HOW AMERICA LEARNED TO PLAY GOD
The Aftermath of 9/11:
America’s Second Great Transformation and the Emergence of a Brave New World
John Chuckman
I call America’s pattern of behavior since 9/11 a “great
transformation” because it involves revolutionary changes for the country and,
unavoidably, the entire world. In its internal affairs, America has effectively
weakened the protections of the Bill of Rights and instituted many of the practices
of police states – all under the insidious rationale of “protection from
terrorists,” a subject heading which incapacitates the courts and serves to
draw a great dark cloak over matters vital to all. Secrecy, always a favorite
tool of cowardly politicians, now has assumed an enormous, central position in
America. Spying, both on your own people and on those abroad, has become
pervasive.
America has increased spending on military and intelligence
to levels dangerously high both for the stability of the world and the future
integrity of its own society. These resource-wasting establishments also will
entangle any state in all sorts of costly unanticipated difficulties over time.
Foreign policy has shifted to adopt the once-laughable, malevolent fantasies of
the Neocons as official America policy, including an unapologetic and
unprincipled use of America’s military strength around the world and a savage
effort to remake the entire Middle East to its own liking, ignoring the
region’s acute problems and treating the hopes of tens of millions for better
lives as so much collateral damage from a bombing run.
These massive changes add to a social and governing
structure which already had grown far away from the people, a structure which
in many ways resembles that of pre-revolutionary, 18th century France,
a state ruled by and for a class of landed aristocrats, a class of church
aristocrats, and a ruling family and its armies. In contemporary America, the
great hierarchies are the Pentagon, a web of sixteen intelligence agencies, and
the great corporations with their immensely wealthy owners.
America’s first great transformation was the Civil War, a
war which was not about slavery as is commonly believed and generally taught in
public schools but about the division of powers between states and the federal
government, affecting the very economic and political structure of the nation.
The United States under the original Constitution was a very different place
than we have come to know it. The Civil War reduced authorities of the states,
demolished many formidable internal barriers to trade and to federal political
power, and elevated the federal government from a mere debating forum between
states into a powerful central authority. The Civil War transformed, too, the
United States into a world-class industrial nation and military power which
would in coming decades embark on new colonial wars and adventures. The Civil
War made possible the growth of mighty national industries and the coming Age
of Robber Barons and was a necessary precursor to the changes now underway.
For a good deal of time, America grew a healthy middle class,
and for a brief golden era even industrial workers in America prospered
remarkably. Political rights and freedoms tended to expand with that growth. But
real per capita income of middle to lower-middle class Americans has dropped
for many years now, a result in great part of globalization and new competitors
coming up in the world. That has been a major impetus for social change as American
middle class families attempt to hold their positions with incomes from two
careers and lower costs in a seemingly infinite sprawl of cheap hinterland
suburbs. And for years now, the American establishment has made the keenest
political issue of taxes, but an issue only in the sense of by just how much to
lower them, most particularly those affecting the wealthy.
To some extent a fortress-like mentality had taken hold of
the middle class for years as they saw themselves on their way to work passing
parts of rotting cities - doors always locked on their tank-like SUVs and vans -
struggling to raise their position in the world by fending off taxes as much as
possible, and, even, in a growing number of instances, living in “gated
communities” out of fear of crime spreading from rotted cities. I think that
kind of prevailing mentality helps greatly for accepting America’s new, more
oppressive measures.
One might think the United States would have learned from
the country it now copies closely: Israel has had a paralyzing web of secret
police, border restrictions, secret prisons, and a massive military establishment
for 65 years, yet it has never enjoyed genuine peace and lives in a chilling, unpleasant
relationship with all of its neighbors. The average Israeli too does not enjoy
a great life in an economically-inefficient society (whose interests, moreover,
are heavily tilted towards those of its privileged groups), and then there’s that
“great mob of Arabs out there” regarded in much the same way America regards
its poor blacks. And were it not for immense subsidies and special favors
keeping Israel afloat, that security state likely would collapse under the
weight of its economic inefficiency. When any state puts absolute security
above everything else, much of what it achieves is not worth having. Stalin
perhaps provides history’s bleakest, most extreme example of running an
absolute security state.
Of course, security, as understood by what Stalin called
“wreckers of the revolution” and what Israel and the United States call “terrorism,”
is not the complete reason for secret prisons and building walls and networks
and police forces and spy systems. Those with great power and wealth and
special interests have always had an instinctive impulse to control their
environment, including the other people who inhabit it. Vast guarded estates and
fences and bodyguards and summary justice for those trespassing have always
been features of life for the great and powerful, and the same impulses exist
for powerful organizations within a state, especially militarized states. Close
control over behavior unacceptable to an establishment - including behavior
that is merely different or dissident or embarrassing or slightly shady or emotionally
off-balance or politically threatening - is at the heart of the matter. A gigantic
network has been created in the United States which will detect, track, and
file away information on these behaviors in perpetuity. The potential for
blackmail and intimidation of political opponents or NGO leaders or writers or
the press is enormous. While this may not be the case at first, over time, can
you think of any apparatus that has gone unused by those with power, any
apparatus which has not been abused? We should not forget that as recently as
the 1960s, the FBI was actively trying to get Martin Luther King to commit
suicide with anonymous letters threatening to reveal secret recordings. America
is, after all, a country that has used atomic weapons, twice, and both times on
civilian targets.
America is now also doing something no other country is in a
position to do: it is exploiting the dollar’s privileged position as the world’s
reserve currency to pay for much of its gigantic waste through massive future
devaluation of an asset held by millions around the world. Unconscionable?
Arrogant? Bullying? Those words I think are fairly applied to the changes. It
may be no consolation for those being steamrolled by America that its behavior
is unavoidably weakening its position in the world, but that is a fact. The
bullying will prevail for a time, but it does speed the day when world
leadership shifts to new hands, not necessarily to any single country like
China but possibly to a consortium of rapidly-growing large states – India,
Russia, Brazil, and China - with interests of their own.
It is no wonder that the conspiracy-oriented regard 9/11 as
some kind of black operation used to shift the direction of the country towards
a brave new world. The only conspiracy I see in the events around 9/11, though,
are the American government’s refusal to explain to its own people what
happened while exploiting events to its benefit, doing things it likely long
has wanted to do. It is covering up both the incompetence and destructiveness
of the operations of its own intelligence and military establishments as well
as the deadly stupidity of some of its foreign policies, policies which seem fixed
in amber through the tireless work of special interests. Dishonesty now has
become a hallmark of American government. Those with power feel no obligation
to explain to the people they nominally serve what happened in almost any event
of genuine importance, and a long-term practice has only become more intense
and pervasive.
America’s press, still sometimes is heard patting itself on
the back as the “fourth estate” protecting peoples’ interests and handing out
meaningless journalism awards to itself, actually works as a silent partner
with government, never once investigating the genuinely important stuff. A
merged, corporate press has no interest in investigating a corporate
government, indeed it depends on government agencies for the leaks and
interviews and data access which make it appear as though it is investigating
and reporting day-in, day-out. It often provides the security agencies with
cover for their overseas operations, it frequently has hired them, sometimes
unwittingly, onto its staff, and it provides an outlet for the agencies’
disinformation, again sometimes unwittingly. And of course the corporate advertising
which sustains the press puts the scrutiny of many corporate matters out of
bounds, including many cozy and anti-democratic relationships with government
and its major agencies.
Just as there is a natural cycle in the life of great
industries – the scores of early American car manufacturers are now reduced to
a few functioning as an oligopoly, an historical pattern repeated in industry
after industry – there appears to be a
life cycle for a government organized like that of the United States. The duopoly
which runs the American government consists of two parties which differ in almost
no particulars except some social issues, but even that difference is rather a
sham because the American government no longer has any interest in social
issues. It is concerned overwhelmingly with representing and furthering the
interests of the nation’s three great power centers of the
military-industrial-intelligence complex. Social issues now are soap-box stuff
for street-corner politicians and members of NGOs.
But in any case, all players in this political duopoly, no
matter to which office they may be elected, know they can never challenge the
immense authority and virtual omnipresence of America’s military, intelligence,
corporate hierarchies and special interests like the Israel Lobby, powerful
anti-democratic institutions which literally shape the space America’s
politicians must inhabit.
Americans today quite simply could not vote in an informed
manner if they wanted to do so (and many are not interested in voting at all,
as we shall see): they are completely in the dark as to what happens inside
their government, both its operations within the country and in international
affairs. No one knows the full extent of spending on intelligence, nor do they
know what dark programs are underway. No one knows the full extent of spending
on the military, nor do they know to what questionable tasks it is being put
around the world. No one knows the immense extent and complexity of lobbying
and special interests in the American government. And of course no one is privy
to the planning and operations of the great corporations, nor do they know
anything of the dealings and financing arrangements between those corporations (or
the wealthy individuals who own and run them) and the people’s supposed
representatives, who all must spend a substantial part of their time just
raising money for the next election (the average American Senator is said to
spend two-thirds of his or her time doing just that).
Americans’ votes in elections have become to a remarkable
extent meaningless, although an elaborate political stage play keeps the
appearance of meaning and keeps those interested in politics involved and entertained.
Almost certainly as a result of sensing how little their votes count, Americans
often simply do not vote and do so in increasing numbers. The further down the
political totem pole you go from the presidential elections which generate the
most noise owing to the obscene amounts of money spent on marketing and advertising,
the greater is this truth. Maybe 60% vote for president, a minority vote in
other national elections, and a tiny fraction vote in state and local
elections.
For those who cherish rights and values won since the
Enlightenment, it is a disheartening prospect we face. A nasty bully, armed to
the teeth and endowed with a profound sense of entitlement and scant regard for
the other 95% of humanity, casts a long shadow over the entire planet. Not so
terrifying a figure as a Stalin or a Hitler, he is frightening enough, and his
insincere words about rights and values and fairness fool many as he proceeds
to do just as he pleases, including killing any individual on the planet he
decides in secret to be an opponent. It is indeed a brave new world, not Shakespeare’s
and something far grimmer than Huxley’s.
