We have reached the point that the idea of liberty, an idea relatively recent and new, is already in the process of fading from our consciences and our standards of morality, the point that neoliberal globalization is in the process of assuming its opposite: that of a global police state, of a terror of security. Deregulation has ended in maximum security, in a level of restriction and constraint equivalent to that found in fundamentalist societies.
–Jean Baudrillard, “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,”
reprinted in Harper’s Magazine, February 2002
Dear Editor,
Sorry to have missed my column deadline. I got delayed at the airport. I was intending to write about the progress of the war on war. I wanted to write about how similar are the wars of words being used in the war on terrorism, the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy and the war on hunger. I had intended to explore the ramifications of terms like “axis of evil,” “triumvirate of terror,” “parasites” and the concept of “taking no prisoners” (just detainees).
If I hadn’t been delayed, I meant to talk about the war stories we’re telling ourselves. That the Geneva Conventions aren’t such a big thing. There’s just no time for Miranda rights. Civil rights are just not needed. Got to break a few rules to enforce the law.
I was thinking that maybe I am just behind the times. While I wasn’t looking, we moved on to less law, more New World Order. It’s sort of a military order, as it turns out. It’s a religious order too, what with our taxes becoming tithes for Faith Based Initiatives, Soldiers of Fortune and born-again Armies of Compassion.
But order it is, and you’ve got to admit, an ordered society is a nice and tidy one. Enemies are secretly and sanitarily disposed of. The media are controlled to provide only uplifting images of clean conquest and happy, grateful multitudes. Noisy protesters are swept into neat piles, like leaves. The government encourages village snoops and urban gossips to volunteer their infinite time and darkest thoughts as a way of keeping the rest of us in line. And I don’t know much about Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai, but you’ve got to say this for him: that bias-cut green silk tunic worn over relaxed-fit, wool/linen blend trousers has become “le must” of the fashion world. No wonder Bush is up for that Nobel Peace Prize.
Anyway, that’s what I was going to write about, but I didn’t have time because I had to take a flight to Philadelphia and I was late because the old man who lives on the next block put his head in my car window as I was about to drive off and he wouldn’t remove it while he told me all about how he’s our new neighborhood volunteer-for-victory monitor or some such, and he wanted to take an inventory right there and then of any supplies I might have in my house that would be useful in case of national emergency. Any gas masks? Generators? Cell phones? Cudgels? Axes? Prescription drugs?
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“Band-Aids,” I offered politely. “And could we possibly do this another time?”
“How many people live in your house?” he persisted. “And didn’t I see you pushing a baby carriage the other day?”
“Not in many years,” I say.
“But I’m sure it was you,” he pressed. At that instant I was visited by a very clear image of him on the witness stand. He is white-haired and gentle-eyed, firm-voiced and credible. Even I wanted to believe him so much that I forgot that I had not yet been charged with anything.
When I finally got to the airport I went through the abasements of security, a ritual cleansing of the sort practiced at maximum security prisons: I removed my shoes. I took off my coat. I held out my arms. A guard in a rakish blue beret bestowed apologies like a rain of blessings as she wanded my armpits. “You have an underwire in your bra?” she asked. “You mind if I feel?”
It is hard to be responsive to such a prayer with any degree of grace. It is ceremonial, I know, a warding off of strip-search hell. “Not at all,” I intoned, as though singing in Latin.
Another agent was going through my bags. He removed my nail clippers from the intimacy of my makeup pouch and discarded them in a large vat filled with hundreds of nail clippers. A proper sacrifice, I think. I imagine they will distribute them to the poor.
The agent put on rubber gloves and opened my thermos and swirled the coffee around. He removed the contents of my purse and spread it out. When he picked up my leatherbound diary and flipped slowly through the pages, a balloon of irreligiosity exploded at the back of my head, and I could feel the hair rise up, as it does sometimes, getting all militant despite my best prostrations of mousse.
“My diary?” I said as evenly as I could. “This is getting like the old Soviet Union.”
“So, you visited the Soviet Union…?” he asked, a glinty new interest hardening what had been his prior languor.
Anyway, I finally got to where I was going. And on my way back from Philadelphia, I wasn’t searched at all. They stopped the woman just in front of me, though, and there she stood, shoeless and coatless, with the tampons from her purse emptied upon the altar of a plastic tray. Once on the plane, she and I commiserated, and then the oddest thing happened. Others around us joined in about how invaded and humiliated they felt when searched. The conversation spread across the aisle, then to the seat in front, the row in back. It grew to about five rows of people, all angry at the overseers, all suspicious, all disgruntled and afraid. I was, I admit, strangely relieved to see that we were not only black or brown; we were men and women, white and Asian, young kids, old designer suits. There was a weird, sad kind of unity in our vulnerability, this helplessness of ours. But there was a scary emotional edge to the complaining, a kind of heresy that flickered through it too. What a baffled little coterie we were. Equal opportunity at last.
Anyway, dear editor, that, in short, is why this is not a column. I was having a really bad hair day.
