In a New York Minute
Walter A. Davis, MWC News Editor in Chief

“That void where the towers once stood is meant to be a place that visitors can fill with their thoughts, and reflect on what America lost that day.”
Laura Sydell, NPR

Speak, Memory

Is being an innocent victim something that changes with history?  It was, I suppose, possible five years ago today for many Americans to occupy that position.  All that was needed was a certain naivete or blindness about the historical meaning of Bush I’s proclamation that “the American way of life is not negotiable.”  I.e., maintain ignorance with respect to the actions of the western powers in the Middle East and it was easy to not see 9-11 as payback.  

But before going any further I must point out that the previous sentences do not amount to support for the act of terrorism that took place that day.  They do not entail support for bin laden or al-Qaida or Islamic fundamentalism, etc.  What they constitute is an overture to the responsibility of citizens in a democracy when faced with a traumatic event; namely, to develop an understanding of the history that contributed to that event.

But then the last 5 years have been quite an education in the latest chapter in the colonial adventure of global capitalism in the Middle East. (Again, I must add that saying this does not mean one supports the Islamic fundamentalism of Bin Laden etc.  My position, as you’ll see, is opposed to both sides in the current conflict.)

But let’s move to such august issues slowly.  And concretely. What is 9-11 and what does it mean to “remember” it?  For Bush and Company it remains a trauma to be exploited to advance the cause of what is now clearly a fascist agenda. At the same time the mainstream media trot forth a bevy of mental health experts to help us find a way, in commemorating it, to resolve this trauma.   9-11 is a blank check to be filled in Bush and Company with as many as have to die to win that battle against “terror” (or what is now repeatedly termed “Islamofascism” ), a battle which Cheney told us will last 50 or more years.  (See the article below by Gideon Polya for statistics on how many have already had to die in this cause.) But 9-11 is also a ritualized memory in which with each passing year the American people are healed again from a traumatic wound that will otherwise eat away at the national psyche.  We must, we are told, commemorate the dead in a way that will enable us to put them aside and get on with the business of living. 

All that was needed was a certain naivete or blindness about the historical meaning of Bush I’s proclamation that “the American way of life is not negotiable.”  I.e., maintain ignorance with respect to the actions of the western powers in the Middle East and it was easy to not see 9-11 as payback.

But before a trauma can be resolved, it must be constituted.  And that is precisely the thing we have refused to do.  As a trauma that cannot be resolved 9-11 has the power to expose all the central contradictions both of our politics and of the war on terror.  Instead, it is exploited to fulfill what is the primary gesture of ideology.  Lacan and Zizek refer to it as “the forced choice.”  This happens whenever one is manipulated into accepting the lesser of two evils under the idea that one must choose one side or the other.   The deep ideological function of the choice is thus twofold: (1) to trap us in a false alternative in order (2) to prevent our developing the only authentic position—one that breaks with both sides.  By way of illustration.  The elections of 2006 and even more of 2008 will be framed as a choice between “staying the course” (McCain) and the leftist threat posed by daring “radicals” such as Lamont.  The two dominant responses to the trauma of 9-11 will thus serve as the hidden cause of politics as travesty and avoidance. And as a predictable result liberals in the Democratic party will eventually find a way to get wet for Hillary Clinton as she finds her way toward some revisionary middle way.

The whole thing will be a sham from start to finish.  For here’s the proper equation.  Iraq is about Oil is about Global Warming. All elections henceforth should turn on the environmental crisis.  The forced choice merely keeps that issue either off the agenda or far enough on the margin that it can’t intrude to disrupt the shoddy game played by politicians of both parties and the mainstream media in forcing a choice on us that assures one thing: the crisis of global warming will have become irreversible before it will work its way onto the agenda because, as Bush I said, “the American way of life is not negotiable.”  I.e., we must get the oil to keep the cars running that gets the consumers out to a suburbia teeming with WalMarts.

But this forced choice hides behind another the one that keeps us all paralyzed. For, indeed, World War III has begun.  But the forced choice isn’t between democracy and terror, good and evil.  It is between global capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism.  And it is here that we must reject the forced choice we are offered if we are to reject all the other forced choices that flow from it. 

The Anniversary Waltz   

But all the above is so theoretical. 9-11 calls for simplicity and directness.  Perhaps even for aphorism as the only way to dramatize the argument outlined above.

Thus:

The forced choice merely keeps that issue either off the agenda or far enough on the margin that it can’t intrude to disrupt the shoddy game played by politicians of both parties and the mainstream media in forcing a choice on us that assures one thing: the crisis of global warming... 

(1)The greatest contemporary film is Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. It was shown at the Pentagon after 9-11 as an instructional film in how to fight terrorists.  For other audiences it offers an unprecedented opportunity: namely, to identify with the “terrorists” and their cause by seeing that what one ideology (of state and now global terror) labels terrorism is for many people the only action available in a war of liberation against colonialism. To see this film is perhaps to identify with the terrorists.  (The film was banned in France for decades.  Spike Lee, Steven Soderberg and Oliver Stone all credit it as the film that changed their life forever.) 

(2) Is there any justification for violence? Ever? And specifically for violence that brings suffering and even death on “innocent” victims?  These are complex ethical questions. But the fact that we can pose them—and construct a-historical, transcendental ethical answers to them—reflects the privileged socio-economic situation that most of us inhabit.  For us violence is an ethical question, and one that we answer by and large by refusing to get our hands dirty.  But for some people violence is an immediate necessity, the only way to preserve oneself and to resist one’s oppression.  Historical situations and the purity of ethical absolutes: is this too a forced choice?

(3)Well, that question involves another far more concrete one. Is murderous violence always wrong or are there certain situations where it is a moral responsibility? Is this another forced choice or perhaps the primary ethical choice that we all face?  Though we do all in our power to find some way to deny or avoid it.