Gary J Carter
2008-08-07 20:41:36 UTC
Bush's Fierce Global War of Denial
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 2, 2008.
The motto of the Bush administration might have been: Pay any price.
Or, rather, make everyone else pay the price for us to remain in
denial.
Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, Wasting Away.
-- the Beatles, "When I'm 64"
I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps
the best day of the century. It was, in fact, the day of the failed
German officers' plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
My mother was a cartoonist. She was known in those years as "New
York's girl caricaturist," or so she's called in a newspaper ad I
still have, part of a war-bond drive in which your sizeable bond
purchase was to buy her sketch of you. She had, sometime in the months
before my birth, traveled by train, alone, the breadth of a mobilized
but still peaceable American continent to visit Hollywood on
assignment for some magazine to sketch the stars. I still have, on my
wall, a photo of her in that year on the "deck" of a "pirate ship" on
a Hollywood lot drawing one of those gloriously handsome matinee
idols. Since I was then inside her, this is not exactly part of my
memory bank. But that photo does tell me that, like him, she, too, was
worth a sketch.
Certainly, it was appropriate that she drew the card announcing my
birth. There I am in that announcement, barely born and already
caricatured, a boy baby in nothing but diapers - except that, on my
head, I'm wearing my father's dress military hat, the one I still have
in the back of my closet, and, of course, I'm saluting. "A Big Hello
-- From Thomas Moore Engelhardt," the card says. And thus was I
officially recorded entering a world at war.
By then, my father, a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and operations
officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma, had, I believe, been
reassigned to the Pentagon. Normally a voluble man, for the rest of
his life he remained remarkably silent on his wartime experiences.
I was, in other words, the late child of a late marriage. My father,
who, just after Pearl Harbor, at age 35, volunteered for the military,
was the sort of figure that the -- on average -- 26-year-old American
soldiers of World War II would have referred to as "pops."
He, like my mother, departed this planet decades ago, and I'm still
here. So think of this as... what? No longer, obviously, a big hello
from Thomas Moore Engelhardt, nor -- quite yet -- a modest farewell,
but perhaps a moderately late report from the one-man commission of me
on the world of peace and war I've passed through since that first
salute.
On Imagining Myself as Burnt Toast
Precisely what do I mean to say now that I'm just a couple of weeks
into my 65th year on this planet?
Let me start this way: If, on the evening of October 22, 1962, you had
told me that, in 2008, America's most formidable enemy would be Iran,
I would have danced a jig. Well, maybe not a jig, but I'll tell you
this: I would have been flabbergasted.
On that October evening, President John F. Kennedy went before the
nation -- I heard him on radio -- to tell us all that Soviet missile
sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a
nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." It was, he
said, a "secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles
-- in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship
to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." When
fully operational, those nuclear-tipped weapons would reach "as far
north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru." I
certainly knew what Hudson Bay, far to the north, meant for me.
"It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy added ominously, "to
regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in
the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a
full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." And he ended, in
part, this way: "My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a
difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can
foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties
will be incurred..."
No one could mistake the looming threat: Global nuclear war. Few of us
listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated
Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations
for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the
communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with
estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access
to that SIOP, we -- I -- knew well enough what might be coming. After
all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies,
even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to
alien worlds, as in that science fiction blockbuster of 1955 "This
Island Earth," or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging
radioactive monsters. Now, here it was in real life, my life, without
an obvious director, and the special effects were likely to be me,
dead.
It was the single moment in my life -- which tells you much about the
life of an American who didn't go to war in some distant land -- when
I truly imagined myself as prospective burnt toast. I really believed
that I might not make it out of the week, and keep in mind, I was then
a freshman in college, just 18 years old and still wondering when life
was slated to begin. Between 1939 and 2008, across much of the world,
few people could claim to have escaped quite so lightly, not in that
near three-quarters of a century in which significant portions of the
world were laid low.
Had you, a seer that terrifying night, whispered in my ear the news
about our enemies still distant decades away, the Iranians, the... are
you kidding?... Iraqis, or a bunch of fanatics in the backlands of
Afghanistan and a tribal borderland of Pakistan... well, it's a
sentence that would, at the time, have been hard to finish. Death from
Waziristan? I don't think so.
Truly, that night, if I had been convinced that this was "my" future
-- that, in fact, I would have a future -- I might have dropped to my
knees in front of that radio from which Kennedy's distinctive voice
was emerging and thanked my lucky stars; or perhaps -- and this
probably better fits the public stance of an awkward, self-conscious
18-year-old -- I would have laughed out loud at the obvious absurdity
of it all. ("The absurd" was then a major category in my life.)
Fanatics from Afghanistan? Please...
That we're here now, that the world wasn't burnt to a crisp in the
long superpower standoff of the Cold War, well, that still seems
little short of a miracle to me, a surprise of history that offers
hope... of a sort. The question, of course, is: Why, with this in
mind, don't I feel better, more hopeful, now?
After all, if offered as a plot to sci-fi movie directors of that
long-gone era -- perfectly willing to populate Los Angeles with giant,
mutated, screeching ants (Them!), the Arctic with "The Thing From
Another World," and Washington D.C. with an alien and his mighty
robot, capable of melting tanks or destroying the planet ("Klaatu
barada nikto!") -- our present would surely have been judged too
improbable for the screen. They wouldn't have touched it with a
ten-foot pole, and yet that's what actually came about -- and the
planet, a prospective cinder (along with us prospective cinderettes)
is, remarkably enough, still here.
Or to put this in a smaller, grimmer way, consider the fate of the
American military base at Guantanamo -- an extra-special symbol of
that "special and historical relationship" mentioned by Kennedy
between the small island of Cuba and its giant "neighbor" to the
northwest. In that address to the nation in 1962, the president
announced that he was reinforcing the base, even as he was evacuating
dependents from it. And yet, like me in my 65th year, it, too,
survived the Cuban Missile Crisis unscathed. Some four decades later,
in fact, it was still in such a special and historical relationship
with Cuba that the Bush administration was able to use it to publicly
establish all its new categories of off-shore injustice -- its global
mini-gulag of secret prisons, its public policies of torture,
detention without charges, disappearance, you name it. None of which,
by the way, would the same set of directors have touched with the same
pole. Back in the 1950s, only Nazis, members of the Japanese imperial
Army, and KGB agents could publicly relish torture on screen. The FOX
TV show "24" is distinctly an artifact of our moment.
A Paroxysm of Destruction Only a Few Miles Wide
Of course, back in 1962, even before Kennedy spoke, I could no more
have imagined myself 64 than I could have imagined living through
"World War IV" -- as one set of neocons loved to call the President's
Global War on Terror -- a "war" to be fought mainly against thousands
of Islamist fanatics scattered around the planet and an "axis of evil"
consisting of three relatively weak regional powers. I certainly
expected bigger, far worse things. And little wonder: When it came to
war, the full weight of the history of most of the last century
pointed exponentially in the direction of a cataclysm with few or no
survivors.
From my teen years, I was, you might say, of the Tom Lehrer school of
life (as in the lyrics from his 1959 song, "We Will All Go Together
When We Go") -- and I was hardly alone:
We will all fry together when we fry.
We'll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie.
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry...
And we'll all bake together when we bake,
They'll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.
I was born, after all, just a year and a few weeks before the United
States atomically incinerated Hiroshima and then followed up by
atomically obliterating the city of Nagasaki, and World War II ended.
Victory arrived, but amid scenes of planetary carnage, genocide, and
devastation on a scale and over an expanse previously unimaginable.
In these last years, the Bush administration has regularly invoked the
glories of the American role in World War II and of the occupations of
Germany and Japan that followed. Even before then, Americans had been
experiencing something like a "greatest generation" fest (complete
with bestselling books, a blockbuster movie, and two multi-part
greatest-gen TV mini-series). From the point of view of the United
States, however, World War II was mainly a "world" war in the world
that it mobilized, not in the swath of the planet it turned into a
charnel house of destruction. After all, the United States (along with
the rest of the "New World") was left essentially untouched by both
"world" wars. North Africa, the Middle East, and New Guinea all
suffered incomparably more damage. Other than a single attack on the
American fleet at Hawaii, thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland,
on December 7, 1941, the brief Japanese occupation of a couple of tiny
Aleutian islands off Alaska, a U-boat war off its coasts, and small
numbers of balloon fire bombs that drifted from Japan over the
American west, this continent remained peaceable and quite traversable
by a 35-year-old theatrical caricaturist in the midst of wartime.
For Americans, I doubt that the real import of that phrase World War
-- of the way the industrial machinery of complete devastation
enveloped much of the planet in the course of the last century -- ever
quite came home. There had, of course, been world, or near-world, or
"known world" wars in the past, even if not thought of that way. The
Mongols, after all, had left the steppes of northeastern Asia and
conquered China, only being turned back from Japan by the first
kamikaze ("divine wind") attacks in history, typhoons which repelled
the Mongol fleet in 1274 and again in 1281. Mongol horsemen, however,
made their way west across the Eurasian continent, conquering lands
and wreaking havoc, reaching the very edge of Europe while, in 1258,
sacking and burning Baghdad. (It wouldn't happen again until 2003.) In
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British and French
fought something closer to a "world war," serial wars actually in and
around Europe, in North Africa, in their New World colonies and even
as far away as India, as well as at sea wherever their ships ran
across one another.
Still, while war may have been globalizing, it remained, essentially,
a locally or regionally focused affair. And, of course, in the decades
before World War I, it was largely fought on the global peripheries by
European powers testing out, piecemeal, the rudimentary industrial
technology of mass slaughter -- the machine gun, the airplane, poison
gas, the concentration camp -- on no one more significant than
benighted "natives" in places like Iraq, the Sudan, or German
Southwest Africa. Those locals -- and the means by which they died --
were hardly worthy of notice until, in 1914, Europeans suddenly,
unbelievably, began killing other Europeans by similar means and in
staggering numbers, while bringing war into a new era of destruction.
It was indeed a global moment.
While the American Civil War had offered a preview of war,
industrial-style, including trench warfare and the use of massed
firepower, World War I offered the first full-scale demonstration of
what industrial warfare meant in the heartlands of advanced
civilization. The machine gun, the airplane, and poison gas arrived
from their testing grounds in the colonies to decimate a generation of
European youth, while the tank, wheeled into action in 1916, signaled
a new world of rapid arms advances to come. Nonetheless, that war --
even as it touched the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- wasn't quite
imagined as a "world war" while still ongoing. At the time, it was
known as the Great War.
Though parts of Tsarist Russia were devastated, the most essential,
signature style of destruction was anything but worldwide. It was
focused -- like a lens on kindling -- on a strip of land that
stretched from the Swiss border to the Atlantic Ocean, running largely
through France, and most of the time not more than a few miles wide.
There, on "the Western front," for four unbelievable years, opposing
armies fought -- to appropriate an American term from the Vietnam War
-- a "meat grinder" of a war of a kind never seen before. "Fighting,"
though, hardly covered the event. It was a paroxysm of death and
destruction.
That modest expanse of land was bombarded by many millions of shells,
torn up, and thoroughly devastated. Every thing built on, or growing
upon it, was leveled, and, in the process, millions of young men --
many tens of thousands on single days of "trench warfare" -- were
mercilessly slaughtered. After those four unbearably long years, the
Great War ended in 1918 with a whimper and in a bitter peace in the
West, while, in the East, amid civil war, the Bolsheviks came to
power. The semi-peace that followed turned out to be little more than
a two-decade armistice between bloodlettings.
We're talking here, of course, about "the war to end all wars." If
only.
World War II (or the ever stronger suspicion that it would come)
retrospectively put that "I" on the Great War and turned it into the
First World War. Twenty years later, when "II" arrived, the world was
industrially and scientifically prepared for new levels of
destruction. That war might, in a sense, be imagined as the extended
paroxysm of violence on the Western front scientifically intensified
-- after all, air power had, by then, begun to come into its own -- so
that the sort of scorched-earth destruction on that strip of
trench-land on the Western Front could now be imposed on whole
countries (Japan), whole continents (Europe), almost inconceivable
expanses of space (all of Russia from Moscow to the Polish border
where, by 1945, next to nothing would remain standing ). Where there
had once been "civilization," after the second global spasm of
sustained violence little would be left but bodies, rubble, and human
scarecrows striving to survive in the wreckage. With the Nazi
organization of the Holocaust, even genocide would be industrialized
and the poison gas of the previous World War would be put to far more
efficient use.
This was, of course, a form of "globalization," though its true nature
is seldom much considered when Americans highlight the experiences of
that greatest generation. And no wonder. Except for those soldiers
fighting and dying abroad, it simply wasn't experienced by Americans.
It's hard to believe now that, in 1945, the European civilization that
had experienced a proud peace from 1871-1914 while dominating
two-thirds of the planet lay in utter ruins; that it had become a site
of genocide, its cities reduced to rubble, its fields laid waste, its
lands littered with civilian dead, its streets flooded by refugees: a
description that in recent times would be recognizable only of a place
like Chechnya or perhaps Sierra Leone.
Of course, it wasn't the First or Second, but the Third "World War"
that took up almost the first half-century of my own life, and that,
early on, seemed to be coming to culmination in the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Had the logic of the previous wars been followed, a mere two
decades after the "global," but still somewhat limited, devastation of
World War II, war's destruction would have been exponentially upped
once again. In that brief span, the technology -- in the form of A-
and H-bombs, and the air fleets to go with them, and of nuclear-tipped
intercontinental ballistic missiles -- was already in place to
transform the whole planet into a version of those few miles of the
Western front, 1914-1918. After a nuclear exchange between the
superpowers, much of the world could well have been burnt to a crisp,
many hundreds of millions or even billions of people destroyed, and --
we now know -- a global winter induced that might conceivably have
sent us in the direction of the dinosaurs.
The logic of war's developing machinery seemed to be leading
inexorably in just that direction. Otherwise, how do you explain the
way the United States and the Soviet Union, long after both
superpowers had the ability to destroy all human life on Planet Earth,
simply could not stop upgrading and adding to their nuclear arsenals
until the U.S. had about 30,000 weapons sometime in the mid-1960s, and
Soviets about 40,000 in the 1980s. It was as if the two powers were
preparing for the destruction of many planets. Such a war would have
given the fullest meaning to "world" and no ocean, no line of
defenses, would have left any continent, any place, out of the mix.
This is what World War III, whose name would have had to be given
prospectively, might have meant (and, of course, could still mean).
Or think of the development of "world war" over the twentieth century
another way. It was but a generation, no more, from the first flight
of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to the 1,000-bomber raid. In
1903, one fragile plane flies 120 feet. In 1911, an Italian lieutenant
in another only slightly less fragile plane, still seeming to defy
some primordial law, drops a bomb on an oasis in North Africa. In 1944
and 1945, those 1,000 plane air armadas take off to devastate German
and Japanese cities.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas was compacted into
the belly of a lone B-29, the Enola Gay, which dropped its single bomb
on Hiroshima, destroying the city and many of its inhabitants. All
this, again, took place in little more than a single generation. In
fact, Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, was born only 12 years
after the first rudimentary plane took to the air. And only seven
years after Japan surrendered, the first H-bomb was tested, a weapon
whose raw destructive power made the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima
look like a mere bagatelle.
Admittedly, traces of humanity remained everywhere amid the carnage.
After all, the plane that carried that first bomb was named after
Tibbets's mother, and the bomb itself dubbed "Little Boy," as if this
were a birthing experience. The name of the second plane, Bockscar,
was nothing but a joke based on similarity of the name of its pilot,
Frederick Bock, who didn't even fly it that day, and a railroad
"boxcar." But events seemed to be pushing humanity toward the inhuman,
toward transformation of the planet into a vast Death Camp, toward
developments which no words, not even "world war," seemed to capture.
Entering the Age of Denial
It was, of course, this world of war from which, in 1945, the United
States emerged triumphant. The Great Depression of the 1930s would,
despite wartime fears to the contrary, not reappear. On a planet many
of whose great cities were now largely rubble, a world of refugee
camps and privation, a world destroyed (to steal the title of a book
on the dropping of the atomic bomb), the U.S. was untouched.
The world war had, in fact, leveled all its rivals and made the U.S. a
powerhouse of economic expansion. That war and the atomic bomb had
somehow ushered in a golden age of abundance and consumerism. All the
deferred dreams and desires of depression and wartime America -- the
washing machine, the TV set, the toaster, the automobile, the suburban
house, you name it -- were suddenly available to significant numbers
of Americans. The U.S. military began to demobilize and the former
troops returned not to rubble, but to new tract homes and G.I. Bill
educations.
The taste of ashes may have been in global mouths, but the taste of
nectar (or, at least, Coca Cola) was in American ones. And yet all of
this was shadowed by our own "victory weapon," by the dark train of
thought that led quickly to scenarios of our own destruction in
newspapers and magazines, on the radio, in movies, and on TV (think,
"The Twilight Zone"), as well as in a spate of novels that took
readers beyond the end of the world and into landscapes involving
irradiated, hiroshimated futures filled with "mutants" and
survivalists. The young, with their own pocket money to spend just as
they pleased for the first time in history -- teens on the verge of
becoming "trend setters" -- found themselves plunged into a mordant,
yet strangely thrilling world, as I've written elsewhere, of
"triumphalist despair."
At the economic and governmental level, the 24/7 world of sunny
consumerism increasingly merged with the 24/7 world of dark atomic
alerts, of ever vigilant armadas of nuclear-armed planes ready to take
off on a moment's notice to obliterate the Soviets. After all, the
peaceable giants of consumer production now doubled as the militarized
giants of weapons production. A military Keynesianism drove the U.S.
economy toward a form of consumerism in which desire for the ever
larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console
and atomic submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The
companies -- General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among
others -- producing the icons of the American home were also major
contractors developing the weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into
its own age of abundance.
In the 1950s, then, it seemed perfectly natural for Charles Wilson,
president of General Motors, to become secretary of defense in the
Eisenhower administration, just as retiring generals and admirals
found it natural to move into the employ of corporations they had only
recently employed on the government's behalf. Washington, headquarters
of global abundance, was also transformed into a planetary military
headquarters. By 1957, 200 generals and admirals as well as 1,300
colonels or naval officers of similar rank, retired or on leave,
worked for civilian agencies, and military funding spilled over into a
Congress that redirected its largesse to districts nationwide.
Think of all this as the beginning not so much of the American (half)
Century, but of an American Age of Denial that lasted until... well, I
think we can actually date it... until September 11, 2001, the day
that "changed everything." Okay, perhaps not "everything," but, by
now, it's far clearer just what the attacks of that day, the collapse
of those towers, the murder of thousands, did change -- and of just
how terrible, how craven but, given our previous history, how
unsurprising the response to it actually was.
Those dates -- 1945-2001 -- 56 years in which life was organized, to a
significant degree, to safeguard Americans from an "atomic Pearl
Harbor," from the thought that two great oceans were no longer
protection enough for this continent, that the United States was now
part of a world capable of being laid low. In those years, the sun of
good fortune shone steadily on the U.S. of A., even as American
newspapers, just weeks after Hiroshima, began drawing concentric
circles of destruction around American cities and imagining their
future in ruins. Think of this as the shadow story of that era, the
gnawing anxiety at the edge of abundance, like those memento mori
skulls carefully placed amid cornucopias in seventeenth-century Dutch
still-life paintings.
In those decades, the "arms race" never abated, not even long after
both superpowers had a superabundant ability to take each other out.
World-ending weaponry was being constantly "perfected" -- MIRVed, put
on rails, divided into land, sea, and air "triads," and, of course,
made ever more powerful and accurate. Nonetheless, Americans, to take
Herman Kahn's famous phrase, preferred most of the time not to think
too much about "the unthinkable" -- and what it meant for them.
As the 1980s began, however, in a surge of revulsion at decades of
denial, a vast anti-nuclear movement briefly arose -- in 1982,
three-quarters of a million people marched against such weaponry in
New York City -- and President Ronald Reagan responded with his
lucrative (for the weapons industry) fantasy scheme of lofting an
"impermeable shield" against nuclear weapons into space, his "Star
Wars" program. And then, in an almost-moment as startling as it was
unexpected, in 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev almost made such a fantasy come true, not in space,
but right here on planet Earth. They came to the very "brink" -- to
use a nuclear-crisis term of the time -- of a genuine program to move
decisively down the path to the abolition of such weapons. It was, in
some ways, the most hopeful almost-moment of a terrible century and,
of course, it failed.
Thanks largely, however, to one man, Gorbachev, who consciously chose
a path of non-violence, after four decades of nuclear standoff in a
fully garrisoned MAD (mutually assured destruction) world -- and to
the amazement, even disbelief, of official Washington -- the USSR
simply disappeared, and almost totally peaceably at that.
You could measure the era of denial up to that moment both by the
level of official resistance to recognizing this obvious fact and by
the audible sigh of relief in this country. Finally, it was all over.
It was, of course, called "victory," though it would prove anything
but.
And only then did the MADness really began. Though there was, in the
U.S., modest muttering about a "peace dividend," the idea of "peace"
never really caught hold. The thousands of weapons in the U.S. nuclear
arsenal, which had seemingly lost their purpose and whose existence
should have been an embarrassing reminder of the Age of Denial, were
simply pushed further into the shadows and largely ignored or
forgotten. Initially assigned no other tasks, and without the
slightest hiccup of protest against them, they were placed in a kind
of strategic limbo and, like the mad woman in the attic, went
unmentioned for years.
In the meantime, it was clear by century's end that the "peace
dividend" would go largely to the Pentagon. At the very moment when,
without the Soviet Union, the U.S. might have accepted its own
long-term vulnerability and begun working toward a world in which
destruction was less obviously on the agenda, the U.S. government
instead embarked, like the Greatest of Great Powers (the "new Rome,"
the "new Britain"), on a series of neocolonial wars on the
peripheries. It began building up a constellation of new military
bases in and around the oil heartlands of the planet, while
reinforcing a military and technological might meant to brook no
future opponents. Orwell's famous phrase from his novel 1984, "war is
peace," was operative well before the second Bush administration
entered office.
Call this a Mr. Spock moment, one where you just wanted to say
"illogical." With only one superpower left, the American Age of Denial
didn't dissipate. It only deepened and any serious assessment of the
real planet we were all living on was carefully avoided.
In these years, the world was essentially declared to be "flat" and,
on that "level playing field," it was, we were told, gloriously
globalizing. This official Age of Globalization -- you couldn't look
anywhere, it seemed, and not see that word -- was proclaimed another
fabulously sunny era of wonder and abundance. Everyone on the planet
would now wear Air Jordan sneakers and Mickey Mouse T-shirts, eat
under the Golden Arches, and be bombarded with "information"...
Hurrah!
News was circling the planet almost instantaneously in this
self-proclaimed new Age of Information. (Oh yes, there were many new
and glorious "ages" in that brief historical span of
self-celebration.) But with the Soviet Union in the trash bin of
history -- forget that Russia, about to become a major energy power,
still held onto its nuclear forces -- and the planet, including the
former Soviet territories in Eastern Europe and Central Asia open to
"globalizing" penetration, few bothered to mention that other nexus of
forces which had globalized in the previous century: the forces of
planetary destruction.
And Americans? Don't think that George W. Bush was the first to urge
us to "sacrifice" by spending our money and visiting Disney World.
That was the story of the 1990s and it represented the deepest of all
denials, a complete shading of the eyes from any reasonably possible
future. If the world was flat, then why shouldn't we drive blissfully
right off its edge? The SUV, the subprime mortgage, the McMansion in
the distant suburb, the 100-mile commute to work... you name it, we
did it. We paid the price, so to speak.
And while we were burning oil and spending money we often didn't have,
and at prodigious rates, "globalization" was slowly making its way to
the impoverished backlands of Afghanistan.
A Fierce Rearguard Action for Denial
This, of course, brings us almost to our own moment. To the neocons,
putting on their pith helmets and planning their Project for a New
American Century (meant to be just like the old nineteenth century,
only larger, better, and all-American), the only force that really
mattered in the world was the American military, which would rule the
day, and the Bush administration, initially made up of so many of
them, unsurprisingly agreed. This would prove to be one of the great
misreadings of the nature of power in our world.
Since what's gone before in this account has been long, let me make
this -- our own dim and dismal moment -- relatively short and sweet.
On September 11, 2001, the Age of Denial ended in the "mushroom cloud"
of the World Trade Center. It was no mistake that, within 24 hours,
the site where the towers had gone down was declared to be "Ground
Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion. Of course,
no such explosion had happened, nor had an apocalypse of destruction
actually occurred. No city, continent, or planet had been vaporized,
but for Americans, secretly waiting all those decades for their
"victory weapon" to come home, it briefly looked that way.
The shock of discovering for the first time and in a gut way that the
continental United States, too, could be at some planetary epicenter
of destruction was indeed immense. In the media, apocalyptic moments
-- anthrax, plagues, dirty bombs -- only multiplied and most
Americans, still safe in their homes, hunkered down in fear to await
various doom-laden scenarios that would never happen. In the meantime,
other encroaching but unpalatable globalizing realities, ranging from
America's "oil addiction" to climate change, would continue to be
assiduously ignored. In the U.S., this was, you might say, the real
"inconvenient truth" of these years.
The response to 9/11 was, to say the least, striking -- and craven in
the extreme. Although the Bush administration's Global War on Terror
(aka World War IV) has been pictured many ways, it has never, I
suspect, been seen for what it most truly may have been: a desperate
and fierce rearguard action to extend the American Age of Denial. We
would, as the President urged right after 9/11, show our confidence in
the American system by acting as though nothing had happened and, of
course, paying that visit to Disney World. In the meantime, as
"commander-in-chief" he would wall us in and fight a "global war" to
stave off the forces threatening us. Better yet, that war would once
again be on their soil, not ours, forever and ever, amen.
The motto of the Bush administration might have been: Pay any price.
Others, that is, would pay any price -- disappearance, torture, false
imprisonment, death by air and land -- for us to remain in denial. A
pugnacious and disastrous "war" on terrorism, along with sub-wars,
dubbed "fronts" (central or otherwise), would be pursued to impose our
continuing Age of Denial by force on the rest of the planet (and
soften the costs of our addiction to oil). This was to be the new Pax
Americana, a shock-and-awe "crusade" (to use a word that slipped out
of the President's mouth soon after 9/11) launched in the name of
American "safety" and "national security." Almost eight years later,
as in the present presidential campaign of 2008, these remain the
idols to which American politicians, the mainstream media, and
assumedly many citizens continue to do frightened obeisance.
The message of 9/11 was, in truth, clear enough -- quite outside the
issue of who was delivering it for what purpose. It was: Here is the
future of the United States; try as you might, like it or not, you are
about to become part of the painful, modern history of this planet.
And the irony that went with it was this: The fiercer the response,
the more we tried to force the cost of denial of this central reality
on others, the faster history -- that grim shadow story of the Cold
War era -- seemed to approach.
Postcard from the Edge
What I've written thus far hasn't exactly been a postcard. But if I
were to boil all this down to postcard size, I might write:
Here's our hope: History surprised us and we got through. Somehow. In
that worst of all centuries, the last one, the worst didn't happen,
not by a long shot.
Here's the problem: It still could happen -- and, 64 years later, in
more ways than anyone once imagined.
Here's a provisional conclusion: And it will happen, somehow or other,
unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we
surprise ourselves and the United States ends its age of denial.
And a little p.s.: It's not too late. We -- we Americans -- could
still do something that mattered when it comes to the fate of the
Earth.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted August 2, 2008.
The motto of the Bush administration might have been: Pay any price.
Or, rather, make everyone else pay the price for us to remain in
denial.
Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, Wasting Away.
-- the Beatles, "When I'm 64"
I set foot, so to speak, on this planet on July 20, 1944, not perhaps
the best day of the century. It was, in fact, the day of the failed
German officers' plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
My mother was a cartoonist. She was known in those years as "New
York's girl caricaturist," or so she's called in a newspaper ad I
still have, part of a war-bond drive in which your sizeable bond
purchase was to buy her sketch of you. She had, sometime in the months
before my birth, traveled by train, alone, the breadth of a mobilized
but still peaceable American continent to visit Hollywood on
assignment for some magazine to sketch the stars. I still have, on my
wall, a photo of her in that year on the "deck" of a "pirate ship" on
a Hollywood lot drawing one of those gloriously handsome matinee
idols. Since I was then inside her, this is not exactly part of my
memory bank. But that photo does tell me that, like him, she, too, was
worth a sketch.
Certainly, it was appropriate that she drew the card announcing my
birth. There I am in that announcement, barely born and already
caricatured, a boy baby in nothing but diapers - except that, on my
head, I'm wearing my father's dress military hat, the one I still have
in the back of my closet, and, of course, I'm saluting. "A Big Hello
-- From Thomas Moore Engelhardt," the card says. And thus was I
officially recorded entering a world at war.
By then, my father, a major in the U.S. Army Air Corps and operations
officer for the 1st Air Commando Group in Burma, had, I believe, been
reassigned to the Pentagon. Normally a voluble man, for the rest of
his life he remained remarkably silent on his wartime experiences.
I was, in other words, the late child of a late marriage. My father,
who, just after Pearl Harbor, at age 35, volunteered for the military,
was the sort of figure that the -- on average -- 26-year-old American
soldiers of World War II would have referred to as "pops."
He, like my mother, departed this planet decades ago, and I'm still
here. So think of this as... what? No longer, obviously, a big hello
from Thomas Moore Engelhardt, nor -- quite yet -- a modest farewell,
but perhaps a moderately late report from the one-man commission of me
on the world of peace and war I've passed through since that first
salute.
On Imagining Myself as Burnt Toast
Precisely what do I mean to say now that I'm just a couple of weeks
into my 65th year on this planet?
Let me start this way: If, on the evening of October 22, 1962, you had
told me that, in 2008, America's most formidable enemy would be Iran,
I would have danced a jig. Well, maybe not a jig, but I'll tell you
this: I would have been flabbergasted.
On that October evening, President John F. Kennedy went before the
nation -- I heard him on radio -- to tell us all that Soviet missile
sites were just then being prepared on the island of Cuba with "a
nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere." It was, he
said, a "secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles
-- in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship
to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere." When
fully operational, those nuclear-tipped weapons would reach "as far
north as Hudson Bay, Canada, and as far south as Lima, Peru." I
certainly knew what Hudson Bay, far to the north, meant for me.
"It shall be the policy of this nation," Kennedy added ominously, "to
regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in
the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a
full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union." And he ended, in
part, this way: "My fellow citizens: let no one doubt that this is a
difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out. No one can
foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties
will be incurred..."
No one could mistake the looming threat: Global nuclear war. Few of us
listeners had seen the highly classified 1960 SIOP (Single Integrated
Operational Plan) in which the U.S. military had made its preparations
for a massive first strike of 3,200 nuclear weapons against the
communist world. It was supposed to take out at least 130 cities, with
estimated casualties approaching 300 million, but, even without access
to that SIOP, we -- I -- knew well enough what might be coming. After
all, I had seen versions of it, perfectly unclassified, in the movies,
even if the power to destroy on a planetary scale was transposed to
alien worlds, as in that science fiction blockbuster of 1955 "This
Island Earth," or imputed to strange alien rays, or rampaging
radioactive monsters. Now, here it was in real life, my life, without
an obvious director, and the special effects were likely to be me,
dead.
It was the single moment in my life -- which tells you much about the
life of an American who didn't go to war in some distant land -- when
I truly imagined myself as prospective burnt toast. I really believed
that I might not make it out of the week, and keep in mind, I was then
a freshman in college, just 18 years old and still wondering when life
was slated to begin. Between 1939 and 2008, across much of the world,
few people could claim to have escaped quite so lightly, not in that
near three-quarters of a century in which significant portions of the
world were laid low.
Had you, a seer that terrifying night, whispered in my ear the news
about our enemies still distant decades away, the Iranians, the... are
you kidding?... Iraqis, or a bunch of fanatics in the backlands of
Afghanistan and a tribal borderland of Pakistan... well, it's a
sentence that would, at the time, have been hard to finish. Death from
Waziristan? I don't think so.
Truly, that night, if I had been convinced that this was "my" future
-- that, in fact, I would have a future -- I might have dropped to my
knees in front of that radio from which Kennedy's distinctive voice
was emerging and thanked my lucky stars; or perhaps -- and this
probably better fits the public stance of an awkward, self-conscious
18-year-old -- I would have laughed out loud at the obvious absurdity
of it all. ("The absurd" was then a major category in my life.)
Fanatics from Afghanistan? Please...
That we're here now, that the world wasn't burnt to a crisp in the
long superpower standoff of the Cold War, well, that still seems
little short of a miracle to me, a surprise of history that offers
hope... of a sort. The question, of course, is: Why, with this in
mind, don't I feel better, more hopeful, now?
After all, if offered as a plot to sci-fi movie directors of that
long-gone era -- perfectly willing to populate Los Angeles with giant,
mutated, screeching ants (Them!), the Arctic with "The Thing From
Another World," and Washington D.C. with an alien and his mighty
robot, capable of melting tanks or destroying the planet ("Klaatu
barada nikto!") -- our present would surely have been judged too
improbable for the screen. They wouldn't have touched it with a
ten-foot pole, and yet that's what actually came about -- and the
planet, a prospective cinder (along with us prospective cinderettes)
is, remarkably enough, still here.
Or to put this in a smaller, grimmer way, consider the fate of the
American military base at Guantanamo -- an extra-special symbol of
that "special and historical relationship" mentioned by Kennedy
between the small island of Cuba and its giant "neighbor" to the
northwest. In that address to the nation in 1962, the president
announced that he was reinforcing the base, even as he was evacuating
dependents from it. And yet, like me in my 65th year, it, too,
survived the Cuban Missile Crisis unscathed. Some four decades later,
in fact, it was still in such a special and historical relationship
with Cuba that the Bush administration was able to use it to publicly
establish all its new categories of off-shore injustice -- its global
mini-gulag of secret prisons, its public policies of torture,
detention without charges, disappearance, you name it. None of which,
by the way, would the same set of directors have touched with the same
pole. Back in the 1950s, only Nazis, members of the Japanese imperial
Army, and KGB agents could publicly relish torture on screen. The FOX
TV show "24" is distinctly an artifact of our moment.
A Paroxysm of Destruction Only a Few Miles Wide
Of course, back in 1962, even before Kennedy spoke, I could no more
have imagined myself 64 than I could have imagined living through
"World War IV" -- as one set of neocons loved to call the President's
Global War on Terror -- a "war" to be fought mainly against thousands
of Islamist fanatics scattered around the planet and an "axis of evil"
consisting of three relatively weak regional powers. I certainly
expected bigger, far worse things. And little wonder: When it came to
war, the full weight of the history of most of the last century
pointed exponentially in the direction of a cataclysm with few or no
survivors.
From my teen years, I was, you might say, of the Tom Lehrer school of
life (as in the lyrics from his 1959 song, "We Will All Go Together
When We Go") -- and I was hardly alone:
We will all fry together when we fry.
We'll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery
When the world is our rotisserie.
Yes, we will all fry together when we fry...
And we'll all bake together when we bake,
They'll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.
I was born, after all, just a year and a few weeks before the United
States atomically incinerated Hiroshima and then followed up by
atomically obliterating the city of Nagasaki, and World War II ended.
Victory arrived, but amid scenes of planetary carnage, genocide, and
devastation on a scale and over an expanse previously unimaginable.
In these last years, the Bush administration has regularly invoked the
glories of the American role in World War II and of the occupations of
Germany and Japan that followed. Even before then, Americans had been
experiencing something like a "greatest generation" fest (complete
with bestselling books, a blockbuster movie, and two multi-part
greatest-gen TV mini-series). From the point of view of the United
States, however, World War II was mainly a "world" war in the world
that it mobilized, not in the swath of the planet it turned into a
charnel house of destruction. After all, the United States (along with
the rest of the "New World") was left essentially untouched by both
"world" wars. North Africa, the Middle East, and New Guinea all
suffered incomparably more damage. Other than a single attack on the
American fleet at Hawaii, thousands of miles from the U.S. mainland,
on December 7, 1941, the brief Japanese occupation of a couple of tiny
Aleutian islands off Alaska, a U-boat war off its coasts, and small
numbers of balloon fire bombs that drifted from Japan over the
American west, this continent remained peaceable and quite traversable
by a 35-year-old theatrical caricaturist in the midst of wartime.
For Americans, I doubt that the real import of that phrase World War
-- of the way the industrial machinery of complete devastation
enveloped much of the planet in the course of the last century -- ever
quite came home. There had, of course, been world, or near-world, or
"known world" wars in the past, even if not thought of that way. The
Mongols, after all, had left the steppes of northeastern Asia and
conquered China, only being turned back from Japan by the first
kamikaze ("divine wind") attacks in history, typhoons which repelled
the Mongol fleet in 1274 and again in 1281. Mongol horsemen, however,
made their way west across the Eurasian continent, conquering lands
and wreaking havoc, reaching the very edge of Europe while, in 1258,
sacking and burning Baghdad. (It wouldn't happen again until 2003.) In
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British and French
fought something closer to a "world war," serial wars actually in and
around Europe, in North Africa, in their New World colonies and even
as far away as India, as well as at sea wherever their ships ran
across one another.
Still, while war may have been globalizing, it remained, essentially,
a locally or regionally focused affair. And, of course, in the decades
before World War I, it was largely fought on the global peripheries by
European powers testing out, piecemeal, the rudimentary industrial
technology of mass slaughter -- the machine gun, the airplane, poison
gas, the concentration camp -- on no one more significant than
benighted "natives" in places like Iraq, the Sudan, or German
Southwest Africa. Those locals -- and the means by which they died --
were hardly worthy of notice until, in 1914, Europeans suddenly,
unbelievably, began killing other Europeans by similar means and in
staggering numbers, while bringing war into a new era of destruction.
It was indeed a global moment.
While the American Civil War had offered a preview of war,
industrial-style, including trench warfare and the use of massed
firepower, World War I offered the first full-scale demonstration of
what industrial warfare meant in the heartlands of advanced
civilization. The machine gun, the airplane, and poison gas arrived
from their testing grounds in the colonies to decimate a generation of
European youth, while the tank, wheeled into action in 1916, signaled
a new world of rapid arms advances to come. Nonetheless, that war --
even as it touched the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- wasn't quite
imagined as a "world war" while still ongoing. At the time, it was
known as the Great War.
Though parts of Tsarist Russia were devastated, the most essential,
signature style of destruction was anything but worldwide. It was
focused -- like a lens on kindling -- on a strip of land that
stretched from the Swiss border to the Atlantic Ocean, running largely
through France, and most of the time not more than a few miles wide.
There, on "the Western front," for four unbelievable years, opposing
armies fought -- to appropriate an American term from the Vietnam War
-- a "meat grinder" of a war of a kind never seen before. "Fighting,"
though, hardly covered the event. It was a paroxysm of death and
destruction.
That modest expanse of land was bombarded by many millions of shells,
torn up, and thoroughly devastated. Every thing built on, or growing
upon it, was leveled, and, in the process, millions of young men --
many tens of thousands on single days of "trench warfare" -- were
mercilessly slaughtered. After those four unbearably long years, the
Great War ended in 1918 with a whimper and in a bitter peace in the
West, while, in the East, amid civil war, the Bolsheviks came to
power. The semi-peace that followed turned out to be little more than
a two-decade armistice between bloodlettings.
We're talking here, of course, about "the war to end all wars." If
only.
World War II (or the ever stronger suspicion that it would come)
retrospectively put that "I" on the Great War and turned it into the
First World War. Twenty years later, when "II" arrived, the world was
industrially and scientifically prepared for new levels of
destruction. That war might, in a sense, be imagined as the extended
paroxysm of violence on the Western front scientifically intensified
-- after all, air power had, by then, begun to come into its own -- so
that the sort of scorched-earth destruction on that strip of
trench-land on the Western Front could now be imposed on whole
countries (Japan), whole continents (Europe), almost inconceivable
expanses of space (all of Russia from Moscow to the Polish border
where, by 1945, next to nothing would remain standing ). Where there
had once been "civilization," after the second global spasm of
sustained violence little would be left but bodies, rubble, and human
scarecrows striving to survive in the wreckage. With the Nazi
organization of the Holocaust, even genocide would be industrialized
and the poison gas of the previous World War would be put to far more
efficient use.
This was, of course, a form of "globalization," though its true nature
is seldom much considered when Americans highlight the experiences of
that greatest generation. And no wonder. Except for those soldiers
fighting and dying abroad, it simply wasn't experienced by Americans.
It's hard to believe now that, in 1945, the European civilization that
had experienced a proud peace from 1871-1914 while dominating
two-thirds of the planet lay in utter ruins; that it had become a site
of genocide, its cities reduced to rubble, its fields laid waste, its
lands littered with civilian dead, its streets flooded by refugees: a
description that in recent times would be recognizable only of a place
like Chechnya or perhaps Sierra Leone.
Of course, it wasn't the First or Second, but the Third "World War"
that took up almost the first half-century of my own life, and that,
early on, seemed to be coming to culmination in the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Had the logic of the previous wars been followed, a mere two
decades after the "global," but still somewhat limited, devastation of
World War II, war's destruction would have been exponentially upped
once again. In that brief span, the technology -- in the form of A-
and H-bombs, and the air fleets to go with them, and of nuclear-tipped
intercontinental ballistic missiles -- was already in place to
transform the whole planet into a version of those few miles of the
Western front, 1914-1918. After a nuclear exchange between the
superpowers, much of the world could well have been burnt to a crisp,
many hundreds of millions or even billions of people destroyed, and --
we now know -- a global winter induced that might conceivably have
sent us in the direction of the dinosaurs.
The logic of war's developing machinery seemed to be leading
inexorably in just that direction. Otherwise, how do you explain the
way the United States and the Soviet Union, long after both
superpowers had the ability to destroy all human life on Planet Earth,
simply could not stop upgrading and adding to their nuclear arsenals
until the U.S. had about 30,000 weapons sometime in the mid-1960s, and
Soviets about 40,000 in the 1980s. It was as if the two powers were
preparing for the destruction of many planets. Such a war would have
given the fullest meaning to "world" and no ocean, no line of
defenses, would have left any continent, any place, out of the mix.
This is what World War III, whose name would have had to be given
prospectively, might have meant (and, of course, could still mean).
Or think of the development of "world war" over the twentieth century
another way. It was but a generation, no more, from the first flight
of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to the 1,000-bomber raid. In
1903, one fragile plane flies 120 feet. In 1911, an Italian lieutenant
in another only slightly less fragile plane, still seeming to defy
some primordial law, drops a bomb on an oasis in North Africa. In 1944
and 1945, those 1,000 plane air armadas take off to devastate German
and Japanese cities.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas was compacted into
the belly of a lone B-29, the Enola Gay, which dropped its single bomb
on Hiroshima, destroying the city and many of its inhabitants. All
this, again, took place in little more than a single generation. In
fact, Paul Tibbets, who piloted the Enola Gay, was born only 12 years
after the first rudimentary plane took to the air. And only seven
years after Japan surrendered, the first H-bomb was tested, a weapon
whose raw destructive power made the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima
look like a mere bagatelle.
Admittedly, traces of humanity remained everywhere amid the carnage.
After all, the plane that carried that first bomb was named after
Tibbets's mother, and the bomb itself dubbed "Little Boy," as if this
were a birthing experience. The name of the second plane, Bockscar,
was nothing but a joke based on similarity of the name of its pilot,
Frederick Bock, who didn't even fly it that day, and a railroad
"boxcar." But events seemed to be pushing humanity toward the inhuman,
toward transformation of the planet into a vast Death Camp, toward
developments which no words, not even "world war," seemed to capture.
Entering the Age of Denial
It was, of course, this world of war from which, in 1945, the United
States emerged triumphant. The Great Depression of the 1930s would,
despite wartime fears to the contrary, not reappear. On a planet many
of whose great cities were now largely rubble, a world of refugee
camps and privation, a world destroyed (to steal the title of a book
on the dropping of the atomic bomb), the U.S. was untouched.
The world war had, in fact, leveled all its rivals and made the U.S. a
powerhouse of economic expansion. That war and the atomic bomb had
somehow ushered in a golden age of abundance and consumerism. All the
deferred dreams and desires of depression and wartime America -- the
washing machine, the TV set, the toaster, the automobile, the suburban
house, you name it -- were suddenly available to significant numbers
of Americans. The U.S. military began to demobilize and the former
troops returned not to rubble, but to new tract homes and G.I. Bill
educations.
The taste of ashes may have been in global mouths, but the taste of
nectar (or, at least, Coca Cola) was in American ones. And yet all of
this was shadowed by our own "victory weapon," by the dark train of
thought that led quickly to scenarios of our own destruction in
newspapers and magazines, on the radio, in movies, and on TV (think,
"The Twilight Zone"), as well as in a spate of novels that took
readers beyond the end of the world and into landscapes involving
irradiated, hiroshimated futures filled with "mutants" and
survivalists. The young, with their own pocket money to spend just as
they pleased for the first time in history -- teens on the verge of
becoming "trend setters" -- found themselves plunged into a mordant,
yet strangely thrilling world, as I've written elsewhere, of
"triumphalist despair."
At the economic and governmental level, the 24/7 world of sunny
consumerism increasingly merged with the 24/7 world of dark atomic
alerts, of ever vigilant armadas of nuclear-armed planes ready to take
off on a moment's notice to obliterate the Soviets. After all, the
peaceable giants of consumer production now doubled as the militarized
giants of weapons production. A military Keynesianism drove the U.S.
economy toward a form of consumerism in which desire for the ever
larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console
and atomic submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The
companies -- General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among
others -- producing the icons of the American home were also major
contractors developing the weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into
its own age of abundance.
In the 1950s, then, it seemed perfectly natural for Charles Wilson,
president of General Motors, to become secretary of defense in the
Eisenhower administration, just as retiring generals and admirals
found it natural to move into the employ of corporations they had only
recently employed on the government's behalf. Washington, headquarters
of global abundance, was also transformed into a planetary military
headquarters. By 1957, 200 generals and admirals as well as 1,300
colonels or naval officers of similar rank, retired or on leave,
worked for civilian agencies, and military funding spilled over into a
Congress that redirected its largesse to districts nationwide.
Think of all this as the beginning not so much of the American (half)
Century, but of an American Age of Denial that lasted until... well, I
think we can actually date it... until September 11, 2001, the day
that "changed everything." Okay, perhaps not "everything," but, by
now, it's far clearer just what the attacks of that day, the collapse
of those towers, the murder of thousands, did change -- and of just
how terrible, how craven but, given our previous history, how
unsurprising the response to it actually was.
Those dates -- 1945-2001 -- 56 years in which life was organized, to a
significant degree, to safeguard Americans from an "atomic Pearl
Harbor," from the thought that two great oceans were no longer
protection enough for this continent, that the United States was now
part of a world capable of being laid low. In those years, the sun of
good fortune shone steadily on the U.S. of A., even as American
newspapers, just weeks after Hiroshima, began drawing concentric
circles of destruction around American cities and imagining their
future in ruins. Think of this as the shadow story of that era, the
gnawing anxiety at the edge of abundance, like those memento mori
skulls carefully placed amid cornucopias in seventeenth-century Dutch
still-life paintings.
In those decades, the "arms race" never abated, not even long after
both superpowers had a superabundant ability to take each other out.
World-ending weaponry was being constantly "perfected" -- MIRVed, put
on rails, divided into land, sea, and air "triads," and, of course,
made ever more powerful and accurate. Nonetheless, Americans, to take
Herman Kahn's famous phrase, preferred most of the time not to think
too much about "the unthinkable" -- and what it meant for them.
As the 1980s began, however, in a surge of revulsion at decades of
denial, a vast anti-nuclear movement briefly arose -- in 1982,
three-quarters of a million people marched against such weaponry in
New York City -- and President Ronald Reagan responded with his
lucrative (for the weapons industry) fantasy scheme of lofting an
"impermeable shield" against nuclear weapons into space, his "Star
Wars" program. And then, in an almost-moment as startling as it was
unexpected, in 1986, in Reykjavik, Iceland, Reagan and Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev almost made such a fantasy come true, not in space,
but right here on planet Earth. They came to the very "brink" -- to
use a nuclear-crisis term of the time -- of a genuine program to move
decisively down the path to the abolition of such weapons. It was, in
some ways, the most hopeful almost-moment of a terrible century and,
of course, it failed.
Thanks largely, however, to one man, Gorbachev, who consciously chose
a path of non-violence, after four decades of nuclear standoff in a
fully garrisoned MAD (mutually assured destruction) world -- and to
the amazement, even disbelief, of official Washington -- the USSR
simply disappeared, and almost totally peaceably at that.
You could measure the era of denial up to that moment both by the
level of official resistance to recognizing this obvious fact and by
the audible sigh of relief in this country. Finally, it was all over.
It was, of course, called "victory," though it would prove anything
but.
And only then did the MADness really began. Though there was, in the
U.S., modest muttering about a "peace dividend," the idea of "peace"
never really caught hold. The thousands of weapons in the U.S. nuclear
arsenal, which had seemingly lost their purpose and whose existence
should have been an embarrassing reminder of the Age of Denial, were
simply pushed further into the shadows and largely ignored or
forgotten. Initially assigned no other tasks, and without the
slightest hiccup of protest against them, they were placed in a kind
of strategic limbo and, like the mad woman in the attic, went
unmentioned for years.
In the meantime, it was clear by century's end that the "peace
dividend" would go largely to the Pentagon. At the very moment when,
without the Soviet Union, the U.S. might have accepted its own
long-term vulnerability and begun working toward a world in which
destruction was less obviously on the agenda, the U.S. government
instead embarked, like the Greatest of Great Powers (the "new Rome,"
the "new Britain"), on a series of neocolonial wars on the
peripheries. It began building up a constellation of new military
bases in and around the oil heartlands of the planet, while
reinforcing a military and technological might meant to brook no
future opponents. Orwell's famous phrase from his novel 1984, "war is
peace," was operative well before the second Bush administration
entered office.
Call this a Mr. Spock moment, one where you just wanted to say
"illogical." With only one superpower left, the American Age of Denial
didn't dissipate. It only deepened and any serious assessment of the
real planet we were all living on was carefully avoided.
In these years, the world was essentially declared to be "flat" and,
on that "level playing field," it was, we were told, gloriously
globalizing. This official Age of Globalization -- you couldn't look
anywhere, it seemed, and not see that word -- was proclaimed another
fabulously sunny era of wonder and abundance. Everyone on the planet
would now wear Air Jordan sneakers and Mickey Mouse T-shirts, eat
under the Golden Arches, and be bombarded with "information"...
Hurrah!
News was circling the planet almost instantaneously in this
self-proclaimed new Age of Information. (Oh yes, there were many new
and glorious "ages" in that brief historical span of
self-celebration.) But with the Soviet Union in the trash bin of
history -- forget that Russia, about to become a major energy power,
still held onto its nuclear forces -- and the planet, including the
former Soviet territories in Eastern Europe and Central Asia open to
"globalizing" penetration, few bothered to mention that other nexus of
forces which had globalized in the previous century: the forces of
planetary destruction.
And Americans? Don't think that George W. Bush was the first to urge
us to "sacrifice" by spending our money and visiting Disney World.
That was the story of the 1990s and it represented the deepest of all
denials, a complete shading of the eyes from any reasonably possible
future. If the world was flat, then why shouldn't we drive blissfully
right off its edge? The SUV, the subprime mortgage, the McMansion in
the distant suburb, the 100-mile commute to work... you name it, we
did it. We paid the price, so to speak.
And while we were burning oil and spending money we often didn't have,
and at prodigious rates, "globalization" was slowly making its way to
the impoverished backlands of Afghanistan.
A Fierce Rearguard Action for Denial
This, of course, brings us almost to our own moment. To the neocons,
putting on their pith helmets and planning their Project for a New
American Century (meant to be just like the old nineteenth century,
only larger, better, and all-American), the only force that really
mattered in the world was the American military, which would rule the
day, and the Bush administration, initially made up of so many of
them, unsurprisingly agreed. This would prove to be one of the great
misreadings of the nature of power in our world.
Since what's gone before in this account has been long, let me make
this -- our own dim and dismal moment -- relatively short and sweet.
On September 11, 2001, the Age of Denial ended in the "mushroom cloud"
of the World Trade Center. It was no mistake that, within 24 hours,
the site where the towers had gone down was declared to be "Ground
Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion. Of course,
no such explosion had happened, nor had an apocalypse of destruction
actually occurred. No city, continent, or planet had been vaporized,
but for Americans, secretly waiting all those decades for their
"victory weapon" to come home, it briefly looked that way.
The shock of discovering for the first time and in a gut way that the
continental United States, too, could be at some planetary epicenter
of destruction was indeed immense. In the media, apocalyptic moments
-- anthrax, plagues, dirty bombs -- only multiplied and most
Americans, still safe in their homes, hunkered down in fear to await
various doom-laden scenarios that would never happen. In the meantime,
other encroaching but unpalatable globalizing realities, ranging from
America's "oil addiction" to climate change, would continue to be
assiduously ignored. In the U.S., this was, you might say, the real
"inconvenient truth" of these years.
The response to 9/11 was, to say the least, striking -- and craven in
the extreme. Although the Bush administration's Global War on Terror
(aka World War IV) has been pictured many ways, it has never, I
suspect, been seen for what it most truly may have been: a desperate
and fierce rearguard action to extend the American Age of Denial. We
would, as the President urged right after 9/11, show our confidence in
the American system by acting as though nothing had happened and, of
course, paying that visit to Disney World. In the meantime, as
"commander-in-chief" he would wall us in and fight a "global war" to
stave off the forces threatening us. Better yet, that war would once
again be on their soil, not ours, forever and ever, amen.
The motto of the Bush administration might have been: Pay any price.
Others, that is, would pay any price -- disappearance, torture, false
imprisonment, death by air and land -- for us to remain in denial. A
pugnacious and disastrous "war" on terrorism, along with sub-wars,
dubbed "fronts" (central or otherwise), would be pursued to impose our
continuing Age of Denial by force on the rest of the planet (and
soften the costs of our addiction to oil). This was to be the new Pax
Americana, a shock-and-awe "crusade" (to use a word that slipped out
of the President's mouth soon after 9/11) launched in the name of
American "safety" and "national security." Almost eight years later,
as in the present presidential campaign of 2008, these remain the
idols to which American politicians, the mainstream media, and
assumedly many citizens continue to do frightened obeisance.
The message of 9/11 was, in truth, clear enough -- quite outside the
issue of who was delivering it for what purpose. It was: Here is the
future of the United States; try as you might, like it or not, you are
about to become part of the painful, modern history of this planet.
And the irony that went with it was this: The fiercer the response,
the more we tried to force the cost of denial of this central reality
on others, the faster history -- that grim shadow story of the Cold
War era -- seemed to approach.
Postcard from the Edge
What I've written thus far hasn't exactly been a postcard. But if I
were to boil all this down to postcard size, I might write:
Here's our hope: History surprised us and we got through. Somehow. In
that worst of all centuries, the last one, the worst didn't happen,
not by a long shot.
Here's the problem: It still could happen -- and, 64 years later, in
more ways than anyone once imagined.
Here's a provisional conclusion: And it will happen, somehow or other,
unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we
surprise ourselves and the United States ends its age of denial.
And a little p.s.: It's not too late. We -- we Americans -- could
still do something that mattered when it comes to the fate of the
Earth.
Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the
American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.