Snakes

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur. But it behoves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. “Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

-- Emerson, "Circles"

I've used the central part of this selection from Emerson on several occasions, but it seems to me to never run dry, given our current situation. The image above accompanies Francis Fukuyama's essay from the Times Book Review, which I should think would be required reading. I re-cite the Emerson passage and draw your attention to the article because Fukuyama has affirmed something many of us have been feeling for some time now, which is that the terrorist threat has been exaggerated; and, even if it has not, we've been placed, willingly or not, in its thrall, as our government passes abhorrent legislation and sends our armed forces off to fight senseless battles overseas, all in the name of nothing more than physical safety.

Fukuyama reminds us that we have always exaggerated threats, have always indulged in a kind of collective paranoia about the enemy or the Other. The image illustrates his central examples: the Nazis, the Communists, and now, the Terrorists. The Bush administration and the right-wing noise machine have repeatedly conflated the current "conflict" with World War II, comparing anyone living east of Istanbul to the cast of Triumph of the Will. I think it's fair to say that any idiot should know that, however numerous and dangerous "The Terrorists" may be, they constitute nothing like the threat of the Third Reich, to say nothing of a nuclear armed, expansionist totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. Fukuyama authoritatively states this obvious point:

While the nihilistic murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on American soil was unprecedented, the fact remains that both the actual and perceived threat of the late 1940’s was much more acute than the one presented by Islamist terrorism today. The Communists controlled a huge nation-state — the Soviet Union — and conquered half of Europe. In 1949 they came to power in the most populous country in the world. The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons was new; experts at the time confidently predicted that many states would acquire them in short order and that future wars would be nuclear. Americans lived in the shadow not of the destruction of a single city, but of their entire society. And the enemy had agents who could potentially penetrate the country’s most elite institutions, something few jihadists can aspire to do today.

True enough? One wouldn't think so by the corrupt rhetoric emanating from Washington, which consists of a single message: be afraid. The Terrorists are out there, coming to kill you -- and any number of un-American policies and criminal enterprises have been justified by this entirely hollow proposition. The "War on Terror," in all its various forms, constitutes nothing more, in fact, than one large, organized, criminal enterprise, in defiance of international and domestic law, the laws of war, the laws of reason. Fukuyama points out that the culture of fear spawns a culture of secrecy, which naturally spawns a culture of corruption. The secrecy state began, he says, with the Cold War, and the intelligence community's insistence on secrecy created a population that was simply out of touch with the facts; and it is a basic premise, which we supposedly understand as Americans, that an uninformed public cannot, by definition, be a functioning democracy. As Aristotle knew, in ignorance we are simply not capable of acting as moral agents. When the government has a monopoly on information, then, our agency is effectively stripped.

If the warrantless wiretapping "program" had not been revealed by the New York Times, it would have continued unabated, in secret, without our knowledge, and the President and his henchmen would have been allowed to continue this patently criminal practice without any sort of accountability to the voters. The "program" continues today, of course, and Congress wants to legalize it -- even though they still don't know what it is. Perhaps this is a sign that we really have entered a "new age," where none of this matters any more. Or maybe we have always been a nation of fear, and maybe our sole purpose has always been to clear the world of obstacles so as not to be bothered. Perhaps we like wearing our boots so much that we don't really care if it stands as a symbol of our fear of snakes, and prevents us from touching the world with our own feet. Fear, as Emerson says, is what allows us to mistake paranoia for prudence -- and Bush and company have surely been offering the one while pretending to the other.

Fukuyama, at any rate, believes there is nothing new in any of this, that the world did not, in fact, change fundamentally on 9/11, but simply offered another occasion for "the eternal return of the same," just another face on the poster to feed our collective hysteria.