it is the literary guy in me, but 9/11 seemed to me to be a turn in the plot that was sorely needed, and interruption within the empty temporality of neoliberal tide rising. In other words, nothing was happening, there was nothing to talk about, a crisis of meaning - until 9/11, and then we could watch the news again and it would mean something. There were conversations to be had around the water cooler again. You could go to bed with the nervous excitement of thinking you might never get up again.

Remember the stories, true or not, about post-9/11 sex. Everyone hooking up, a la WWII, because who knows what comes tomorrow? Everything got a bit more auratic, haloed with fear and excitement.

Think of how this one event spawned so many other stories, the wars, the end of the end of history, etc...

I think we're saying the same thing - both "complexity" and "simplicity" can be used to describe what was desired. A good story is more complex than a boring one. But then a story is more simple than random, unorganized time.

Posted by: CR | Jul 4, 2006 2:24:49 PM

CR:

I love this part of your comment:

"interruption within the empty temporality of neoliberal tide rising. In other words, nothing was happening, there was nothing to talk about, a crisis of meaning - until 9/11, and then we could watch the news again and it would mean something. There were conversations to be had around the water cooler again. You could go to bed with the nervous excitement of thinking you might never get up again.
Remember the stories, true or not, about post-9/11 sex."

I think you are right: "9/11" gave us something to talk about. Or, as I'd put it, let us avoid dealing with the crisis that is neoliberalism. Your point about the sex is great--"9/11" let us have sex again, feel desire, feel passion, all that good stuff.

In my little schema, I account for what you call 'complexity' under the category of meaning. It may be, though, that I need something better than "simplicity" as my first category.

Posted by: Jodi | Jul 4, 2006 3:37:14 PM

I agree with CR, which may be why I think Baudrillard was more on-target than Zizek in understanding what 9-11 meant.

Regardless, I'm not sure I understand what desire means here. On the one hand, you seem to be saying that 9-11 satisfied an American desire for simplicity, i.e. that Americans have an extant desire for simplicity and reighteousness and 9-11 was a vehicle by which they could justify that desire. On the other hand, assuming some specificity and singularity to 9-11, you seem to be saying that 9-11 was uniquely demanded, and your warrants for this involve retroactive assignations of meaning for which 9-11 was crafted, either by the powers that be (Bush et. al) or by those resistant to the powers that be (lefty academics). For some reason, I think these different sense of desire are in tension with one another, so I'm wondering if maybe you could clarify?

And if it's the latter, why does retroactive production of meaning necessarily mean that the meaning is inherent for the desire for the event itself, rather than in the political discourse that attends and shapes the meaning of the event post hoc? This is, I think, Derrida's point in his interviews on the subject (the ones published in _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_). 9-11 can be sacred without it being an object of extant desire, since desire is itself produced, in this instance by recourse to particular binaries that preexist the historical advent of 9-11.

And lest we forget, 9-11 also marks something other than simplicity and righteousness: it marks tragedy.

Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 4, 2006 7:28:19 PM

Whose tragedy? That of neoliberal reality? What else could tragedy mean?

Posted by: Amish Lovelock | Jul 4, 2006 11:49:40 PM

Amish, don't be insipid. There's tragedy in and for all who died, from those working in the towers to those who hijacked the planes. Every life is infinitely valuable, priceless, and death and violence are thus always tragedies, and not merely political and philosophical abreactions.

Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 5, 2006 4:28:39 AM

The Jews desired the Holocaust.

I don't mean that the Jews desired the specific deaths and losses. But, the Jews did desire the shock, the horror, the rupture. It may be more accurate then to say that the Jews desires "the Holocaust" meaning that the series of events and articulation of meanings captured by the term "the Holocaust" are an object of intense Jewish desire.

I say this because were it not the case that the Jews desires "the Holocaust" the worldwide Jewish community would not have been able to mobilize a very specific set of meanings and emotions in accordance with the term. I say this because were it not the case that the Jews desire "the Holocaust" journalists, in print and on television, would not continue to sacralize the term, speaking in hushed voices, in awe with continued shock before the horrors of those years. I say this because were it not the case that the Jews desire "the Holocaust" we would not continue to have feature films ("Schindler's List" and Roman Polanski's recent "The Pianist") about it.

So, what do Jewish people desire when they desire "the Holocaust"?

Posted by: Anatoly | Jul 5, 2006 5:30:26 AM

Kenneth--I don't think Amish is being insipid at all. I agree with him when he says that about 'tragedy'. I don't think the term 'tragedy' applies at all in the case of 9/11--it doesn't have that structure. It might the case that it does for individuals who died--but then that could be the case of many different deaths. "9/11" is presented as a national tragedy--this is what I'm rejecting. And, my intent is trying to expunge the sense of need or attachment to thinking in these very terms.

Also, Kenneth--I'm confused about your contrast between Zizek and Baudrillard at the beginning. My post didn't have anything to do with Zizek.

On desire--we tend not to know what we desire until after we have it, there is a sense that X is not it; then when we find something that seems uniquely satisfying, we may feel Y is it. So, desire in general preexists and then it attaches to something that seems to fufill it, although this is retroactive. The Lacanian objet petit a as the object-cause of desire is one way this notion can be understood. What objet petit a designates is the way that this certain something is wanted, desired for, and then found, retroactively. So, desire isn't produced in the way that you describe, rather that Y fufills our desire is what is produced. And, my argument is that the Bush administration made "9/11" into Y.

Think about the British subway bombings: hardly persisting as a kind of national tragedy, instance of collective engagement in shared event.

Posted by: Jodi | Jul 5, 2006 7:16:23 AM

Anatoly, Jodi can speak for herself but I will play along with your inference - It is not the "hushed tones" that indicate a certain desire for the Holocaust. What reflects this "desire" is the constant use of the holocaust to justify every atrocity commited by the Isrealis. So perhaps it would be more correct to say that Zionists desired the holocaust. And to the degree that some Zionists were negotiating with the Nazis before the War, they may be complicitous.

Posted by: Alain | Jul 5, 2006 10:12:47 AM

Jodi, I wasn't saying desire worked one way or another, I was simply asking you to clarify what you meant by the term in the post, which you did, though not without some of the same tension. If desire is known retroactively, is it safe then to say that the desire for simplicity and righteousness existed, but we didn't know it, but the manufacture of a particular meaning of 9-11 reveals that desire? I'm really not trying to be polemical here, it just seems to me that this logic of desire requires a self-satisfying hermeneutic gesture that I think isn't necessarily supportable without very broad generalizations about collective and individual psyches, and without its own ideological reification, wherein what is contingent appears to have been psychically necessary.

And I wasn't making a complaint about your interest in Zizek, just thinking out loud that CR's comments remind me why, at least in the Verso book series on the subject, I found Baudrillard's contribution more interesting than Zizek's.

Regarding tragedy, I don't know what structure that either you or Amish think is somehow necessary, intrinsic, and so delimiting about the term tragedy, but as I initiated its usage, I mean it as I mentioned previously, that the violent, systematic compulsion that shortens and vitiates life produces a sense of tragedy, and is a tragedy, for all those who died and all those affected by the event. If you prefer, we can substitute trauma for tragedy and attempt to bypass philosophical determinations that make agreement easier.

Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 5, 2006 10:14:33 AM

Regarding Alain and Anatoly, this parody of desired trauma could be extended infinitely, to every historically aggrieved and ravaged group. I think this possibility reveals more the problem with the concept of desire than it does any insight regarding the status of victimage and the use of past event as inventional resource for present actions.

Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 5, 2006 10:17:13 AM

Kenneth, I appreciate your comments about desire. It may be the case that "desiring 9/11" or "desiring the holocaust," is not the most useful or appropriate manner of speaking of these events. But to step out of the "parody of desired trauma," I think the holocaust is clearly a significant part of Isreal's founding mythology and continues to play a constitutive role in defining its current politics. And obviously 9/11 has a similar function in American politics.

Posted by: Alain | Jul 5, 2006 10:33:41 AM

Kenneth, I would say that it isn't that the concept of desire is problematic, but rather that its application to 9/11 is unwarranted. It may seem to be substantiated by the arguments Jodi lists (the ability, after it happened, to mobilize a specific set of emotional responses, the sacralisation, etc.), but it isn't really, as the parody with the Jews and the Holocaust shows -- and that parody, as you note, can be adapted to just about any other situation in which a group undergoes a profound collective trauma.

Alain, it seems somewhat misguided to me to invoke the negotiations some Zionists were conducting with the Nazis both before and during WWII in support of the alleged Zionist desire for the Holocaust, considering both that those contacts were never sanctioned by the Zionist leadership in Palestine and that their purpose was always to encourage or make possible further immigration of Jews from Nazi-controlled areas to Palestine. That is, they were (mostly misguided, wrong and sadly ineffective) attempts to prevent the Holocaust.

Regarding your other point, Israel does not invoke the Holocaust as explicit justification of this or that policy, the e way the United States makes uses of 9/11 after 9/11. Explicit comparison of current political situation with the Holocaust is usually shunned in Israel as it is widely considered to cheapen the memory of the Holocaust. Some extreme right-wing politicians do make frequent use of it, yet they do not enjoy popular support, perhaps in part due to their abuse of such rhetoric.

Posted by: Anatoly | Jul 5, 2006 11:45:08 AM

"Breaking out of the trap of "9/11" will require shedding (traversing) our fantastic investments in simplicity, meaning, and righteousness."

Sorry, but it seems to me that the line of thinking in this piece does nothing to shed or transverse such investments. Quite to the contrary, it very simply reinscribes them, and it would seem, to no political end. Just because people in the US and elsewhere believe in and see good and evil in the world doesn't mean they can only structure their forms of being and thinking in useless and empty dichotomies ("left/right"; "us/them"; "the other side" ???!!!) And what could "the US" possibly mean, here or anywhere?

Posted by: tracy devine guzman | Jul 5, 2006 11:53:56 AM

On the Holocaust. First, Anatoly, I am skeptical about a referent for 'the Jewish people,' if one has in mind the differing groups of European Jews in the first half of the 20th century. Second, I can't remember the name of the book, but Norman Finkelstein has a fascinating discussion of the emergence of "the Holocaust" as a key signifier after the 1967 war. Whether or not one agrees with his every point, that there is not a single line extending from 1944 to the present, a single vision of meaning, is significant.

My point is that for such a single vision to exist, for it to hold together, it has to fit with some preexisting desire. If not, then the Bush administration simply crams its visions down our throats and we sit like geese in a box. Or, the media dupes us completely--a thesis that 40 years of critical theory has nicely disposed of. How then do we account for the fact that "9/11" functions in such a singular way, for left and right, each sure of its status as a kind of sacred tragedy, or now as Kenneth offers, trauma? My thesis is that it does so because it fills a preexisting desire for simplicity, meaning, and righteousness.

CR does a good job in setting up this desire in his post.

On reification: here is where Zizek is pretty interesting. He argues that it's crucial not simply to emphasize contingency but to recognize necessity. What's fascinating about September 11 is the way that the signification and meaning could have gone in different ways in the early weeks. There were competing discourses, discourses about the sacrifices made by firemen and cops for the high paid suits in the tower, for example. Did these disappear simply because the Bush administration and Fox news forced us to think otherwise? I don't think so and I think that including desire in the account helps explain why.

Posted by: Jodi | Jul 5, 2006 12:00:34 PM

Jodi: My thesis is that it does so because it fills a preexisting desire for simplicity, meaning, and righteousness.

Without a doubt, Jodi, this is true. I suggest, however, that these desires themselves rest in the deeper, more existentially significant state: despair. For it is someone in despair about their very existence that brings such desires to the surface. Kierkegaard, of course, describes the way that despair itself arises and conditions the human being's emotional and intellectual response to the Other/other.

Posted by: cynic librarian | Jul 5, 2006 2:20:24 PM

I don't see anything interesting about desire as an expository device here, Jodi. In effect, you're saying that, retrospectively of course, desire explains why something was successful because, since that thing/discourse was successful, it must have been because of a desire for it. In effect, things are as they are because they were desired to be that way, which of course, we know is true because otherwise they would be different. Language, I think, deserves a more complicated engagement and events deserve a more rigorous, grounded analysis.

Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 5, 2006 4:58:01 PM

PS an appeal to Kierkeghaard's concept of despair in a secular/political context comes by way of Martin Matustik, Charta 77 signatory and Leftist theoretician. In a short piece tranalated at openDemocracy, Matustik writes:

Known to [Frederick] Douglass but lost on most contemporary Americans is the danger of an even greater evil: what Kierkegaard called the human capacity for acting “diabolically.” The “diabolical” is anyone who wills oneself to be good without having confronted one’s capacity for evil. Such a person must cling fast to false innocence because this person despairs over the question whether he or she truly is innocent. The politically “diabolical” is any regime that in despair wills its false innocence. The desire to be the innocent source of one’s power - a phenomenon we can call the despair of America - can be confronted, says Kierkegaard, by the breakdown of the false ego and its attachment to power.

If we desired 911--and I don't doubt it--it was indeed because we were in despair in the context of a life and style that breeds alienation and ethical blindness.

That we sought our own punishment for the evils visited on generations of others--here and abroad--can only mean that at that unconscious level where so much life is lived beyond our awareness, there's a secret passion to atone for not only personal sins but also those of our fathers and mothers.

Posted by: cynic librarian | Jul 5, 2006 5:42:38 PM

Jodi,

I have a number of reservations about this, I want first ask about something I really don't understand, because clarifying that may undo or qualify some of my reservations. By "the US" do you mean the set of all Americans (defined as ... what, citizens, residents, permanent residents)? A diffuse entity consisting of real (self-identified, or culturally genuine, or something similar) Americans? A sort of discourse of Americanism?

Aside from that, I don't have CR's experience of nothing happening immediately pre-9/11. Where I was living in Chicago there was a lot happening pre-9/11. "Antiglobalization" protest was a wave that seemed might never crest and the no global events planned for the end of that September were anticipated to be enormous - and precisely an enormous gathering against neoliberalism. 9/11 sucked all the air out of that, froze everything, if anything nothing happened after that for a long time.

Lastly, on tragedy, I don't know what I think about the concept of national tragedy, and I realize this is just a blog post so maybe it's a product of abbreviation, but ... it seems to me that, your take implicitly repeats a perspective in which the national register should be the only one - or the nation should be the only 'we' - such that there are no others. If that's not the case, or abandoning that perspective, seems to me to imply looking some of the various and variably relating perspective and collectivities below (and in some cases beyond) the national register. I think, for example, it's fair to say that 9/11 was at a tragedy for the Service Employees International Union since, if I remember correctly, 600 SEIU members died in those events. It was also a tragedy of a smaller scale for US no-global circles, since the AFL and other reformist groups pulled out of the mobilizations fearing a backlash and thus breaking the fragile and at the time still productive knitting together that had been accomplished. And since in the aftermath, at least in Chicago, Trot groups and other assorted ilk with an utter lack of political imagination found an environment uniquely suited to their bad faith (and despairing) organizational repertoire.

Drat, okay, really lastly this time - I think my questions about what you mean by "the US" essentially turn around whether 9/11 really does function quite so singularly for left and for right (assuming "singular" means "unitary") as you say. I think my very ability to ask "singularly for whom" and your ability to diagnose its functions for left and for right implies at least one (probably two) other possible (non)functions of the event. If anything to my mind 9/11 is used as an ideological bludgeon by one (perhaps internally heterogeneous but still politically dominant) sector in order to beat back others who can't (yet) defeat that sector individually and can't (yet) knit together with other sectors to defeat the dominant one. None of that has to imply a shared desire for or interpretation of 9/11.

cheers,
Nate

Posted by: Nate | Jul 5, 2006 6:39:23 PM

Nate -

Aside from that, I don't have CR's experience of nothing happening immediately pre-9/11.

Of course things were happening. My statement that nothing was happening was written in some sort of style indirect libre. Things were happening, but overall, you must have felt the unbearable lightness of the end of history too, right? Even at the marches?

Did you feel like you were going to win?

Think also of Hardt and Negri's Empire... A work absolutely haunted by stasis, grinding away toward a magic trick to break the chain of inevitability. It is just as preoccupied with stasis as Marx's work was preoccupied with the "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation" etc...

Posted by: CR | Jul 5, 2006 9:41:31 PM

hi CR,

I thought soon after I wrote that it might seem like I was making an attack or dis on you for your sense of things. That wasn't my point. My point rather was that there were a host of different dynamic and static sensibilities about the world pre- and immediately post 9/11 depending on location, rather than either a-perspectival stasis or dynamism.

Beyond that, I don't know what you mean by lightness and end of history, Negri/Hardt/Marx. Did I think we were going win? I still do. Just not so soon as I used to. For the most part, though, what I remember from those times was less a propositional content in beliefs ("we will win in X fashion by Y date") and more a sensibility, something in the air, a dynamism and a sense that things were continuing to grow and change - political recomposition, a positive accumulation on our side of things.

cheers,
Nate

Posted by: Nate | Jul 6, 2006 12:00:33 AM

Nate,

You are/were a more optimistic person than I am. Which is a good thing to be, of course. I guess the third way seemed to me a formidable opponent indeed - whereas the issues are right there on the surface now. I bore myself when I talk about them, whereas the nineties were truly an interesting time for left intellectuals who like difficult problems to deal with - because of the complexity of the problem.

All that I meant about Empire vs. Marx was that in the case of the latter, change was the constant, was inevitable. With Hardt and Negri, the question was how to instigate change in a rapidly congealing political sphere. Hence the infamous trouble with the pragmatics of their answer - what they provide (at least in Empire) is more like a wish than a plan.

Posted by: CR | Jul 6, 2006 2:00:17 AM

Mostly unrelated to the topic, but worth recounting nonetheless now that we've mentioned the "end of history" and 9/11 and dreaming for this stuff...

I was in the fourth year of my undergrad when it happened. In the morning I worked as an R.A. (typist/editor, really) for an economist who was putting together a grant application. We were working on the part, "Who do you think would make a good referee?" and he decided that he wanted some people from the Federal Reserve to referee the application. As we were doing this, he got a phone and talked for a few minutes and then hung up the phone. "Apparently some plane flew into the World Trade Center. I guess I won't be getting anyone from the Federal Reserve." Well... and people say that economists aren't nihilistic, positivistic, and narcisstic!

And, just as weird, I had a seminar in "contemporary political theory" that afternooon. It was taught by a guy who holds a lot of resentiment towards Fukuyama. You see, he (Tom Darby, that is) and Barry Cooper had both written their dissertations under H.S. Harris on Hegel and the end of history in the late seventies/early eighties and they've both been quite sore that they didn't get any recognition for it. And that Fukuyama didn't cite either of them. The ego of the right wing political theorist knows no bounds.

Anyway, he felt it was an opportune event because it confirmed the footnote to the second edition of Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: you know, because some post-historical remnants committed an act of pure snobbery and hatred. He liked to call them, after Kojeve, "Japanized terrorists." Later, when we all agreed on a new term, he started to use Islamofascist. I imagine he was upset that "Japanized terrorists" didn't catch on.

In addition to all this, he also assured us there was, in fact, no Straussian conspiracy! (The other two political theorists in the department were a Straussian and a Voegelian respectively.)

Posted by: Craig | Jul 6, 2006 12:16:43 PM

I second Nate re "US". This term is not defined. Can an entity "US" desire something?

Posted by: MD | Jul 6, 2006 4:02:51 PM

I think WE can desire something, but US has grammatical difficulties doing so.

Heh.

Posted by: Kenneth Rufo | Jul 6, 2006 5:11:32 PM

Hi folks--I've been away; actually, I'm, in Baltimore and will be in these parts for the better part of a week. Anyway:

of course we can speak of the US!

do any of you think you can speak of a person, say Jodi or CR or Matt or Alain or whomever?

In so doing, are you assuming a unitary, self identical, autonomous subject? I should sincerely hope not! That one names something in no way implies a unitary identity or singularity.

Yet, we do use names. And, we recognize that sometimes names are held together, in whatever fractious way, by enjoyment and desire. I use the term US in that way.

If you think that notions of ideology or hegemony have any purchase, then you can use the term US. If you think that discourse designates something in which antagonists participate, sharing some assumptions and terms, then you can use the term US.

Posted by: jdean | Jul 6, 2006 11:28:09 PM

Jodi, I think perhaps it's the steps between - as you put it - "ideology and hegemony" and the construal of the US as an entity which "desires" that might require more emphasis so that the latter is not presented (or read) as unconditioned. And perhaps here too is where the divisions that unfold within those steps might also be emphasised, as that which is not shared.

Posted by: s0metim3s | Jul 8, 2006 1:02:56 AM

Man, and the academic left wonders why the unwashed masses won't get on board with their amoral rhetoric...

This statement is patently stupid unless you can show that the Bush Administration wanted to do this in advance of 9/11 and hence "desired" for something that tragic to occur. It would be like saying I desired to get hit by a car because maybe just maybe it ended up being advantageous for me (e.g., big court settlement, lots of sympathy from friends and family, etc.). Of course, if the advantage is uncertain or if, perhaps, I value bodily integrity over, say, sympathy and money, that thesis would erode pretty quickly. In this case, you would have to show convincingly that Bush & Co. have no legitimate concern with safety or the lives lost, but rather sat around waitin for the first shit storm to hit so they could solidify their power position. Sure, that's great malarky for conspiracy theorists to wade in, but as a matter of expressing reality, it's suspect.

Simplicity, meaning, and righteousness.

...and the U.S. didn't possibly have those things before 9/11? Assuming I play your game here, I could just easily point to the last 200 years and claim the last two points especially have never disappeared from the American "experience" or "ideology". As for "simplicity", only a simpleton would see 9/11 as simple or even the response to it that way. But then again, you and most of the "cultured despisers" are so abstracted from the facts that to even engage in a meaningful critique would require a mountainous hike out of the valley of self-blinding declarations.

Rather than having to deal with and acknowledge the complexities of economic globalization, the environmental crises facing the entire world, the extremes of religious nationalism and mafioso capitalism facing every country, the US could find its bearings with a very simple moral compass.

Except it hasn't worked that way and never has worked that way. I'm sure you sleep easier at night thinking the government is run by a bunch of retarded monkies, but the shifts in policy planning and reaction to terrorism have hardly been "simplistic" or lacking in adequate calculations over the "complexity" of the world sphere. It seems to me that you're failure (and the failure of so many who share your views) is that you don't actually bother to engage the issue; you don't see any reason to actually understand what the U.S. policy is towards terrorism. Your concern is with rhetoric--the politics of the matter at its most unremarkable level. That sort of talking hardly penetrates to those who have to actually deal with these issues, whether its in the Department of Homeland Security or even in international efforts such as the PSI or even INTERPOL. But, setting that all aside, the real point is that you can't prove your assertions. They're as empty as even the worst possible Bush speech to "rally the masses." It's the same genre; if one is so pathetic, so too is the other. I can't imagine why you feel exempt from the same labels you toss out.

Except that it is a key turning point and event. True, global terrorism and, more limitedly, Islamic terrorism, existed prior to 9/11. It's not a "new issue." What is new is that the U.S. is involved in combating it in an unprecedented manner. One can rightly criticize the Bush Administration for making this into a "new thing", but that's politics. What doesn't disappaear and what will not disappear in the foreseeable future is that there are organizations out there with murderous intent who sit far outside "traditional" classifications of hostile actors. When one couples that with the fact we live in a world where rapid increases in technology allow for these groups to have great movement, communication, and access to the means to engage in catastrophic violence, the situation should strike the intelligent observer as new (even if 9/11 in and of itself didn't start it).

This sort of righteous indignation is so empty that no one acquainted with the facts ought to entertain it as anything more than the crazed indictment of a mind warped by the empty platitudes of the left. Given how empirically unverifiable it is, combined with the suspect leaps on logic, I'm not sure what is being displayed here except that the only righteous simpletons are the opponents of the Bush Administration.

Is this what passes for theory these days? Is this an example of leftist criticism? If so, I feel confident in continuing to ignore it even as I have grave misgivings over certain moves made by the current administration. When words no longer express reality, but rather the warped vision of what needs to be so that their head hits the pillow a little lighter at night, they become the movers and shakers of ideology. Why that seems like the best means to combat another alleged ideology is quite beyond me. But, I do take solace in the fact that the latter hasn't completely exited the reasonable, even if it may be equally bereft of a sustainable moral.

Posted by: Gabriel Sanchez | Jul 9, 2006 3:32:36 PM

In this case, you would have to show convincingly that Bush & Co. have no legitimate concern with safety or the lives lost, but rather sat around waitin for the first shit storm to hit so they could solidify their power position

Um.............. Iraq.

Have you looked at Dick Clarke's book? How the warpath to Iraq was born literally hours after the attack, over the objections of those who wondered why a nation with zero linkage with Al Qaeda (not too mention a diametrically opposed ideological directionality) would be the place to start this war on terror...

the shifts in policy planning and reaction to terrorism have hardly been "simplistic" or lacking in adequate calculations over the "complexity" of the world sphere.

Well, it depends which way you look at it. I'll admit that Rove and company were amazingly canny and cunning when it came to selling a war that was, for all intents and purposes, a complete and utter non-sequitur. Complex, yes...

Posted by: CR | Jul 10, 2006 12:47:51 AM

Desiring "9/11"

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