Exile and the prophetic: Boston and the drone wars

This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

As I write, the airwaves are full of the Boston Marathon bombings.  Clues and suspects are being turned up. Our over-hyped surveillance society has it all recorded.  It’s only a matter of tapping businesses and the citizenry who save every image we create.  The drumbeat is incessant.  Bring us your every image so we can catch the criminal in our midst.

The lesson:  Everything that follows us, follows them.

What would we do without brave columnists like Thomas Friedman challenging terrorists to bring it on?  We stand tall.  In fact, we’re standing taller already.  Schedule the next marathon, Friedman opines. Schedule it sooner than later.  Show them what America is.  Show them who Americans are.

As for terrorists – those “cave dwellers” Friedman evokes – yes that language hasn’t gone away, well you know what’s in store for them.  Cave-dwellers-speak is the essence of Friedman’s warrior mentality.  If we couldn’t call them cave dwellers, who and what would the civilized world – us – be?

For God’s sake, mourning and introspection would be giving over our civilization to them. 

After all, according to Friedman, Americans “run in the open on our streets.”  Where cave dwellers run isn’t so obvious and Friedman doesn’t tell us.  Or, worse, if you can imagine, perhaps the cave dwellers don’t run for exercise.

Imagine a society without runners, out in the open, on the street.  Yet another sign of how uncivilized they are.

Listening to the radio, NPR isn’t much different these days. 

Where does Friedman begin his column?  You guessed it – Israel – and a Hamas bombing Friedman witnessed in Tel Aviv a decade ago.  He quotes with satisfaction the police spokesperson who said to him:  “We will have this whole area cleaned up in two hours.  By morning, the bus stop will be repaired.  You will never know this happened.”

Friedman is invigorated by this resolve.  You can feel his adrenaline pumping.  Israel is a model we need to emulate.  Israel knows how to take a hit and move on.  After all, with all its faults, Israel is civilized, too. Like us.

On the other side of the globe – yet originating here in America where people run for exercise – the drone wars continue.  And the debate drones engender.  What are the constraints on our violence?  There are many other places in the world where the police have to clean up.  So, we will never know it happened?

Here’s Maureen Dowd on the CIA’s debate about the “angry birds.” Over the winter she heard military commanders and White House officials “murmur in hushed tones about how they would have to figure out a legal and moral framework for the killer robots executing targets around the globe.”  Now it’s coming into public view via, of all people, Rand Paul.

Unlike Friedman the official tones are hushed.  Nonetheless, the language is similar isn’t it? Clean it up, legalize it – so, we will never know it happened?

Dowd quotes President Obama on legalizing and limiting drone strikes – thus placing drones inside the Beltway dressed up in a legal framework:  “One of the things that we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place and we need Congressional help to do that to make sure that not only am I reigned in, but any President is reigned in.”

The difference between us – the civilized – and them – the cave dwellers? Our violence is authorized.  Legal.  Has to be.  Otherwise the difference between us/them might be blurred.  Imagine usthem becoming one and the same?

The news cycle and commentaries on the Boston Marathon and drones reminds me of Albert Camus who wrote in The Rebel:  “One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood.”  Camus continues:

In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror’s chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and the judgment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment.

Camus ends his reflection with the following statement worth contemplating:  “On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence — through a curious transposition peculiar to our times — it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself.”

Camus wrote this in 1951, my whole lifetime away.  Yet we’re dealing with the same issues, albeit in ways he could never have foreseen.  We, the technologically, exponentially hyped-up ones, the vanguard of the new era, the Thomas Friedman’s of the world, have donned the apparel of innocence. Rather than cleaning it up, we, too, are called upon to justify our claim to innocence.

Disguised Innocence – criminality dressed up – is rampant.  We live in an age where planting bombs to teach others a lesson to those in power or for no reason at all and where remote controlled drones attack targets are decided upon by the powerful with their skewed vision of the world or no vision at all.  

The model of civilization – the difference between us and them?  We clean it up.  As if it never happened.

These curious transpositions desperately need a re-thinking in (un)hushed tones.