An early look at the book I’m writing in Wales on 9/11, religion, and culture:
“Terrible thing, to live in fear. . . . All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t have to be afraid all the time.”
Red (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption
“I wish I wasn’t afraid all the time. But I am.”
Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), V for Vendetta
They flew into lower Manhattan out of a brilliant blue sunlit sky, two jetliners, glinting in the sunlight. It was incongruous—and remains so, in the videos we still sometimes see—how something so familiar could cause so much damage, could become the source of so much terror. Before September 11, 2001, Americans had felt largely immune to the acts of terror that have afflicted other nations around the world. But after the fiery collapse of the Twin Towers and attack on the Pentagon, after the deaths of office workers and first responders, our shock and anger were also accompanied by—and perhaps, prompted by—a deeper, darker emotion: fear.
We live in the world’s lone remaining superpower, we told ourselves. We spend more on defense than all other nations—friends and rivals—combined. And yet we had been hurt. Humbled.
In a world where planes piloted by blade-wielding terrorists could fly into buildings, Americans asked ourselves, what else is now possible? What is to prevent future attacks? How can we keep ourselves, our families, our nation, safe?
We came to the sad if perhaps long overdue realization that perhaps, for all our military power and economic might, we could not protect ourselves from all harm.
And we were afraid.
In the Oscar-winning movie Crash, Jean (Sandra Bullock), the wife of the Los Angeles District Attorney, stands in for many of us. If anyone should be safe from attack, she should. And yet, when she and her husband are carjacked, she is startled to discover that her wealth and privilege do not protect her from even the most basic assault. They return home, Daniel, a Hispanic locksmith (Michael Peña), comes to change all the locks, but Jean now sees threat everywhere. She takes one look at Daniel and tells her husband they will need to change the locks again, because “your amigo in there is gonna sell our key to one of his homies.” And although Daniel is one of the movie’s moral centers, a gentle and generous man, Jean’s world has been knocked off its axis; although she is safe, what she sees is danger. What she sees is the need for better, more secure locks.
In that, she would not be so different from other Americans. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans were told our entire way of life would change. A major new agency, Homeland Security, was created; time-consuming screenings changed our travel habits; danger charts set (permanently, it seems) on Orange reminded us that the danger of another terrorist attack was always high; at occasional moments, officials would announce intelligence of a possible terrorist attack–or the foiling of one–and our fear would roil again.
Historian Ruth Rosen noted a year after 9/11 how the attack was a shattering of illusions of safety, and how, in the wake of it, we desperately wanted to trust our president and our government to keep us safe from further attacks. What happened, she said, was that “our leaders have taken advantage of our fear. The Bush administration has planted the seeds of a security state that can, without judicial oversight, congressional opposition, and popular resistance, grow into a repressive government.” Rosen quantified the possibilities in this way:
In the name of preventing terrorism, the Bush administration has employed a politics of fear to create the most extensive national security apparatus in our nation’s history.
Military tribunals. Mandatory registration. Mass detentions. Electronic surveillance. Government secrecy. Executive privilege. Office of Total Awareness. Perpetual war.” [1]
And fear had put all of these elements in the mix back in 2002 before we even knew of Abu Ghraib, renditions, spying on Americans, and squads of assassins.
Importantly, however, we should note that these are not partisan charges. Many of them continue under the Obama adminstration. Dan Gillmor is one of many commentators who notes that some of the most egregious examples of expanded presidential power from the Bush era are still in use by the Obama White House, and that civil libertarians continue to fear that we could slip into a police state. “Most depressing of all,” he writes, “the majority of the American people would probably welcome such a government. Our preference for the illusion of safety over the recognition and acceptance of risk has only grown. We are a society too afraid of our own shadows to confront reality.” [2]
Although encouraging a terror of terrorism was begun in the Bush White House, promotion of fear has not been limited to strictly official channels. What Corey Robin has called “Fear, American Style” demonstrates that once American elites have settled on the source or sources of fear they wish to foreground, that emotion can and will spread through both state power and through every institutional and incidental avenue. [3] Some examples of the pervasiveness of fear are instructive: though violent crime actually has fallen nationwide (it actually fell throughout the 1990s, and except for slight ticks in 2005 and 2006, continues to show declines), many Americans believe the opposite is true. [4] Public perceptions of crime, as the Wall Street Journal notes, have yet to square themselves with the facts. [5]
But the common media elements of our contemporary life militates against our putting fear in its proper place; around the clock news and local TV both inform us first about atrocities committed anywhere around the globe (as you may have heard, “If it bleeds, it leads,” is the credo of local TV journalism). If a child is snatched in another city or a bloody murder is committed in another state, it is committed to memory. If a bomb goes off in a square in Baghdad; if a terrorist group claims credit for an attack in Jakarta; even if some fundamentalist bonehead fails to blow up a plane with the bomb in his pants, it dominates news cycles and the diatribes of talking heads, and the grim sum of all of this is that we believe the world is a dangerous place, even as, for most of us, the chances of our being the victim of violent crime or terrorist attack are slim.
[1] Ruth Rosen, “Politics of Fear,” San Francisco Chronicle Dec. 30, 2002. Accessed at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/30/ED192178.DTL&hw=Ruth+Rosen&sn=020&sc=240
[2] Dan Gillmor, “Dear Mr. President: Please abuse your powers,” Salon June 22, 2010. Accessed at http://www.salon.com/technology/dan_gillmor/2010/06/22/obama_abuse_civil_liberties
[3] Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 163.
[4] Jerry Markon, “Violent crime in the US on the decline,” Washington Post May 25 2010. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/24/AR2010052402210.html
[5] Evan Perez, “Violent Crime Falls Sharply,” Wall Street Journal May 25, 2010. Accessed at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704113504575264432463469618.html
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