The America Syndrome Read online

  I was by no means immune to this mass panic. The subsequent anthrax attacks from New York to Florida only heightened my anxiety. But what really pushed me over the edge was a short article in our local paper about a rental car traced to one of the 9/11 bombers that had been spotted at a nearby nuclear power plant the summer before. The clear implication was that terrorists had been scoping out the plant as a potential target. The reliability of the evidence was debatable for this story and for the other reports that suggested the terrorists had considered targeting nuclear plants,36 but the article nonetheless triggered the nuclear fears of my childhood, fears that I probe further in Chapter Three. For me, the panic induced by 9/11 got bound up with images of atomic explosions and radiation. We kept emergency supplies in our car in case we had to flee suddenly.

  Over time I realized my emotions were getting the better of me, and getting in the way of a sober assessment of the causes and consequences of the 9/11 attacks. I was falling into yet another apocalyptic trap, but how could I get out of it? Looking for answers, I began to study how national security fears are produced, work that culminated in an anthology I co-edited called Making Threats. One chapter in particular provided the insight I needed to spring the trap—sociologist Jackie Orr’s concept of the “militarization of inner space.”

  Orr uses the term to describe the “psychological organization of civil society for the production of violence.” While US military and civil defense agencies have long been in the propaganda business, after 9/11 the militarization of inner space took a new form “with the language of psychology itself, of emotional and ‘inner’ experience . . . immediately deployed in public discourse about the attack and its aftermath. A reductive, repetitive discourse of trauma, healing, and recovery displaced the complicated realities of violent historical and political conflict.” Instead of a serious reckoning about the high price of our foreign policy in the Middle East, we were encouraged to engage in a kind of “therapeutic patriotism.”37 “Every American is a soldier, and every citizen is in this fight,” Bush proclaimed a month after the attacks.38

  Was the focus on mass trauma a psyops campaign perpetrated by the Pentagon and Bush administration? Maybe, but probably not. More relevant are the ways trauma was already well-planted in the American psyche.

  In 1980 the American Psychiatric Association added Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, to its classification scheme of mental disorders. The PTSD diagnosis grew out of studies of Vietnam War veterans, Holocaust survivors, and sexual violence victims. PTSD became a valuable diagnostic tool for treating people directly affected by serious or life-threatening accidents and catastrophic or violent events, but in popular culture it soon lost its sharper edges and became overused. All sorts of stress and anxiety began to be conflated with trauma and its aftermath. In encouraging Americans to feel traumatized by 9/11, the media drew on this cultural propensity. The effects were widespread enough that the US government’s National Center for PTSD issued this correction: “Exposure through electronic media (e.g., televised images [of] the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center) is not considered a traumatic event.”39

  It didn’t help that government leaders themselves were freaking out. Journalist Jane Mayer traced Vice President Dick Cheney’s paranoia in the aftermath of 9/11 to his participation in Cold War nuclear attack drills during the Reagan administration in which he spent days in an underground bunker as part of a secret government team.40 Other senior administration officials, including the President himself, were frightened sick by daily security briefings based on the “Threat Matrix,” an unfiltered list of potential terrorist threats based largely on rumors and unsubstantiated information, whose “catalogue of horrors” and “daily looming prognoses of Armageddon” made policymakers ever more terrified of Islamic extremism.41

  The result was that the Bush administration came to see terrorism as an “existential” threat, capable of destroying the country and civilization itself. Accompanying this institutionalized paranoia was the fear that if policymakers didn’t take all potential threats seriously, then they would be held responsible should one actually materialize.42 “Not on my watch” became the order of the day. In the throes of trauma, both real and manufactured, Americans were susceptible to the rising apocalyptic alarm coming from the administration, as were most of their elected representatives in Congress.

  Predictably, cynicism grew as time wore on. The administration may have been in the grip of paranoia in the first months after 9/11, but afterwards the Bush–Cheney team proceeded to play the apocalypse card for all it was politically worth: the Patriot Act, color-coded terror alerts, birth of the Homeland Security leviathan, the war in Afghanistan, and finally the trump card—the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In retrospect it may seem astonishing that they got away so easily with leading the country into a major war on the basis of blatant lies about connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda, alongside false claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Astonishing, that is, until one considers the power of their propaganda machine. George W. Bush may not have had the Hollywood magic of Ronald Reagan, but he turned out to be a master of strategic PR.

  In The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Frank Rich describes how the Bush administration systematically fed the press false stories, infomercials, and infotainment, all produced at taxpayer expense, to sell the public on the war on terror. A covert Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), that included representatives of the Army’s Psychological Operations Command, opened in the Pentagon by the end of 2001. Its mission was to plant “helpful” news in foreign media outlets, with the assistance of PR firms. After it was exposed by the New York Times in 2002, the OSI was forced to shut down, but its activities were dispersed elsewhere in the Pentagon bureaucracy.43 Presaging the Trump administration’s manufacture of fraudulent “alternative facts,” in a now-famous interview with journalist Ron Suskind a presidential aide—probably Karl Rove—expressed his disdain for what he called the “reality-based community” of journalists who pursue the real facts on the ground. It’s “not the way the world works anymore,” he declared. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”44

  In the 1990s, major changes in the news industry had already weakened the “reality-based community” of journalists. With the advent of cable TV and its 24-hour news cycle, the news format shifted from serious reportage to entertainment. The media crafted a “problem frame” to churn out scary stories that would titillate viewers. Echoing the morality plays of a bygone era, this framing highlights dangers and threats, exaggerates the number of people they impact, and touts solutions that typically involve the courageous efforts of the forces of law and order. “Fear is more visible and routine in public discourse than it was a decade ago,” media scholar David Altheide wrote shortly before 9/11. “Indeed, one of the few things Americans seem to share is the popular culture that celebrates danger and fear as entertainment organized with canned format delivered through an expansive and invasive information technology.”45

  The same decade also saw the growth of a “military-media complex,” featuring increased use of satellites for both military and communications objectives, target-based cameras that bring the shock and awe of aerial bombings straight to your TV screen, and appearances by retired military officers as news commentators.46 The “embedding” of journalists with military units during the 2003 invasion of Iraq cemented a relationship that had already grown incestuous. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has embedded with the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq, wrote about the result: “We are observing these wars from just one perspective, not seeing them whole. When you see my byline from Kandahar or Kabul or Basra, you should not think that I am out among ordinary people, asking questions of all sides. I am usually inside an American military bubble. That vantage point has value, but it is hardly a full picture.”47

  Hardly a full picture, indeed. How little Americans have come to know—or been allowed to know—about the terrible human costs of our invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Brown University’s Watson Institute estimates that from 2003 to 2015 at least 165,000 Iraqi civilians died from direct war-related violence, while twice as many probably died from war’s indirect effects on systems that provide food, clean water, and health care, bringing total civilian deaths to about half a million. In the same period, around 8000 American soldiers and military contractors lost their lives.48

  THE BATTLEGROUNDS OF PERMANENT WAR

  The US defense establishment has become so powerful that it operates—in the words of Michael Glennon, international law scholar and former legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—as a “double government,” effectively independent of Congress, the judiciary, and the executive branch. In the sphere of national security, constitutional democracy has become more and more a charade.49 Always looking toward new threats to legitimize its financial and political power, the military-industrial complex generates a constant stream of worst-case scenarios to terrify elected officials, like the rest of us, into compliance.

  Preparations for such scenarios are rehearsed again and again by government agencies and their civilian counterparts, sometimes making them seem all too real—especially to those left out of the loop. An anti-terror active-shooter drill at New York’s JFK airport, which happened to be held on the very day of the terrorist attack on the Brussels airport in March 2016, took the Port Authority police by surprise, putting officers and the public at risk. In August 2016 a false report of gunfire at JFK’s Terminal 8—probably triggered by waiting passengers clapping enthusiastically while viewing the Olympics on an overhead screen—prompted a multi-agency counter-terror response that evacuated two terminals and caused mass pandemonium.50 Even though the risk of dying in a t
errorist attack in the US remains infinitesimally small—one in four million under present conditions51—most Americans have become convinced that they or a family member could be next in line.

  The fact that the US is now by far the largest military power on Earth reinforces American exceptionalism, the belief that we are a special and superior nation, with an ordained mission to save the world.52 Yet that heady sense of confidence is hard to sustain when there are few real victories to celebrate in America’s permanent war. Soldiers return, not to jubilation in the streets, but to long waits at VA hospitals and mounting casualties from suicide. A recent spate of nostalgic movies about World War II may have done well in the box office, but the bells of freedom and justice ring hollow. The martial music playing in the background instead sustains fears of future terrorist attacks. American exceptionalism has come to mean that the population must be rendered exceptionally afraid. If there were a fear thermometer, Americans would likely be the most feverish people on Earth.

  A vicious cycle is in play. Blowback from the war on terror continually throws up new enemies to be vanquished, enemies with twisted apocalyptic ambitions of their own that in turn stoke our fears. Al Qaeda and other jihadi groups had virtually no presence in Iraq until Bush’s war plunged the country into chaos, creating a power vacuum for extremists to fill. Today, even George W. Bush says his main regret about the war in Iraq is that it set the stage for the rise of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State.53

  Pentagon officials describe ISIS as an organization with “an apocalyptic, end-of-days strategic vision.”54 Among the beliefs that ISIS propagates is the prophecy that the Day of Judgment will arrive after Muslims defeat Rome (now a stand-in for Western powers) at al-A’maq or Dabiq, two places near the Syrian border with Turkey.55 The group’s grisly beheadings of infidels and hostages give a medieval cast to its otherwise modern methods of warfare, including advanced weapons systems and the use of social media to recruit new adherents. An ISIS Twitter account, “End of Times Dreams,” influenced an American who attacked a Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland, Texas in spring 2015. Social media are particularly well-suited to spreading apocalyptic ideas. Their fast pace compresses time and distance and communicates imminence, and they provide a virtual but intimate reality where people can experiment with transgressive world views.56

  Domestically, permanent war encourages the tightening of borders and the further militarization of domestic law enforcement. Author Todd Miller describes how Customs and Border Patrol grew after 9/11 into the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. Previously housed within the Department of Justice, in 2003 the Border Patrol moved into the new Department of Homeland Security, with an expanded mission to protect the country from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. The $18 billion allocated to border and immigration enforcement in 2012 was more than the combined budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies. The allocations have been a windfall for the manufacturers of weapons, surveillance technologies, and construction materials, creating a new phenomenon: the Border Security- Industrial Complex.57

  The border has expanded even as it tightens, becoming an “elastic frontier” that stretches inwards and outwards.58 The idea of a border line, epitomized by the fence between the US and Mexico, disguises the fact that the Border Patrol has extra-constitutional powers in wider border zones within 100 miles of our land or coastal boundaries. With the additional integration of local police into immigration enforcement and workplace raids, the security apparatus now extends across the length and breadth of the country.

  In partisan Washington, this militarization has been a bipartisan affair. Even as he wooed Latino voters, Obama deported more immigrants than any previous president.59 If Trump’s dangerous rhetoric on immigration is put into practice, he will undo what small progress the Obama administration made on immigration reform—such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—while further militarizing border enforcement and sanctioning mass deportations and rights violations, such as the Muslim ban he ordered only a week after his inauguration in January 2017.

  These developments contribute to the further militarization of inner space, bringing the apocalyptic imagery of war to the no-longer-safe homeland. The physical distance shrinks between the embattled desert landscapes of the Middle East and those of southern Arizona. In both places, Predator B drones hover overhead, and checkpoints are manned by men with guns. No bombs have been dropped on Arizona yet, but the forest fires stoked by climate change lend hellish pyrotechnics to the scene. Meanwhile, on the northern edge of the country, post-industrial cities like Detroit and Buffalo come to represent post-apocalyptic wastelands in popular culture. In addition to the war on drugs in such cities, there are now surveillance operations and raids of immigrant communities.60 These undermine the positive efforts of those communities to revive abandoned neighborhoods and rebuild local economies.

  The arming of local police with surplus weapons from the war on terror adds another dimension to the militarization of the homeland. M16s, armored vehicles, night-vision goggles, surveillance aircraft—all may belong to a police department near you. In Ferguson, Missouri they were on display in 2014 against those who took to the streets to protest the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

  Of course, it’s not only the state that perpetrates a culture of violence in America. The power of the National Rifle Association to block gun control, even bans on assault weapons, in the aftermath of mass shootings in schools, sparks moments of public outrage that quickly dissipate into despair when nothing really changes. Access to assault weapons turns the actions of homegrown, mentally unstable would-be terrorists from small-scale events into mass murders. Omar Mateen, who attacked the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando in June 2016, killed 49 people and wounded 53 in the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Even that wasn’t enough to overcome the power of the gun lobby. As despair breeds dystopia and dystopia breeds despair, a powerful undercurrent of anxiety is always there, ready to be tapped. What’s next, if you can’t even be sure your own kids are safe at school?

  THE AMERICA SYNDROME

  I name our apocalyptic bind “the America syndrome.” The syndrome is so normalized that its abnormalities are scarcely recognized. Ideology and psychology have spawned a national pathology of global significance. Although its parts are closely intertwined and the whole is much more than the sum of its parts, one can identify core elements of the America syndrome. These elements don’t define all of American history nor do we all share them. They’re dominant traits, not universal ones. I call them the Seven Deadly Synergies:

  1. American exceptionalism. The Puritans bequeathed to us the confidence and hubris that we are God’s chosen people, called upon to save the world. America is at the center of the moral universe.

  2. Belief in a coming apocalypse. Pessimistically, we are headed toward a violent end. Optimistically, a golden millennium awaits us. In either case, history is an unfolding prophecy, and time itself runs on a spiritual clock.

  3. Susceptibility to sermonizing. Perfected by the Puritans, a powerful form of political sermon called the “jeremiad” continues to keep us trapped in the America syndrome. It castigates us for our sins and calls for repentance so that we may renew ourselves and fulfill the promise of America.

  4. Expansion, occupation, and empire. This land is our land, not yours or theirs. To reach our God-given destiny, war is just and extreme violence justified. To ease moral qualms, we paint ourselves as victims, and the victims as perpetrators. We also see our enemies as racially, ethnically, and religiously inferior to the white Protestant ideal.

  5. Exclusion, inequality, and duality. In order for the chosen people to be who they are, they must distinguish themselves from those who they’re not. Those who don’t conform don’t belong, and should be punished or banished. Hierarchies are sanctified by the invisible hand of God as well as the invisible hand of the market. The world is sharply divided between good and evil, friend and foe.