| Friday, June 7, 2002 |
13:45 - We Defend Ourselves with Star Wars and the Heart of Gold
http://www.kenlayne.com/blogarchives/week_2002_06_02.html#002400
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Ken Layne speaks for the Secular Humanist American Populace (which, by comparison to any Islamofascist, nearly every single American is, right up to Falwell):
Yeah, it's cheap and wrong to quote a Star Wars movie when dealing with murdering bombers, but I think it's better than quoting Allah. I'm tired of Allah. I'm tired of Allah and Jeebus and the whole gang. What the hell have they ever done for anybody?
It is said that people will always look for some spiritual deal, no matter how rich and happy they are. Los Angeles is being savaged around the country right now because we have a basketball coach who wants his team to meditate before a game. But compare that to the scumbags running out of Jenin or Gaza or Saudi Arabia. Madonna doing yoga is harmless. Freaks doing jihad against office towers or a commuter bus is cancer.
Cut it out. Root cause? Idiots who believe in Super Gods. Ain't no super gods. Just us. I've read in my local Arafat daily that Americans who support Israel are right-wing religious folk. Really? I've seen a few blogs by such people, and I'm glad they're around, but most people I know are agnostics who started off wishing the best for Palestinian Arabs. Now, they're sick of it all.
Oh, you mean like me. Good, I'm not the only one.
They didn't have Star Wars when the holy texts were written, Ken. Those texts were Star Wars.
I'm also sick, by the way, of pretending that capitalism and democracy and a culture of entertainment consumption is sick and evil. It's not. We've seen evil. We know what these words we've been bandying about really mean, and there is no shame and no fascism in our recognizing that living a life that glorifies individual freedom and achievement and mutual respect in a heterogeneous world is inherently superior. I'm sick of having to avoid using that word lest I be accused of being an arrogant, self-centered American. Peggy Noonan of the WSJ is similarly fed up.
Norm Mineta, our transportation secretary, has a searing memory, and that memory determines U.S. airport security policy in 2002. When he was a little boy at the start of World War II, Mr. Mineta and his Japanese-American family were sent to an interment camp. It was unjust and wrong. The Japanese of America in 1942 were American citizens, not illegal aliens or visitors newly arrived; moreover, they had never, not one of them, launched an attack on the United States. What FDR did to them was wrong.
But the facts of Japanese-Americans in 1942 do not parallel the facts of our enemies today. Our enemies has already killed civilians and announced they will kill more. We know who the enemy is--we know many names, and we certainly know the general profile--and we have every right, or rather duty, to give those who fit the profile extra scrutiny. Instead we play games and waste time wanding people we know to be innocent, and searching their tired old shoes. We do this to show we're being fair. But we really know otherwise, all of us.
We are being irresponsible and careless in the hope that history will call us tolerant and compassionate. It is vanity that drives us, not the thirst for justice and a safer world. Mr. Mineta has received many awards for his sensitivity to ethnic profiling. Good for him, but I'd personally give him an award if he'd begin to act like a grownup and recognize that his childhood trauma shouldn't determine modern American security policy.
(I quote the same three paragraphs that Glenn Reynolds did because they happen to be the best ones for the topic at hand. I add this disclaimer not because I hope that history will not judge me a plagiarist, but because I'm slowly waking up. I'm slowly coming to grips with the fact that there are some absolutes in the world, or things that are close enough to absolutes as to be indistinguishable from them. I'm beginning to accept that some things are more important than how we're thought of by our peers.)
Let's say that within six months, if we were to do nothing further in our war against terrorism, a nuclear attack of some sort were to flatten New York. What would we do then? I'd imagine that we would go through our list of terrorist-supporting states, one by one, quickly and methodically, and transform them into wholly controlled American protectorates with very little surviving infrastructure and substantially less civilian population. A terrible thing to have to do, but it's our tradition these days to respond to any terrible thing that happens by taking whatever precautions are necessary to prevent that exact same thing from happening again. Like antibodies to a virus, we've ensured that nobody's going to be able to use box-cutters to hijack a plane and fly it into a building again anytime soon, or to carry C4 onto a plane in his shoes. But the problem with antibodies is that they can be easily duped by a trivial mutation in the virus. We're closing a whole series of barn doors after the respective horses have left. We may well be unable to stop the next attack, whatever form it takes, once the operation is actually underway and the planes are in the air and the bomb is in play or what-have-you.
So what's the alternative? Why, taking whatever precautions are necessary to prevent the terrible things from happening in the first place. In the case of terrorism on a global, city-destroying scale, that means flattening entire Muslim countries. And how do we work up a national mandate to do that, if we're not responding to an actual attack on us in kind? We don't. We have never been able to. America just doesn't work that way. We're deadly in our retaliation, but retaliation is all it ever is. And that's what the bin Ladens of the world are counting on.
They know we can't bring ourselves to strike at them first. They know how much ridicule Clinton faced after his cruise missiles failed to kill Osama in his hut. They know what kind of trouble we get into with the world if we act like "cowboys". They know we're such wusses that we'll refrain from pre-emptively attacking radical Islam at its core as long as we have no clear-and-present threat short of a giant skywritten message over New York reading DEATH TO AMERICAN INFIDELS, spelled out by the contrails of North Korean nuclear missiles covered with scrawls of Allahu Akbar.
Fitting, isn't it, that "Star Wars" was what we'd dubbed the system that was supposed to protect us from that kind of attack, if it had ever been made to work?
Speaking of which, Lileks liked episode II. A lot. And to see why this is not a bizarre digression, read his Bleat. He has insights into the nature of Good and Evil, and Darkness and Reality, that are more than a little bit applicable to our current times. As was the Han Solo quote that Ken Layne offers in the first linked article.
I am ready, finally, to admit that I unconditionally prefer the world in which I live, where our biggest problems have to do with whether Anakin Skywalker is a believable character, to the world that is populated by people who are committed to a cause for which they will happily give their lives in order to see us dead. Ours is the world of the future, and anybody who agrees is welcome to come along for the ride. But anybody who lashes out at us out of spite and in a tantrum over how their Super God is no longer relevant to anybody but them-- well, it's time we started hitting them harder than they plan to hit us. That's the only way to stop them. They're designed not to understand reason or feel pain. They're trained not to value their own lives or the distinction between military and civilian targets. They've engineered themselves to be impossible to reform or to integrate into a world where they are not supreme. And so, tragic and horrible as it is, and as shitty as it is that we don't yet have the technology to imprison them in an envelope of Slo-Time and seal it with the Wikkit Key, we have to do the next best thing.
We have to put aside our vanity and our hope that we won't be judged fascist by future generations. Because if we don't, the only future generations to judge us will be the ones who call us demonic infidels already.
To what extent are we willing to go to prevent New York from turning into a fallout zone? We know what our enemies are willing to do, and we know that the only thing keeping them from doing worse than they already have is the lack of means, which they will undoubtedly gain if we just give them enough time. Is our safety from the next cataclysmic blow worth committing an action which the whole world will surely "condemn" <ack, pth>? What's the greater catastrophe?
We who have seen the future, even if it's a future a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, say that that future is worth protecting at any cost.
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