September 26, 2010
Dear Clusterflock
Prompted by this post at Snarkmarket by Tim Carmody, I’ve been pondering the differences and similarities between the U.S. post-9/11 and the U.S. during the uncertainties of the Cold War. I’m curious if our more-seasoned Flockers who grew up in that environment might speak to this comparison?
Is the threat of terrorism less rational than the threat of nuclear war or Soviet aggression? Are they both irrational? As we continue to demonize and scapegoat our perceived enemies, are we doomed to repeat electoral and cultural history? What has been gained and what has been lost?
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The chances of mass, species-extincting death seem much more remote with terrorism than with the Cold War, for me, anyway.
I dunno, Josh. One of the differences is that it was much easier to militate against some of the issues of the Cold War – in university I was a member of Project Plowshares, and I demonstrated against testing of the Cruise Missile in Canada. How does one oppose a diffuse and vague amorphous entity such as capital-T Terrorism?
One day in high school (I think it was 81 or 82) I was downtown when one of the town’s air raid sirens went off by malfunction or error. I was terrified that I was never going to see my family again, or survive the next hour, as I was convinced that missiles were in the air (I was an alarmist back then, y’know).
The mass fear and dread of annihilation I grew up in is difficult to convey to people younger than me.
So yeah, I’d say the threat of terrorism does seem less rational, and that the stakes are fortunately smaller now than they were then. If anything, terrorism is much more a constructed bogeyman than the previous threat.
I’m just glad that my daughters presumably won’t live under the same fears I grew up with.
I was born at the tail end of the cold war and remember the bomb / tornado drills we would have in elementary school. They could never quite figure out which we were practicing for — bombs or tornados. “Children, get under your desks.” Or we would line up in the hall, face down, next to each other.
There was a week where all the guys nutted each other with lunch boxes, too, but I think that had more to do with terror.
I remember the looks on the teachers’ faces when they saw us do this to each other. Oh the confusion boys can cause.
I think irrational people have irrational fears, even when the root of those fears (nuclear annhiliation) is a real possibility.
The cold war felt more dangerous. Most of that was “the bomb”, which had us turtled under school desks throughout the 50s & early 60s. Some was the machinations of both governments – Bay of Pigs and nukes on cuba. Shoe-banging and threats of “burying you.” McCarthy’s un-American activities witch hunts. Blacklists – that included actors for all gods’ sakes; there was no relief from the perpetual propaganda. We lived on the edge of a razor fought over by a couple of raging dry drunks. We all believed that the balloon could go up any minute.
The killing of JFK was both the end of it and a new beginning: the assumption was that the USSR had a hand in the assassination. Yet tensions reached a manageable plateau as both parties pissed on each other in Viet Nam. Fear of nuclear annihilation as a day-to-day reality receded.
The war on terrorism, however, holds no more fear for me than the statistical possibilities of death by car, plane, lightning strike or misplayed bowling ball.
Not to negate/mock the deaths of 9/11, or the sufferings of the families and friends left behind, but the war on terrorism is nothing more than a slogan designed to cover our outright theft of Iraqi oil. It is the cynical, calculated response to a large flock of chickens coming home to roost – bin Laden could have, should have been tracked down and killed within a year. The special ops folks could have, should have developed long term strategies to isolate and eventually destroy al- Qaeda as an effective guerilla fighting force: the CIA, in conjunction with the services, has been doing just this since the early 50s. (One of the most disappointing aspects of Obama’s presidency has been his enthusiasm for continuing the “war” in Afghanistan.)
However it is also safe to say that my disdain for GWOT arises from my comprehension of the marketing any WH Administration spews forth and being able to compare it – first hand – to past events. If I were school aged today, who knows? I hear that the Korean and Viet Nam conflicts are not taught in elementary and jr. high History…where History is indeed taught, instead of ‘modern civics’.
Rick – chime in here….
I, too, remember the “Duck and Cover” drills of the cold war days. I remember seeing my father going over plans for the building of a personal bomb shelter–and then not doing that anymore when data about the effect a single five megaton warhead would have on a metropolitain area was released. The lie of civil defense just couldn’t be sustained anymore. This kind of threat, though, seemed huge and general–similar to a great comet streaking toward the Earth that nobody could do anything about. The doom it suggested played into my hedonistic tendencies at the time.
9/11 gave me a sense of a different kind of fragility. It was like a story of a gnat getting into a machine and causing a tiny short that sets off a cascade failure. My sense of the status of apocalyptic fears in play now is that an always present element has become much more powerful: an actual desire for apocalypse–whether it be held by terrorists who think their best shot at long term power would lie in wiping the slate clean, crawling back out, and making a new push for significance, or American religious fundamentalists who see the “next” world as the real one and would be pleased to see god’s great plan expedited (as if his “need” for us to do that is not ironic). I am personally more fearful of the American fundamentalists, since they have become politically viable and this nation has more powers of mass destruction than any other.
What scares me most about ‘The War on Terror’ is the impact on the psychology of my fellow citizens. This country has gone nuts since then.
These are all great responses.
Deron, your last comment is probably what I was most trying to get at — the idea of whether there are similarities or differences in the American psyche from the Cold War to the GWOT. Growing up, I never really heard any laments from my grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, adults, etc. with regard to the irrationality of their behavior during the Cold War (I’m thinking specifically of the anti-communist attitudes that warped into blacklisting and the House Un-American Activities Committee. And here we are yet again, balancing over what could be another age of McCarthyism that substitutes Muslims for Communists.
Deron–yes. No sense of proportion anywhere. For instance, let’s kill a short list of terrorists–and spend $100 billion dollars each to do it. There is no asking about what actually makes the USA strong and what would be most likely to make it stronger. How many college educations could be paid for with $100 billion? How many free health clinics? How many micro loans for new businesses, not tied to the standard financial models for loans?
my impression, deron, is that the mythology of the gwot has been melded into the insane conflation of idiocies held dear by the tea-bagging fundamentalists that daryl referenced earlier. that this was initially aided and abetted by mainstream pols as an excuse for gov’t overrereaches (fisma et al) would be humerously ironic if it weren’t so damned dangerously stupid – we’ve blow a trillion off-budget dollars in the last decade to reclaim the idea of american exceptionalsim. myself, i would have put that money toward a crumbling education system, the infrastructure…you know, crap.
The older I get the more manichean I become: fear and rage, conjoined, are like bad water that will seep into any place it can. It generates in people a kind of release experienced in the destructive act, and many hold to it like a drug that is the only source of a sense of power–even when the harm fostered is sure to engulf them as well.
that’s an apt description of a willful child, daryl. one that’s not learned to think.
[...] Daryl Scroggins: I, too, remember the “Duck and Cover” drills of the cold war days. I remember seeing my father going over plans for the building of a personal bomb shelter–and then not doing that anymore when data about the effect a single five megaton warhead would have on a metropolitan area was released. The lie of civil defense just couldn’t be sustained anymore. This kind of threat, though, seemed huge and general–similar to a great comet streaking toward the Earth that nobody could do anything about. The doom it suggested played into my hedonistic tendencies at the time. [...]