Freedom Is On The March

Among the things the second term of the Bush junta will bring is the NewFreedom Initiative. This is a proposal, barely reported in the press, to giveall Americans--beginning with school children--a standardized test for mentalillness. Those who flunk the test will be issued medication, and those who donot want to take their medication will be urged to have it implanted under theirskin. Needless to say, the New Freedom commission, appointed by the President,is composed almost entirely of executives, lawyers, and lobbyists forpharmaceutical corporations.

The question is: Will anyone pass the test? Half of America is clearlyderanged, and it has driven the other half mad.

The President openly declares that God speaks through him. The Republicansare making television advertisements featuring the actor who played Jesus in MelGibson's "The Passion of the Christ," while sending out pamphlets thatwarn that if Kerry is elected he will ban the Bible. Catholic bishops havedecreed that voting for Kerry is a sin (mortal or venial?) that must beconfessed before one can take communion.

The one piece of scientific research actively promoted by the government isinvestigating whether having others pray for you can cure cancer. (The NationalInstitute of Health has explained that this is "imperative" becausepoor people have limited access to normal health care.) At the official giftshop in Grand Canyon National Park, they sell a book that states that thisso-called natural wonder sprang fully formed in the six days of Creation. Wealready know that the current United States government does not believe inglobal warming or the hazards of pollution; now we know it doesn't believe inerosion either.

The polls are evidence that the country is suffering a collective headinjury. On any given issue--the economy, the war in Iraq, health care--themajority perceive that the situation is bad and the President has handled itbadly. Yet these same people, in these same polls, also say they'll be votingfor Bush. Like a battered wife-- realizing yet denying what is happening, stillmaking excuses for their man--the voters are ruled by fear and intimidation andthe threat of worse to come. They've been beaten up by the phantom of terrorism.

Every few weeks we're bludgeoned by warnings that terrorists may strike in amatter of days. Incited by the Department of Homeland Security, millions havebought duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect their homes from biological andchemical attack, and have amassed caches of canned food and bottled water. Toensure that everyone everywhere stays afraid, 10,000 FBI agents have been sentto small towns to talk to local police chiefs about what they can do to fightterrorism. After the massacre at Beslan, school principals received letters fromthe Department of Education instructing them to beware of strangers. The VicePresident intones that if Kerry is elected, terrorists will be exploding nuclearbombs in the cities. (And, to anticipate all possibilities, also warns thatterrorists may set off bombs before the election to influence the vote. . . butwe're not going to let them tell Americans who to vote for, are we?)

Fear has infected even the most common transactions of daily life. It is notonly visitors to the US who are treated as criminals, with fingerprints andphotographs and retinal scans. Anyone entering any anonymous office buildingmust now go through security clearances worthy of an audience with DonaldRumsfeld. At the airports, fear of flying has been replaced by fear ofchecking-in. Nearly every day there are stories of people arrested or detainedfor innocuous activities, like snapping a photo of a friend in the subway orwearing an antiwar button while shopping in the mall. Worst of all, the wholecountry has acquiesced to the myth of terrorist omnipotence. Even those wholaugh at the color-coded Alerts and other excesses of the anti-terror apparatusdo not question the need for the apparatus itself. The Department of HomelandSecurity, after all, was a Democratic proposal first rejected by Bush.

Common sense has retreated to the monasteries of a few websites. It isconsidered delusional to suggest that international terrorism is nothing morethan a criminal activity performed by a handful of people, that Al-Qaeda andsimilar groups are the Weather Underground, the Brigato Rosso, theBaader-Meinhof Gang, with more sophisticated techniques and more powerfulweapons, operating in the age of hysterical 24-hour television news. They arenot an army. They are not waging a war. They are tiny groups perpetratingisolated acts of violence.

There's no question they are dangerous individuals, but--without demeaningthe indelible trauma of 9/11 or the Madrid bombings--the danger they pose mustbe seen with some kind of dispassionate perspective. A terrorist attack is arare and sudden disaster, the man-made equivalent of an earthquake or flood.More people die in the U.S. every year from choking on food than died in theTwin Towers. About 35,000 die annually from gunshot wounds. (While Bush liftsthe ban on assault weapons, and both Bush and Kerry promote gun ownership, acaptured al-Qaeda manual recommends traveling to the U.S. to buy weapons.) About45,000 die in car crashes--while the Bush administration lowers automobilesafety standards to increase the profits of the auto industry, major donors tohis campaign. Millions, of course, die from diseases, and one can only imagineif the billions spent on useless elephantine bureaucracies like the Departmentof Homeland Security had gone to hospitals and research. If the goal weregenuinely to protect lives, fighting terrorism would be a serious matter forpolice and intelligence agencies, and a small project of a nation's well-being.

Compare, for a moment, Spain. After the Madrid bombings, the police, in a fewdays, arrested those responsible. (After 9/11, the U.S. rounded up more than5,000 people--many of whom still in jail and not a single one of whom has beenproven to have any connection to any form of terrorist activity.) They did notcarpet-bomb Morocco. They are quietly increasing police surveillance withoutTerror Alert national panics and with little or no interruption of daily life.And, geographically, demographically, and historically (the fundamentalist dreamof recuperating al-Andalus), there is a much greater possibility of anotherterrorist attack in Spain than in the U.S.

But of course the current "war on terrorism" is not about savinglives at all; it's about keeping power in the hands of a tiny cell ofideologues. In the manner of all totalitarian societies, the Bush junta, with ahappily compliant mass media, has wildly exaggerated the power of the Enemy.This has allowed them to wage a war in Iraq they began planning long before 9/11and to plot further invasions, to suspend Constitutional rights and disdaininternational law, to enrich their friends and ignore the opinions of most ofthe world. Many Americans who dislike Bush will still vote for him in Novemberbecause the marketing campaign has made him appear the resolute"wartime" Commander-in-Chief who will keep the nation"safe." It has become futile to try to argue that this war on terrordoesn't exist, that the actual war in Iraq has nothing to do with the safety ofAmericans at home, and that abroad it has killed or maimed more Americans than9/11. It remains to be seen what price the country, and the world, will pay forthis fantasy.

An unnamed "senior adviser" to Bush recently told the journalistRon Suskind that people like Suskind were members of "what we call thereality-based community": those who "believe that solutions emergefrom [the] judicious study of discernible reality." However, he explained,"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now,and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying thatreality... we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can studytoo, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, allof you, will be left to just study what we do."

This may well be the clearest expression yet of the Bush Doctrine. To becomeenraged by particulars--the daily slaughter in Iraq, the prison torture, theworst economy since the Great Depression, the banana republic tricks andslanders of the electoral campaign--is to miss the point. We are no longer in"discernible reality." In the second term, the only choice will be toline up for your medication and enjoy the New Freedom. As Bush now says in everyspeech, "freedom is on the march."

Eliot Weinberger is an American essayist, translator, and editor. Hischronicles of the Bush era have been collected in 9/12 and are widelyavailable on the internet. Among his recent books are Karmic Traces(essays) and The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. Heis the translator of many books by Octavio Paz, as well as Jorge Luis Borges
and the exiled Chinese poet Bei Dao.