Fighting (And Losing) The Last War...In Bunny Slippers, No Less

    It occurred to me --- as I untied my hiking boots in the airport so they could pass through an x-ray machine in order to add yet another layer of spurious safety to the mass illusion known as "Homeland Security" --- that I was fighting the last war.
        You know, as in that old axiom of futility, "Generals are always planning to fight the last war"?
    In the 1930s, the generals of France were preparing to fight the battles of 1914-1918. In the 1910s, they were preparing to refight the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. And when American generals squared off for the Civil War, the big shots were hooked on the doctrines of Napoleon and Jomini.
    And so it goes, back to the first hominid who was counting on teeth and claws -- until his opponent picked up a rock.
    America, the battle of the Shoe Bomber is over. Al-Qaeda is as likely to send over another sneaker attack as it is to buy tickets for another five Arabic-looking guys with box cutters. It's not likely to send another tender full of kaboom out to a U.S. Navy vessel in a Yemeni port, either.
    Strangely enough, Japan didn't spend the rest of WWII trying to sneak up on Hawaii, either.
    In fact, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 have something in common besides the obvious: Both were the opening gambits of limited-objective wars.
    Japan didn't imagine it could "conquer" America, any more than Al-Qaeda imagined that 9/11 would "defeat" us. Japan's war planners hoped to sink enough of America's Pacific fleet to buy many months' grace for its occupation and fortification of oil-rich Southeast Asia. They gambled that, by the time we were ready to strike back, their position would be too strong to make war worth our while.
    They gambled wrong.
    Osama and company's 9/11 objective was not to conquer America -- as if! -- but to reap tremendous political profit in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda bet that America's overkill response would galvanize anti-imperialist, anti-Western elements from Algiers to Sarawak.
    They bet right.
    End of war.
    That's right. In a limited war, the player who achieves his war aims and is alive to tell the tale is the winner. Al-Qaeda got what it wanted (i.e., a hell of a lot of publicity and recruiting momentum) and we didn't. (We didn't get Osama, we didn't get all the Taliban, we didn't get a stable Afghanistan --- hell, we didn't even get to keep our allies' sympathy.)
    War is an instrument of policy, and unless you are so cynical as to believe that neocons in the Bush Administration knew of and welcomed a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil (as an answer to the prayers of the Project for a New American Century) you have to concede that the "War of 9/11" --- including the Battle of the Shoe Bomb -- is a done deal. The Bush Administration certainly thought so, as it settled for far less than Osama's head on a pike and started a brand-new war of its own.
    It's worth noting that the essential strategy of terror/guerrilla warfare is to tie up maximal amounts of your enemy's manpower, wealth, resources and strength-of-morale at minimal effort and cost.
    I got dizzy, waiting for my shoes to be screened, when I tried to calculate the extra hours expended by all the Americans who would have to arrive hours early and wait in airport lines that day so they could give up their toenail clippers and penknives (while the smokers among them were permitted to carry on high-tech lighters that would have made Richard Reid a successful martyr). My head swam, imagining the sky-high stack of dollars being spent on airport security measures and forces -- not to mention on Homeland Security pork projects like far-from-the-border Border Patrol stations and infrared goggles for the East Nowheresville Volunteer Fire Department -- that aren't doing a thing to protect us against the next war.
    But individual Americans, I noticed, are often more flexible and foresightful than their leaders. The man in the picture, glimpsed in the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky airport, had embraced the Transportation Safety Administration's recommendation that air travelers wear slip-on footgear. Since we're forced to facilitate our own full-body frisking, why stop with shoes? Like Americans everywhere who'd happily surrender a few "rights" to score some "security," he's ready to slip out of something more comfortable...

--- HistoryBuff

More On Border Patrol's 'Whiteness Checkpoint': NY Public Radio

    Pat Bradley of Albany-based WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, reported today on growing opposition to the proposed permanent Border Patrol presence in Hartford, Vt. (see earlier post, ‘The Whiteness Checkpoint’). Here’s a link to an MP3, which includes a soundbite from yours truly.

--- HistoryBuff

Christo's 'Gates': A Perfect Moment For Content-Free Public Art

    Perhaps it was a bad idea for a history buff to approach "The Gates," Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Feb. 12-28 installation in New York's Central Park, by way of Columbus Circle.
    The roundabout at the park's southwest corner is, after all, a monument to consequentiality: Atop his 40-foot pillar, Christopher Columbus looks around Manhattan like the guy who made all this possible--- which, in some measure, he is. Though he's now dwarfed by the innovative architecture of telecom corporate HQs, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas still demands his props. (So does gilt William Tecumseh Sherman, guardian of the park's southeast entrance: To rate one of these spots, you have to either discover a new world or burn down an old one.)
    And entering the park by the circle's Merchant's Gate is like running a referential gauntlet. The major distraction is the U.S.S. Maine Memorial, a 1913 massif carved with the names of the crew of the battleship that blew up in Havana Harbor in 1898, providing the dubious pretext for the Spanish-American War. (Headlines screamed, "SABOTAGE!"; later investigations whispered, "accident.") But statutes, plaques and commemorations of various kinds are everywhere, especially when you reach the foot of the Mall and step into the arcade of curling elms and bronze penmen known as Literary Walk.
    Of course, by then we'd passed between several hundred of "The Gates"' 7,500 bright orange paired pylons, and under an equal number of flapping, bright-orange clouts of nubbled synthetic fabric. They were pretty, despite the fact that the advertised "saffron" orange wasn't really all that far off from everyday U-Haul orange. The light of a bright winter afternoon sometimes filtered through the drapery to impart an orange glow to park pathways. And how could all that effort at outdoor dress-up not be cheery? Yes, it was a $23-million effort, admirably organized and engineered, but the park would likely have been quite as beautified by so many hanging flags of all nations, or donated quilts, or super-size beach towels printed with poems from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”
     But of course, "The Gates" was devoid of all such possibly divisive or limiting or ennobling content, and so was merely, and quite pleasingly, pretty.
    Surrounded by statues of Shakespeare and Byron, Halleck and Burns -- none of them great statues; but then again, I'd venture to predict that "The Gates" won't make anyone's 21st-century Top 100 in 2099 -- it was hard not to question the meaning of meaningless public art. Central Park itself is an artwork, a huge, evolving "installation" of a complexity and profundity that makes "The Gates" seem like a pencil doodle. And its content is a sermon on citizenship and civic virtues. "The Gates" succeeded, I think, because they invited us to celebrate this treasure--- but in that sense, they had no more intrinsic meaning than the gallery light that shines on the "Mona Lisa."
    What does it mean that we're embracing public art that, of itself, says nothing to the public? What does it mean that the most prominent recent proposals for meaningful public art -- e.g., the World Trade Center rebuild and the WWII memorial on the mall in D.C. -- are specimens of bombastic kitsch?
    Well, "art" that isn't about anything is the ultimate escapism. And kitsch is, in the main, the art of egregious self-congratulation. Neither intends to say anything accurate about who and what we are. (By contrast, though Columbus, Sherman, Shakespeare and the other Central Park statues are more or less hagiographic, they do proclaim our intent to embrace their works.) As the first celebration New York has thrown for itself since 9/11 (New Year's Eve doesn't count; it's for the cameras), the content-free "Gates" seems to say... "Let's not think too hard."
    And that DOES ring true. Public art -- once devoted, as was Cleopatra's Needle, the 2,500-year-old Egyptian obelisk set up by the Metroplitan Museum, to the details of history and the ideals of civilization -- may have to play it safe in a society currently devoted to accepting the indefensible. How does one design a monument to preemptive attacks upon weak and distant neighbors? To nonexistent WMDs? To the government's bold assertion of the right to torture and hold without charge foreigners AND U.S. citizens? Columbus symbolizes visionary daring; Sherman, God's "terrible, swift sword" scything slavery and rebellion. Who would care to be cast in bronze as the embodiment of our brave attempt to exercise direct control over the lion's share of Middle Eastern oil reserves?
    And since it's considered disloyal to even mention that last motivation -- despite its prominence in pre-war neoconservative game plans -- and since all the offered excuses for invading Iraq fell apart, this is a remarkably content-free war. Such a conflict can only be prosecuted by a nation with a remarkably content-free collective consciousness.
    And that does seem to be what we're becoming. Francis Fukuyama got "The End of History and the Last Man" wrong. He thought that free-market capitalism and liberal democracy had triumphed over competing ideologies (e.g., Soviet-style communism) and that capitalism and liberal democracy would co-reign over the future. He somehow didn't foresee that --- sure as the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a U.S.-China superpower struggle -- capitalism and liberalism, left all to themselves, would not co-exist but duke it out. And right now, capital is hitting liberal democracy right where it lives: in reason, information, memory and debate.
    It was one thing for the Hearst papers to shout incendiary half-truths in 1898, when any major city had several important newspapers offering in-depth coverage of the truth's other halves. Today, FOX News is the only "news" source for half of a non-reading nation, and informs that half so badly that most still do not realize Saddam Husseim had no WMDs and nothing to do with 9/11. The slice of all network news time devoted to reporting (high overhead) international and national stories of consequence is now much smaller than the whopping helping devoted to (cheaply produced) lifestyle and local crime segments, and it's shrinking to the size of a parsley garnish. Capitalism is unmaking journalism, dismantling the Fourth Estate. The bottom line is that content costs too much -- and that's fine, since a lot of that content would only embarrass and inconvenience the very corporations that own the news media. News-wise, history-wise, we're entering an era of extremely noisy silence, of bright, quick cuts to emptiness.
    Walking back out of the park, out of "The Gates"' blank orange blare, I passed the Maine monument again. This time I noticed that the names of officers and crewmen on its northwest side -- carved just 92 years ago -- were already almost illegible, smoothed away by acid rain.

--- HistoryBuff