The Spectacular: Bin Laden and Trump and Trigger Warnings
In a recorded speech for policy wonks at a link that is no longer reliable, a 404 webpage, a former CIA operative named Patrick Skinner was explaining what is known about ISIS. I drafted this piece, transcribing Skinner’s words, and embedded that link in March of 2016, according to Medium.com. In those days, Trump was a candidate for office, someone Lindsey Graham had implored to stop being “such a jackass”, and I knew him from my almost-four decades in New York City as a kind of over-the-top guy from the boroughs who wanted to make it big in Manhattan, a publicity whore, the butt of jokes in Spy Magazine.
More than four years later, Trump’s public role has changed and Patrick Skinner is now a police officer in Georgia who is written about in the New Yorker and has himself weighed in on the police controversy in the Washington Post. Still, nothing I wrote back then seems less true.
The ideology is Bin Ladenism, which means ‘If you’re not exactly like them, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, it means you’re worthy of death.’ It’s a complete us-and-them wedge, but they have enlarged the us vs. them to it’s everybody but them.
No gray.
They want to burn all nuance out of the conversation.
After 9/11, people asked “Why do they hate us?” President Bush said they hated our freedom and urged us to go shopping to show we were still Americans. I had a different view. In college during the Iran Hostage Crisis, I took a class with Zalmay Khalilzad, who had not yet joined the Reagan-Bush government. In the class, we went country-by-country through the Middle East, studying the factions and the alignments and how the West had intervened to keep the balance of power optimal throughout the Cold War, from our perspective. There was a lot of meddling, as well as allowing dictators to rule with iron fists, all to protect Western interests.
Around noon on 9/11, I was in my apartment, looking out my window at the already-missing fireman’s apartment, where friends were converging to support his not-yet-widowed wife and son. The Christian Science Monitor, which I subscribed to by mail, arrived with its story about The Lion of Pashtun, leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, the one who stood against the Taliban. He had been blown up by suicide bombers posing as journalists. As soon as I read that article, I knew that it was connected to what had just happened in my neighborhood. I picked up pieces of burned papers that were raining down on our sidewalk and remembered as best I could what I’d learned in class with Khalilzad, himself from Afghanistan.
I knew that “they” had reason to hate us. Our government and our allies had bombed innocent people, overthrown governments to keep our man in power, and basically had no thought ever for the well-being of millions of people as long as those in power did our bidding. It was not a surprise that eventually this would come to a boiling point and result in a spectacular uprising. The same is true of centuries of discrimination and abuse in this country, which was supported and covered up by those in power using our system of law, whether it was slavery, Jim Crow, sex abuse at Penn State or in Catholic Churches.
There is always tension between danger and freedom. The “this vs. that” is different for Tea Party politicians than it is for sexual harassment campus activists, but the result is the same: complete intolerance of anyone who doesn’t conform to their way of thinking; the radical policing of thought and talk and action, especially in the sexual realm; and the inability to have a discussion in which ideas are considered and debated. The very act of asking a question is considered abuse. It is Trump responding to a press question with “That’s what’s wrong with America.” — in other words, the journalist asking a question that challenges his idea represents what is wrong. It’s a young man on RadioLab responding to the host’s question with “Oh no no no,” instead of an explanation. It’s campus activists filing a Title 9 case against a professor for simply writing an opinion piece, which they labeled as abuse. It’s the refusal to engage in the substance of the argument, as if there is no point in discussion.
Given the history of discrimination and exclusion of voices based on race, class and gender, it might seem understandable to adopt a tactic of simple refusal to enter into that discussion with a power dynamic that has always found a way to stay in power. But if we don’t want to live in a post-fact world, we must be willing to marshall the facts and the reasoning, not just the feeling. And to listen to the reasoning of others.
Patrick Skinner again:
Before 9/11, there was a lot of chatter on the wires that something spectacular was coming. After a while, they stopped using it as an adjective, and it become a noun — ‘the spectacular.’
Al Quaeda defined a spectacular as the enormous event that is destructive to the West. ISIS has realized that it doesn’t have to be a spectacular event to get a spectacular reaction. They are using small events that they claim credit for to create a spectacular reaction, which we are carrying out ourselves. In Boston, an entire city was shut down for two days, and people all over America were afraid. When two guys drove from Arizona to Garland, Texas for the Mohamed comics thing, everyone got all upset — oh, ISIS came to Texas. It was two idiots who drove a long way to get shot in a parking lot. If you see it as criminal acts, we can handle it. But we don’t, we hype it, overreact — we change our laws, change the nature of our society.
No gray.
They want to burn all nuance out of the conversation. They have succeeded, because in response we have burned out the nuance ourselves.
And somehow, that infection has worked its way like a virus into the American psyche and is attacking us from within, as we burn down our own house, the spectacular glowing from afar.
