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June 17, 2005
There's a War On
I was thinking a few weeks ago that the United States is not really at war - not in the sense of an active engagement with a named enemy. We're not just not in a total war, as WWII or the Civil War, but also not in a war in which the majority of the people seem to realize, on a daily basis, that there are high stakes for which we (in the sense of our military, in any case) fighting and dying. But before I could put this in any coherent essay form in my head, Gerard Vanderleun beat me to it:
Over the decades since Vietnam, our media has evolved into a self-sustaining series of institutions that literally cannot see anything other than their internal elite reality. This would be benign if they did not also have the power to inflict it on others. The destruction of this power is the real pivot on which the political fights of the next decade will turn.Unless we run out of time in which to entertain this cute little internal cultural and political squabbles. Unless, of course, many of us wake up one morning to find that there is, after all, a real war on -- one that can reach out and kill us at will.
In this manner, it is both tragic and yet hopeful, that our current war, in order to be really on, waits upon another September 11. For, it is clear now as it has been for sometime, that nothing absent another significant attack on the homeland will wake us from our media induced stupor.
[snip]
So, in the final analysis, what will it take for America to wake up and to stay awake, and to finally and at last, "know there is a war on?"
Quite obviously and without a doubt, it will take thousands of dead American civilians, men, women and our children. They will die here on our soil. They will be your family and your friends and your neighbors.
That is precisely what it will take. Not one body more. Not one body less. And although our enemy will be at fault, we will have nobody but our own weak and fat souls to blame. After all, we won't be able to say we didn't see it coming this time.
I agree with Vanderleun that the Bush administration squandered the American will to fight that 9/11 awoke. This requires stoking; Americans are not naturally belligerent as a people (though our elected officials often are), and this has been President Bush's one massive failing. And, like Vanderleun, I fear that the only way to change the image of the war is to suffer another attack on the magnitude of 9/11, or worse. But I hope that, rather than being a "losing police action[]", we can win the war abroad before our will gives out and before we suffer another catastrophic attack on America.
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