Adulthood is the collecting of experiences. Maturity is the pace at which you move from one experience to the next. You do not grow in the shape of an arc but in that of a belt, like the travelator at the airport, where it is impossible, and certainly not advisable, to linger on one point of your journey because you are, in a social and spiritual sense, moving at cruising speed with the rest of your fellows. So naturally when the belt stops, you are jolted out of place along with everyone else riding the belt with you. Bodies tumble, baggage intermingles unwelcomely. Notions of space and stability are utterly upended. It is both an appropriate and an inappropriate metaphor in relation to one such historical stoppage.1
I came into the first day of my senior year of high school with unusually high spirits. It was not merely the unlifting of the weights of the past three years, or the feeling of a cycle nearing completion. It was a feeling of life’s pieces being in all their proper places. I and my classmates had weathered a series of apparent catastrophes: Y2k hysteria, school shootings, free trade backlash, the 2000 election, the looming threat of decentralized culture. All of which came on with warnings from apparently wiser people to brace for impact. But the impacts, once they came, lacked a destabilizing force. A feeling of good fortune, even blessedness, washed over our well-being. Who was I to not appreciate it?
That was September 10, 2001. By third period word-processing class the next morning, fortune and blessings alike had all but evaporated. Or maybe more immediately they felt like part of a dream from which we were rudely awakened.
Full-scale global terrorism was hardly on anyone's mind for the better part of the last decade, this extended to our adult figureheads as much as it did to us. So if my instant reaction as I’m recalling it seems a little self-involved it was for lack of any better mode of reaction. The only other one on offer was viewing footage of the Twin Towers collapsing over and over again while the more vocal fumbled around over what we are to do next. And it was evident that we could not “move on” on a stalling conveyer belt. For it was more than a stoppage, it was a rupture of many previously held assumptions.
We acclimated ourselves to a level of jingoistic patriotism not felt, and often scoffed at, since the first Persian Gulf War. The only flag we had at home was the one given to my dad at his Air Force Lieutenant father’s funeral. Mom took it out of the basement, unfurled the triangle and hung it from the front of our house. She posed me and my brothers in front of it for a picture. It was very large and not really meant for display, so it fell to the ground overnight. I wouldn’t say this reaction was unanimous but it was widely felt, and sensitivity to dissent was acute; because reflexive patriotism was followed by an unleashing of all self-control. One of my history teachers, always excitable in his later career, was working toward what had all the appearance of an emotional breakdown. He prefaced most classes with premonitions of future attacks, with an emphasis on nuclear capability. When Daniel Pearl was beheaded, he encouraged some students to search for its footage on his classroom computer, an instance of that moment in time that was as comical as it was unhinged. They didn’t find it, and its pedagogical function will forever be a mystery.
Yet almost without any prompting from us, the conveyer belt was moving again. We had not forgotten what had happened, but we assimilated it back into our own journeys. College application essays and the valedictorian commencement addresses wrote themselves. Ditto the op-eds from the Jeane Kirkpatrick and Howard Zinn clones feeling a boost in relevance. This was not without encouragement from our betters that this was the proper way. “Everything has changed,” they said. “So it will shock you how everything is also exactly the same.” In time, recalling September 11 was on the level of your parents’ divorce: localized, more vaguely traumatic, and in smaller proportion compared to other historical (or domestic) anomalies.
But a rupture of reduced scale still causes ripples, at once subtler and more substantive. Less about the wounds of the psyche than the molding of thought. An interior terrorist attack, even without direct repercussions can demolish and rebuild a weltanschauung from top to bottom. It’s only a matter of how.
You could do so from the right. This is nothing short of a clash of Civilization against Barbarism. You do not hesitate to subsume your very being into the cause in defense of Civilization. You adopt the warrior spirit. The “West” is not an abstraction but the core of your very position on earth. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is off the table when it comes to upholding its principles and perpetuating its reach. Though I’d say this was felt more earnestly in the corridors of the Claremont Institute and among the kids in Jesus Camp, this imperative was not negligible in America’s power centers and even among the general public. It could be called upon to justify any strategic axiom or any retributive desire. It led to unexpected modes of praxis, as we shall see.
For my part I only recall the leftist posture. This was somewhat more complicated. Opposition to the predominant stance was so despised that many in this camp felt they had to repress their true feelings. This is not as bad as it seems. People were perfectly comfortable protesting and arguing their points on this or that objection—if not war itself then certain other outcomes like “Support the Troops” bumpersticker fetishism or the Patriot Act. This engendered, on the one hand, a self-righteousness that today is as plentiful as oxygen and, on the other hand, a mode of despair that the worst is always before us as the wider public goes along with King George II’s whims. This, amazingly, did not produce a wealth of the hopeless logical extremists, radical knights-errant who think beyond the meager scope of second-rate do-gooders. Protest should not simply be a theatrical airing of complaint but a kind of philosophy in action: declaring what is unequivocally wrong and doing what is right. That that right action tends to compromise conventional comforts, to themselves and others, is a tradeoff like any other. Such was the thinking of Ted Kaczynski, of the Weathermen, to say nothing of the self-immolators in recent history.
Both views are united by the same apocalyptic framing, in that they are steeling themselves for an impending end. My own view was also apocalyptic, but in the stricter definitive sense of an unveiling. It demanded neither confrontation nor repression, but something closer to sublimation: the socio-hygienic obligation of evaluating the ways in which my political reality had acquire what appear like accents of evil.
A proper apocalypse does not dawn on you in an instant, no matter the level of pyrotechnics involved. You should never be entirely sure of what you’re seeing and you should allow a response as methodically as the apocalypse proceeds from its catalyst.
Even before it started I sensed that the war in Iraq was a bad idea. On simple logical terms there was no basis for it. Saddam Hussein’s connection to the September 11 attacks and Al-Qaeda seemed tenuous at best; serving, if anything, as a timely convenience for certain politicians and bureaucrats with a longstanding interest in having a deeper imprint in the region. This was not a controversial position, I think. Neither broad rationales nor offers of highly suspect intelligence were altogether persuasive. Most of the “support” for it, at least in my middle-to-upper-class blue state orbit, came in the form of resignation. “Saddam is a menace,” they said. “He gasses his own people, etc., etc.” Apparently none realized, or cared much about, my capacity to recall any number of instances between the fall of the Berlin Wall and that moment where we very notably hesitated on similar premises. Whatever. We invaded; my college made the news because an alumnus was its first American casualty. Things collapsed as many foresaw in short order. Bush’s removal from the White House by democratic means was in that moment of the highest importance.
The trouble with war is that it is contingent. The complacency of simple incompetence did not prepare me for the change of April 2004. Unlike 9/11, I don’t know where I was when the Abu Ghraib story broke, only that once it did it was impossible to escape. The internet, even at that stage, offered an impressive array of real-life violence. This was a time when scrolling Rotten dot com or seeing the exploding head .GIF from Scanners were as thrilling as they were commonplace. That, combined with the election-year advantage supposedly to be gained from it, made the many, many images from that prison unprecedentedly profuse in their accessibility.
To say that I was affected solely by the images of the casual cruelty, the flair for sexual and scatological humiliation, and the horrific iconography of the man in the black hood would be melodramatic. In terms of media violence it was another item to add to an ever-growing pile. Rather it was the logical framework around which the violence was encased. To assure my own freedom, it seemed necessary to concoct a baroque tapestry of strange euphemisms (“learned helplessness”), legal jargon, Sadean hypotheticals, and an approach to information-gathering that resembled a Black Mass offering. I suppose if the exposure had been able to actually remove the people under which these policies were implemented from any positions of responsibility my attitude might have been more modified. Though that would have underscored its apocalyptic nature. And once the veil, unlike the hood, is lifted there is no use putting it back on. You respond to it as best as you’re able.
At least by appearances my response wasn’t very unique compared to my classmates. In fact it looked as if I was doing less. I didn’t partake in any protests or volunteer for any campaign. Americans, being literal-minded to a fault, deal rather virginally with anything beneath the surface, which is where my response worked itself out. I think of it as making mental notes to keep track of the change in the national ambiance. So while I was watching The Daily Show as everyone else was (believe it or not) I underwent my own process of converting a lot of abstract radical-fringe rhetoric about American “neo-imperialism” into a more acute reality. Abu Ghraib made a black comedy out of the sometimes cooperative, sometimes competing national defense and human rights justifications of the war. In this light it was more an in-yer-face found-footage drama of euphoric national self-confidence. And that euphoria had weight. When it pressed down, patriotic creeds became platitudes; sentimental rhapsodies became a symptom of delusion. The euphoria was a fact of American life.
But when facts reveal themselves you have to live them out. I can’t say that, 20 years later, I’ve lived them out as well as I could or should have. But I try, using the tools at my disposal. One is the intellect.
I went my whole college career ignorant of the difference between argument and rhetoric. Much of my formal education went into honing the former, which was and remains a significant weakness. My natural affinity for rhetoric went mostly unobserved, not least of all by me. It was stoked incidentally by the distinctive languages of the Bush Administration. The President’s own clunky cadences lodged into the memory like musket balls in the skull. The Vice President’s infernal vocal fry was a choking hazard. Their underlings were armed with focus group aphorisms (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”) But its true linguistic soul was found in the bureaus and sub-departments, whether in the cold legalism of John Yoo’s memos (“Because the presence of good faith would negate the specific intent element of torture, it is a complete defense of such a charge.”) or in Donald Rumsfeld’s koan-like meditations about “unknown knowns.”
“Words for me have a powerful effect,” Frantz Fanon wrote. “I feel it impossible to escape from the sting of a word or the vertigo of a question mark.” The words of Bush’s government initiated me into language’s dark arts. They played their educational part in showing the extents to which language could be stretched and the myriad purposes they served in being so stretched. I committed myself as a practitioner. I developed a strong sense for icily portentous prose: the paradoxical thought experiment, the earnest “modest” proposal, the transgressive academic paper, the bad judicial opinion. This effort was marked as much by perverse reverence as by fear; its decadence would have easily exceeded its actual value without my second tool, a moderating moral force.
Disillusion is practically built-in to the college experience. No doubt select Noam Chomsky-parroting professors made an honest effort. They needn’t have bothered. Before I was 20 I was initiated into the Advanced Studies of secret moral education. It consisted mainly of a reorientation process; of bringing my social context and all who shared it up to speed with the apocalypse. I think there’s some variation of it that people like to call “radical honesty.” Though in simpler terms it’s “getting the facts straight.” The facts must be spoken as accurately as possible. America is not evil or even uniquely corrupt. America is goal-oriented. Anyone or anything so oriented is imbued with a particular mode of sight: a sharp knife-slit of clarity in between impenetrably nocturnal slabs, and in those slabs anything goes. I see the Obama Administration releasing the report of the things we did in the dark as a pleasant courtesy, and one with a cost. That torture happened at all is not really the issue compared to how quickly it occurred, how easily it was accommodated, how comfortably it was ingrained into our defense apparatus, and how long it took for any proper reaction in accordance with our principles to take place. Admitting the deed gave tacit permission to forget that it happened. The human conveyer belt is back on schedule.
One step in the sublimation process lingers on almost out of its own refusal: the national. It is best summarized in the Fugazi lyric “America is just a word, but I use it.” The word “use” is significant, giving it an imposing physicality that merely saying cannot equal. It is used to describe, to rationalize, and to create images and shape realities. Its recipients more than just hear it, they are made participants in its drama. It is used to give direction and to assign roles. We, as the confirmed users, hold the prerogative of user-friendliness in the hinterlands of the endlessly and justifiably used.
But its use is no less friendly in negotiations with your own community. You agree not to call them or their loved ones “goal-oriented” to their faces; they agree not to bullshit you with their queasy sentimentality or lie to you that all of this working itself out in a just and sensible way. They take full responsibility for any new “goal” that happens to appear; you don’t get a prize for knowing what’s true. “America” is the tool by which you press your weight upon them until they relent and come to terms with their own status, to the precipice of “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death” if need be. America is a word, and I use it.
This is a revised and expanded “reboot” of an earlier essay that was long in need of improvement. It perhaps fits in with my surely doomed book project, now titled Human Lard.