by John Kilgore
Terrorists have turned down the heat in my office. After the attacks on September 11, the economy took a header, tax revenues in Illinois declined, and the University's budget was cut. One of our cost-saving measures has been to turn down the thermostats all across campus. Supposedly this heat recision is targeted to just 68 degrees, but the register in my office, perhaps in an excess of patriotism, has taken us as low as 63.
So now when my grandchild—gender still unknown, due in three weeks or so—gets old enough to ask, “What did you do in the War on Terror, Granddad?” I will know just what to say: “Kid, I hope you never have to go through it. I sat in my office and I shivered. There were days when I never took off my sweater vest.”
Of course, I may have opportunities for more substantial heroism before then. I may be within fifty miles of ground zero when someone finally sets off a backpack nuke. I may be on the wrong airplane, anywhere in the world, at the wrong time. Biological weapons may finally reach the steep part of their development curve, the way computers did thirty years ago, with the result that North America once again becomes safe for the wolf and the buffalo. But in any of these cases, unfortunately, I will not be around to brag.
Shiver, shiver.
If I can joke about such things, however lamely, it is a measure of the relative calm and good fortune that have prevailed since September. The Taliban has come down like the rotten house of cards it was. Our bombs have mostly hit the bad men with bandoliers and turbans, not the hungry children in hospitals. Despite several mysterious national alerts, no further attacks have taken place in the U.S., encouraging the cheery thought that the CIA or FBI must actually have thwarted a plot or two. Nuclear weapons have not been detonated in Islamabad, New Delhi, the West Bank, or Detroit. Most of the world is still mostly on our side. Normalcy has so far resumed that a single death—Daniel Pearl’s—can preoccupy us for weeks at a time, and Gary Condit is back in the news.
But any tendency toward celebration gets cut off at the knees by the macabre unpredictability and disconnectedness of this postmodern “war”; and by the suspicion that security itself may be the most dangerous of emotions. Secure self-confidence is what we felt on September 10, 2001 and on December 6, 1941. It is what Europeans felt in the spring of 1914, on the brink of a two-stage apocalypse, after a century of peace and progress. Feelings of security are dangerous. Much better to bet on paranoia, which has performed splendidly since August 6, 1945. My generation grew up with the ghastly unspoken conviction that World War III was past due any time after 1966, and that when it came it would be over in an hour or two. As long as we believed this, it didn’t happen: faith healing in reverse.
But if we no longer believe it, will it happen after all? And is paranoia really paranoia if you hope it will protect you?
As the splendid little war in Afghanistan winds down, the question suddenly upon us is, “What next?” In the State of the Union address, the President seemed to answer all too clearly, defining Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—famously by now, in a phrase certain to appear in future history textbooks, if there is a future—as an “Axis of Evil.” As Hendrik Hertzberg noted in The New Yorker, this very calculated language tropes on both of our last two major wars, the short hot one that defeated the Axis powers from 1941-1945, and the long cold one that vanquished the “Evil Empire” of global communism from 1945-1989. Just short of an ultimatum, it is language to threaten foes with, language to rally your own troops by. Tough, tough talk, the merit of which, frustratingly, can be assessed only in the light of information not publicly available. Jimmy Carter has said it will “take years to repair the damage” done by the phrase; but since September 11 it is hard to question the wisdom of pre-emption. If Saddam Hussein really does have fully weaponized anthrax and sleeper operatives with valid crop-duster endorsements on their pilot’s licenses, the President’s language is not too reckless but too cautious. How is anyone to know?
What an English teacher can do, though, is analyze metaphors; and from this angle, things don't look so good. Mussolini’s original phrase referred just to Germany and Italy, and so made good geographical sense in view of their midway position between Russia and the western Allies. An “axis” is the thing at the center, around which other things revolve. The figure no longer worked visually when Japan came into the war, but persisted through usage, even among the Allies, who perhaps began to construe it differently, as referring to the centralization of power within the fascist states. (Conceivably there was even a buried pun on the axe bundled up in the Roman fasces, from which fascism got its name.)
Right off, Bush’s recasting of the figure confronts us with two troublesome incongruities: the impossibility of seeing anything axis-like in the position of these three countries on the map; and the vast disproportion between such rogue states and the terrifying fascist empires of the early twentieth century. Try to envision Saddam or Kim Jong Il in Hitler’s place, and you get a cartoon: tiny feet in huge boots, sleeves flapping down past the fingertips. The whole thing has the feel of imprecision and anachronism, of misplaced and slightly meretricious enthusiasm. At worst it looks like sheer scapegoating. In this frontless struggle against faceless infiltrators, this environment of random and sporadic but increasingly lethal violence, “bad nations” are no longer the essential problem, and I had thought that Bush, in September and October, was saying as much, when he warned us to prepare for a long, obscure, twilight struggle. Now there is the fear that he may be reverting to the tattered script of World War II, with its compressed time frame, clear end-game, and satisfying catharsis.
This is to the say that we may be hunting for a nationalist solution in a post-nationalist world. Even before September 11, I would have argued that bad nations were not so much humanity’s worst problem, nor even such other promising contenders as racism, social injustice, environmental degradation, drugs, or religious fanaticism, but finally weapons, the worst demon in a horrific bunch. The shift has been a long time coming. From the first, really, weapons have imposed a terrible literalism on what sociobiologists call “threat behavior,” precipitating homo sapiens into the role of killer when all he truly wants is to howl and pound his chest a bit. The problem has grown worse with each turn of the technological wheel, till finally it hardly matters whether we are filled with loving-kindness or not: we have simply grown too dangerous. After the Columbine massacre, someone said, “We have always had angry, crazy young men; the difference now is that they can get automatic weapons.” In just the same way, the cataclysms of the twentieth century can be parsed as fundamentally technological rather than nationalist or ideological. The heart of the dilemma is not how badly nations or creeds have hated each other, but the efficiency with which weaponry has translated such feelings into mountains of corpses. Of course it is hard to account for the full bestiality of, let's say, Nazism and Stalinism in such terms; but those creeds and others like them stemmed in part from the trauma of "excess lethality" on the battlefield, and their butcher bureaucracies played a role analogous to that of modern weapons, facilitating murder while diffusing reponsibility for it.
All this is old hat. But since September 11 it seems that the principle must be broadened to include not just weapons but technology in general, our whole modern way of life. It was not nukes that brought down the twin towers, but box-cutters, airplanes, and above all what looks less like religious fanaticism in the old sense than a new technology, perhaps more fearsome than all the rest: I mean that set of repeatable methods whereby various modern organizations (including our own military) can now produce efficient, reliable, high-quality killers. Nuclear weapons have played a paradoxically beneficent role since 1945, but no matter. Nineteen programmed psychotics can still inflict 3,000 deaths. Not much earlier, it took just two lunatics to kill 166 in Oklahoma city. The line on the graph still seems to end in the world of Dr. Strangelove, where the only thing required to end everything is one man’s madness.
Forgive me my fears, my pettifogging. But it’s cold in here, and I find too little comfort in echoes of Ike and Reagan, in an effort to isolate problems of enormous scope and complexity in specific countries. Teeing off on these quaint, hellish little regimes may not stave off the unimaginable and may even hasten its onset. The worry that worries me worst, when the icy blast from the register really gets cranking, is not just that Bush and Cheney and Powell seem a bit stuck in the past, but that it may be the wrong past altogether. In their sober, laconic, can-do, who’s-next approach to global terror, they seem at worst to have gone all the way back to Clausewitz’s mad dictum that war is only “the pursuit of policy by other means.” That, of course, is exactly what war is not: a comprehensible process, a tool that can be rationally applied, a means to foreseeable ends, or anything but a last resort. Do they understand this? Have they remembered how often splendid little wars were prologue to ghastly debacles? Do they know the devil they are dancing with?
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With the exception of our 58-page Agoranthology in October, 1998, this is the fullest Agora ever: testimony (as ever) to the energy and productivity of our Department, but also to the easy expandability of web pages. The contributions speak so well for themselves that the briefest of comments should suffice here. Graham Lewis shares with us two poems from his winning entry in the Illinois Arts Council grant competition last year, Gothic pieces whose spooky beauty will make you shiver enjoyably with something besides physical cold—then sleep with the lights on. "Dissident Voices" by Bill Searle, who unlike me has been to war, is a portion of the impressive body of scholarship he has since devoted to the Vietnam experience. The essay shows a very admirable sympathy for those we once called the enemy. Chris Hanlon's edgy, well-informed, and extremely readable essay on the "virtual university" is also an exemplary demonstration of web scholarship, conducting you to all sorts of interesting places when you click the footnotes at the end. In her interview with me, Angela Vietto tells how to construct your own 1100-page authoritative anthology with nothing more than vast knowledge and four years of eighty-hour weeks. And in the Prologue to her new novel Darkroom, Mary Maddox out-Grahams Graham, with a teaser whose too-true rendering of drug violence may get you turning on all the lights in the house, even as you yearn to read the rest of the tale.
So click on, everyone, and enjoy. As before, I will be grateful for any advice and feedback you can give me. Are these pages showing up readably on your browser? How do I turn off table borders in Netscape? Why do the colors on the Dreamweaver palette all seem so ugly? If you know, let me know.
Next time out, we launch our special "Friends" issue. Remember that John, David, and I are eager to see work that you have recruited from your colleagues at other institutions. Bookmark this site, and let us hear from you.
—J.K.