One of the coldest political revelations I had in life was working for John Kerry in 2004 to get rid of George W. Bush and the American people voted for Bush. It was obvious to me that Kerry was preferable, still they reelected the moron who had invaded Iraq because Kerry was seen as weak. If the election turned on one constituency, it was suburban mothers supporting Bush, the women swayed by the commercial of a child on a soccer field who was shown to be vulnerable to terrorism. These women were called “security moms” and they voted their interests as they saw them and for a man who was if nothing else decisive, and who they believed had made America safer. That alas is democracy, people whose judgments I find wanting reach different conclusions than I do. George Bush was reelected because he had responded to 9/11 forcefully.
The overwhelming majority of Americans now support Obama’s decisive actions re Osama bin Laden for the same reason. We were attacked on 9/11. I don’t see how any society would respond differently than we have to the spectacular assault of 9/11, when thousands of innocents were murdered. Most societies would respond vengefully. And in the OBL case, the vengeance was seen as being just. This man was responsible, we got him.
I place myself in the Chris Hedges camp by temperament. I’m a writer, he’s got a religious orientation, he says that violence begets violence. I’m with him, and yet I don’t think we’ve had much influence in human history. So, more realistically I want to believe that Roger Cohen is right, and Jack Ross, that the destruction of bin Laden means that a disgraceful chapter in our history that brought out the very worst in us can come to an end. I hope.
The very worst in us… I do realistic posts like this sotto voce because I truly wonder whether progressivism, which is the creed of this site, can be reconciled with late middle age, which I seem to be entering. I think of Mark Twain a lot, who became misanthropic at this period in his life. At my age, he began his famously cynical story The Mysterious Stranger, about how damned the human race is, how we can watch with indifference as others are mutilated. I read the Sherburn chapters of Huckleberry Finn yesterday. Remember that Sherburn cruelly kills the drunk who is libelling him in the first scene right in the main square, in the sight of his loving daughter, and in the second scene when the crowd goes to lynch him he faces them down on his front porch and says they will only kill him at night in the dark because there’s not a man among them. It’s very dark; the lesson is that human society is a mob moved by passion and their morality will always wilt before decisive cruelty. As they respected George Bush’s decisive cruelty.
I do realistic posts like this sotto voce because I’m not a full-blown cynic; I believe in social progress or I wouldn’t be here. The essence of this site is the belief that there will only be peace in the Middle East when there is justice for the Palestinians. Osama bin Laden was moved in part by the Palestinian condition to do horrifying things, ten years ago. He was further evidence to support the State Department’s ’47 prognosis that Partition would produce unending bloodshed. So I hope that all that violence has produced some awareness in my country, and that in the next ten years, we’ll study not war but its causes.
