Second Thoughts

I spent the day yesterday, which began when I woke up at 1:30, lying around with a general feeling of disuse and inoccupancy. As with the other variously empty Sundays of life, which I tried to fill with all manner of periodicals and books and food and browsing the Internet, I mostly felt like I needed to get out of my head (or apartment) and lose the self-centric perspective.

Even though half of what I read yesterday tangentially surrounded the four year anniversay of that incomprehensible morning, I managed to go until 11 or so at night before I realized how utterly unaware I was of the fact that it was, indeed, a day in which I ought to be doing a lot less thinking about my own emotions and a lot more thinking about what has happened in the last four years.

I don't have much to say because I feel without the right to say anything, but I did do some thinking about it today. When did this way change from a war against terrorism to a "war against terror"? In other words, when did we lose sight of an empirical, real battle against physical people and specific acts, and when did we get caught up in a battle which can never be demonstrated as won? When did we drop the -ism?

What I can't get away from is that we are in a country that is in a climate still dictated by fear, which is, of course, the method by which terrorism itself operates--to commit a violent act on a few which reverberates a feeling of terror to the rest. The way our media seems to operate, and indeed the way that the ideology of our administration propogates itself, is via a feeling of fear. We are fighting in Iraq as a statement against the terrorists, but Iraq has instead served to demonstrate the limits of America's power. It feels as if we lashed out, that it's misplaced, that we are throwing our whole weight into a quagmire of a war because we're afraid of terrorists who are hiding in caves, somewhere in the desert.

I went to a taping of The Daily Show last week, and I keep thinking about the guest, Marc Spiegel, who wrote a book called "False Alarm" about the way our media tends to elevate most situations to an overinflated degree of hype, which results in every risk being at the same high level, and therefore fear-inducing but meaningless. Jon Stewart brought up something that FDR was famous for saying, that "we have nothing to fear but fear itself." Is this the bold defiance something that we believe in now? Is it something our administration believes in? Consider that FDR was fighting Hitler, and Bush made clear immediatly after September 11th that these terrorists were the direct descendants of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, despite a pretense to piety. He may be correct on some level. But the effect of this shaping the terrorists into a familiar enemy is, I think, to abstract them, to ideologize them. Of course, there must be ideology to some level. But it is the gap between rhetoric and reality that has always been disturbing about the way things have gone in Iraq.

Even as the terrorists are made to be mere echoes of a past enemy which has already been defeated, and even as Bush has led America into Iraq with bravado and fanfare, we nevertheless still live with some motivation of fear. We are fighting against terrorism, of course, but Bush has also declared war on terror itself, as an abstract concept, as apart of the goal of "eradicating the world of evil" in general. Can we fight terror and still be afraid without risking an absurd contradiction? Eradicating the world of evil is impossible, as is fighting an abstraction. How will we measure when this war is finished? When will we stop counting the anniversary years after Sept. 11, 2001?