Not Worth Protecting

On September 11, 2006, several men flew airplanes into the World Trade Centers in New York and the Pentagon, just outside of Washington, D.C. Approximately three thousand people were killed, the Pentagon was badly damanged, and the World Trade Center towers collapsed, causing billions of dollars worth of physical damage to New York and wreaking as-yet-unspecified environmental degradation. The immediate response of the governing class, which includes both the recognizeable government and the so-called Fourth Estate media--the self-nominated explicators of the rest of the governing class--was to begin cloaking the events of that day in obfuscating euphemism. It's difficult not to be guilty of it. Even calling them the "events of September 11" is engaging in a kind of revision, but it was far worse when, within weeks, the hive mind agreed that going forward the proper general locution would be, simply, "September 11" or "9-11."

There's only one other day in the American calendar similarly named: the Fourth of July.

Meanwhile, as Didion pointed out in her essay, "Fixed Ideas," a whole series of pieties appeared in a newly catholic national dialogue: the "heroes," the "families," the "firefighters." The problem wasn't the specific reference--certain people did act heroically, for instance, and surely the relatives of those killed in the attacks of that day deserve a degree of collective sorrow for seeing their family members die so jarringly and, in a sense, so publicly. The problem was that specific referent became moral concept. It's a common and deeply damaging trend in American thought on justice: "What about the victims? What about their rights?" Justice, which should be as impartial an act as possible, becomes little more than a psychodrama of offense precipitating moral vengeance.

But the new sanctity of all people, places, and things associated with those "events of September 11" wasn't a one-way designation foisted on grieving families by politicians in need of a moral foil; it was also a welcomed to an unfortunate degree by a great many designees, who in the American, CourtTV, Larry-King style accepted with barely-contained eagerness and a false sense of more-in-sorrow-than-anger the moral mantle—an authority rooted inexplicably in proximity to disaster. Their experience of personal tragedy, in this formulation, gave them an innate and unchallengeable platform from which to pass judgment on their society’s actions, post-tragedy. Many were, in other words, willfully and willingly complicit in their own cooptation by a governing class with its own imperatives and narratives.

It was in no small part because of the "familes," the "heroes," the "firefighters," the "first responders," of September 11 that the neologistic Department of Homeland Security was born. Political obsessives enamored of partisan conflict will point instead to the familiar form of political gamesmanship: the Democrats proposed said department; the Republicans rejected it; but, seeing public support, the Republicans stole the idea, perverted it, made it their own. Then it worked or didn’t. It was or wasn’t well managed. It’s function was or wasn’t clear. It’s purpose was or wasn’t defined. All depending on political self-identification.

But the Department of Homeland Security isn’t a matter of policy; it’s a matter of rhetoric. It exists as an organizational chart. It can’t be construed as a rational, actual response to disaster. It makes no sense to think of it that way. The Department of Homeland Security isn’t a policy crafted by one or other ideologically distinct political entities for a practical purpose. It is, instead, the natural outcome of a kind of bureaucratic, institutional imperative recognizable to anyone who’s ever worked for a large organization. Re-name; reshape; re-present. Hasn’t anyone been watching the Enron trials? It’s an off-book account; a shell company; a mechanism for transferring dollars.

And now, there’s trouble in the Homeland. Monies aren’t being rationally disbursed. Stated priorities and actual behaviors don’t match up. Rewards aren’t disbursed coherently.

"Why," asks John Amato at Crooks and Liars, "[does DHS] hate America?"

I’ve asked the question before on this blog, and I’ll ask it again. How do you know it’s broken? How do you know it’s not doing precisely what it was intended to do?