Invitation To A Degraded World

Ever since September 11, 2001, and the "war on terror" itoccasioned, the very quality of public events -- their grain, their tenor, theirstyle, if you like -- has seemed to undergo a certain deterioration, as if fromthat day forward history was being authored by a third-rate writer rather than amaster, or was being compelled, even as it visited increasing suffering on realpeople, to follow the plot of a bad comic book. Not the representation of theevents but the actual events, not the renderings of the characters involved butthose characters themselves, not the telling of the story but the story itself-- all seem to have become crasser, coarser, woven of shoddier materials.

The tone was perhaps set by the sudden appearance of Osama bin Laden, a massmurderer who came across at the same time as a comic-book, caricature villain --a man whom it would be impossible to take seriously if he had not killed so manypeople. The plan that he brought to fruition on September 11 was lifted wholeout of any number of action comics, video games, or disaster movies, most ofwhich end up with buildings blowing up, the more the better. (For example, inthe most recent Terminator movie, The Rise of the Machines, starring thecurrent governor of California, scarcely any standing structure shown on camerasurvives for more than a few minutes, and the movie winds up with a nuclearholocaust.)

Bin Laden's choice of spectacle obviously was contrived to match this stockscene. He lacked any capacity even to slightly dent the military power of theUnited States, so he delivered his blow to the nation's psyche instead. Whatbetter means than to turn its most common fantasies into horrifying life? He wasassisted in his aim by accident. The towers had been designed to withstandairplane crashes. Perhaps that's why, immediately after the attack, theauthorities in New York failed to give timely warning that the towers might comedown. Yet they did come down, and when they did the emotional power of thecatastrophe was magnified a hundred-fold. The attacks alone would have been anevent of the first order; but it was the belief-defying, heart-crushing fall ofthe towers that knocked history off its course. (What would the world be likenow if the girders holding up the buildings had managed to withstand the fires?Would there have been a Camp X-ray in Guantanamo, a war in Iraq, a global"war on terror"?)

As it was, the towers' collapse added an element of the uncanny to thefantasy made real by bin Laden. Yet although the scale of the crime was new, hisstrategy was hardly original. Terrorists have long compensated for theirmilitary weakness by creating the greatest possible spectacle with their bloodyacts. They work in a symbolic realm. Real destruction and real deaths are onlythe means to accomplish their psychological effects. It's a strategy that cannotsucceed without the de facto cooperation of the news media, which are routineexploiters for commercial purposes of all varieties of violence and destruction,from the local murder or fire in the warehouse to the latest hurricane. (Howoften does a meeting of negotiators, or a city council or parliament lead thenews?) Their habits have guaranteed that the terrorists get all the coveragethey hope for.

These media have in addition been busy in recent years scrambling reality andfantasy for entertainment purposes. A watershed was the coverage of the carchase in which the Los Angeles police pursued the white Bronco carrying O.J.Simpson, fleeing arrest for the alleged murder of his wife. Like the September11 attacks, the Simpson episode recreated in the real world a type of scene --in this instance, the car-chase -- that had been seen endlessly in movies and ontelevision. What was sensational in the event was not any intrinsic drama (allyou could see were a couple of cars driving along a highway) but the fact thatthe stale fictional scene was being lived out by real people. Ghoulish criminalcases, always popular, soon became the main stock-in-trade of television news --infotainment. Soon came "reality" television, which reversed theprocess of the Simpson chase. If infotainment started with real events andturned them into de facto soap operas, reality television started with soapoperas and spiced them up by adding "real" elements (consisting mostlyof people being serially kicked off the shows).

It goes without saying that movie mayhem and reality television have no morallikeness to September 11. However, the news media's longstanding symbiosis withviolent criminals along with their infection of reality with fantasy providedmodels for bin Laden's action as well as a global stage on which it would appearand be guaranteed unlimited coverage. Bin Laden strove for maximum effect withhis crime, and he was granted it. At the time, it seemed that everyone wassaying or writing, "Everything has changed." (I also wrote it, in acolumn right after the attack.) But in this reaction, felt as defiance of binLaden, was there not also a kind of surrender -- not, to be sure, exactly tohim, but to his debased style of thinking, his understanding of how the worldworks? What was damaged was not only the quality of political discussion anddecision-making but something that might be called the dignity of the real.

Surely our reaction suited bin Laden well. He had no power to "changeeverything" unless the government of the United States agreed. Theneverything could change.

The government of the United States did agree. And a lot of things -- if noteverything -- did change. President Bush seemed to accept Bin Laden's invitationto enter into the world of an apocalyptic comic book. Even today, it may be hardto think of any response to September 11 as excessive. A great atrocity had beencommitted. A great reaction was needed. But was it necessary or wise to divideevery person and government on earth into two camps -- the good, the lovers offreedom, who are "with us," and the "evil-doers" who hatethe good ones for their very goodness, and "who are against us"? -- asif no other evils or horrors existed on earth to compel the attention of humanbeings?

The comic-book aspect became even more pronounced when the President turnedhimself into a sort of real life action figure, donning a pilot's suit andlanding on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare success in theIraq war (though in his National Guard service, in which he was trained as apilot, he was grounded for failing to show up for a physical). But the fullestrealization of a fantasy world built on the foundation of September 11 was theRepublican convention, where a collection of villains abroad was blurred intoone mass of evil-doers who were in turn blurred with John Kerry, depicted astheir domestic accomplice. Iraq, descending in actuality into anarchy, waspresented as an inspiring example of democracy for the entire Middle East.Hidden behind the visions of a glorious future -- the favorite tense of thedemagogue -- rose the pile of corpses, Iraqi and American. It was a furthercurious demonstration of the power of illusion that bin Laden himself slippedthrough the administration's fingers, as if the actual villain of September 11had been dissolved in the fantasy his act set in motion.

Each country that plunges into nightmare -- whether Germany under Hitler, theSoviet Union under the Bolsheviks, Chile under Pinochet, or, for that matter,Iraq under Saddam Hussein -- travels there along its own path. The Americanpolitical system -- based on free elections, the rights of citizens, and therule of law -- is, though under the severest pressure, still available for use.If it is lost, and the full American nightmare descends, there will be manycauses. They will include the militarization of foreign policy, global imperialambition, the loss of balance among the branches of government, the erosion ofcivil liberties, and the overwhelming influence of corporate money and powerover political life -- all present before Osama bin Laden made his appearance.But at every step of the way the skids will be greased by the national capacity,conferred by the media and exploited by politicians, to produce and consumeillusion, which, though hardly an American monopoly, may be the specific form ofcorruption most dangerous to American democracy.

Once, observers imagined that we were entering an information age, but theywere wrong. It is a misinformation age. The stupendous machinery of modern mediahas reached into every cranny of American life. Its outlets have been posted inevery household, like a mechanical standing army. The steady, mild propaganda ofadvertising has long saturated the home for hours every day, the mentalequivalent of low-level radiation. Now the public is being dosed with morevirulent stuff. The standing army has been given increasingly insistentpolitical marching orders. Stalin and Mao, confined mainly to radios andmegaphones, could only dream of such penetration of daily life by theirpropaganda apparatuses.

The injection of fantasy into the real offends the aesthetic sense, but thetrue price is paid in blood -- in the torture of prisoners, in the launch ofwars. If a grasp of reality and the constitutional machinery to act upon itremain intact, then every other ill can be addressed. But if these are lost, thecapacity to recover is lost with it, and the game is over.

Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the NationInstitute. He is most recently the author of TheUnconquerable World (Metropolitan Books) and AHole in the World (Nation Books), a collection of his "Letters fromGround Zero" columns for the Nation Magazine. This piece appears in printin the new magazine Final Edition, edited by Wallace Shawn anddistributed by Seven Stories Press.

Copyright C2004 Jonathan Schell

Used with the permission of Final Edition, Volume I, no. 1 (the lastissue), Autumn 2004. Courtesy, TomDispatch.Com