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Pen Points
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Kill the Mad Dogs
BuckcuB has had several private emails, as well as
reading some posts on various Internet lists, suggesting that
the United States should not respond to the terrorists'
violence with violence of our own. Buck realizes that
these folks have their hearts in the right place. But
let's stop to think, for a minute.
A few acquaintances abroad wrote to remind BuckcuB that America is viewed by many, even many of our friends, as a symbol of world-government domination and capitalist excess. Perhaps that is true. But is it a good enough excuse to murder six thousand innocent civilians? No. Others wrote to say that America must maintain the "moral high ground," must show restraint, must scrupulously avoid harming even one innocent civilian in our response. Does anyone seriously think that these terrorists will be impressed by a show of restraint, or give us even grudging respect for maintaining the moral high ground? Come on -- these are people who deliberately set out to murder innocent civilians, here. This isn't some fancy little Cold War dance of detente -- this is kill-or-be-killed. We welcomed these murderers to our country, as we welcome all who come here. No other nation has the sign on its very doorstep that we have here in America - -- the goddess Liberty, not a statue of some famous hero or some revered leader -- and she is inscribed with these words, of which most people know only the last few lines: "Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame, "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" The "Mother of Exiles" stands in New York Harbor not far from the destroyed World Trade Center towers, the symbol of America's hand outstretched to the world. This is hospitality on a scale unrivaled on the planet. How did these terrorists repay that trust, that welcome, that hospitality? With cold-blooded murder. If your houseguest cut your family's throats in the night, how would you respond? With restraint? BuckcuB doesn't think so. There is no other response than violence to animals who understand nothing else. Still, some have written to BuckcuB reminding him that there's no way to fight terrorists who believe that if we kill them, they will awaken in the arms of Allah. Well, if necessary Buck guesses we will just have to provide them all with a one-way ticket to the arms of Allah, and with post-haste speed, too. You do not try to reason with a mad dog. You kill it.
Lastly, BuckcuB would remind those abroad who disapprove in advance of America's likely retaliation - -- it is easy to criticize us, but notice that there is little criticism when your nations come to us with your hand out, asking for aid and money because of some terrible natural disaster or crop failure or military coup. You get that aid and money. We have yet to turn anyone down, even our enemies. We are not criticized for trying to be "the world's policeman" when it is your countries struck by terrorism, or teetering on the brink of war, or in the grip of some mad dictator, and you turn to America to remedy the situation. We help in those instances as we have always helped when asked. Now we need your support. It is time to make some repayment on all that aid and help from America. We will have vengeance. It will be a just vengeance, and however extreme it may seem to some remember that it might have been far more extreme. There were those here who said we should demand the surrender of Osama bin Laden and if he was not produced with 48 hours, then we should reduce the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina to radioactive rubble. And we might have done so, and no nation could have done a damn thing about it if we did. Let's all try to remember that "restraint" is and must be a relative term. If you want to have something to say about America in this time of shock and horror and sadness, let it be a prayer for the victims and their families, not criticism of our politics or judgment on our military policy. It is not our fault that madmen have finally awakened the great dozing lion of the United States, roaring deafeningly with fury, claws unsheathed now ready to rend and slash in retaliation. It is the fault of the monsters who goaded that lion once too often -- and, this time, too cruelly to ignore. BuckcuB Gathering the Fragments: War, Peace and Health Care Tuesday, September 18, 2001
We will remain vulnerable even if we rebuild all the monuments of wealth and power in underground bunkers. Not only in public and in political meetings, but in silence and solitude, we might ask if we really wish to be members in good standing of this empire -- whose economic and military borders are marked on no official map of the world. Raising this question may be judged out of order at this time, or may even be construed as disrespect for thousands of people who just wanted to get through another day of work and go home. But if this question is not raised now, then when? The nation (as one headline informs me) is binding up its wounds with red, white and blue. Ann Coulter, volunteering for service in the pages of The National Review (September 13), has no doubt about the proper course of action now: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war." Leaders of the religious right have pointed a finger of blame at sodomites, feminists and civil libertarians, but believe that anyone who shelters such people is also near to danger. By a similar though seemingly secular logic, whole nations may become proper targets in the search for terrorists.
The point now -- though "centrist" pundits are paid to deny it -- is that apocalyptic extremism is by no means limited to the podiums of right wing think tanks and the pulpits of hellfire churches. It is by no means the specialty of youngsters wearing black bandannas and smashing a few corporate windows. It is now, on the contrary, the moral consensus among influential sectors of the religious and political establishment. Thomas Friedman lost no time announcing World War III in the op-ed pages of The New York Times. In the same paper, Clyde Haberman invited the United States to follow the moral and political example of Israel, since terrorist actions (so he argued) end all argument. And then there is that voice from the deep, Lance Morrow, whose exhortation to the nation was appended to a special photographic supplement of Time magazine: "What's needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury -- a ruthless indignation that doesn't leak away in a week or two." In these preachings and pronouncements there is no fear of God, since all the given premises lead to only one conclusion: Actions we make with limited human and historical judgment are quite simply the Last Judgment. The moral to this story as to every other is likewise familiar: America has done and can do no wrong. Count me out. Not because I do know the will of God and they don't. Now is a time when many of us can say simply, "I don't know -- but that doesn't mean the people in power know better." Now is a time when we have a right to say "I will not," when journalists are issuing military commands, and military commanders are sounding like journalists. Count me out. Not because I'm a pacifist -- on the contrary, limited military actions are one reason we maintain at least the democratic ideal that the power of the military should also be limited. Yet many of those now shouting from podiums and op-ed pages know no limits, and can be trusted only to advance their own careers. They issue commandments not like prophets come down from the mountain, but like gods in their own right. They will go the way of all flesh, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In the meantime, they do their best to speed others to their doom. They reason that there will be many funerals and there should be many flags; and since there are many flags there must be all the more funerals. For the sake of world peace, and for the sake of punishment within human limits, many of us would prefer that those responsible for crimes against humanity should stand before an international tribunal. We might also hope that Kissinger will yet have his day in court -- he and others whose sleep and digestion haven't been much troubled when great numbers of civilians were driven under the wheels of empire. Count me out because a strong dissent from this temporary "national consensus" is necessary. Count me out because I mourn all those many moments of decision in which individuals take orders to treat civilians as collateral damage -- and then go on to carry out those orders. Count me out because no good cause is served by forgetting human history before September 11, as if those hijacked jets had truly appeared (as we say) out of the clear blue sky. Count me out because one act of barbarism does not justify another. Indeed, as Ann Coulter reminded us, "we carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians." Whenever such people come to the defense of civilization, they use that powerful and dangerous word "we" in just the way that ought to make we, the people, think twice. Count me out because a choice was also made to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities, once the choice had already been made to round up Japanese American citizens in tar-paper shacks after Pearl Harbor. And in this chain of events many other choices have been made -- "inevitably," so we are often told -- to hold the entire populations of other nations hostage to our own foreign policy. Count me out because I do not support the devastation the United States has inflicted on Iraqi civilians -- not only by means of conventional weapons, but by means of a brutal and sweeping economic blockade.
Count me out because the delegations of the United States and Israel walked out of the recent International Conference on Racism and Xenophobia. And they dared to argue that the political agenda was too contradictory? What else could it have been? By walking out, those officials were taking no principled stand whatsoever; they were only making the point that their own power must be above debate.
And count me out because this one queer with AIDS refuses to vote for the "viable candidates" who create and enforce such policies. The parties of big business would rather put all of sub-Saharan Africa on a morphine drip rather than provide serious medical aid across borders. When skyscrapers collapse and bury thousands, then we watch, we remember, we mourn. Does it follow that now is not the time to remember so many other tragedies, so many other acts of brutality? I have a duty to remember the bipartisan politicians who wouldn't set foot near the AIDS Quilt even when it was on their doorsteps, and I mourn the thousands who die daily of AIDS in places without camera crews. I must keep in mind that this nation's leaders speak now of deep wounds in the body politic, but were complacent during the early decades of AIDS. What's more, there were people in power who never considered counting most of those dead of AIDS among "innocent victims," and there were men in pulpits telling us we weren't dying fast enough. As the death toll mounted during all those years, the rhetoric of many in public office did not suggest that we, the people, had been deeply wounded, but only that a nation was being purged of the usual suspects. The people killed on September 11 did not deserve to die, and those who killed them deserve to be punished. But the fiction of unstained American innocence serves no good cause. On the contrary, it only further enflames a global conflict that began long before September 11 and will continue long after -- even if we leave no stone unturned in Afghanistan. If we don't find the very folks we're looking for in desert bunkers, then what next? Do we rain punishment on workers and peasants already struggling under a reckless regime? Do we grind the faces of the poor in the rubble? Undeniably, this nation has the power to do so. Or maybe we will think twice about the real global price of imperial power. The guilt for the terrorist attacks on September 11 belongs only with the terrorists. But the responsibility for the causes of war and violence has to be shouldered within and beyond borders. Only those with the most fanatical faith can see office buildings explode and find apocalyptic satisfaction in the spectacle. Yes, we are under judgment, but not as the fundamentalists here and elsewhere judge. As an outward drama, everything that passed on our TV screens seemed like a movie -- many have said so by now, which is very telling in itself. Arnold Schwarzenegger's new film, Collateral Damage, is now in suspended animation. Rather than savor this irony (since irony always comes too late) we might wonder why we did not always find disaster movies disgusting, rather than merely tasteless at this point in time. We exercise restraint in releasing a movie, and then we may unleash the military with a clearer conscience. What might we learn from all such spectacular evidence? Perhaps that everything outward, taken inwardly and in the right proportion, is a kind of medicine for what ails us, though of course no patient lives forever. But Reverend Falwell (and others like him, all on the public record now) have simply proclaimed, "Oh ye of little faith, the bad news is never bad news. It's all Good News!" No one gets through this life pure, no one gets out of this world alive. That knowledge must be endured even in times of relative peace, and is truly no cause for optimism. But once this knowledge becomes as enduring as the next breath we take, then it also becomes ground for hope. Evangelical Christians sometimes speak of finding a verse of scripture that became an open door into a new life. In that spirit, here are several words from the gospel of John: "Gather up all the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." Nothing once known can ever be entirely lost as long as we have life and reason. That is real cause for hope, even if we can't silence the steady drumbeats for war. I attended a meeting of health activists last night -- one of the congregations in which I find my own faith. There are, of course, legitimate worries that a nation on high alert may treat civil liberties as dispensable luxuries. These concerns could only be raised, not thoroughly addressed, in a meeting which ran a full three hours. There we were, a roomful of energetic and intelligent people, and it's fair to say that we long ago reached the consensus that a war economy is not good for health care. But that consensus remained idealistic, and had not been thoroughly tested by the harshness of history -- even the Gulf War, and the armed conflicts in other regions since, have not yet had quite the transforming effect throughout all social movements that the Vietnam War had for a previous generation of activists. That is a historical observation, not a moralistic scolding for the young -- who are teaching older folks like myself many other lessons from their own experience. In the wake of September 11, however, we did not reach consensus in one meeting of roughly thirty people that this movement for health care must also become a movement for peace. Yet the discussion was principled, and will continue. Presently, thousands of interfaith and ecumenical events are planned or happening all over the nation. If we participate as radical health care activists, then we should not let priests and ministers define the agenda. Our message has to be much more pointed and specific than universal good will -- which makes good religion, but bad politics. (At least some priests and ministers would agree.) If a global epidemic helped to teach us that sex, race and class are health care issues, as surely as are medical research and drug marketing, then now is the time to forge practical links of solidarity between health and peace activists alike. We have, in truth, a common cause. You have no patience with three hour meetings, but can write checks? Do so. You can't make big donations of money, but can make a donation of labor? Do so. You are reluctant to speak your mind right now? Then don't be surprised if demagogues claim to speak for you. After September 11, all of us who hope and work for social change must also change our own worldview and practice. The consequences of terrorism and of imperial power are not theoretical, but altogether a clear and present danger.
In sorrow and solidarity, |
Protests in Pakistan against military action by the United States 
© 1997-2002 BEI