Theater is heady stuff. Since 9/11 we have been a captive audience to intoxicating security theater. It has little to do with our real-world security, but it has been believable enough to take us into two wars. There have been high and low alerts, color codes, alarmist operas, orgies of punditry and think-tank schmaltz.

Truth is hardly the only casualty when a culture gives itself over to 24-hour theater. All its ideals and priorities fall victim, too. Nazism was theater. That is what the German generals knew when they were sent to war without adequate preparations. They played their role. They looked scary. But they knew a Wagnerian opera when they saw one.

Health care, education and jobs have all become theater, because a nation, even a nation as resourceful as we are, can’t afford to fight two endless wars and indulge in nation-building while at the same time seriously attending to such matters. The debate in Washington and our state capitals about health care reform, jobs and education is a puppet show. The people pulling the strings know damned well there is no money for real reform, no money and no will. But the press covers the show as if it were a real debate because the press is a character in the show.

Who pulls the strings? Who profits from war? Bankers do. The interest charged on war debt is almost inconceivable. So the profiteers who brought us the disaster we euphemistically call a recession are profiting from war more than Al Qaeda: we are, after all, killing terrorists, but we’re not killing any bankers. And then there are the contractors and their political stooges who listen more to lobbyists than they do to voters, because our election campaign laws have loaded the dice against democracy.

And to make matters dicier, we are engaged in nation-building in two countries that are proving themselves incapable of deciding they want to be nations as opposed to an assortment of tribes.

Students of Nazi Germany, myself included, have long marveled at Germany’s tenacity in fighting a war it lost at Stalingrad in February 1943. I think it was because Germany believed in its own theater, the myth of its superiority, its exceptionality. Many of its generals didn’t, but realism didn’t get them any promotions and it isn’t getting our generals any either.

And exceptionalism is what has gotten us into our current mess. We have believed that we are immune to the ills that brought down great empires before us. We have believed in our superiority and therefore think we don’t have to play by ordinary rules.

This is theater. It plays day after day, night after night, to standing-room-only audiences, but it has little to do with our real circumstances or our position in the world. George W. Bush was inclined to say he would follow the advice of generals who knew “the conditions on the ground.” He knew this was a charade. We all did. But it sounded patriotic, and in our fear of terrorism we failed to distinguish patriotism from jingoism.

Barack Obama is following suit. But what ground is that? What conditions? The Taliban in Afghanistan are prepared to stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is prepared to stay in Iraq indefinitely. Are we? Can we? Do the bloody conditions on the ground in those countries today have anything to do with the overall reality of their predicament? And cannot Al Qaeda operate as well from Yemen or Somalia or Nigeria or Algeria as it can from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq? We’re fighting fanaticism, stupidity, not geography. We can win a war in one or two places, but not all the places from which terrorists might set forth.

The conditions the generals are talking about are a handful of pieces of a much larger puzzle. It’s not up to the generals to put that puzzle together. That is the job of the civil government in Washington. It’s a job Washington is demonstrably not up to. Washington has opted for theater, the pretense of addressing problems of security and health and education and employment.

The war in Afghanistan is a bankrupting pretense. —DM

***

Hear me read poems and talk about writing at From The Fishouse.

It could be Michaele’s striking blondness was a kind of pass for her Arab-American husband, who seems to be as American as apple pie, but could it also be that the men and women in black might have been slightly less vigilant in the service of our first African-American president?

I know, I know, it’s a horrid thought and damn me all to hell for asking, but it will be asked, just as it was asked whether the Secret Service had been less than protective of our first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.

President Obama is, after all, the target of an unprecedented number of death threats. That would argue for hyper-vigilance around him, and yet the publicity-seeking Salahis breezed right up to the President.

The gatekeepers, presumably trained profilers, could not have missed that Salahi is a Middle Eastern name. True, it would be a farce for them to go ballistic every time they encounter an Arab name or a face that matches prejudices about what Arabs look like, but you can’t help wondering where the alarm bells were hidden that night, can you?

After all, we’ve had people pulled out of airport lines for looking Arab or spelling their names “funny,” so where was the Secret Service at Barack Obama’s very first state dinner? While we’re worrying about a security lapse, maybe we should ask if the Salahis could have barged in on Laura and George Bush the way they did on Michelle and Barack Obama.—DM

Amari Hamadene, the editor who first published the title poem, has written to me that at the recent Algiers (inset) Book Fair some Algerians marveled that an American university press had published a book by someone with an Algerian name.

Amari proposes to translate the book into French. No easy task, I’m sure. Amari is the founder and editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review, a trilingual journal.

The marvel, if there is anything to marvel at, is that Algerians should think the book’s circumstances remarkable. I’m an American. I’ve lived in the United States my entire life and served in the Navy. My name is common in Algeria, highly unusual in the United States. I could have published under the name Del, my byline as a newspaperman, but I thought my birth name more appropriate because some of the poems are about my birth.

My book isn’t about Algeria. It’s about belonging and yet finding it difficult to belong, a common theme in this migratory world. I never knew my Algerian father, his family or culture. My mother’s family was German-American-Polish and did not find me an easy fit. My book is sometimes about that ill fit.

It’s also about nativism, demonization and cold shoulders. The Algerians who find life in France and other parts of Europe sometimes harrowing will certainly relate to these poems. But so will American Hispanics, African-Americans and Native Americans, all of whom have experienced the pain of being singled out as unusual guests, a euphemism, to be sure, for something much darker; and it’s not lost on Native Americans that the guests are singling out the guests for alienation.

The theme of my book emerged in the recent election campaign. Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, suggested that some Americans were not as American as others and that some parts of America were not as American as others. This cheap jingoism is a familiar refrain to me. My mother’s family raised the same issue about me, and so did some kids in the boarding school on Long Island where I lived for more than a decade. Who did they think belonged? Themselves, certainly. Belonging is an issue as crucial to America as its economy, because as long as we try to impose a litmus test beyond that of honorable citizenship, there will be injustice and polarization.

What was interesting about my boarding school experience is that during World War II many of my schoolmates were English war evacuees, so they weren’t raising an issue about my Americanness, they were raising a more blatantly racial issue. That’s how I learned that there are many ways to disguise racism, to call it by other names, and to hide behind the sheer smarm of coding bigotry.

The Algerians who found it interesting that an American academic press should bring out my first book of poems knew perfectly well—they could tell from the book’s cover and jacket—that the poems had won a prize. And, with a little web research, they could have seen how the judging was conducted. But nonetheless their cultural orientation led them to assume something unusual had happened, something having to do with my name, unusual to Americans, usual to them. They seemed to think that an American press had had to rise above a cultural bias to publish my book, a notion that is patently untrue.

The subject came up last month when TV interviewer Mimi Moriarty asked me why I had broken a silence of some 35 years to write poems after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. My stock answer has been that I wanted to affirm creativity in the face of such stark nihilism. But I realize now that while my stock answer is not disingenuous, it is facile. I had found some aspects of our response to the attacks disquieting and redolent of my own struggle to fit in. We immediately profiled Arab-Americans and called their loyalty into question. We bullied each other, some of us trying to make the case that those of us who didn’t agree with Bush Administration decisions—attacking Iraq, curtailing civil liberties, suspending certain rights, incarcerating Muslims in Guantanamo, etc— were not as American as the rest of us, might in fact be the sort of persons who ought to be detained in airports.

Instead of reaffirming our dynamism, our creativity, our commitment to civil and universal liberties, we began diminishing our democracy and imposing a federal security state. I knew something about security states, because they can be imposed by families, neighborhoods, institutions, traditions. So I saw that my stock answer had shied away from confronting my profound disquiet at the way nativism had so readily reared its head in the wake of an outside attack. It seemed to me that an American Kristallnacht was not far off. I felt that we could no longer pretend not to understand how the Holocaust had taken place, since we had now become adept ourselves at scapegoating and scaring ourselves into repudiating our own democratic ideals when, indeed, it was exactly the right time, the best time to reaffirm and strengthen them. Security is always the reason for dismantling democracies, and it’s always a bad reason.—DM

Russia, deploying troops presumably to support separatist Abkhazia, has apparently moved from the disputed area into pro-Western Georgia proper. This is the outcome of our win-win policy in Iraq, the policy John McCain is now trumpeting.

Win-win in Iraq has meant to hell with Afghanistan, to hell with all our other strategic interests. It has meant fighting the wrong enemy at great cost. Never mind what win-win means. Does it mean, for example, that we intend to settle a running dispute between Shias and Sunnis that began shortly after the Prophet Muhammad died? Does it mean that majority rule in Iraq, meaning Shia rule, will ally the country with Shia Iran, a country we (and Israel) are now threatening in response to its nuclear ambitions?

And why has a press corps that gets all het up about lapel pins and Obama’s supposed elitism declined for so long to pin down John McCain and his supporters about just what win-win in Iraq does mean? The majority of Iraqis are Shias. That means, given a free vote, the government is going to be dominated by Shias. Iran is Shia. So does win-win mean going in there, getting thousands of people killed and bankrupting ourselves only to give the mullahs in Iran a new pal?  Is this the national security and foreign policy experience the Republicans are talking about?

Georgia, to make matters even dicier, has troops in Iraq which it wants us to fly home to face the Russians. It has also asked for NATO membership, but NATO has dawdled in the face of Russian hostility.

So here we are, talking about win-win in Iraq, allowing the Taliban and Al Qaeda to regroup in Afghanistan, and talking tough and empty about Georgia. Some foreign policy. Is this the vaunted expertise we want to opt for in November by electing John McCain? Will the press give him a pass on this, too? —DM

What the news needs more than anything else is historical context, the very thing news executives have always eschewed in favor of immediacy. Without historical context the news becomes a major cause of ill-considered, slogan-driven policy.

The news industry has given itself a pass for its culpability in taking us to war in Iraq, but while we’re remembering the distortions of intelligence data and the downright lies of the White House we ought to remember how CNN and Fox News melodramatically beat the war drums and how the print media failed at due diligence when there were plenty of Arabists around to challenge the war policy.

Anyone who has ever watched the Discovery, Military, History or Weather channels may have observed that they often give us far more food for thought than the so-called news channels. They are more reflective, less inclined to dramatize. Such was the case this week when the Military Channel reopened the case of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898.

With the exploding of the Maine, American foreign policy departed from its republican ideals to take a distinctly imperialistic turn. The impetus, of course, was money, business. We had considerable monies invested in Spanish-held Cuba, and we had embarked on the expansion into the Pacific Basin that ultimately brought us into conflict with Imperial Japan.

The press, led by the ultraconservative and hawkish Hearst newspapers, jumped to every conspiracy theory conceivable. The Navy commission established to investigate the sinking, pressured by Congress, concluded that it was an act of terrorism either by Spanish sympathizers or by Spain itself. The slogan, Remember the Maine, To Hell With Spain, led us into a war in which we ultimately seized Cuba and The Philippines from Spain and destroyed what remained of its empire.

The parallels with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that legitimized the Vietnam War and with George Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s bogus rationale for invading Iraq can hardly be more compelling. But in each case a complacent, irresponsible press played a major role and then stood by acting as if it had had nothing to do with war hysteria but was merely an objective bystander. Ever since the press has been tsk-tsking all the way to the bank.

The Military Channel recounted that in 1974 four-star Admiral Hyman Rickover, a controversial maverick, headed another commission of inquiry that concluded that the Maine had sunk because of an explosion within the steel-plated ship itself. This cast doubt on the Spanish conspiracy theory but failed to put it completely to rest.

But now scientists, using computer modeling and cutting-edge metallurgical research unavailable in 1974, have shown that the explosion originated in a coal bunker by spontaneous combustion, a frequent occurrence wherever coal was used to power ships, and then ignited gunpowder in the Maine’s hold. So much for the Spanish conspiracy.

Here we have three instances in which a democratic republic, which had renounced empire and colonialism from its inception, went to war in behalf of imperialist interests on the basis of misinformation and even chicanery. And the press, which had been envisioned by our founders as a bulwark against government misdeeds, took part in inflaming public opinion.

The media role in the sinking of the Maine (which has been explored closely by scholars) and in the Vietnam and the Iraq wars should give us pause. What we think of as news is more a tsunami of ephemeral reports and events, self-serving interpretations and political posturing. Sometimes the press may argue, as it did regarding the Maine, that there was nowhere to turn for countervailing viewpoints, but it had no such excuse in the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

The Internet, to which the news industry is reluctantly transitioning, offers a unique opportunity to redefine news. Indeed, we might usefully revisit the very word. What we need is information and contexts in which to put it. We need new nomenclature for the ideal media role in the 21st Century. Perhaps a word like context. The reason for hope is hypertext, which enables the news industry to put events in perspective. For example, when the White House was making its case for barging into Iraq in the name of democracy, the press could have said, Whoa, Remember the Maine, and then linked breaking stories to all those previous doubts about how the Maine actually blew up that winter’s day in Havana harbor. The press could have revisited the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and its historical reexamination.

But even more significantly, the press could have turned each Iraq story into a virtual index of issues related to modern Iraq history. Readers would have clearly seen that the British had failed in the 1920s to create a balance among Iraq’s sectarian parties. They would have seen how many Arabists thought it a bad idea to invade. They would have understood the secular nature of the Ba’ath Party and the unlikelihood of its having made common cause with Al Qaeda. They would have been able to ask themselves who would benefit most from an Iraq incursion. The answer, of course, would have been big oil and Pentagon contractors.

All these matters eventually came into play, but too late, because our concept of news is not broad enough to prevent nitwit sloganeers and conspiracy theorists from hijacking foreign policy.

The 2001 anthrax incident is another case at hand—a string of developments without context. If the FBI can convince us, as it is now trying to do, that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biochemical researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland, who recently committed suicide, was in fact the man who in 2001 killed five people and threatened many more, will the media remember that it was the anthrax scare and not the September 11th attacks that frightened us into allowing our civil liberties to be eroded in the name of national security? And will the media reopen the case with the same vigor with which they have reported each development? By reopening the case I mean, Will the media point out that a nation of 300 million souls was made docile by fear that foreign terrorists were using anthrax powder against us rather than a domestic terrorist for reasons that are not entirely clear?

If the media continue to refuse to take responsibility for the issue of context, if they persist instead in providing a steady stream of developments and smart-alecky punditry, they will have forfeited the opportunity of a century to redefine American journalism in the name of public enlightenment. The media have traditionally taken the position that it is for historians to make sense of things, to provide overview. But in a world as fast-moving as ours we can’t wait for the historians; we must instead take advantage of what is already archived. The current formula of literally poisoning news with punditry is a sorry excuse for putting news in context. It accelerates the polasrization of an already profoundly polarized society, because it daily invites partisans to pick their poison, leaving independent-mind citizens to fend for themselves.

There will always be a segment of our population that prefers ideology to fact, simple-minded solutions to nuanced examinations, and war to peace. Profiteers depend on this predilection for easy answers. One would think, would hope that the press would be the antidote to knee-jerk hawks and profiteers, but the press is owned by big business and takes its responsibility to make money for investors more seriously than its First Amendment responsibilities. A democracy can never be reminded too often that war is big business.

That is why the idea of citizen journalism is so spectral to press moguls. The idea of being no longer capable of hyping and propagandizing news by ownership of media outlets is truly intimidating. And yet nowhere in today’s presidential campaign is the issue raised of who will control the Internet. That’s no accident. It’s the last issue corporate media wants raised.—DM

And even if we were to become a military state like ancient Sparta the morale, the genius of the state would be best served by everyone serving equally. How else can children of wealth discharge their duties to a state from which they have benefited? Everyone should be willing to defend a state in which they believe, whether by active military service or by engaging in such projects as AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

The argument should be not only about the quality of the army but the quality of the state and the ideals it holds. The argument is too one-sided, too limited to military science; the broader interests of the state should be considered too. The military does not exist for itself; rather it exists to uphold and defend our ideals, and it should not be allowed to take part in dismantling them in the name of expedience. Not even Sparta for all its militarism would have countenanced that.
We should consider, too, that historically the use of mercenaries is a measure of a civilization’s decline. We have used soldiers for hire in Iraq. When Iraq’s medieval empire under the Abbasids decided to use mercenaries it foreshadowed a breathtaking decline. The same may be said of Rome and the Ottoman Empire and many another world power.

By eschewing the draft we are making the case for an elitist society, saying not that Yankee Doodle will defend us when necessary but that poor Yankee Doodle will do the job. If the lords of the land, our fatted upper class, is unwilling to send its children to war it tells us they’re Americans for what they can get out of the rest of us, not because they believe in our ideals.

If we are to remain as egalitarian as we say we are, as egalitarian as those who wrap themselves in the flag and try to make traitors out of dissenters say we are, then let the rich put their money where their collective mouth is. If their children object to war, let them serve in other capacities. This is not just a military issue, it is a social issue. We do not exist to serve our military. We do not exist to adjust to it; it exists to protect our commonly held birthright. If we become a military state, or merely a state that panders to its military-industrial sector, we forfeit that birthright.

But by all means let us rid ourselves of a circumstance in which old, overweight white men wearing flag pins and waving for the camera send children of color, poverty and despair to war—and then desert them when they come back broken. —DM

Responsible journalism? It’s a rhetorical question as long as the profit motive is as heavy-handed a censor and distorter as the Homeland Security Department. When The New Yorker portrays Israeli uber-hawk Benjamin Netanyahu wearing an SS visor cap, perhaps then it will have a sturdier leg to stand on.—DM

The Social Security Administration can’t process disability claims fast enough, the Border Patrol can’t seal the borders, the Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t have enough controllers to assure air safety, the Food and Drug Administration can’t protect us from toxic food and drugs, our health care system is killing people, our schools have created a booboisie, and we can’t afford the life style the politicians tell us we’re entitled to. And oh yes, they want us to buy more with less.

Most Americans agree none of this is good. But are they willing to pay the taxes to redress these problems? Are they even interested in a debate about who should pay the additional taxes? Or are they content to keep on living in a funny-money society in which politicians bamboozle them into believing we’d have enough money: a) if we cut government waste and civil service corruption , and b) if we keep on giving the rich and the corporations tax breaks in the expectation that their prosperity will trickle down to the rest of us?

We do not have a corrupt civil service. We have a good civil service beleaguered by politicians of the right, the left and the middle who scapegoat it. They come to Washington blaming the civil service they need to do anything and then they reform it by demoralizing it. Tax breaks do not trickle down to the rest of us, they whoosh to private accounts in the Caymans and Zurich. We’ve had thirty years of this trickle-down bunk—are we better off?

There is no magic about public service. If we want it, we have to pay for it. If we should happen to prove that we’re willing to pay for it, then we have to ask how the burden should be apportioned among us.

But these are not even questions being asked in the current election campaign. Stories about disgraceful service are being published and aired, but nobody is connecting them to taxes. If we keep on electing politicians who relieve the tax burdens of the rich and their corporations and disguise it as phony tax relief for everyone, we’re going to keep on hearing horror stories about federal and state agencies.      —DM

My most memorable experience in Navy boot camp in the early 1950s at Bainbridge, Maryland, was being shown the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, starring Henry Fonda. Each and every one of us knew the United States Navy wanted us to know that a man may be unjustly accused and lynched and that it was up to each of us to stand, like Henry Fonda, against the terroristic atmosphere in which men may be wrongly accused and even executed.

We filed out of that building into the hot summer sunlight awed and silent. The United States Navy had told us we were embarked upon a great project of upholding the flinty ideals Henry Fonda had expressed in that famous wartime movie. Not for nothing was such a film made while we were fighting formidable enemies of our dearest beliefs. We got the message. Loud and clear.

I can’t imagine after all these years that instructing our recruits in foreign policy could be half as important as showing them such a film. I don’t know what the sailors and Marines with whom I served would have made of Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. (I remember playing baseball at Gitmo.) But I choose to believe that those of us who saw The Ox-Bow Incident might have believed that the enlistees at Abu Ghraib had been given unlawful orders. Orders for which no commissioned officer has been prosecuted.—DM

How much of such news as theater can we take?

Perhaps our traumatized soldiers are coming home to a society unprepared to care for them because the homeland too is traumatized by the sheer weight of importunate news. It’s true that the homeland can switch off the bombardment, but it seems also true that we are addicted to our celebrities and their fecklessness, our lying, money-grubbing politicians, our smiley air-head anchors, and all the disturbing imagery and dissembling that is called the news.

We are bombarded by reminders of our inhumanity, indifference, greed, and failure to rise to principle, and yet we ourselves struggle to be principled, to be decent, to treat each other respectfully, but the media are not interested in this daily heroism of ours, however much they may occasionally toss it a bone. We are a mass to them and individuals only when we behave badly.

It’s not unlike Iraq. Our men and women know there are places not as
terrifying and dangerous, but they are over there, for better or worse, bombarded, bombed, ambushed and sniped at. And so are we. Different kinds of trauma, to be sure, but traumatizing nonetheless.

Child experts will tell you that verbal abuse is as damaging as physical abuse, if not more so. Verbal abuse is slow poison. The child never gets it out of his system. It deforms and dements his life. Why should it not be so, then, that our steady diet of trivia, ugliness, mendacity and pettiness also gets into our systems and poisons us? If it is true in medicine, as the medical community is now saying, that attitude plays a profound role in recovery, why should it not be true that our emotional and even physical state is not affected by the news?

If this is so, then we should question how we define the news. What passes for news is the result of corporate greed. It is trivial, condescending and shallow because to do a better job would cost more money. To intelligently explain issues, to expose malfeasance, to explore complex issues is costly. It cuts into cheap, quick profit. You need smart people and time for good reportage, for real edification, and that translates into money, money shareholders and CEOs would have to forfeit for the public good, which they don’t give a damn about. So we get what we get, and I have a feeling it is traumatizing us in ways we don’t understand, just as our returning heroes don’t understand how they can look healthy and yet be so emotionally battered.

The so-called news frustrates us because, lacking in depth, intelligence, respectfulness and vision, it provides us with no ways out of our common condition. It gives us no tools to build a better society. This is its real failure, and it is not merely a failure, an omission; it is a betrayal, and like all betrayals it wears the face of helpfulness and concern and honesty.—DM