Monday, October 11, 2004

Terrorism as Nuisance: War on Terror vs War on Terrorists Kerry is being pilloried again by the bankrupt liars because he said he hoped that one day, through proper prosecution of the war on terror, that fear of terrorism would no longer dominate American political life. During the interview in the NY Times Magazine, Matt Bai said "This was a word that Kerry came back to repeatedly in our discussions; he told me he would wage a more ''effective'' war on terror no less than 18 times in two hours of conversations. The question, of course, was how. Later came the quote Republicans love to hate: "When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.'' His crime, to the Republicans, is not being apocalyptic. Let's try to talk about this using Lakoff's frames.   First, the "War on Terror".  War invokes a total effort, no compromise, life threatening.  Terror invokes mass panic and destruction--daily lives lived in fear.  Together they create a sense of a powerless population--one that is totally dependent on a strong, tough authoritarian leader.  The combination of the war on terror meme with the fight against evil meme, which is the other part of this apocalypse, creates a situation where total subordination to authority is demanded of all "good" people. Kerry, who would do well to invoke a different meme, has at heart a radically different view.  I would call it "War on Terrorists".  He is saying we will strike out against terrorists (individuals) who attack us, and we will pursue them until we are victorious. Because we are fighting terrorists, not a global, apocalyptic evil, we can afford to fight them in a smart, effective way:  bribing rulers to turn them in, building intelligence alliances that compromise their networks, and building a global consensus that terrorists must be isolated and hunted. Eventually, in the war on terrorists, the remaining few become less and less powerful, become less and less of a threat, and so eventually we have peace again, with an occasional deranged action by an isolated terrorist. Such actions by definition are local, contained, and minimal. What infuriates the Bush Liars is that this meme, the "war on terrorists", does not require total subservience on the part of the American people-- it only requires that we all act together in the best way possible. It does not require a division of the world into good and evil.  Like all other moral quests, the pursuit of good happens quite independently of the war on terrorists.   It happens in eradicating aids, in providing health care, in expanding opportunity. With the war against terrorists, none of these other pursuits are crowded out. So-- our answer to the cry of Cheny and Bush should be that we fight the "war on terrorists" more effectively.  They have taken their eye off the ball, and diverted America into a quixotic crusade against evil that has cost thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars, and has made us the target of more terrorists, with more support, than they had on 9-11-2001.  Their "war on terror" was a total blunder, driven by an apocalyptic ideology and political opportunism, that led them to mistake wishes for reality, fiction for fact, and fantasy for reality. To fight terrorists, we must wake up from the nightmare of the Bush apocalypse, and fight "terrorists"  as the weak individuals they really are, so they do become no more than a nuisance to us.   11:26:56 PM   comment []

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