Fri, 2007 Nov 30
Trust-Fund Tussle
I’m at Moe’s, eating my burrito, trying not to think of the stomach bug I’ve had the past four days. The news on the muted TV seemed an okay distraction (I wasn’t up to actual conversation). At some point, I looked up and saw in large letters “The Voice of Evil”. This was shortly followed by a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Given this photograph (and the Fox News logo), I’m assuming that the “Evil” entity referred to in the headline was bin Laden.
Mull that over a moment. Bin Laden. Capital-E Evil. I mean, yeah, the guy’s a selfish asshole, but “The Voice of Evil”. Do we really want to give to bin Laden the status of Sauron (or even the Mouth thereof), of Satan, of Voldemort, of, dare we suppose, Palpatine? Yes, I’m jesting a bit here, but all of these have a status–for at least some people–of being/representing evil incarnate (side note: think the “mythical” Satan here, the way he’s viewed culturally; otherwise, we could open a whole can of worms). So, what’s the problem with adding bin Laden to this group? All of these also have a particular psychological power, by virtue of being Evil. All, in their contexts, while powerful, suffer significant weaknesses, but these tend to be overlooked because of the way these entities are perceived.
By seeming bigger than life, the Evils have two major psychological powers:
1) The ability to draft others to fulfill their selfish plans. There may be a “cause” involved, but more significant is that other “bad people” draft off of the prevailing fears of this being.
2) Fear. Because this entity is Evil, I can conceive of he, she, it, or they doing anything to me. If I accept that conception, it inspires exceptionally strong fears.
We in the US have indeed granted Bin Laden a portion of both these qualities. That I would even consider the war in Iraq as more valuable to my personal safety than doing something about Interstate cell-phoners (and, I am admittedly an Interstate cell-phoner myself, although I try to keep it to a minimum) is irrational. But that irrationality is based on a fear of a repeat of the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, that this fear actually garnered support for the Iraq war is clear evidence of this irrational power (No, I still don’t know what they supposedly had to do with each other).
To make matters worse, that fear is continually placed specifically in the persona of Osama bin Laden. If I attribute to bin Laden the status of Evil, I resign myself to accepting his role in my life and culture, regardless of any real connection. As the war against Al-Qaeda has failed to materialize, the pundits have pushed the idea of bin Laden as a great Evil as an excuse for his continued real power; if we will instead acknowledge that the Bush administration in particular (and many others in general) mismanaged their post-9/11 offensive, bin Laden loses power. We could instead focus on an improved scheme for eliminating both the current offensive abilities of terrorist groups and the social, economic and political issues that make these groups attractive to a given population.
So let’s consider what bin Laden is if he is not Sauron. Bin Laden is a trust-fund kid. I don’t know much about his personal life, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he got interested in politics and religion out of a combination of boredom and wanting to prove himself. Pride, idleness and available resources is a most dangerous combination (by the way, it rather concerns me that the primary disciplinary action in modern Western culture is forcing idleness on people who have just had their pride hurt).
The current war on terror can then be seen as a pissing match between two trust fund kids. In that light, a second definition of Evil appears. This is the type of Evil that the rivalry football team is. “The Fighting Carrots are evil”, might say a member of the school on the other side of the state. Most times this is in jest, but an insult placed wrongly can turn it ugly. If such a rivalry definition of evil can be turned for political gain, it will be. Consider the Cold War. Certainly the USSR’s government did some evil things, but the “communism is evil” has a lot of the rivalry sense; indeed it’s hard for me to interpret “the space race” in any other light. Folks like McCarthy saw the political potential and acted to turn communism from a rivalry evil (if only in part) to an Evil.
There is a natural conclusion to this: Vietnam. To generalize, creating an Evil for political (or “news entertainment”) ends generates conflicts with no reasonable particular purpose or well-defined goal. People lose their lives fighting an Evil that is at worst no more than a rivalry, at best a sociopath with lots of guns who could be better dealt with if we acknowledge what that entity really is.
I don’t know if I could, but I’d like to say I’d be willing to sacrifice my life to end Al Qaeda’s ability to kill people (note that I don’t know how to go about that, which is partly because even writing this article I struggle to mentally separate that goal from Iraq). I’d even like to say I could sacrifice my life for the creating a more secure environment for Iraqi children, although I’m confident I have no idea how to that (dividing Iraq into multiple independent states might be a decent start though). But I am not in the least willing to lose my life fighting a mythical Evil that has some theoretical connection to Iraq. And that is so hard, to see a list of those who have died who, yes, fought very real problems, but who, from the perspective of the Bush administration and much of congress where ultimately fighting an Evil that is a product of press releases.
Epilogue: This point isn’t central to my above article, but I think it bears mentioning, if only because it might clarify some of the above thoughts. It’s early year in the 2008 election season (not that you’d know it was still early from the five-nightly debates), but I have done some thinking about the candidates. Up until tonight, preparing to write this article, I hadn’t seen any reason for caring that Clinton is a woman. Sure, if all else was equal, I might vote for her above a man just because I enjoy seeing stupid traditions fail, but I can’t see where her being female would affect her governing decisions in significantly different way than the male candidates.
Tonight, though, I see one possible arena. I’m a guy, and I know a lot of guys, and I know that rivalries are something we guys tend to get into. Blowing those silly rivalries way out of proportion is something we also seem to enjoy. That any male president could think of bin Laden as a rival, could transfer that rivalry onto Hussein in order to get on “more comfortable turf” is not so surprising, because rivalries are an element of the (a?) cultural “man” role in the US.
I would like to think that a woman president might have been more likely to take the 9/11 attacks as an attack on a family (in this case, the US population in general) rather than as a point in a “my dick is bigger” match. If this is accurate–and it may not be–it may help explain something that has been bothering me about Clinton. Overall, I feel she would be an excellent president, except for what has seemed to me to be excessive support of the administration’s (flawed, in my opinion) response to 9/11. However, I may need to rethink this, because I suppose I have been assuming that her response is based on a rivalry philosophy. If not, her execution of that response, as the Executive, may be entirely different.
