No One Man Can Kill a Million

Hey, remember General Petraeus? After months of orgiastic anticipation complete with its own ginned-up controversy, he certaily popped and poofed out of the picture quickly. Mere days after his testimony all that remained was an echoing howl of indignation at MoveOn.org, and now as the days stretch into weeks he's vanished completely. Polls purportedly show that American's opinions haven't budged one way or other due to his testimony. We have "turned against the war." In 2005 our views tipped from ambivalent to negative, and they've not tipped back. The American people, though slow to change, are ultimately wise, and Washington cannot fail to take note forever.

Hoo. Had you going, didn't I? When I hear the phrase The American people, I draw the shades, lock the doors, unchain the dog, and go for the gun cabinet.

The consensus in the country is that America got bamboozled into war. The consensus is that politicians cynically exploited legitimate anxieties, pumped them up to hysteria, and took advantage of the malleability of a fearful population. The consensus is that Americans are by and large opposed to the imperial policies of the American government, or at least would be if they undertood them. The consensus is that if politicians hewed to the national will and mood, they'd more seriously contemplate swift withdrawal from occupied Iraq.

The idea is that Americans got led by the nose into a disaster that they wouldn't have chosen for themselves, and that extrication from such disaster requires a change in political leadership brought about through exercise of the franchise. In other words, Democracy. America, good fucking luck.

So many of the political arguments of the last several years boil down to the question of who is leading whom, of whether politicians and their dark urges are expressions of the national id or independent actors trying desperately--and often successfully--to manipulate the public. The question of the supposed ideological affinities of the media is an extension of the argument. The questions of "fixed intelligence" are extensions of the argument. It should go without saying that culture, even political culture, doesn't work that way. The media reflects national taste, which is in turn amplified by the media. Politicians serve ideologies that are rooted in national urges, but the national character is also determined by the independent decisions of national leadership. These aren't paradoxes. They are self-reflexive, self-supporting, self-amplifying, mutually necessary pieces of the self-driving and self-perpetuating synthetic whole that is the United States of America. There is no chicken. There is no egg. The question of what precedes what is a fallacy.

What polls about the war reveal is not opposition but indeterminacy. The war has gone badly from the perspective of its myriad stated purposes, but as an act of national catharsis, it hasn't been without merits. It has briefly exorcised some bloody desires, and therefore served its brutalizing purpose. The question of how many Americans now believe that we "should not have gone over in the first place" is entirely irrelevant. At the moment when that question was relevant, America answered as it did, and off we went. The only point at which national opposition to a war actually matters is prior to the war. You'll note that those conditions almost never obtain. Wars are almost always popular at their outset. Once they begin, they too are self-perpetuating. Fire burns as long as there's fuel. Remember, we continued to fight in Vietnam even after the Congress cut off the dollar spigot. For nearly two years! That's warfare's tenaciuos hold on its own life, if nothing else.

This, I think, is one of the most fundamental arguments for anarchy. The truth is that in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, political necessities and practical considerations actually put a damper on the bloody public mood. I have no doubt that America in its panic would have blessed the use of nuclear weapons. Even as opinions on the war supposedly sour, there's remarkable tolerance for the horrors of torture. The souring mood is in any event a statistical illusion. What polls reveal is less opposition to the war--certainly not opposition to the bases of imperial warfare--than it is simple confusion. On all those questions pertaining to "what do we do now," Americans are perfectly divided, both by population and in their own minds. There are remarkable contradictions in polling results, all of which reduce to the desire to end the war but not to end it, for in ending it lies Consequence. You'll note that that's precisely the position of the majority of politicians in Washington.

The solution is dissolution.