All We Have To Fear

I honestly believe that all we have to fear is fear itself. (there was a great T-shirt I saw the other day and almost bought, totally Alaskan or other outdoorsy places, with a picture of a tent, campfire, and night mountainous starry sky, and the caption below it read: "All we have to fear is fear itself, and bears.") Sometimes I feel like the more we invoke, remember, and pay homage to the mysterious and terrible events of 9/11, the more we give the perpetrators what they wanted from us. I idealogically agree with all such sentiments to remember and pay homage to the tragedy, but I pragmatically take exception to giving the event undue significance. I came by this opinion honestly and through the confluence of three or more things.

I) right after nine-eleven-oh-one, I had been a pharmacy cashier and then wine-salesman/gift-store cashier at a little place in vaguely conservative Corvallis, OR. By ten-eleven the place had literally hundreds of U.S. flags, all makes and models, for sale and on display. I hadn't thought anything of it, until a random customer, having recently returned from a trip to Europe and having been overwhelmed by the fervor in her home town, literally broke into tears in the store after having walked around and shopped amidst our patriotic looking store. The lady wasn't just freaked out by the sudden out-pouring of flag-waving, she felt clenched and frightened by the idea that if she didn't salute, she'd be completely frowned upon and ostracized. Since she had become vocal and angry while in the store, telling me all these things she was upset by since I was the Rice's Pharmacy representative closest at hand (and fortunately empathic enough to calm her down and preserve the company's reputation a bit), I received the brunt of her anger at our perceived symbolic demagoguery and opportunistic faux-patriotism. I myself hold the flag dear in terms of the Enlightenment ideals it represents, but also agree with the late great George Carlin, opponent of anti-flag-burning laws, who said: "I'll leave symbols to the symbol-minded." The lady I described points to the overwhelming pathos generated in the wake of my wedding day, and how odd the national reaction would have seemed had we all not been living it day by day. My reaction to her was colored by my own understanding of our national commerce and media: in a nutshell, I agree with the theory of Manufactured Consent developed by Noam Chomsky and that other guy. What this theory informs me of is that things like excessive flag waving or the demonization of flag burning (or if, say, some purportedly liberal senator did or didn't wear a U.S. flag lapel pin) is a social control designed to marginalize critics of the Federal government. The neo-con\military-industrial agenda was more than served by the hordes of symbol-minded patriots waving flags in the faces of the Progressives and True Conservatives who were both calling for a non-reactionary response (which ended up being cast as "offering counseling and sympathy to the terrorist enemies."

II) a few years before, my cousin had attended a WTO riot in Seattle that made world news headlines. His involvement and, much later, a Sociology class I took at UAA educated me as to what the WTO does or could represent. There is no excuse for violent action, but if those responsible for the nine-eleven attacks were muslim extremists who attacked us because we represent freedom and infadel threat, why would they attack the World Trade Center? I understand that in the world of economics, New York represents the heart and capital of the U.S.'s might. I get that there definitely is such a thing as muslim extremism, but again I think that unless you view the twin towers as a particular symbol for the United States (the patron saint of economic hegemony?), the World Trade Center itself is way less tragic to lose than the thousands of U.S. teens and twenties from poor cities and farms who were sent off to Iraq.

III) a little while ago I was posting a blog about things along these lines and tried looking up the actual statistics on an average American's chance of dying from a terrorist attack on U.S. soil from a muslim extremist. So this guy Michael Rothschild estimates: "Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered." -source, http://www.reason.com/news/show/36765.html.

These three things made me realize that whatever happened that day, nine-eleven has been repeatedly pushed and invoked to the benefit of American militarism. The only reason Americans accept the notion of a war on terror is because they're all mostly terrified of something less dangerous to them personally than cars, or, by some estimates, being struck by lightening. The only threat to the elite of America is that the U.S. political system will work, and peace will prevent the military/industrialists from continuing or furthering economic hegemony through U.S. and key U.S. ally military actions designed to open foreign markets to exploitation. Fortunately nationalism struck a resounding chord that day (even internationally in the form of sympathy by non-U.S. entities) and another Pearl Harbor let the Pentagon fill up on orders for newly mechanized, self-guided bombs, drones, and global reconnaisance while simultaneously marginalizing the rising tide of true patriotism, which questioned the wisdom of pissing off everyone on the planet by consuming 25% of it's resources.