The Impact of 9 11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment: The Day that Changed Everything?

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03

The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment

10.1057/9780230101616 - The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment, Edited by Matthew J. Morgan

Also by Matthew J. Morgan

The American Military after 9/11: Society, State, and Empire The Impact of 9/11 on Politics and War The Impact of 9/11 on Business and Economics The Impact of 9/11 and the New Legal Landscape The Impact of 9/11 on Psychology and Education The Impact of 9/11 on Religion and Philosophy



A Democracy Is Born

The Day That Changed Everything? Edited by Matthew J. Morgan With a Foreword by Rory Stewart



The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment

9/11 ON THE MEDIA, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT Copyright © Matthew J. Morgan, 2009. THE IMPACT OF

First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60841–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The impact of 9/11 on the media, arts, and entertainment : the day that changed everything? / edited by Matthew J. Morgan ; with a foreword by Rory Stewart. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–60841–2 (alk. paper) 1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Influence. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in mass media. 3. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001, in art. 4. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Social aspects. I. Morgan, Matthew J. HV6432.7.I447 2009 973.931—dc22

2009012784

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



To the memory of Charlotte G. Morgan, and for Sharon, who carries her memory like no one else



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Foreword Rory Stewart

ix

Acknowledgments

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About the Contributors Introduction Matthew J. Morgan

xvii 1

Part I New Narratives and the Media 1

Aggressive Action: In Search of a Dominant Narrative Melvin J. Dubnick, Dorothy F. Olshfski, and Kathe Callahan

2

The 9/11 Attacks and the Social Construction of a National Narrative Richard Jackson

25

The Battle of Narratives: The Real Central Front against Al Qaeda P. J. Crowley

37

Islamic Terrorism: The Red Menace of the Twenty-First Century Krista E. Wiegand

51

3

4

9

5

Escape from 9/11: Back to the Future of the Mass Society James F. Tracy

63

6

The Resurgence of U.S. Public Diplomacy after 9/11 Nancy Snow

77

7

Leaving the Cave: Government, Culture, and the Information Age Simon Moore and Donald Bobiash

89



Contents

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CONTENTS

8 A Distracted Media: Sidetracked and Hoodwinked Lisa Finnegan

99

Part II The Arts and Entertainment 119

10 9/11 in the Novel Kristiaan Versluys

141

11 Poetry, a New Voice for Dissent Marguerite G. Bouvard

151

12 “all language bankrupt”: On the Poetics of Solidarity Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman

165

13 Libraries, Archives, and the Pursuit of Access Rebecca J. Knuth and Michèle V. Cloonan

181

14 Hollywood 9/11: Time of Crisis Thomas Pollard

195

15 Screaming Her Way into the Hearts of Audiences: Dakota Fanning as Post-9/11 Child Star Kathy Merlock Jackson

209

16 Sporting Spectacle and the Post-9/11 Patriarchal Body Politic Michael L. Silk and Mark Falcous

221

17 NASCAR’s Role Post-9/11: Supporting All Things American Paul Haridakis and Lawrence Hugenberg

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Index

251



9 Reading Afghanistan Post-9/11 Sophia A. McClennen

Rory Stewart

S

eptember 11th, I missed entirely. I had crossed from India into Nepal and begun walking North on the 9th. On the 12th or 13th, a farmer stopped me, offered some tea, and began repeating something he had heard on the radio. My Nepali was poor but I caught “Bombs” “New York” “America” “thousands killed.” I guessed he was saying that the United States had developed a new bomb to drop on people in New York. Perhaps it was some new conspiracy theory. I moved on. At one in the morning, on the 18th, police broke into my room, in the village of Jumla. At the station, they asked me if I was a Muslim, whether I liked Muslims and finally whether I was an “Usama Bin Laden Activist.” It took me another 10 days to walk to Nepal Gunj in the Terai and, there, in an Internet cafe read about the event. By then, to my surprise, we had concluded that the appropriate response was to invade Afghanistan. I am writing this, more than eight years later, on a three-foot cement block. Beside me a Peruvian security contractor is playing with his metal detecting wand. He has spent three years, working in this camouflagenetted shipping container, listening to the roaring generators but he has never walked the two hundred yards, past the cement block, into Baghdad itself. Later tonight, I will board the “midnight Rhino from the IZ to BIAP”: a convoy of five armored buses. I do not know when exactly because the bus runs at some unscheduled time between ten and two in the morning, intended to confuse insurgents. Behind us, in the Al-Rashid Hotel aging Iraqi politicians smoke and negotiate. I think the man in the gold trimmed, silk robe with the bloodshot eyes was Sheikh Khayun Al Ubeid of the Abude tribe. His group looked up as I passed, perhaps halfremembering a time when young Western men such as myself, controlled money and positions. But it was only for a second and then they returned to their conversation. This scene, these terms, these people have been



Foreword

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FOREWORD

shaped by our response to 9/11. How have we understood and described these years? * *

The common starting point of most of these chapters is despair at the failure of American culture—journalists, film-makers, sports-promoters, and travel-writers—to oppose or moderate the policies of the Bush administration. This was not through a shortage of witnesses. Fifty million Afghans and Iraqis, thousands of British bodyguards, cooks from Kerala and Russian businessmen and more than half a million Americans have directly experienced the liberations or occupations that followed 9/11. Nor was there an absence of interest even among those who had not been on the ground. Hundreds of thousands Americans criticized Rumsfeld’s lack of planning for a postwar phase, feared withdrawal from Iraq would lead to civil war, advocated the buying of the Afghan opium crop, or supported charities to improve the lives of Afghan women. Nevertheless, despite all this knowledge and debate, the great machine of state lurched on from Kabul to Baghdad, through Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, with Patriot acts and exit strategies, civilian casualties, surges, and supplemental budgets. Some of this reflects the power of the administration’s domestic propaganda. The wars were in historical terms, relatively modest: there was no draft, no demands on the civilian population, the troop numbers at maximum were only a quarter of those in Vietnam and casualties ran at less than a thousand deaths a year. It had minimal impact on most American lives. Success in the counter-insurgency campaigns, therefore, depended more on winning the “hearts and minds” of Iraqis and Afghans than Americans. Yet, as the chapters show, the administration’s propaganda was powerful at home and weak abroad. The military invested extravagantly in the PR potential of NASCAR, turning races into military pageants and purchasing cars. Fox Sports saturated the 2002 Super-Bowl with images of national warrior heroism. Tens of millions of Americans were convinced that the 9/11 attack was an epochal “act of war” by powerful, global, evil, statesponsored terrorists who posed an existential threat to the nation and who could only be met by a “new and different war.” This new narrative found fertile ground in the media, business, and think-tanks, was reinforced through legislation and new bureaucracies and propagated through posters, federal booklets, and commercial advertising. Given the apparently existential threat, doubts about the cost, benefits, or risks of these adventures came to seem cowardly, small-minded, and



*

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disloyal. Few journalists were willing to question the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the curtailment of civil liberties or the administration’s apparent use of security alerts to boost their polling figures. There was no sympathy for the traditional/European view that terrorism might be disrupted and contained but could not be eliminated. Instead, increasingly ambitious plans for state-building were sketched to ensure the final defeat of terrorism. In the words of Barack Obama: “To catch Usama Bin Laden we must stabilize Pakistan and win the war in Afghanistan.” Such grand propositions suddenly seemed plausible, conceivable, and respectable. Yet, although the administration could sell such theories to educated Americans, they could not convince illiterate Afghans and Iraqis. Afghans simply did not believe that soldiers had flown ten thousand miles to their village and arrived in tanks to build girls’ schools. A Washington thinktank might argue that gender rights would lead to development, development to state-building, and stable states to an absence of terrorists, but for a villager it was patently implausible. Little wonder that conspiracy theories flourished and villagers concluded that the soldiers must in truth be prospecting for oil. The administration failed to overcome such suspicions. Counterinsurgency struggled to understand the appeal of fighting for Islam and Afghanistan against a foreign military occupation and remained hopeful that Muslims could be convinced of America’s good intentions, courage, and generosity. Meanwhile, millions more Muslims from Egypt to Indonesia turned against the United States. Even when the United States tried most conscientiously to orchestrate public opinion, they were frustrated. In the Saddam trial, the United States sent judges abroad for training, carefully gathered detailed evidence and defined the legal process in the hope of launching a new Iraqi democracy through a transparent act of transitional justice. But the final scene, caught on cell-phone cameras of militiamen dancing around him, chanting “Long live Muqtada As-Sadr,” while the attorney-general watched, revealed a gap between American views of the “rule of law” and Iraqi practice, which could not simply be papered over by slicker “strategic communications.” *

* *

American culture was, of course, not silent on these issues. These chapters highlight the opposition of poets. The impact of 9/11 could also be traced in drama (from new productions of Sophocles’ Ajax to the success of Black Watch) and even in contemporary art exhibitions such as the



FOREWORD

FOREWORD

“Living Traditions” exhibition of Pakistani, Afghan, and Iranian art, in Kabul in 2008. Yet, the artistic responses never fully captured the absurdity, specificity, and complexity of our contemporary wars. Moises Saman, Seamus Murphy, and Steve Dupont, for example, have all published acclaimed collections of photographs of Afghanistan and held prominent exhibitions in London and New York. But they rehearse the same repeated images of beggars in burqas, women in burn wards, turbaned fighters, bombed houses, dust in the air, blood, and American weapons. It sometimes seems as though no photographer of Afghanistan has failed to shoot children fighting in the empty Shir Pur swimming pool. The black and white photographs portray a dark Afghanistan of violence and victims in chiascuro. Color, humor, incongruity, modernity, light, or the trivia of domestic life are apparently reserved for photographs of India. If photographers have been curiously repetitive, in their approach to Afghanistan, celebrated writers have been simply embarrassing on 9/11. Updike’s “realist” account of an American Muslim’s life in Terrorist is a troubling layering of cliché and solecism typified in the imam, wearing “shiny pointed shoes,” sitting in a chair on the carpets of the mosque. Martin Amis’ “The Last Day of Mohammed Atta” substitutes scatology for imaginative empathy. Christopher Hitchens embraced polemic in his defense of the war and—in submitting himself to water-boarding—performance art in his opposition to torture. Continental intellectuals from Umberto Eco to Alan Badiou have been encouraged by 9/11 to produce some of their most insipid essays. Writers such as Naipaul, Coetzee, and Heaney who formerly engaged effectively with resistance, oppression or religion, appear almost deliberately to have avoided the subject. Their best analyses of the current situation, from Waiting for the Barbarians to Among the Believers, precede the events by 20 years. Philip Roth deals with it, in The Plot against America only through implied analogy. Poets such as Ann Carson or Graham Hill ignore the events entirely. The most successful literary responses have approached the events tangentially. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children and Gary Steyngart’s Absurdistan use 9/11 as a background event. Those such as Mohsin Hamid or John Le Carre who choose to directly portray “fundamentalists,” make the “Islamic identity” of the protagonists clearly secondary to their other commitments, and imply their strongest connection to Bin Laden is in the imagination of the security services themselves. The most comprehensive critique of the world since 9/11 has been produced not by poets, novelists, photographers, or academics but by literary journalists. Travel-writers and Hollywood film-makers may have



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failed to dwell on the role of Pakistan and the CIA in shaping Afghanistan, but Lawrence Wright and Steve Coll have addressed the subject in depth. Woodward, Packer, Ricks, and Chandrasekaran have dominated the New York Times Bestseller list with well-researched, careful, and well-written criticisms of the Iraq invasion, which highlighted the absence of postwar plans, the inadequate resources, the self-defeating decision to abolish the army or debaathify, the farcical appointments in the Green Zone. Yet, their criticism—perhaps the best we have produced—only exemplifies the limits of our cultural response. They do not portray the context of the policies: the institutional constraints, career pressures, and intrinsic energies of the U.S. government and military. Instead they blame individual policy makers such as Bush, Bremer, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. They ignore the fundamental structural characteristics of the U.S.A., Iraq, and Afghanistan that doom, hobble, and scar these interventions. They fail to present a convincing alternative model of foreign policy. Previous generations considering our predicament would have emphasized cowardice, moral luck, decadence, providence, or hubris. They would have focused on issues of justice; or questioned the risks and potential benefits of our engagement. Even our best narratives only gesture toward these issues and with little conviction. These narratives are not ethical, though they often refer to moral obligation; nor economic, although they are often entranced by sunk-costs. Nor even, despite the subject matter, tragic. The grammar of our descriptions is not in the form of epic, fugue, atonality, or ferro-concrete but instead in the form of management theory. The blindness and the horror of war are expressed as a failure of research, planning, process, resource-allocation, regulation, and measurement. Even very sophisticated non-American observers, such as the Iraqi Ali Allawi, echo this approach. The actual events since 9/11, however, are an immense reductio ad absurdum of such a world-view. Despite all the talk of “strategy,” we have no common or consistent objectives; no clear sense of our capacity or our interests; we diagnose without scientific examination and confuse our diagnosis with a cure. We are learning to recognize the chaos, uncertainty, and impotence in our financial policy but we remain reluctant to acknowledge all that is incomprehensible, alien, and elusive in our foreign adventures. There has been no equivalent in Foreign Policy to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller on the illogicality of the financial markets. Yet, the sudden new trajectories of our foreign adventures seem as stark and unexpected as anything in the stock market. In 2002, for example, Iraq seemed an easier place to build a nation than Afghanistan; three years later, Afghanistan has gone much better; another three years, and Afghanistan is doing much worse. Yesterday, I walked safely through a market in Baghdad, in which



FOREWORD

FOREWORD

three years ago I would have probably been killed and met insurgents who are now receiving American salaries as “sons of Iraq” and talking warmly about American development assistance. No one predicted such changes. Yet, instead of meditating on our ignorance and uncertainty, bestselling public intellectuals continue to explain these shifts in terms of the decisions of policy makers: Rumsfeld’s lack of a plan for the postwar phase or General Petraeus had a “surge strategy.” The sudden end of the Iraqi insurgency is, therefore, accounted for by a 20 percent increase in U.S. troops, development projects, counter-insurgency manuals for U.S. soldiers, “the training of the Iraqi security forces,” the elimination of key insurgent leaders and the “buying” of their followers. All this leaves fundamental questions unanswered. Why were similar development projects unsuccessful in 2003? Why did the assassination of insurgent leaders not simply lead, as it has elsewhere, to the emergence of new and perhaps less reconcilable leaders? Why would insurgents have rejected coalition money in 2003 and yet accept it now? Is their primary motive suddenly financial? Why were we unable to predict these things? There can be no clear answers to such questions. But they are more plausibly explained in terms of religion, politics, nationalism, consent, charisma, culture, authority, and legitimacy rather than in terms of counterinsurgency field manual. This is the domain of the ethnographer, the theologian, the historian, and the philosopher, not of the project manager. It is our culture’s reluctance to acknowledge this that underlies many of the problems recorded in these chapters and my inability to render this present scene between the check-post and the razor-wire that marks Baghdad. We are aware of our tactical failings but not the limits of our world-view; conscious that we are failing but an unable to formulate an alternative model of foreign policy. It may be tempting to assume that such problems will vanish with Bush. But the Obama administration already seems to share in its Afghanistan policy Bush’s view that our interventions are purely technical operations, requiring only the right plan and resources. He is equally reluctant to acknowledge the limits of our power, our knowledge, and, most importantly, our legitimacy. Nine years after 9/11, therefore, the credo of the White House and much of U.S. media, arts, and culture remains, “Yes, we can.”



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he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were an event that for most Americans will be remembered for a lifetime as a pivotal moment in history. Like the Kennedy assassination a generation before on November 22, 1963, Americans share a collective memory and trauma of the event, often asking each other and reminiscing about what one was doing during that fateful moment. Now, with several years passed since 9/11, this series reflects on that event by bringing together from a broad spectrum of disciplines the leading thinkers of our time. To undertake such an ambitious project as this, appreciation must go to a wide range of people. First and foremost are the distinguished and skillful writers who have contributed to the series. Their willingness to share their talents and follow through with their commitment to this effort made all the difference. I cannot thank them enough for the sacrifices they have made to contribute their work to this series. As I thank the many authors from such diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and even countries, I should caution readers that opinions expressed in this series reflect the views of each contributing author of each chapter and should not be contrived to represent views of the contributing authors generally or even my own views. The series has self-consciously attempted to include a “big tent” of different perspectives, some highly critical of policy decisions, others supportive of government actions in difficult times, some dubious of the significance of 9/11, others finding it a disruptive event that “changed everything.” I have tried to reserve my own views to allow this series to collect these perspectives. I would like to thank several people who have made special contributions to this process. First, two friends have proven themselves adept at finding my errors and improving my work, which is an invaluable skill for an author to find in a trusted colleague. These two distinguished professionals—Jennifer Walton of JPI Capital and Linda Nguyen of Deloitte Consulting—have taken time out of their busy schedules to review these manuscripts, and I am eternally grateful. Second, many of our authors



Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

are extremely busy top leaders at the pinnacles of their careers. In these cases, their professional assistants and staff have been incredibly helpful in managing correspondence and facilitating the timely completion of these contributions. Among these helpful professionals are Flip Brophy of Sterling Lord Literistic, Minna Cowper-Coles, Chip Burpee, Sarah Neely, Toni Getze, Nancy Bonomo, Elizabeth Ong Baoxuan, Brooke Sweet, Anna Porter, and Janet Conary. I also owe gratitude to institutions with colleagues very supportive of my writing during my time with them: Bentley University of Waltham, Massachusetts, and McKinsey & Company. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to several members of the publishing community to bring this massive effort to fruition. First, Hilary Claggett of Potomac Books, my editor at Greenwood/Praeger for my first book (A Democracy Is Born, 2007), envisioned an interdisciplinary series reflecting on the national tragedy that was 9/11. This concept was initially to be four volumes, but due to the enthusiastic response from the scholarly and writing communities, the series expanded to six, allowing for a full treatment of each major area we have undertaken. Next, Toby Wahl of Westview Press, and former Political Science Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, supported me with my publication of The American Military after 9/11: Society, State, and Empire at Palgrave (2008) and provided energy and commitment in the initial stages of the development of The Day that Changed Everything?. After his departure, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, Editorial Director at Palgrave, assumed Toby’s responsibilities and provided excellent advice and support, taking the series through its last stages in the summer of 2008. Lastly, Editorial Assistant Asa Johnson deserves heartfelt appreciation for his efforts to bring the book to publication in its final form, exceeding all expectations. Matthew J. Morgan White Plains, New York



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Foreword. Rory Stewart is the Ryan Professor of Human Rights at Harvard University and Director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He is the author of the best-selling Places in Between (2004) and The Prince of the Marshes (2006). He has been awarded numerous honors, including the Order of the British Empire. He is a former diplomat in the British Foreign Service and current serves as Executive Chairman of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation in Kabul, Afghanistan. Donald Bobiash is Deputy Head of Mission of the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo and author of South South Aid. Marguerite G. Bouvard, a political scientist and poet, is Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and author of 15 books, including several on human rights. Kathe Callahan is Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University. Michèle V. Cloonan is Dean and Professor at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science of Simmons College and author of several books and numerous articles about the preservation of cultural heritage. From 2004–07, she led a program to train Iraqi professionals under the National Endowment for the Humanities program Recovering Iraq’s Past. Philip J. (P. J.) Crowley is a Senior Fellow and Director of Homeland Security at the Center for American Progress. He has authored several studies on homeland and national security issues and is a frequent guest on network news programs. During the Clinton administration, Crowley was Special Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs and served on the staff of the National Security Council. Melvin J. Dubnick is Professor of Political Science at University of New Hampshire and author of American Government. 10.1057/9780230101616 - The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment, Edited by Matthew J. Morgan


About the Contributors

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CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Falcous is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His work focuses on intersections of sport, nationalism, media, and global processes.

Kathy Merlock Jackson is Professor and Coordinator of Communications at Virginia Wesleyan College, where she specializes in media studies and children’s culture. She is the author of Images of Children in American Film, Walt Disney: A Bio-Bibliography, Rituals and Patterns in Children’s Lives, and Walt Disney: Conversations. She also edits The Journal of American Culture. Richard Jackson is Reader in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, where he is also Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence. He is the founding editor of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and co-editor of the new book Critical Terrorism Studies. Paul Haridakis is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Kent State University. Lawrence Hugenberg was Professor of Communication Studies at Kent State University. Professor Hugenberg passed away before this volume went into print. Rebecca J. Knuth is Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Hawai`i. Her books include Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction and Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the 20th Century. The daughter of an Afghan economist who worked for the IMF, Dr. Sophia A. McClennen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she teaches postcolonial literature, women’s world literature, media studies, and comparative cultural studies. She has written and edited four books. Simon Moore is Associate Professor at Bentley University and co-author of Effective Crisis Management and Global Technology and Corporate Crisis. Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine, and author of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison.



Lisa Finnegan is a journalist and the author of No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11.

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Thomas Pollard is Professor of Social Sciences at National University at San Jose and author of Sex and Violence: The Hollywood Censorship Wars, and, with Carl Boggs, The Hollywood War Machine and A World in Chaos. Michael L. Silk is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Bath and an Associate Professor in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland. His research and scholarship centers on the production and consumption of space, the governance of bodies, and, the performative politics of identity within the context of neoliberalism. Nancy Snow is Associate Professor of Public Diplomacy in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University on professional leave as tenured Associate Professor of Communications at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author or editor of six books: Persuader-in-Chief; Propaganda Inc; Information War; The Arrogance of American Power; War, Media, and Propaganda (with Yahya Kamalipour); and the Routledge Handbook on Public Diplomacy (with Philip M. Taylor). James F. Tracy is Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Florida Atlantic University. His research areas include examination of the relationship between media and society and the history of labor in media industries. Dr. Tracy’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Journalism & Communication Monographs, Journalism Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, and European Journal of Communication. Kristiaan Versluys is Full Professor of American literature and culture at Ghent University and the founding director of the Ghent Urban Studies Team. Versluys was president of the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association (1989–1992) and in 2001 was elected as a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. He is the author of Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009). Krista E. Wiegand is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia Southern University.



Dorothy F. Olshfski is Associate Professor of Public Administration at Rutgers University.




Matthew J. Morgan

T

his book is the fourth volume of the six-volume series The Day that Changed Everything? With some time having passed now since the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is possible to reflect upon the attacks and assess their impact. The series brings together from a broad spectrum of disciplines the leading thinkers of our time to reflect on one of the most significant events of our time. This volume is devoted to changes after 9/11 to the media as well as to the fields of arts and entertainment broadly. Shortly before 9/11, Arnold Schwarzenegger was anticipating the release of another blockbuster film, Collateral Damage. By that time in 2001, films starring Schwarzenegger had grossed a lifetime total of $1.4 billion, so the new movie was expected to be a financial heavyweight. In Collateral Damage, Schwarzenegger played a firefighter seeking revenge on international terrorists who killed his wife and child in a bombing attack. So the film, which featured airline hijacking and other sensitive subject-matter, was released four months later than originally scheduled despite the loss of the financial investment that such a delay implied. Much of its advertising campaign was revamped, including removal of a tagline that had suddenly become all too relevant: “What would you do if you lost everything?” Other works of contemporary literature were also envisioning terrorist mega-catastrophes before the actual 9/11 attacks. The plot of the March 4, 2001, pilot of the X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunmen, featured an attempt to fly a passenger jet (by remote control) into the World Trade Center. Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor (1994) concluded with a Japanese (rather than Islamic) extremist piloting an aircraft into a State of the Union Address, killing the entire U.S. government leadership (except for Clancy’s hero, Jack Ryan, of course, who goes on to become the president in the aftermath of the attack). After 9/11, forays into the subject-matter have been more hesitant, as exhibited by the delayed release and altered



Introduction

MATTHEW J. MORGAN

advertisement campaign of the Schwarzenegger film. A few films have focused on the attacks directly, including United 93 (2006) and Flight 93 (2006), which described the aborted attack on the fourth plane, which passengers thwarted by sending it crashing into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The triumphant narratives promoted in these films are somewhat at odds with the actual tragedy of the day itself.1 Similarly, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) poignantly described the rescue attacks in the carnage of Manhattan on that horrible day. Many films have provided criticism of the Bush administration’s policy, with the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 (2003) leading the way as it earned unprecedented box office revenues and awards (such as the People’s Choice Award for favorite motion picture and the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme d’Or). Rendition (2007), Redacted (2007), and Stop Loss (2008) have similarly positioned themselves in the middle of the war on terror with a goal of a critical narrative of American policy decisions during the war. Others, such as Harsh Times (2005), have been more subtle in their critique, with the war a central plot device but not the central plot. Ross Douthat composed a thoughtful review of post-9/11 film and television in The Atlantic Monthly, in which he observed that the war in Iraq has been the most consequential political event for Hollywood.2 Although the post-9/11 national narrative was dominated by a return to the patriotic simplicity of earlier times, this has not been the Hollywood interpretation. Harkening back to the Vietnam War era of the 1970s, Douthat argued, the post-9/11 films and television are characterized by a deep skepticism of American government and powerful corporations as well as a stylistic realism “offering a bleak revision of a classic American genre.” Quite the opposite of returning to a 1950s type of idealism, Hollywood of the past decade has gone in the opposite direction. Douthat quoted Tony Soprano to lament this changing entertainment landscape: “Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?” The clearest film comparisons to contemporary international politics are the most likely to portray the government as inept. Lions for Lambs (2007), Syriana (2005), and other such films depicted an ineffective and impotent U.S. foreign policy, in contrast to such films as the Jason Bourne series and even Mission Impossible, which give the government near-omnipotent capacities if not usually any better intentions. Of course, Juliet Lapidos pointed out in Slate the wild inappropriateness of the conspiracy-theory narrative to today’s realities: “Either way, with six years’ distance, the whole syndicate concept [of The X-Files] seems hopelessly naive. The old white guys in the military-industrial complex can’t handle state-building in Afghanistan—we’re supposed to believe they can coordinate an alien invasion?”3 If the cynical conspiracy theory has passed



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as a device in the plot of post-9/11 international thrillers, it seems that it is not because of a more generous interpretation. Rather, in the aftermath of inconclusive government efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hollywood is now skeptical of the viability of conspiracy theories themselves. Douthat was forceful in his argument about Hollywood’s resistance to exhibit an overt influence of 9/11 in its filmmaking: More big-budget movies featuring Islamic villains were released in the 1990s than in the seven years since 9/11 . . . terrorist baddies turn out to be Eurotrash arms dealers (2006’s Casino Royale), disgruntled hackers (2007’s Live Free or Die Hard), a sinister air marshal (2005’s Flightplan), or the handsome white guy sitting next to you in the airport lounge (2005’s Red Eye). Anyone and anybody, in other words, except the sort of people who actually attacked the United States on 9/11.4

Of course, as influential as they are in modern culture, television and film are not the only creative outlets. Fictional and nonfictional literary efforts with post-9/11 themes have met with critical and commercial successes. One of the most notable is the best-selling 9/11 Commission Report, an unexpected commercial success for the findings of a bipartisan congressional commission. Other nonfiction has emerged, with “reports from the front” of the post-9/11 battlefields being among the most successful. The author of the foreword of this volume, Rory Stewart, has proven himself a master in this genre. His Places in Between weaved together a sympathetic narrative of the harsh realities of contemporary Afghanistan with the rich cultural history of that exotic land. After the success of this effort, Mr. Stewart’s Prince of the Marshes followed to provide similar insight to today’s other main conflict zone: Iraq. Sophia McClennen’s chapter in this volume provides an indepth exploration of such literature that focuses on Afghanistan, the staging base of the 9/11 attacks. Fictional adventures into Afghanistan have met with similar acclaim. Khaled Hosseini’s Kiterunner enjoyed an extraordinary popular response. I do not argue that the book’s setting was unprecedented. James Michener’s Caravans presented an authentic and compelling fictional look at Afghanistan a half-century ago. (And it is striking and somewhat poignant how relevant the descriptive narrative of Caravans still is today.) Nonetheless, Hosseini’s success is without doubt intertwined with an American nation shocked by 9/11 and fascinated by Afghanistan, for many a very newly introduced neighbor in the world and one whose destiny had suddenly become intertwined with America’s own in many ways. Other forms of artistic expression have been similarly influenced by 9/11 and its aftermath. Country music is one genre that has responded in an opposite way from Hollywood’s cynical reaction.5 Rather than a paranoid,



INTRODUCTION

MATTHEW J. MORGAN

Vietnam-era type of criticism, country music has reacted with a patriotic jingoism. When the exceptional musician has used his or her position as a platform for protest, the backlash has been strong. The Dixie Chicks are the most prominent country musicians to have experienced the sanctions for violating the patriotic expectations of their genre. Sports have been another cultural medium for which the post-9/11 reaction has been one of greater unity and nationalism. The last two chapters of this volume consider this aspect of entertainment, first looking at sports broadly and then considering the particularly pro-American pursuit, NASCAR. Aside from the cultural arts, the news media has been altered by 9/11. Journalists have been the major interpreter of events after 9/11, and their commentary has been criticized for being either too accepting or too disparaging of administration policy. Others have argued that post-9/11 journalism is not significantly different from before the attacks, but there has been a resurgence of government-sponsored public diplomacy. Several times in the twentieth century, the media has been engaged in wartime news reporting. From the days of the Second World War and Korea to Vietnam and then to the first Persian Gulf War, the media has vacillated. This changing media is seen both in its ability and determination to bring graphic and violent imagery into the American household and in its “watchdog” role and standards of criticism and independence. Arguably, Vietnam was the peak in both of these dimensions, and today’s media, with embedded journalists and satellite technology, has been a more supportive institution for the government than it was a generation before. This volume explores the effect of 9/11 in two sections. First, several authors explore the new narratives that have evolved, the struggle for dominant narrative among these various alternatives, and changes to private and public media outlets. Mel Dubnick, a senior political science scholar, along with his colleagues Dorothy F. Olshfski and Kathe Callahan, begins this conversation by looking at the many different narratives that have emerged. Richard Jackson of Aberystwyth University in the United Kingdom considers the process of construction of a national narrative. Next, P. J. Crowley, the former National Security Council Senior Director of Public Affairs, argues that this battle of narratives is the real central front against al Qaeda. Krista Wiegand of Georgia Southern University follows with her chapter on narratives, considering that Islamic terrorism is today’s “Red Menace.” Simon Moore and Donald Bobiash put art and culture at the heart of a new approach to government communication with global communities. James F. Tracy of Florida Atlantic University and journalist Lisa Finnegan consider in separate chapters the media’s complicity with the government’s agenda after 9/11. Finally, media scholar Nancy Snow explores the resurgence of U.S. public diplomacy.



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The second section looks at various forms of arts and entertainment, beginning with literature. Sophia McClennen of Penn State leads off the section with a chapter reviewing Afghanistan as a popular subject of post9/11 writing. Kristiaan Versluys of Ghent University follows with a look at 9/11 itself as a subject in fictional literature. Marguerite G. Bouvard of Brandeis University and Marcy Newman of An Najah National University follow with two expositions on poetry as a form of post-9/11 dissent, and library studies scholars Rebecca Knuth of University of Hawai’i and Michèle Cloonan of Simmons College consider libraries and archives. The arts and entertainment section continues with an exploration of film, beginning with an overview by Thomas Pollard of National University at San Jose and then with an exposition on the post-9/11 child star Dakota Fanning by Kathy Merlock Jackson of Virginia Wesleyan College. The volume concludes with two chapters on sports: “Sporting Spectacle and the Post-9/11 Patriarchal Body Politic” by Michael Silk of Bath University and Mark Falcous of the University of Otago and then Paul Haridakis and Lawrence Hugenberg’s look at NASCAR after 9/11. Sadly, Professor Hugenberg passed away before this volume went into print, and his coauthor, Paul Haridakis, has dedicated his chapter to Lawrence’s memory and love of NASCAR. The contributing authors of this volume—and the entire series—have been deliberately assembled to provide divergent perspectives on 9/11 and its aftermath. Some have interpreted developments after the 9/11 attacks as a serious setback for a free press and creative culture; others view the artistic response as critically appropriate. This series attempts to bring together leading minds from a variety of perspectives. Without any particular “ax to grind,” I believe that this approach, incorporating such diverse viewpoints to reflect on the impact of the attacks, is best to explore the question of whether September 11, 2001, was the day that changed everything. Notes 1. Ron Rosenbaum, “Hijacking the Hijacking: The Problem with the United 93 Films,” Slate, April 27, 2006. 2. Ross Douthat, “The Return of the Paranoid Style,” The Atlantic Monthly, (April 2008): 52–59. 3. Juliet Lapidos, “Aliens Are Overrated,” Slate, July 24, 2008. 4. Douthat, 58–59. 5. William Hart and Dana Heller, “Hitting the Right Chord: Selling U.S. Foreign Policy through Country Music,” in The Selling of 9/11: How a Tragedy Became a Commodity, ed. Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).



INTRODUCTION




New Narratives and the Media



Part I




Aggressive Action: In Search of a Dominant Narrative Melvin J. Dubnick, Dorothy F. Olshfski, and Kathe Callahan*

A photo of that moment is etched for history. The president’s hands are folded formally in his lap, his hand turned to hear [Andrew] Card’s words. His face has a distant somber, almost frozen, edging on bewilderment. Bush remembers exactly what he was thinking: “They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we are going to war.”1

T

he idea of “going to war” seemed obvious enough at first blush. We had been attacked, and we planned to respond in kind. It was that simple. Or was it? Despite the analogies drawn to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, the decision to enter a “state of war” after September 11, 2001 was a unique event in American history. Although other American wars are associated with “triggering” events (e.g., the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the sinking of the Battleship Maine, Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Kuwait), none of those past instances occurred in a “narrative vacuum.” In each previous case, the road to war had been well paved materially, politically, and psychologically over an extended period of time. The shelling of Fort Sumter by South Carolinian troops was the culmination of events that had unfolded over several months after the election of Lincoln and after many years of heated discussion * Melvin J. Dubnick is Professor of Political Science at University of New Hampshire. Dorothy F. Olshfski is Associate Professor of Public Administration at Rutgers University. Kathe Callahan is Assistant Professor of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University.



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DUBNICK, OLSHFSKI, AND CALLAHAN

and debate.2 The public clamor for war with Spain was already several years old when the battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana in February 1898, but even then two months passed before Congress declared war.3 The U.S. entry into the First World War is often associated with the loss of American lives when the Lusitania was sank—but nearly two years and a great deal of preparation passed between that event and the declaration of war.4 Although the attack on Pearl Harbor was a military surprise, it took place in the midst of a debate over plans for mobilizing and ongoing preparations for war that had been building for at least two years.5 And the extended build-up—psychologically as well as militarily—to the Persian Gulf War was still fresh in our memories as the process was repeated in 2003.6 The “war on terror” triggered by the events of 9/11 had no such gestation period. The state of war was declared by President Bush and others without hesitation, but it was also done without any troops or plans in place to confront this particular enemy. As important, it occurred in context of public indifference to and/or ignorance of the threat posed by terrorists. There had been discussions within intellectual communities about possible “blowbacks”7 and a coming “clash of civilizations.”8 There were also warnings issued in a series of reports by a relatively obscure advisory commission9 chartered in 1998 by Secretary of Defense William Cohen. But otherwise little attention was given pre-9/11 to establishing a scenario for anything resembling a war on terror. Such matters as terrorist threats remained stories of law enforcement, criminal investigations, and the prosecution of bombers and their co-conspirators. The bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, and the exploits of the Unabomber were perceived as the criminal acts of fringe fanatics who would be brought to justice through the normal channels of law and order. Until the morning of 9/11, however, there was no substantial “story line” in the popular press or from the government about a war on terror.

War Narratives and the Shaping of American Culture Surprisingly little scholarship has focused on the role of narratives in times of war, and most of what we know of this topic is anecdotal (in the broad historical sense) or atheoretical. There are a number of examinations of how different national cultures—winners as well as losers—handled the memory of past wars. Lundberg10 provides an analysis of the literature that emerged from the American Civil War as well as U.S. involvement in World Wars I and II; Moeller11 examines the search for a “usable” past



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in post-Nazi politics and more recent German literature; and Igarashi12 focuses on the literature of postwar Japan. Yet, the American cultural experience with war narratives has received increasing attention in recent years. War narratives have played a central role in American history from the outset of colonization.13 Today, there is a growing literature documenting the efforts to establish narratives that defined the nation’s enemies and the threats they posed. Some of these studies focus on the mass media helping set the public mood for war.14 Others concentrate on stereotypical images of enemy societies and the threats they posed to the American way of life15 and how these images pervaded American culture and the narratives of the cold war.16 This expansive and expanding literature on the importance of war narratives in American culture would be of little import outside of academe if not for its potential relevance to issues surrounding the operations of government in the post-9/11 world. The uniqueness of the declared war on terror in terms of both its timing and engagement calls for a greater understanding of how state of war narratives impact on the public administration community. This, in turn, requires a better understanding of the role that narratives in general play in administrative life.

The Centrality of Narratives in Social and Administrative Life Narratives have taken on considerable importance in the social sciences in recent years. Among sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists, the use of discourse analysis17 has drawn greater attention to narratives used in distinct contexts from daily conversations18 and interactions in the workplace19 to physician-patient interactions20 and celebrity interviews.21 The new field of narrative psychology22 has generated a number of studies attempting to deal with the long-standing issues of self identity23 and human development.24 Legal scholars are paying greater attention to the role that narratives and storytelling play in the dynamics of litigation and legal reasoning.25 Political scientists have addressed narratives through the study of political culture and rhetoric (in the form of symbols, ideology, and myths) and public policymaking.26 The common thread of these and related political science perspectives is the view of narratives as the tools—and reflection—of political power.27 Students of public policy have also found the concept of ideological narratives increasingly useful. Some have stressed the important historical role that narratives (in the form of ideologies or “schools of thought”) have played in shaping foreign policymaking.28 The role of narratives in other policy arenas is implied by those who focused on policy



AGGRESSIVE ACTION


argumentation and policy design.29 Emery Roe’s30 efforts to apply literary narrative techniques to a range of policy debates in 1994 was the first major effort to focus attention on policy-relevant narratives, and in recent years studies have been published on the role of narratives in such topics as postwar urban policies in the United Kingdom,31 telecommunications in New Zealand,32 environmental regulation in Canada and the United States,33 anti-corruption in China,34 criminal justice in Britain,35 and race and ethnicity in the United States.36 Work specifically linking narratives with administrative decision making has emerged from the study of “sensemaking” by Karl Weick and his students. Building on his earlier ground-breaking work on the social psychology of organizing, Weick 37 makes narratives an important part of his examination of how people make sense of their environments. He argues that sensemaking precedes interpretation by isolating and focusing on some events among the flow of experience. By focusing on some specific events, outcomes are explained by assigning them to a plausible story to recount what is going on. Sensemaking needs a good story. Thus stories, or narratives, are an important element of how individuals make sense of their environment and how they see themselves operating in that environment. The war on terror provides an opportunity to extend Weick’s analysis of sensemaking in organizations to a more general context. The challenges of making sense of administrative life in the post-9/11 world goes beyond understanding the limited and constrained capacity for rational decision making in modern organizations. Nor is it limited to making sense of the bureau pathologies or the distortions and abuses of bureaucratic power.

Making Sense of a State of War The perspective applied here relies on narratives as more than merely a literary form, a rhetorical instrument of power, or a methodological tool that treats actions as texts. Narratives are fundamental to analyzing human consciousness and understanding—and thus to comprehending human thought and action. Human thought and action do not occur in a mental vacuum, but rather are shaped by (and, in turn, shapes) ongoing processes of narration (i.e., sensemaking) that seem implied by the situation.38 We can pursue this perspective in three distinct ways. First, narratives can be approached as causal and controlling factors in social life. Such a position is strongly implied in the political and administrative culture literatures where narratives take on determinative roles by shaping the



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realities, values, and premises that form attitudes, decisions, and behaviors. In this view, narratives are assumed to be an autonomous cultural artifact, distinct from any individual and generated by a community within a range of possible options. This is reflected in the cultural theory approach used by Mary Douglas and others,39 and applied to public administration by Wildavsky40 and, more recently and elaborately, by Hood.41 A second approach treats narratives as dependent variables—as the product of bureaucratic behavior and administrative machinations. In this literature, narratives are not merely the vehicle through which bureaucratic control is exercised, but the context created by and manifest in those narrative structures and the norms and assumptions they represent. This is the “lifeworld” of phenomenologists42 that has found expression in analyses of the bureaucratization of administrative, political, and social life.43 The third—and least developed—approach is to regard narratives as the key intervening variable in social life in general, and administrative life in particular. From this view, narratives are neither sources of external control nor functionalist drivers of the human lifeworld. Rather, they are the internalized media—the sensemaking mechanisms—through which human thought and action take shape. In the general literature, this approach has found its most explicit expression in the work of Dennett.44 In the study of administrative life, it is the view central to the work of Weick45 and his colleagues. Applying that third approach, a central question and challenge of the war on terror for individual public administrators was to make sense of the radically altered environment and their respective places (and roles) in it. In lieu of an established metanarrative—or at least efforts to develop and nurture a state of war narrative that would identify an enemy, end state, and some expectations regarding roles and obligations—what emerges in the consciousness of administrators are “multiple drafts.” In Dennett’s terms, these drafts represent the continuous revision of narratives through a complex “multitrack” process that occurs in “hundreds of milliseconds” and generates “something rather like a narrative stream or sequence” that is subject to “continual editing”: Contents arise, get revised, contribute to the interpretation of other contents or to the modulation of behavior (verbal and otherwise), and in the process leave their traces in memory, which then eventually decay or get incorporated into or overwritten by later contents, wholly or in part.46

In Weick’s terms, public administrators are engaged in an ongoing process of “making sense” of the war on terror through state of war narratives drawn from past experiences real and perceived. The challenge we



AGGRESSIVE ACTION

14


face is to understand how—and to what effect—those state of war narratives manifest themselves.

Of course, it would be absurd to contend that the war on terror occurs in a complete narrative vacuum. State of war narratives are a part of American culture, and public administrators are no less subject to the historical and popular images and myths of war that permeate American culture than are other citizens. A framework for distinguishing among four common state of war narratives47 was developed based on the transposition of two salient features of such narratives: what they imply about the operational demands and cultural commitments to be expected from American citizens. Operationally, a state of war can call for the full mobilization of our economic and social resources at one extreme or, at the other, a level of mobilization that generates minimal or isolated demands on the nation. In terms of cultural commitment, a state of war can be perceived as requiring a full integration of the war effort’s values, norms, and priorities in the national culture or, again at the other extreme, a minimal deference to the cultural demands of war. When combined, the two dimensions provide a framework outlining four major options for the “state of war” narratives. The substantive form of these narratives on the war on terror were identified by an analysis of speeches and news reports that emanated from politicians and administration officials after the 9/11 tragedy. The narratives identified were about the war on terror and the initial response to neither the terrorist attacks on the United States, not the actual invasion of Iraq in March 2003 nor the events that followed. Four narratives were identified: the garrison state narrative, the temporary state narrative, the glass-firewall narrative, and the enemy within narrative.

Low

High

Garrison State Narrative

“Temporary” State Narrative

Low

Operational Demands

Cultural Commitments High

Enemy Within Narrative

Glass Firewall Narrative

Figure 1.1 “State of War” Narratives



Contending State of War Narratives

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Briefly, under a garrison state, society is completely and permanently transformed to deal with the present and future threats on national security. Society organizes itself around the constant threat of war—it becomes a “war machine.” This narrative can be viewed in its most extreme forms in Orwell’s 1984, and in real life in contemporary North Korea. The concept is attributed to Harold Laswell, who in 1941 wrote of a future in which “specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society.”48 Someone who “hears” the garrison state narrative would agree with statements that reflect permanent changes in our society. The temporary state reflects the belief that the measures taken during war are necessary but short term. The temporary state narrative reflects the ancient Roman doctrine inter arma silent leges—idiomatically: “in time of war, the laws are silent.” The silence and or violation of civil liberties are accepted because they are temporary. The belief is that the sooner we eliminate the enemy, the sooner life returns to normal. Someone who “hears” the temporary state narrative would agree that the violation of individual civil liberties is permissible, as long as it is short term.49 The glass-firewall narrative reflects two parallel administrative worlds, one civilian and one military, that operate simultaneously and in full view of each other. These parallel worlds are separated by a legal and organizational firewall that protects each from interference the other.50 During wartime the military expects to “call the shots” without political interference. This narrative would see an individual agreeing with a statement regarding the expertise of the military and their ability to protect us. As civilians we should go on with our lives, comfortable in the knowledge that the military will protect us. The final narrative requires a high level of personal and cultural commitment and is labeled the “enemy within” to stress its similarity to the McCarthy-era perspective that dominated the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. This narrative emphasizes that the threat to our security emanates from within our borders, as reflected in the Patriot’s Act, and that as good Americans we should ferret out disloyal and subversive individuals. The enemy in this war might very well be our own neighbor and therefore we have to keep a watchful eye on one another and report any suspicious activity.51

Exit Strategy Narratives While “state of war narratives” relate to the justification and initial conduct of war efforts, they are hardly unchanging over time. The progress



AGGRESSIVE ACTION


(or lack thereof) of a war effort will inevitably be reflected in changes in the dominant state of war narrative. Using the framework posited by Dubnick, we can find historical instances in which a conflict initiated under a “temporary state of war” narrative is transformed into a “garrison state” form after it becomes evident that the military campaigns will take years rather than months. For example, as the British mobilized for the First World War in August 1914, the popular image was that it will all be over by Christmas, but it soon became evident that the expectations reflected in that narrative had to be radically altered. This was a lesson put to use by Churchill three decades later when he made certain the British were prepared for a long and sustained conflict. During the American Civil War, Lincoln faced several challenges related to the dominant war narrative. Not only did he face the task of sustaining public support as the conflict wore on, but he needed to do so while adjusting the rationale of the war from one focused primarily on defending the union to a conflict related to emancipation. But as time passes another closely related set of state of war narratives emerge that address how the conflict might—or ought to—end. Exit strategy narratives are especially important when a conflict lasts much longer than the initial state of war narrative implied and the enemy seems to be winning or at least increasingly intractable. Analytically, exit strategy narratives can be differentiated along two dimensions: the portrayal of the likelihood of victory (i.e., the war is won/“winnable” or lost/“losable”) and the level of public attentiveness.

Level of Public Attentiveness

Figure 1.2

Won/ winnable Lost/ losable

Portrayal of Likelihood of Victory

High

Victory Narrative “mission accomplished”

Low Long-term commitment narrative “100 years”

Quick Withdrawal Narrative

Gradual Withdrawal Narrative

Leave in a panic

In stages, slow and subtle, the loss is quiet, forgettable

Very visible, abrupt Loss

Exit Narratives



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Each of these general narrative types provides a picture of how the exit strategy is likely to unfold, and it sets the stage for how various actors approach their tasks. The “victory” narrative provides individuals with a sense that the end is near and positive—and that soon conditions will return to normal (e.g., the famous post-First World War theme of a return to “normalcy”). The “long-term commitment” narrative sets a different tone and outlook for the future, implying that the public should be prepared for a perpetual state of war—even if of a limited type. The “quick withdrawal” narrative prepares the public for the shock of seeming defeat, and in doing so may also prepare the nation for a period of political recriminations, collective self-examination, and (in the longer term) reconciliation. The “gradual withdrawal” narrative, in contrast, sets the stage for an exit that seems tactical and militarily wise—even though the withdrawal itself might be viewed historically as an admission of stalemate or defeat. Applied to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a victory narrative was articulated by George W. Bush on May 1, 2003, on the deck of the aircraft carrier the U.S.S Abraham Lincoln. President Bush, looking fit for command as he stepped out of a jet fighter wearing a green flight suit and holding a white helmet, strutted around the aircraft carrier saluting those on the flight deck and shaking hands with those on deck beneath a banner that declared “Mission Accomplished.” Although the mission has proven far from accomplished, this victory narrative did not disappear in the years that followed as the situation on the ground deteriorated. Repeated declarations by the administration detailing how well the war effort was going and how well the Iraqi government was handling the job of governing continued as the White House remained in what Bob Woodward would term a “state of denial.”52 In a speech delivered on July 31, 2008, President Bush once again spoke of victory: “We remain a nation at war. Al Qaeda is on the run in Iraq—but the terrorists remain dangerous . . . We owe our thanks to all those who wear the uniform . . . and the best way to honor them is to support their mission—and bring them home with victory.” John McCain sustained that narrative during his campaign for the presidency, but in accepting the Republican nomination for the presidency he repeatedly referred to a victory in Iraq in aspirational terms and stressed the necessity that the country commits itself to a victorious outcome. This narrative portrays an interpretation of the situation as moving toward a clear and obvious victory that is easily recognized and agreed upon by most Americans. McCain has also been associated with articulating a “long-term commitment” narrative for the Iraq War, where the situation will play out like the script of the Korean War. We are there for the long haul but eventually the enemy will succumb to the demands for democracy and peace.



AGGRESSIVE ACTION


We have not lost; rather victory will come, but at some later date. Early in his primary campaign for the GOP nomination, McCain had visualized a “100 year” strategy in a conversation with reporters—an approach that reflected the thinking of military strategists and some in the Bush administration who regarded such an approach as the only viable alternative to outright withdrawal. The conflict had morphed from a conventional war into a situation involving insurgency and sectarian strife bordering on civil war, and many field commanders and military analysts believed the war would go on for years, possibly decades, depending on the resilience of the combatants and the U.S. political will to maintain the fight. The long-term commitment narrative defines the war as an incomplete but eventual victory that requires patience with a long-term but smaller contingent of soldiers at or near the war zone who would not constantly be in harm’s way. As in Korea, this would also mean a gradual decrease in the amount of media attention overtime as other issues begin to dominate the political agenda. The war will fade into the background and will be largely ignored by politicians and the unaffected public, all the while sustaining the narrative of, at the least, a partial victory. The quick withdrawal narrative applied to the Iraq War finds the troops withdrawing in the face of a dysfunctional Iraqi government engaged in a civil war and an admission that perhaps it was unwise for the United States to have been there in the first place. Among major American political actors, only a few have articulated this narrative—most notably Governor Bill Richardson during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2007. “Our troops have done everything they were asked to do with courage and professionalism, but they cannot win someone else’s civil war,” Richardson wrote in a September 8, 2007 Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post. “So long as American troops are in Iraq, reconciliation among Iraqi factions is postponed. Leaving forces there enables the Iraqis to delay taking the necessary steps to end the violence. And it prevents us from using diplomacy to bring in other nations to help stabilize and rebuild the country.”53 Unfortunately for Richardson’s presidential aspirations, this narrative was not widely endorsed. Instead, a less-nuanced version of the narrative became associated with a “defeatist” perspective and played out in the press and among opposition politicians as a prescription for a military debacle, reminiscent of the ignominious withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam. The end of American involvement in Vietnam is widely seen by many Americans as a narrative of embarrassment and failure—an utterly useless and costly war. The withdrawal from Vietnam has frequently been framed as a political defeat, not a military defeat, and quick withdrawal narratives such as that articulated by Richardson have suffered as a result.



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The gradual withdrawal narrative has proven more effective for opponents of the Iraq War. In this narrative the troops are withdrawn from harm’s way slowly and come home within a reasonable time frame that will protect American lives while giving the Iraqi government an opportunity to stand on its own militarily and politically. The prospect of a long-term commitment or the spectacle of an embarrassing “defeat” are minimized under this scenario, and the extended timeline means reduced attention from the media as public attention fades into the background. This narrative was central to the three major Democrats in the recent presidential primaries (Obama, Clinton, and Edwards) and remained a core narrative in the Obama campaign in the fall of 2008. It is a narrative that eventually took hold in the lame duck White House as President Bush—who had previously steadfastly refused to accept any timetable for bringing U.S. troops home— agreed with Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to consider a “general time horizon” for a U.S. departure—that is, a phased withdrawal. Maliki understood the challenge this shift in narrative posed for Bush when he told the German news magazine Der Spiegel in July, 2008, that the “Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat.”54

Discussion In previous U.S. wars, a central narrative had been a critical element in developing support and direction for the war effort. This is not the case with the war on terror. The United States declared the war on terror with no established or emergent “state of war narrative.” This had proven to be a critical element in the conduct of past wars and yet this historical condition did not exist with the war on terror. What was absent in the case of the war on terror was an established or emergent narrative generated from the political center with the intent of signaling a coherent response during a time of war. And what is seen now, as the country grapples with ending the war on terror as it is being played out in Iraq, is competing narratives that attempt to define political players as winners or losers in the struggle. We identified four narratives surrounding the operation of the war on terror. We have portrayed narratives describing our involvement in this war on terror according to how extensive the operational demands are and how intense the cultural commitments. And, as Iraq is one of the more invasive representations of the war on terror, we have also identified four narratives that surround the exit strategy that might accompany the withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. The



AGGRESSIVE ACTION


narratives are delineated by their insistence on defining the excursion as a “win” or a “loss,” and to what extent the general public is cognizant of the situation. Both sets of narratives emerge from the political centers of the debate about the war on terror and our disengagement from Iraq as part of that war on terror. Human thought and action does not occur in a mental vacuum, but rather is shaped by (and, in turn, shapes) ongoing narratives that accompany political action. The narratives compete for dominance as competing story lines jockey for public attention. These stories provide a guidepost for citizens as they interpret and evaluate the war on terror. Making sense of the war and the exit from a war draws heavily on these narratives as they manifest themselves in the public consciousness. Notes 1. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 15. 2. Herbert Agar, The Price of Union (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). 3. Thomas G. Paterson, “United States Intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War,” History Teacher 29, no. 3 (1996): 341–361. 4. Daniel M. Smith, “Robert Lansing and the Formulation of American Neutrality Policies, 1914–1915,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43, no. 1 (1956): 59–81; J. A. Thompson, “American Progressive Publicists and the First World War, 1914–1917,” Journal of American History 58, no. 2 (1971): 364–383. 5. Scott D. Sagan, “The Origins of the Pacific War,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (1988): 893–922; William L. O’Neill, A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II (New York: Free Press, 1993); Thomas J. Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 6. Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston: Little Brown, 1995). 7. Chalmers A. Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000). 8. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order (London, UK: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1996). 9. Known by various names—initially the National Security Study Group, then the Hart-Rudman Commission (after its co-chairs), and most recently and formally the U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century—it issued its first report in 1999, a second in 2000, and a lengthy final report less than a year later. See Gary Hart, Warren B. Rudman, Anne Armstrong, et al., New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century—Major Themes and Implications: The Phase I Report on the Emerging Global Security Environment for the First Quarter of the 21st Century (Washington, DC: The United States



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10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

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Commission on National Security/21st Century September 15, 1999); Gary Hart, Warren B. Rudman, Anne Armstrong, et al., Seeking a National Strategy: A Concert for Preserving Security and Promoting Freedom—The Phase II Report on a U.S. National Security Strategy for the 21st Century (Washington, DC: The United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, April 15, 2000); Gary Hart, Warren B. Rudman, Anne Armstrong, et al., Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change—The Phase III Report of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (Washington, DC: The United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, February 15, 2001). David Lundberg, “The American Literature of War: The Civil War, World War I, and World War II,” American Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1984): 373–388. Robert G. Moeller, “War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany,” American Historical Review 101, no. 4 (1996): 1008–1048. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). John Ferling, “The New England Soldier: A Study in Changing Perceptions,” American Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1981): 26–45; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1998); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Thomas Patrick Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (London; New York: Routledge, 1999); Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen, and Heidi Ehernberger Hamilton, eds., The Handbook of Discourse Analysis (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001). Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). David M. Boje, “The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance,” Administrative Science Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1991): 106–126; Nic Beech, “Narrative Styles of Managers and Workers: A Tale of Star-Crossed Lovers,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 36, no. 2 (2000): 210–228; Judy Wajcman and Bill Martin, “Narratives of Identity in Modern Management: The Corrosion of Gender Difference,” Sociology 36, no. 4 (2002): 985–1002. Howard Waitzkin, Theron Britt, and Constance Williams, “Narratives of Aging and Social Problems in Medical Encounters with Older Persons,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 35, no. 4 (1994): 322–348; Ronald Loewe, et al., “Doctor Talk and Diabetes: Towards an Analysis of the Clinical Construction of Chronic Illness,” Social Science & Medicine 47, no. 9 (1998): 1267–1276.



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21. Jacqueline Abell and Elizabeth H. Stokoe, “ ‘I Take Full Responsibility, I Take Some Responsibility, I’ll Take Half of It but No More Than That’: Princess Diana and the Negotiation of Blame in the ‘Panorama’ Interview,” Discourse Studies 1, no. 3 (1999): 297–318. 22. For an overview of narrative psychology and related writings, see http://web. lemoyne.edu/~hevern/narpsych.html. 23. See Ochs and Capps, Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling; Douglas Ezzy, “Illness Narratives: Time, Hope and HIV,” Social Science & Medicine 50, no. 5 (2000): 605–617; Hubert J. M. Hermans, “The Dialogical Self: Toward a Theory of Personal and Cultural Positioning,” Culture & Psychology 7, no. 3 (2001): 243–281; Robert G. Wahler and Frank D. Castlebury, “Personal Narratives as Maps of the Social Ecosystem,” Clinical Psychology Review 22, no. 2 (2002): 297–314. 24. See Susan Engel, The Stories Children Tell: Making Sense of the Narratives of Childhood (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995); Alexander Grob, Franciska Krings, and Adrian Bangerter, “Life Markers in Biographical Narratives of People from Three Cohorts: A Life Span Perspective in Its Historical Context,” Human Development 44, no. 4 (2001): 171–190; Minami Masahiko, “Maternal Styles of Narrative Elicitation and the Development of Children’s Narrative Skill: A Study on Parental Scaffolding,” Narrative Inquiry 11, no. 1 (2001): 55–80; Margaret Morganroth Gullette, “From Life Storytelling to Age Autobiography,” Journal of Aging Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 101–111. 25. Anthony G. Amsterdam and Jerome S. Bruner, Minding the Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Thomas Noonan, Persons and Masks of the Law: Cardozo, Holmes, Jefferson, and Wythe as Makers of the Masks (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 26. See Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (Chicago: Markham, 1971); Murray J. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). 27. H. Mark Roelofs , Ideology and Myth in American Politics: A Critique of a National Political Mind (Boston: Little Brown, 1976); Richard M. Merelman, “On Culture and Politics in America: A Perspective from Structural Anthropology,” British Journal of Political Science 19, no. 4 (1989): 465–493; Christopher Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1996). 28. See e.g., Hunt who stresses the existence of a core ideology throughout U.S. history; and Mead who elaborates four basic “schools of thought” that have dominated foreign policymaking. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (New York: Knopf, 2001). 29. Frank Fischer, Evaluating Public Policy (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1995), part 5; Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram, Policy Design for Democracy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1997). There was some explicit attention to narratives in the 1980s, but these efforts were regarded by one observer as “fledgling” in the early 1990s. See Thomas J. Kaplan, “The



22

30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

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Narrative Structure of Policy Analysis,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 5, no. 4 (1986): 761–778; Deborah A. Stone, Policy Paradox and Political Reason (Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, 1988), 109–116; Deborah A. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas,” Political Science Quarterly 104, no. 2 (1989): 281–300; Mayer N. Zald, “Organization Studies as a Scientific and Humanistic Enterprise: Toward a Reconceptualization of the Foundations of the Field,” Organization Science 4, no. 4 (1993): 522–523. Emery Roe, Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). Rob Atkinson, “Narratives of Policy: The Construction of Urban Problems and Urban Policy in the Official Discourse of the British Government 1968– 1998,” Critical Social Policy 20, no. 2 (2000): 211–232. Todd Bridgman and David Barry, “Regulation Is Evil: An Application of Narrative Policy Analysis to Regulatory Debate in New Zealand,” Policy Sciences 35, no. 2 (2002): 141–161. Gavin Bridge and Phil McManus, “Sticks and Stones: Environmental Narratives and Discursive Regulation in the Forestry and Mining Sectors,” Antipode 31, no. 4 (2000): 10–47. Carolyn L. Hsu, “Political Narratives and the Production of Legitimacy: The Case of Corruption in Post-Mao China,” Qualitative Sociology 24, no. 1 (2001): 25–54. Moira Peelo and Keith Soothill, “The Place of Public Narratives in Reproducing Social Order,” Theoretical Criminology 4, no. 2 (2000): 131–148. Dvora Yanow, Constructing “Race” and “Ethnicity” in America: CategoryMaking in Public Policy and Administration (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2003). Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995). Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Mary Douglas, “Four Cultures: The Evolution of a Parsimonious Model,” Geojournal 47, no. 3 (1999): 411–417; Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990). Aaron Wildavsky, “Cultural Theory of Responsibility,” Bureaucracy and Public Choice, ed. J.-E. Lane. (London, UK: Sage, 1987); Aaron Wildavsky, “A Cultural Theory of Budgeting,” International Journal of Public Administration 11 (1988): 651–677. Christopher Hood , The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, 1998). See Alfred Schu[e]tz, “On Multiple Realities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5, no. 4 (1945): 533–576; Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967). Ralph P. Hummel, The Bureaucratic Experience: The Postmodern Challenge, 5th ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008).



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44. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991); Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1996). 45. Weick. 46. Dennett, 135. Italics in original. 47. Melvin J. Dubnick, “Postcripts for a ‘State of War’: Public Administration and Civil Liberties after September 11,” Public Administration Review 62 (Special Issue, 2002): 86–91; See figure 1.1. 48. Harold D. Laswell, “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology 46, no. 4 (1941): 455. 49. William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (New York: Knopf, 1998). 50. James A. Stever, “The Glass Firewall between Military and Civil Administration,” Administration and Society 31, no. 1 (1999): 28–49. 51. Stephen J. Schulhofer, The Enemy Within: Intelligence Gathering, Law Enforcement, and Civil Liberties in the Wake of September 11 (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2002). 52. Bob Woodward, State of Denial (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006). 53. Bill Richardson, “Why We Should Exit Iraq Now,” Washington Post, September 8, 2007, A15. 54. “Iraq Leader Maliki Supports Obama’s Withdrawal Plans,” Der Spiegel, July 19, 2008, available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/ 0,1518,566841,00.html, accessed September 17, 2008.



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The 9/11 Attacks and the Social Construction of a National Narrative Richard Jackson*

I

t is widely believed that important national events such as wars or acts of terrorism are so obvious that they do not require analysis or interpretation; instead, they are said to “speak for themselves.” The attacks on September 11, 2001, are thought by many to fall into this category; like the events of December 7, 1941 (to which they are frequently compared) it seemed obvious—commonsense even—that this was an “act of war” committed by evil men on the American way of life and its core values that necessitated a large-scale military response. In reality, no actions or events ever “speak for themselves.” Rather, they take on different kinds and levels of meaning for a political community through processes of interpretation and social narration, usually by the powerful symbolic actors authorized to speak on behalf of the whole community. The initial interpretation may seem entirely natural at the time because it resonates with the specific historical and social circumstances of the society at that particular moment, or because it fits into preexisting cultural interpretive frameworks. However, accepted interpretations may change over time when different groups contest the earlier meanings given to the events. In a pertinent example of this process, Emily Rosenberg has shown how the social and political meaning of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was deployed and contested by different

* Richard Jackson is Reader in the Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, where he is also Senior Researcher at the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence. He is the founding editor of the journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and co-editor of the new book Critical Terrorism Studies



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political groups over the subsequent 60 years and was given new narrations and meanings.1 Based on an analysis of hundreds of speeches given by political leaders following the terrorist attacks, as well as hundreds of other social and cultural texts such as media reports, academic publications, films, novels, sermons, and the like, the purpose of this chapter is to explore the main ways in which the dominant narrative about the events of September 11, 2001—or “9/11,” as it is now known—came to be constructed, its primary motifs and subnarratives, the means by which the narrative was reproduced socially and culturally, and some of the main consequences of the political-cultural hegemony of the narrative. The chapter is divided into three main sections. Part one describes the primary themes, characters, and plotlines of the 9/11 narrative. Part two explores some of the main ways by which the narrative came to dominate all other possible interpretations and was embedded into the cultural and political landscape. Part three examines some of the political and ideological consequences of the dominant interpretation given to these events.

The Narration of 9/11 The attacks on the World Trade Center at first seemed to engender a kind of linguistic paralysis or a “void of meaning” for everyone watching.2 Although it was clear that a deliberately caused disaster had killed thousands and caused an immense amount of destruction, it was unclear to most observers what the events signified or meant in terms of either the past or the future. It was into this collective silence that President Bush and senior figures in the administration, as powerful symbolic figures authorized to speak on behalf of the nation, began to articulate a very specific interpretation of the events. This interpretation quickly evolved into a large and powerful political and social narrative that explained what had occurred, who the perpetrators were, why they had done it, what would happen in the future, and how the government would respond. For reasons explained later, this narrative came to dominate American politics and society and remains largely unchallenged today. I have explored the primary motifs and narratives surrounding the attacks in some detail elsewhere.3 It must suffice to summarize them here. First, following an initial characterization as “acts of murder” on the day itself, the events of 9/11 were rhetorically recast by the administration as “acts of war” and a “new Pearl Harbor” the next day, which therefore necessitated (and justified) a war-based or military response. In addition, the day was discursively constructed as a moment of temporal



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rupture.4 That is, it was described as a “day like no other,” the “day the world changed,” and the “beginning of a new age of terror.” This particular subnarrative was very important for later enabling the administration to argue that the “old” rules and approaches to countering such threats were no longer relevant, and “new” means were required to deal with the “new” kind of enemy. Paradoxically, at the same time, the attacks were also narrated as historical continuity in the sense that totalitarian enemies had attacked America before during the war of 1812, the Second World War, and the cold war. The administration argued that, just as then, it would require a “long war” and a major collective effort from society to defeat the new enemy. A second important subnarrative suggested that the attacks demonstrated that there was a massive, global terrorist threat in existence that posed a real, existential threat to America, to “civilization” itself, to democracy and freedom, and to “our entire way of life.” It was argued that there were tens of thousands of sophisticated, ruthless, fanatical, wellresourced, and determined terrorist killers, “schooled in the methods of murder” and just waiting to strike again. The administration emphatically argued that terrorist cells were located in more than 60 countries across the world, further attacks were inevitable, and terrorists fully intended to use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in American cities. In an important evolution of the discourse, it was suggested that the threat was extraordinary and growing in large part because terrorists were supported by rogue regimes such as Iraq and other members of the “axis of evil” who could provide them with “the means to match their madness,” or, WMD. This subnarrative was politically important because it allowed the administration to refocus the threat from an amorphous group of individuals to territorially defined states that could then be attacked using traditional military means. An important element of the broader terrorist threat subnarrative was the longstanding notion of the “enemy within.” According to the administration, there were so-called terrorist “sleeper cells” who were “living in our communities,” like “ticking time-bombs” just waiting to go off. The logic of this particular subnarrative suggested that the public should remain watchful of fellow citizens, and that new measures designed to restrict civil liberties, increase surveillance on U.S. citizens and immigrants, and further militarize American society were necessary to counter the threat of these internal enemies. A third dimension of the 9/11 narratives focused on ascribing the identities of the main characters in the drama. The administration was quick to identify the terrorists as “evil,” “savage,” “cruel,” “cowardly,” “inhuman,” “hate-filled,” “perverted,” and “alien.” In this sense, it was suggested



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that the reason for their actions lay within their character, rather than any rational, historical, or political motives; that is, they attacked America because they were inherently “evil” and hated its values. Later on, the terrorists were more elaborately constructed as part of a broader global threat from “radical Islam” and “Islamism” or “Islamofascism,”5 which in turn, drew upon longstanding Orientalist motifs. In direct contrast to the terrorist “other,” and apart from being the “victims” of a vicious assault, Americans were scripted as “innocent,” “good,” “heroic,” “decent,” “united,” and well-intentioned. These constructions drew upon a great many existing cultural elements in American society, including the “cult of innocence,”6 religious and virtual notions of “evil,” hero-worship, militarized patriotism, and the like. They also tapped into longstanding Western metanarratives such as the eternal “struggle between good and evil” and between “civilization and barbarism.”7 A final important aspect of the broader 9/11 narrative focused on the question of America’s response to the attack. In the first days after the attacks, the administration asserted that because they were “acts of war,” a “war on terrorism” was the necessary and legitimate response. Moreover, it would be a “good war,” a “just war,” a “new and different kind of war,” and a “long war.” Discursively, the war on terrorism was firmly located within the historical tradition of the Second World War and the cold war, and it was suggested that America had to respond to its “historic calling” as the “exceptional” nation to once again protect the free world from totalitarianism. The administration further argued that it was a defensive war, as the terrorists had ensured that no other course of action was possible, it was a war of last resort, and it was entirely winnable. The notion that it was a “new and different war” was particularly important because it suggested that new means and a new mentality was required, including measures normally prescribed under the laws of war, such as the preemptive attack on Iraq, extraordinary rendition, the Guantanamo detention camp, targeted killings, the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques or torture, and the like. It is important to recognize that this powerful interpretation of the events was not necessarily inevitable or natural, even if it was always highly likely give the existing structures and character of American political culture (see the following text). Other possible interpretations and narratives were available to the administration, including, among many others, the “terrorism as crime” narrative (e.g., which was adopted by the European Union), the counterhegemonic “oil politics” narrative (which was later adopted by the antiwar “no blood for oil” campaign), or the “costs of empire” argument (expressed by some left-wing critics such as Noam Chomsky and William Blum). In any event, this particular narrative was



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Embedding a Dominant Narrative There are a number of specific reasons why the administration’s interpretation of the events quickly became the dominant narrative in American political culture and was thereafter embedded into its social and political institutions. Furthermore, the narrative has remained dominant since, despite controversy over the manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, revelations of torture and rendition, and the efforts of the antiwar movement.8 In the first place, the narrative was continuously repeated across the media and other social institutions by the nation’s most powerfully symbolic actors. In the context of the sense of crisis created by both the visual spectacle of the events themselves and their initial interpretation as “the start of a new age of terror” by sophisticated and ubiquitous terrorists, the administration was expected to speak on behalf of the nation and reassure the public. It was therefore, given almost unprecedented access to the media, which in turn, largely repeated the administration’s message uncritically and without interpretation. In the first three years following the attacks, the administration made on average 10 speeches, statements to the press, interviews, and the like, per day on the issue.9 Given that the narrative was in every newspaper, on every radio and television station, as well as in novels, films, sermons, and the Internet, continuously for several years, it is unsurprising that it became the dominant interpretation. Second, the central elements of the 9/11 narrative were also very quickly embedded in the institutions and practices of American government and security. For example, the primary interpretation and assumptions were given expression through, among other things: the establishment of new government departments like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); the enactment of new legislation such as the Patriot Act; new security doctrines, action plans, strategic plans, surveillance and reporting programmes, official reports, memos, operating procedures, and the like; the reorganization and reforms to the security services, policing, the military, the justice system, immigration, banking regulations, and the like; political debate and speech-making; lobby groups and think-tanks; and many other related activities. In their daily practices and activities, these institutions and the individuals within them continuously reproduced and reinforced the core interpretation and narrative, giving it a concrete



carefully and deliberately promoted by the administration and soon came to dominate the American landscape. It was, and to a large degree, still is widely accepted as the commonsense interpretation of the attacks.

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“reality” and a broad sense of legitimacy. Over time, the 9/11 narrative has become cemented within the institutions of political life and its veracity was no longer questioned. Related to this, the central narrative, particularly as it relates to the terrorist threat, was legitimated and given expression in the antiterrorism measures that have since been normalized across all aspects of daily life in America. Apart from the ubiquitous security checks that are now accepted on public transport, at public events, and in public buildings, the terrorist threat subnarrative has become part of everyday life through the DHS Threat Level Warnings, the TRIPS program, the trucker’s Eyes of the Road program, FEMA publications such as the Are You Ready? booklet, and many more federal and local initiatives. Related to this, the retail sector has since launched numerous products designed to protect consumers from terrorism, such as home WMD decontamination kits, parachutes for high-rise office workers, radiation detection kits, and the like. It has also used parts of the 9/11 narrative, such as the call to patriotic unity, as a means of advertising products.10 The function of all these activities was to reinforce the message that the attacks really did herald the start of a new war against terrorists determined to destroy the American way of life. Third, the core elements of the narrative were very quickly reproduced, embedded, and normalized across a range of other social institutions, including, among many others: the academy, with new study centers, courses, and degree programmes, new academic appointments, sources of research funding, and literally thousands of new books and articles published annually; the news media, with stories and reports, editorials, documentaries, interviews, and books published daily; the entertainment media, with tens of thousands of novels, films, television shows, comic books, video games, plays, Web sites, blogs, jokes, cartoons, public art, poetry, popular music, children’s books, and other texts; religious institutions, with religious books, magazines, television and radio broadcasts, home study materials, Web sites, and sermons; and other areas of daily life, from jokes to tattoos to everyday conversation. Across American politics and society therefore, the language and narratives of 9/11 have since become a living discourse that creates a shared understanding of the new “reality” of the war on terrorism, and which creates a “grid of intelligibility” through which to interpret events and make decisions. Importantly, this shared understanding provides a cultural resource that political elites can “hail” or tap into when trying to legitimize or “sell” new policies and programmes. A fourth important reason why the 9/11 narrative has successfully implanted itself as the commonsense view in American society has to



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do with the existing structures and political culture of American society that were primed and highly receptive to such an interpretation. David Campbell has convincingly demonstrated that American foreign policy has long been characterized by an interpretive framework that constructs threats and the response to them in a highly militarized and reflexive fashion.11 Others have suggested that American domestic society has developed a kind of “militarised patriotism” since the cold war that made it vulnerable to the administration’s narrative.12 Another important element here is the genealogy of the 9/11 narrative, which actually has its origins in President Reagan’s first war on terrorism.13 In addition, the administration’s narrative appealed to and was structured by, existing cultural-political narratives of American society, including “American exceptionalism” and “manifest destiny,” the “chosen nation,” the “cult of innocence,” and others.14 In the end, the existing cultural milieu meant that the administration’s 9/11 narrative was always likely to resonate powerfully with the public. Furthermore, it suggests that while political actors have choices regarding the kind of narratives they articulate, they are often restricted by existing cultural structures to particular kinds of narratives that will appeal to, or resonate with the public. Finally, the administration and its supporters have been extremely successful in their efforts to deny and de-legitimize alternative narratives.15 Since 2001, and especially since the attack on Iraq in 2003, a number of fairly vigorous challenges have been made to the dominant narrative, including, among others: the “no blood for oil” campaign of the antiwar movement; criticisms of the administration’s misinformation and manipulation of intelligence in the run-up to the war; criticisms of the Guantanamo detention center, torture, rendition, and the like; the 9/11 Truth Movement; and other critiques from academics, activists, and social commentators such as Michael Moore. These challenges have been effectively countered through vigorous public diplomacy campaigns, appeals to patriotism, discrediting opponents, media manipulation, the use of pressure groups such as ACTA and Campus Watch, and other techniques. As a consequence of all these processes, even most critics of the Bush administration no longer question the dominant interpretation of the events of that day, only the efficacy of the response and future choices in the ongoing “war on terror.” Through daily renarration by other social actors, the narrative has taken on something of a life of its own and now reproduces itself virtually independently of the elites who first constructed it. This is not to say that the 9/11 narrative is either entirely homogenous or completely hegemonic; it is still open to contestation and destabilization and must be defended by its supporters every day. However, given its dominance and the extent to which it has been embedded as a new




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“commonsense” across American politics and society, it is extremely difficult to resist. Politicians, lobby groups, or individuals who attempt to argue that the events were not necessarily an “act of war,” that the threat has been greatly exaggerated, that terrorists are not necessarily “evil,” or that a “war” on terrorism may not be the best response for example, are likely to gain little purchase with such views and may even risk their careers doing so. It is for this reason that even the opponents of the current administration, including the Democratic Party, find it difficult to construct a credible alternative to the 9/11 paradigm. Although they may contest the specific tactics of the administration’s war on terror, they cannot challenge its fundamental building blocks because it is now widely accepted simply as commonsense.

Narrative, Ideology, and Power Neither the use of narrative nor the wider choice of language in politics is without consequences. It is always to some degree, ideological. Among many others, there are four main political/ideological effects of the 9/11 narrative I want to explore here.16 First, the particular narrative constructed by the administration helped to make possible a number of policy choices by rendering them plausible, conceivable, respectable, and so on;17 the same policies would have seemed implausible and inconceivable in the context of alternative narratives. Specifically, policies such as the attack on Afghanistan, regime change in Iraq, the rendition programme, the use of torture during interrogation, the Guantanamo detention center, overseas military base expansion, domestic surveillance, restrictions on civil liberties, military and intelligence expansion, and the like, all became possible in part because the narrative made them appear as commonsensical responses to the “act of war,” the “existential threat,” the risk of WMD attacks, the “evil” of terrorism, and so on. For policymakers and practitioners then, the internal logic of the narrative determined the range of choices and possibilities for action they faced and the logic that they operated under. Second, at the same time, the narrative allowed the administration to “sell” these particular policies as necessary and legitimate to the wider public. Primed by existing cultural narratives and convinced by constant unchallenged repetition that the administration’s 9/11 narrative was an accurate and natural reflection of the events—that, in fact, the events “spoke for themselves”—it was extremely easy to convince the majority of the public that these measures were necessary for their security and for bringing the perpetrators to justice. For example, the narration of 9/11 as an “act of war,” the beginning of a “new age of terror,” and the terrorists as “evil” and



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“inhuman,” made a military and force-based response appear both absolutely essential and legitimate, and functioned to engender the broad social consensus necessary for the enactment of the policies. In short, these narratives were instrumental to the exercise of power by the administration; they were employed as a “political technology” to realize specific political projects. Simultaneously, for both governmental actors and the wider public, the 9/11 narrative created a “grid of intelligibility” for interpreting social reality, and a new commonsense for deciding on policy. Third, at a broader level, it is possible to demonstrate how the narrative functions ideologically by looking at the material and political interests directly (and indirectly) served by it;18 that is, by asking: Who benefits from the widespread social acceptance of this narrative? Apart from the political elites who are able to pursue their political projects more easily, the narrative also materially benefits a large number of different actors, including, among others: the institutions of state security who receive increased resources and authority, such as the military, police, and intelligence agencies; the military-industrial corporations who supply the materials and services needed by the military and intelligence agencies; the private security corporations contracted to provide services at airports and the like; pharmaceutical corporations contracted to supply vaccines and decontamination suits; construction companies who make physical barriers and a host of other companies who manufacture security products; academics and think-tanks who receive grants to study terrorist groups; and media organizations who make money from terrorismrelated products. In short, the war on terror has materially benefited an array of powerful actors who are then invested in ensuring its continued dominance. The narrative is thus underpinned by a set of intertwined political and material interests. Finally, the 9/11 narrative does more than simply justify policies for the political elite or benefit certain material interests. It also functions to construct and maintain a sense of national identity, primarily through the articulation of a contrasting, negative terrorist “Other” who defines the Western, American “Self” through negation. That is, through the lens of the narrative, American society is able to define its own “innocence,” “goodness,” “civility,” “love,” and “heroism” by directly contrasting it with the “evil,” “cowardice,” “hatred,” and “savagery” of the terrorist enemy. Given the widespread acceptance of the narrative it can be argued that “terrorism” now functions as a pervasive negative ideograph in American society.19 Through a powerful process of narration by the administration and the spread of the narrative to every corner of society, the events of 9/11 have become a nation-defining moment, in a similar manner to earlier events such as the Pearl Harbor attack.




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In this chapter, I have attempted to provide a brief overview of the central elements of the 9/11 narrative, the ways in which it became the dominant interpretation of the events, and some its important political-ideological effects. It is important to remember that no large-scale narrative or discourse is ever completely hegemonic, stable, or enduring. In a sense, the narrative has to be renarrated every day and it is always vulnerable to challenge and resistance. Its internal mistakes and inconsistencies mean that it contains the seeds of its destruction. Like the narratives and discourse that sustained the cold war, it is inevitable that one day the war on terror will come to be seen as unsustainable anachronism, and the chasm between the rhetoric and reality will see its collapse. From a normative perspective, it can be convincingly argued that the dominant 9/11 narrative and the war on terror it has made possible has, on the whole, been disastrous for human rights and civil liberties, human security, and progressive politics in America and across the world. There are therefore, legitimate and compelling reasons for resisting and opposing the dominant narrative. The first step in such a project of counterhegemonic struggle is to understand how the narrative functions and what it actually does. More importantly, exposing the underlying ideology of the narrative opens up the necessary discursive space for articulating alternative, more progressive narratives and discourses that put human security and well-being, rather than “national security,” at the heart of responses to acts of terrorism.

Notes 1. Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 2. It can be argued that the “void of meaning” and “the failure of language” was itself discursively constructed. See Lee Jarvis, “Times of Terror: Writing Temporality into the War on Terror,” Critical Studies on Terrorism 1, no. 2 (2008): 245–262. 3. Richard Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counterterrorism, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Richard Jackson, “Security, Democracy and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism,” Democracy & Security 1, no. 2 (2005): 147–171. 4. See Jarvis, “Times of Terror.” 5. Richard Jackson, “Constructing Enemies: ‘Islamic Terrorism’ in Political and Academic Discourse,” Government & Opposition 42, no. 3 (2007): 394–426. 6. Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).



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7. See Mark B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 8. See Start Croft, Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 9. Brigitte L. Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 148–149. 10. See Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 (London: Routledge, 2002). 11. See David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, revised edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 12. Jane Cramer, “Militarized Patriotism: Why the U.S. Marketplace of Ideas Failed Before the Iraq War,” Security Studies 16, no. 3 (2007): 489–524. 13. See Richard Jackson, “Genealogy, Ideology, and Counter-Terrorism: Writing Wars on Terrorism from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush Jr,” Studies in Language & Capitalism 1, no. 1 (2006): 163–193. 14. See Hughes, Myths America Lives By. 15. See Croft, Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror. 16. I explore the ideological consequences of the narrative in much greater detail in: Jackson, Writing the War on Terrorism; Jackson, “Security, Democracy and the Rhetoric of Counter-Terrorism”; Jackson, “Constructing Enemies”; and Richard Jackson, “Playing the Politics of Fear: Writing the Terrorist Threat in the War on Terrorism,” in G. Kassimeris, (ed.), Playing Politics with Terrorism: A User’s Guide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 17. Albert S. Yee, “The Causal Effects of Ideas on Politics,” International Organization 50, no. 1 (1996): 97. 18. For more detailed analysis of “the terrorism industry,” see John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats and Why We Believe Them (New York: Free Press, 2006) and John Mueller’s chapter in Volume 1 of this series: John Mueller, “The Long-Term Political and Economic Consequences of 9/11” in ed. Matthew J. Morgan, The Impact of 9/11 on Politics and War: The Day That Changed Everything? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). See also Jackson, “Playing the Politics of Fear.” 19. Carol Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post-World War II Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006), 11–16.







The Battle of Narratives: The Real Central Front against Al Qaeda P. J. Crowley*

O

ne year after the attacks of September 11, the Bush administration released an updated National Security Strategy of the United States of America, its policy conceptualization of the “war against terrorism” that the president declared hours after al Qaeda had successfully attacked the U.S. homeland.1 The cornerstone of the new strategy was preventive war, confronting threats before they emerge, primarily through military action. While drawing parallels between the cold war and Global War on Terror (GWOT), the strategy gave only passing mention to the ideological dimension that had been central to success against the Soviet Union. “This is a struggle of ideas and this is an area where America must excel.”2 In fact, it has been a significant weakness. From a position commanding broad international support in 2001, the United States steadily lost ground in the battle for hearts and minds within the Islamic world over the next several years. Admiration for the United States, particularly in key countries such as Jordan, Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, plummeted. The al Qaeda brand surged. Even though al Qaeda’s popularity has declined since 2006, the appeal of violent extremism directed at the United States and the West remains too high.3 * Philip J. (P. J.) Crowley is a Senior Fellow and Director of Homeland Security at the Center for American Progress. He has authored several studies on homeland and national security issues and is a frequent guest on network news programs. During the Clinton administration, Crowley was Special Assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs and served on the staff of the National Security Council.



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A revised National Security Strategy in March 2006 acknowledged the long-term challenge, that “winning the war on terror means winning the battle of ideas.”4 This will require the United States to eliminate not just physical safe havens such as Afghanistan and Pakistan where groups like al Qaeda can plan and execute terrorist plots, but the “virtual safehaven” that enables al Qaeda to inspire large-scale violence against civilians on the global scale.5 This battle of ideas is not about branding or messaging. It is arguably the central front, crucial high ground that must be retaken and sustained if the United States is to reduce the threat of terrorism in the twenty-first century. Success will require a significant shift in policies and perspective: less emphasis on individual military battles and a greater focus on broader ideological warfare, using the global media environment to effectively engage key populations to undermine the strategic narrative of al Qaeda and restore the U.S. standing in the world. The most effective weapons will not be smart bombs that can topple regimes, but consistent engagement, effective diplomacy, credible information, and compelling images that address the core grievances used to justify violent extremism and promote a genuine dialogue that can change minds within countries and communities that provide terrorists with explicit or implicit support.

Fighting the Wrong War The GWOT, as it was quickly labeled, has severely handicapped the battle of ideas. Although popular at home, the framework was divisive abroad, undermining support for the United States and its policies. In important respects, it has been helpful to al Qaeda. The images of the World Trade Center towers collapsing in New York and the Pentagon burning in Washington may have enhanced al Qaeda’s stature as a resistance force against the West, but the attacks were broadly viewed around the world as illegitimate. No one except the extremists themselves would label the 3,000 people who died on 9/11 as combatants. The United States received sincere expressions of sympathy and support from unexpected quarters, including Russia, China, and even Iran. President Bush’s address to a joint session nine days later appropriately categorized al Qaeda as practicing “a fringe form of Islamic extremism.” NATO for the first time invoked Article V in defense of one of its members. The ensuing invasion of Afghanistan enjoyed widespread support. But the president’s remarks also revealed the seeds



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of strategic overreach. The president asserted that the “war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but does not end there.” He envisioned a new bipolar world. “Either you are with us,” the president said, “or you are with the terrorists.”6 Use of the term “war” had domestic political significance, but in strategic terms, it validated al Qaeda’s jihadist narrative, since bin Laden had declared war on the United States in 1996. According to Anne-Marie Slaughter, “A war on terror against Islamo-Fascists transforms Muslim mass murderers into Islamic warriors, which is exactly how they want to see themselves.” 7 In the eyes of the broader Islamic world, the war on terror became a war against Islam when the United States shifted from a war of necessity in Afghanistan to one of choice in Iraq. Terrorism depends on the “amplification of its apparent threat by the media and by overreactive governments.”8 Invoking the image of a mushroom cloud, the Bush administration found itself in a confrontation with traditional allies over Iraq. Working with an imposed sense of urgency, it chose not to build the kind of broad-based coalition, including strong regional representation that was critical to political success during Desert Storm. The media jumped on the bandwagon. Hundreds of journalists imbedded with military units entering Iraq in March 2003 documented the “shock and awe” that led to the fall of the government in Baghdad. But pictures of chaos followed the fall of Saddam’s statue in Paradise Square. No weapons of mass destruction, the smoking guns that justified the invasion, were found. The president’s “freedom agenda” was discredited as Iraq lurched toward civil war. Liberation became occupation. Having been militarily defeated in Afghanistan, Iraq gave bin Laden a chance to “rebuild the al Qaeda brand.”9 The U.S. occupation of Iraq, like the forces that remained in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, reinforced bin Laden’s claim that “infidels” were occupying sacred land. In its wake, al Qaeda planned or encouraged deadly attacks in Iraq, Jordan, Indonesia, Spain, Turkey, Britain, and other countries that identified closely with the United States, although the violence gradually created a backlash and an opportunity for moderate Muslims.

Virtual War Whatever the tactical military gains in Iraq and Afghanistan, bin Laden countered with an ideological battle that enabled him to remain relevant and a source of inspiration for angry and disaffected Muslims. As



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Secretary of Defense Robert Gates observed while in office, “we’re being out-communicated by a guy in a cave.”10 If the Gulf War in 1991 was the first live television conflict, the United States is now in the midst of the first Internet war. The insurgents’ most popular weapon in Iraq has been the improvised explosive device or IED, but the most powerful have been strategic images that have influenced public opinion in the United States, the West, Iraq, and the rest of the Islamic world. As Louise Richardson points out, “The point of terrorism is not to defeat the enemy, but to send a message.”11 This struggle is being waged within the global 24/7 media environment where information and images can be transmitted instantly from just about anywhere. The traditional advantage of the nation state to control the flow of information has been neutralized. The rapid furor within the Islamic world regarding the Danish cartoons is a dramatic case in point. While the United States is the foremost military and communications force in the world, terrorist networks such as al Qaeda, which have access to the same modern technology as traditional broadcast networks, are more than holding their own. Says Peter Bergen, “Al Qaeda understands that what the Pentagon calls IO (Information Operations) are key to its successes.”12 It is less clear whether U.S. civilian and military leaders understand how perceptions create a separate and challenging political reality on this global battlefield. For a country that long promoted the rule of law and importance of transparent institutions of government, beginning in January 2002, pictures of shackled prisoners in orange jumpsuits in a makeshift prison in Guantanamo, Cuba—regardless of its legal basis—were inconsistent with the U.S. strategic objective of promoting democracy in the Middle East. Extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, disregard for international standards of treatment, and aggressive interrogation techniques that could be considered torture were the kind of government practices that the United States routinely criticized in autocratic societies that it hoped to transform. These tended to be the very countries that export global terrorists. As Benjamin Wittes suggests, “Guantanamo has become a symbol around the world, fairly or unfairly, of excess in America’s response to terrorism.”13 In Iraq, significant milestones associated with regime change—the fall of the Saddam statue; Saddam’s capture and subsequent trial; and purple fingers as Iraqis voted (ironically in an election that was initially opposed by the United States)—were steadily overwhelmed by the daily grind of a growing insurgency. Within two years of the invasion, the United States was defending itself against devastating pictures of abuse by military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison.



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For all of its military superiority, the United States found itself “losing the propaganda war.”14 Al Qaeda effectively employed the Internet to promote and define its actions. It released regular video and audio tapes by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri through As Sahab, its own production unit, to broadcast outlets like al Jazeera to encourage action and influence global public opinion. One tape released in October 2004 could have affected the outcome of the presidential election.15 Through hundreds of jihadist sites, al Qaeda sustained a dialogue, attracted recruits, and raised money.

Lessons from the Cold War This is not the first time the United States has been in a military and ideological struggle where images have strategic impact. For the past 20 years, government has been dealing with the “CNN Effect.” In 1991, for example, pictures of the “Highway of Death” were decisive in the termination of the first Gulf War.16 Dramatic pictures of conflict and famine put pressure on the United States to intervene in Somalia. Slobodan Milosevic’s decision to expel non-Serbs from Kosovo sustained the NATO alliance during its first hot war. During the cold war, symbols generally worked in the West’s favor. Nikita Khrushchev hoped that Sputnik would demonstrate the technical superiority of the Soviet system. But the world focused on the Berlin Wall, which became a physical manifestation of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain metaphor. Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan used the Berlin Wall for dramatic effect in 1961 and 1987. Despite missteps, the United States engaged in a “long, patient, moral struggle against a hostile ideology” and won an undisputed victory.17 “The creation of the Berlin Wall,” recalls Philip Bobbitt, “erected a visible rebuke to Communism, demonstrating its essential undesirability to the peoples it claimed to benefit.”18 Public diplomacy was vital. Through the United States Information Agency (USIA), it promoted international educational exchanges, operated libraries and cultural centers, and provided credible international broadcasting outlets like the Voice of America. Public diplomacy complemented the broader national strategy. “Hard power created a stand-off of military containment, but soft power eroded the Soviet system from within,” Joseph Nye wrote in Soft Power.19 Andrew Bacevich sees a strong parallel between the cold war and today. “Over time, as the communist alternative to liberal democracy lost its appeal, the threat withered and eventually collapsed from within. A new strategy of containment should have a similar goal, allowing the inadequacies of Islamic extremism to manifest themselves.”20




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There has been a misperception, particularly within the Pentagon, that the United States suffers from a failure to communicate. Leaders complained regularly that the media missed the “good news” in Iraq.21 It was not for want of effort. The uniformed military, recognizing the growing importance of information warfare, conducted daily media briefings in Iraq. It purchased positive coverage through “independent” Arab journalists, a practice that may be typical in the Middle East but is inconsistent with the broader objective of building a vibrant civil society.22 The State Department has established a new Rapid Response Unit and public diplomacy hubs around the world.23 The Broadcasting Board of Governors, what is left of USIA, began new services directed at the Middle East—al Hurra television and Radio Sawa—with mixed reviews.24 But in reality, the United States has had no trouble communicating throughout this GWOT, though the messages received were much different than the ones being sent. The United States promoted freedom, but what Iraqis saw was military occupation. The trial of Saddam Hussein was as fair as could be expected, but to Sunnis, his execution (captured by a smuggled cell phone camera) resembled a sectarian lynching. The United States preached democracy, transparency and the rule of law, but what the world saw was Guantanamo. The United States eventually asked for help in Iraq, but having dismissed the importance of alliances and international institutions, found few takers. As the Defense Science Board concluded, “what we do matters more than what we say.”25 The Bush administration assumed that the aggressive use of force would carry a “demonstration effect” and send the right message to states that support and use terrorists as proxies.26 The experience during the cold war suggested the opposite—the longer the period of actual conflict, the more ideological and political ground was lost, for Americans in Vietnam and Soviets in Afghanistan. Even during the 1990s, while the ground war in Kuwait was brief, the long-term presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia following the conflict and international sanctions that took a heavy toll on the Iraqi people were used as justification for bin Laden’s fatwa against the “far enemy” in 1996.27 There is a dynamic relationship between the tactical military battlefield and the broader strategic information war. Activity in one, particularly if beyond established expectations at home and abroad, can have a profound negative impact on the other. Military force will always be a vital element in defeating terrorists, but as former Secretary of Defense Donald



Understanding What We Communicate


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Rumsfeld cautioned in a 2003 memo, it will be counterproductive if the net result is that military action creates more terrorists than it counters.28

In 2007, a fundamental shift in mindset encompassed in the military’s revised Counterinsurgency Field Manual helped the United States regain ground, aided significantly by al Qaeda’s violent excesses. “The civilian population,” wrote Sarah Sewall in its introduction “is the center of gravity—the deciding factor in the struggle.”29 Extremists have long recognized this. As Brian Jenkins first said in 1975, terrorism is “theater.”30 Violence against civilians is employed to influence wider target audiences, to “obtain leverage, influence and power.”31 Conversely, the perceived legitimacy of established governments rests upon their ability to protect their population from such violence.32 If civilians are a strategic lynchpin, then what a target population thinks is an essential metric. It is literally what the struggle for hearts and minds is all about. “National security is not a global popularity contest,” assert Nancy Soderberg and Brian Katulis, “but how people around the world view America matters much more in the twenty-first century than in previous periods.”33 To succeed, policymakers need to understand “where al-Qaeda is getting its recruits and why people are attracted to its narratives.”34 If a significant number of people in critical countries view the United States as a threat, it is a sure sign the existing strategy is not working. If the United States is to drive a wedge between violent extremists and the broader population, it requires better information, perspective, and even imagery on both the perpetrators of terrorism and the victims. Although the U.S. government has long collected basic information about terrorism trends, it has tended to employ the results for political rather than strategic purposes. For example, the State Department was forced to reissue its 2003 Patterns of Terrorism report after it used partial data to suggest that global terrorism was going down, not up.35 Instead, economist Alan Krueger argues that the U.S. government should place greater priority acquiring better data on terrorist attacks—who is committing them, where, why, and to what effect.36 Counterterrorism consultant Marc Sageman, who stresses the importance of personal relationships in radicalizing jihadi recruits, advocates making communities associated with terrorism more responsible for combating it. 37 A rehabilitation program underway in Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries is a good model. 38 New York City’s efforts to



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engage strategic subgroups, utilizing officers with relevant language skills and historical and cultural awareness, both builds trust and gains valuable intelligence. Public opinion is no less important at home. In light of Vietnam, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (and later Secretary of State) Colin Powell enunciated “doctrines” that identified sustainment of public support as critical to military success. Lessons from Iraq will likely reinforce what the military thought it knew after Vietnam, that “media and public relations will play a decisive role in determining who is winning.”39 Public support for the war in Iraq has declined as the gap has widened between the costs of occupation after the invasion (more than 4,000 American lives lost and at least $1 trillion expended) and expectations established beforehand.40

Attack the Extremist Narrative If what civilians think is vital, then the next step is to reduce support for the opposition, by undercutting the “perceived legitimacy of terrorism” and denying the terrorists sanction, support, and ultimately recruits.41 Daniel Byman of Brookings stresses that the answer is to “go negative” and reverse public tolerance for violence, delegitimize the use of religion to justify violence, and expose al Qaeda’s repressive view of the future. “[R]ather than building ourselves up, we must tear them down.”42 If Iraq is an indication, this is quite achievable. Most Muslims do not want to live in a Taliban-like society. According to Peter Bergen, bin Laden’s vision of a new Muslim caliphate has been, by any measure, “a resounding failure.”43 Support for al Qaeda and for suicide operations as a favored tactic dropped as Muslims realized that they are most often the victims.44 Religious leaders and former terrorists have renounced violence and challenged al Qaeda’s interpretation of Islam.45 The so-called Anbar Awakening in Iraq in 2006 is a good example, where a creative shift in mindset and policy—engaging all relevant forces, employing military force more cautiously, focusing on the civilian population and emphasizing better governance—turned the tables on the al Qaeda movement, put its repressive practices on trial, and delivered a significant political and military setback. The development of a counternarrative is primarily a challenge for Islam itself. According to Joseph Nye, “The United States and other advanced democracies will win only if moderate Muslims win.”46 Adds Michael Sheehan, “Ultimately, the al Qaeda threat will be defeated at its source: within the Islamic faith . . . it will be rejected by most Muslims.”47



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But the United States will also have significant impact. One important element is restoring the United States role in resolving conflict around the world, particularly in the Middle East. According to Bruce Riedel, the “crux” of the al Qaeda narrative is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Serious reengagement in the peace process, enlisting key nations in the region, will demonstrate “a better alternative to endless conflict.”48 Finding the right political formula to include Hamas not only denies al Qaeda a potential ally, but brings into sharp relief its uncompromising rejection of democracy and further undermines its fantasy of a region-wide caliphate. If there is a comprehensive peace agreement, key elements of al Qaeda narrative become irrelevant. Another involves responsible governance. Transforming countries in the region into Jeffersonian democracies is both unrealistic and unnecessary. But being closely identified with reform and the expansion of political rights and effective governmental institutions is important. Despite its stated commitment to democracy, the United States has fallen short in recent years. Take Pakistan, for example, a pivotal country in this struggle. The Bush administration publicly allied itself with an increasingly autocratic and deeply unpopular leader, former President Pervez Musharaf, for too long. Despite its stated commitment to the rule of law, it remained silent as Musharaf dismissed independent Supreme Court justices, even as Pakistan’s legal community and civil society protested. And yet the emergence of a legitimate civilian government is required if Pakistan is going to be able to achieve effective sovereignty over the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, where a toxic mix of extremists pose a threat to Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United States, and Europe.

Repair U.S. Standing in the World Reducing the appeal of extremist movements like al Qaeda will contribute to a reduction in the terrorist threat, but the international standing of the United States also matters. As Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations has argued, “Anti-Americanism is anything but cost-free.”49 According to historian Arthur Schlesinger, “never before in American history has the United States been so feared and hated by the rest of the world.”50 The reason? The United States is no longer perceived as practicing what it preaches. Anger and violence are not precipitated against U.S. values or freedoms as much as policies and their impact on the world. “In contrast to alQa’ida, we do not integrate the war of ideas into our actual policy decisions,”




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says Daniel Byman of Brookings. “American policy is thus shaped without consideration of how people around the world are likely to perceive it.”51 To neutralize the threat posed by al Qaeda, the United States does not have to convince the rest of the world to become its mirror image. But actions should flow from long-term national interests and be consistent with American values. Where they potentially diverge from the U.S. strategic narrative, short-term gains must be weighed against the longer-term loss of U.S. prestige and influence in other areas. Joseph Nye cautions, “Our leaders must make sure that they exercise our hard power in a manner that does not undercut our soft power.”52 Actions do speak louder than words. If one answer to terrorism is political pluralism, then the United States should accept the results of free and fair elections. If the rule of law is important, then so are universal rights, including access to a court that meets international standards. If the American people believe in free speech, then the government should allow religious scholars to engage in a respectful dialogue, whether we agree with what they say. If the constitution allows freedom of religion, then lawful citizens should be able to fulfill their religious obligations, including charitable contributions, without fear of being placed on a terrorist watch list. If the worst case scenario involves a nuclear weapon in the hands of a terrorist group, then the United States must review its existing nuclear policies that encourage have-nots like Iran from trying to obtain them. As Anne Marie Slaughter says, “Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, detention without trial and possibly without end, tolerance of torture by others and even ourselves—all enable our enemies to taunt us as hypocrites and our friends to doubt our sincerity.”53 The solution is that we “must see ourselves as others see us.”54

Focus on Policies, Not Structure The nation’s ability to communicate strategically needs to improve, and the best solutions are programmatic, not bureaucratic. Some see a causal relationship between the decline of global attitudes toward the United States and the elimination of USIA in 1999. The cold war does provide a good model of how the natural strengths of the United States—military, diplomatic, cultural, educational, and economic—were effectively harnessed to prevail in an ideological struggle. USIA was central to that legacy. But that does not mean that the solution is to reestablish an independent government agency to do public diplomacy.55 Today’s world is very different. Sixty years ago, nation states, particularly those behind the Iron Curtain, controlled the flow of information



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within their borders. A country like China may still try, but because of the Internet, this is becoming politically difficult and technologically challenging. Broadcast outlets like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe helped break through autocratic barriers, but that role is now increasingly being played by commercial or quasi-independent media, including the BBC and even al Jazeera. Government-run media face a much more competitive media marketplace than USIA did 60 years ago. Independent outlets are still subject to government intimidation, but the combination of digital technology, the Internet, and growth of global media have dramatically increased the breadth of information available and speed by which information and images are transmitted. During the cold war, the United States faced an adversary that was plodding and unimaginative. USIA specialized in opening up credible channels of communication to populations that had none. Today’s media climate is more dynamic. Given the ease of entry into global media networks, a local event can become a global statement. Bin Laden, despite preaching against the modern world, has demonstrated the “capacity to plan and inspire mass violence by exploiting the channels and the ethos of global integration.”56 Thus, the response to al Qaeda’s global insurgency must be more nimble and adaptive. The challenge is credibly communicating with populations that have access to the outside world, whether through satellite dishes, computers, or cell phones. The solution is not to maintain a strategic communications capability that is disconnected from national security and foreign policy decision making. Public diplomacy will not work if it is only considered after decisions are made. Rather, it is creating a more responsive policy-making process that takes into account how actions will impact the rest of the world. It is also communicating through the right channels. The most effective ones will not be those that it controls. It must communicate forcefully through media that the world pays attention to. According to Peter Bergen, “Bin Laden once observed that 90 percent of his battle is waged in the media.”57 The United States has simply failed to keep up with him. “A better response would be to flood al Jazeera and other networks with American voices to counter bin Laden’s hate speech,” argues Joseph Nye.58

Conclusion Our leaders have made clear that fighting terrorism is a generational challenge. If so, then the United States must demonstrate the same kind of “strategic patience” that was decisive during the cold war. As Philip




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Gordon suggests, “the war will be won only when our enemy’s ideology is defeated and our adversaries abandon it.”59 The key will be fighting the right battle, the battle of ideas, with the right weapons, sensible and sustainable policies and actions that will encourage the rest of the world to follow rather than fear the United States. In an environment where governments, substate groups, and broad populations are better informed and more engaged than ever, civilian and military leaders will have to work harder to ensure that foreign populations have accurate perceptions of those policies if we expect to reduce the appeal of violent extremism. The world will still welcome U.S. leadership, but it must be exercised with greater care. Global support cannot be taken for granted. While the military advocates dominance across the full spectrum of conflict, the United States can expect to control this dimension. In future warfare, the United States will never act alone. Billions of people will be watching and reacting to everything that occurs on the global battlefield. Notes 1. The White House, Statement by the President, September 11, 2001, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911–16.html. 2. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, 31, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/ nss.pdf. 3. Andrew Kohut, 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 10–13. 4. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006, 9, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/ nss/2006/. 5. White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, September 2006, 11. 6. The White House, Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20, 2001, available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html. 7. Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Idea that Is America (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 164. 8. David Rothkopf, Superclass (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 194. 9. Richard A. Clarke, Your Government Failed You (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 183. 10. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Remarks to Academy of American Diplomats, quoted in Jim Garamone, Gates Lauds Move to Bolster Civilian Agencies, American Forces Press Service, May 15, 2008, available at http:// www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=49889. 11. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want (New York: Random House, 2006), 4. 12. Peter Bergen, “Reassessing the Threat: The Future of al Qaeda and Its Implications for Homeland Security,” Prepared Testimony before the



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13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment, July 30, 2008. Available online at http://homeland.house.gov/Hearings/ index.asp?ID=161. Benjamin Wittes, Law and the Long War (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 153. Clarke, 186–187. Michael Abramowitz, Terrorism Fades as Issue in 2008 Campaign, Washington Post, September 11, 2008, A6, available at http://www.washingtonpost. com/wp- dyn/content/article/2008/09/10/AR2008091003393.html?sid= ST2008091004027&s_pos=. Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The General’s War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), 370. Philip H. Gordon, Winning the Right War (New York: Times Books, 2007), xiv. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 293. Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Soft Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 50. Andrew J. Bacevich, The Limits of Power (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 176. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 112. Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi, “U.S. military covertly pays to run stories in Iraqi press,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 2005, 1, available at http://www.latimes.com/ny-la-woiraq1130,0,2014888.story?page=1. Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication, January 2008, 4–5. Craig Whitlock, “U.S. Network Falters in Mideast Mission,” Washington Post, June 23, 2008, 1, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/story/2008/06/22/ST2008062201236.html. Defense Science Board, x. Barton Gellman, Angler (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 231. Bruce Riedel, The Search for Al Qaeda (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2008), 59. October 16, 2003 memo from Donald Rumsfeld, Global War on Terrorism, published in USA Today, May 20, 2005, available at http://www.usatoday. com/news/washington/executive/rumsfeld-memo.htm. Sarah Sewell, Introduction to U.S. Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xxv. Brian Michael Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), 101. Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 41. Bobbitt, 152. Nancy Soderberg and Brian Katulis, The Prosperity Agenda (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008), 11. Ibid., 72. Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 57.




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36. Ibid., 53. 37. Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 166. 38. Jeffrey Fleishman, “Saudi Arabia tries to rehab radical minds,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2007, A1, available at http://articles.latimes.com/2007/ dec/21/world/fg-rehab21. 39. Bobbitt, 148. 40. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), ix. 41. White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, September 2006, 23. 42. Daniel Byman, The Five Front War (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008), 175. 43. Peter Bergen, “Al-Qaeda at 20,” Washington Post, August 17, 2008, B1. 44. Bergen, Reassessing the Threat. 45. Lawrence Wright, “The Rebellion Within,” The New Yorker, June 2, 2008, available at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/ 080602fa_fact_wright?printable=true. 46. Nye, 131. 47. Michael A. Sheehan, Crush the Cell (New York: Crown, 2008), 280–281. 48. Riedel, 136. 49. Richard N. Haas, The Opportunity (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), 202. 50. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., War and the American Presidency (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), xiii. 51. Byman, 181. 52. Nye, 141. 53. Slaughter, 10. 54. Ibid., 40. 55. James S. Corum, Fighting the War on Terror (St. Paul: Zenith Press, 2007), 265. 56. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 575. 57. Bergen, B1. 58. Nye, 108. 59. Philip H. Gordon, Winning the Right War, xvii.



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Islamic Terrorism: The Red Menace of the Twenty- First Century Krista E. Wiegand*

F

or nearly half a century, Americans were united against a common enemy of the Soviet Union, and more generally against the ideology of communism, also known as the red menace. With the close of the cold war, the shifts in the world required a rewriting and new understanding of the threats toward American national security. Even before September 11, 2001, government rhetoric increasingly focused on Islamic terrorism as the new enemy. Today, the ideology of Islamic terrorism is undoubtedly the enemy of the United States, more so than any sovereign state. It is much easier to declare war on terrorism sponsored by self-proclaimed, mysterious, and dangerous radicals than it is on another sovereign state. For this reason, and the fact that terrorism is perceived as an absolutely deplorable act, it is easy to assert Islamic terrorism as the enemy. It has also been easier to justify foreign policy actions based on the ever present threat of Islamic terrorism, much like the threat of the spread of communism during the cold war. This chapter examines the process of how Islamic terrorism replaced the Red Menace of communism as “the” American enemy in political rhetoric, justifying major shifts in U.S. foreign policy. The Enemy

The United States has always had an enemy—from Britain in the eighteenth century to Japan and Germany, and later the Soviet Union in * Krista E. Wiegand is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgia Southern University.



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the twentieth century. What all of these enemies had in common was that they were sovereign states with governments that pursued policies deemed threatening to the national security of the United States. Some enemies directly threatened or attacked the sovereignty of U.S. territory, while other enemies threatened the territories of allies like Britain and France. After the Second World War, the threat of the communist Soviet Union, the red menace, as an enemy of the United States was a shift away from threats to territorial integrity to threats to ideology and way of life— democracy and capitalism primarily. Practically every conflict and crisis the United States was involved in between the end of the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 involved the threat of communism. The preeminent U.S. foreign policy for 40 years was containment of communism to prevent the spread of the threatening ideology to other parts of the globe from Korea and Vietnam to West Berlin to Guatemala and Chile. Political rhetoric focused almost exclusively on the communist threat and the perception of communism and the Soviet Union as “the” enemy of the United States was unquestioned by Americans. Today’s enemy has shifted away from a sovereign state and ideology to a group of nonstate actors and a form of violence pursued in the name of a different ideology—Islamic terrorism. This shift has forced the U.S. government to rewrite narratives about the enemy, the threat to national security. Yet, the task has been relatively easy due to the ability of the rhetoric to simply substitute the concept of Islamic terrorism in place of the concept of communism as the enemy. The reason it has been so easy to substitute the enemy but maintain almost identical rhetoric about the threat to national security is because of the ease with which Americans feel comfortable having a foreign enemy, somewhere out there, ready to threaten the American way of life. Though the perception of the enemy is most prevalent during war time when it is emphasized in order to gain public support for fighting against the enemy, the enemy always exists in people’s minds. The question is not whether there is an enemy out there, but who the enemy is and how threatening the enemy is to the United States. Images of the enemy develop cognitively from incoming information, mostly from reports of the aggressor’s actions or statements provided by the media and government in the form of rhetoric.1 Ideally, the rhetoric “generate[s] a stereotype that justifies action, partially releases the subject from moral constraints that would otherwise pertain, and provides reason to anticipate success.”2 The term enemy refers to a “person or group of persons conceived as feeling hostility toward, or as representing a threat to do harm to, the perceiver.”3 Image implies a cognitive-affective complex of subjective psychological perceptions that include not just imagery, but also concepts,



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beliefs, attitudes, values, stereotypes, emotions (mostly fear and hate), motives, and intentions. The enemy image appears as a result of distortions of information processing, affecting not only perceptions of the enemy, but also attention, recall, assessment of credibility, prediction of future actions, evaluations, and attributions.4 Enemy images affect the processing of new information, inference about the meanings of certain actions, and policy choices. After hearing or reading rhetoric about the enemy—whether the Japs, evil empire, axis of evil, or Islamofascists—rhetoric create schemas in people’s minds, providing them with regularized, organized, and categorized means of processing complex amounts of information. The schema of the enemy image helps people to simplify their perceptions of an aggressor into one negative category. With these simplified perceptions, they believe they can predict and assume the actions and choices of the aggressor, just based on simplified information, like the labeling of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire.” It is these schemas that caused panicked Americans to react so negatively to Muslims in the United States in the period shortly after 9/11 and even to some extent to the present. To gain public support against an aggressor, political rhetoric describes the enemy’s leader as a coercive dictator who is uniformly evil and unwilling to negotiate diplomatically. If the enemy is a state, it is described as an evil nation with a history of ignoble conduct, which the moral nation attempts to correct through intervention.5 Finally, the people are labeled as ruthless, treacherous, cruel, power mad, full of hatred, and deserving to be hated and killed.6 This explains the lack of empathy by many Americans when Iraqi civilians were killed during the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is not that Americans do not care about civilian casualties. Rather, the enemy image simplifies the enemy to be inclusive of anyone potentially associated with the enemy, in this case the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein. The enemy image also substantiates the Bush doctrine after 9/11, which claimed that supporters of terrorism, such as the Taliban forces in Afghanistan, were equivalent to terrorists themselves and should be treated as such. Political rhetoric often takes advantage of a sense of American national identity, particularly in the framing of the enemy as contradictory to national identity and its values. From a political psychology standpoint, which emphasizes the differentiation between the in-group and out-group, “the boundaries of a state’s identity are secured by the representation of danger integral to foreign policy.”7 The more the state emphasizes the contradictory, dichotomous characteristics of the outgroup, or the enemy, the more secure the in-group feels about its identity and well-being. A common enemy can often help to promote cohesion



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and a shared identity among the citizens of a state, besides providing a target for U.S. action. The phenomenon of rallying around the flag and an increased sense of patriotism when the United States is fighting an enemy are frequently invoked by political rhetoric. The enemy—a danger that contradicts and threatens American national identity—is often viewed as a “moral threat to freedom, a germ infecting the body politic, a plague upon the liberty of humankind, and a barbarian intent upon destroying civilization.”8 At least this is how the enemy is framed, regardless of reality. Too often, the “mere existence of an alternative mode of being, the presence of which exemplifies that different identities are possible and thus denaturalizes the claim of a particular identity to be the true identity, is sometimes enough to produce the understanding of a threat.”9 Without an enemy image present in the rhetoric, the likelihood of public support for foreign policies involving use of force dwindles because the public does not know who the United States is fighting and how threatening the opponent is. Thus, constructs of the enemy image provide an opportunity to justify U.S. action against perceived foreign threats. Use of force abroad must be justified by invoking “the specter of dangerous and evil enemies, noble duties, and final purgatory battles.”10 More important is the depiction of the enemy as someone whose negative acts must be abolished in order for our lives to be orderly and safe. Even though threats and dangers today are often labeled as such in a reactive fashion, the “difference, danger, and otherness”11 present in cold war rhetoric is still a major component of rhetoric today, even though the enemy has changed. Today’s political rhetoric uses the same stereotypes, perceptions, and enemy images to define national security threats from Islamic terrorism, just as it did throughout the cold war with communism.

The Rhetoric of Threats Without language and rhetoric, potential enemies and security threats cannot be perceived or prioritized as vital to national interests. Political rhetoric does exactly that; it perceives a situation, ideology, or group of people as threatening and labels it as salient to U.S. national security. Framing a security threat as vital to national interests is critical to justify the costs of foreign intervention, shifts in policy, and use of force. After all, wars are not just fought with arms, but also with words. Verbal descriptions of the threat, interests, and objectives are a critical part of any international threat. The rhetoric that accompanies foreign threats provides a story in which “foreign battles confronting the society in the



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present cease to be a messy tangle with no end in sight . . . clear roles for ‘us’ and ‘them’ are assigned, and the promise of a better future is given.”12 It is impossible to perceive the world without language, symbols, and interpretation of such coding. What defines something as a fact is the explanation and meaning that accompanies the fact. Events, actors, and objects only receive those labels after they have been constituted as such and placed into the context that people understand.13 Language and meaning have always been linked to the political world as rhetoric. Language can be understood as “constitutive of realities, and a central element of all symbolic activities.”14 Forms of language, particularly rhetoric, play a critical role in shaping the beliefs and opinions of the recipients of information. The means by which rhetoric influences beliefs and opinions is through the focus on certain perceptions and ignorance of others. Political rhetoric and metaphors in particular often act as the “means for determining basic attitudes and assumptions that structure decision making.”15 Rhetoric is therefore the “instrument for shaping political support and opposition and the premises upon which decisions are made.”16 Political rhetoric focusing on foreign policy threats comprises continuous construction of the national identity and subsequent national interests, and efforts to label and narrate foreign threats and U.S. intervention. Rhetoric falls under the rubric of argumentation studies, which focus on the means by which policymakers use arguments to persuade the public of the validity of the government’s agenda and claims.17 Therefore, argumentation is a critical tool in foreign policymaking.18 As policy choices are fluid, political leaders are able to frame them using rhetoric based on values that “speak to what would be best”19 for the United States. Threat rhetoric provides the obligatory statement of facts of the foreign threat, a description of good versus evil melodrama, and the normative policy objectives of the government. The reason the policy objectives are normative is because the policy is often framed in moral language, in that the rhetoric matches what the public already believe, due to schemas and stereotypes of the enemy.20

Same Rhetoric, Different Enemy There is much agreement that the end of the cold war opened up a vacuum for who would be the American enemy. For nearly half a century, American society united against a common enemy of the Soviet Union, and more generally against communism. Throughout the cold war, the Soviet empire fostered a strong American national identity that was



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dichotomous to everything communist—individual rights and freedoms, private property and the free market, and less government involvement in people’s lives. Cold war rhetoric provided sharp dichotomies of American values against the enemy’s values. Thus, the cold war was a “contest of force versus freedom, irrationality versus rationality, and aggression versus defense [that permeates] the substance and style of the call-to-arms throughout American history.”21 The most basic dichotomy framed the United States as good and the Soviet Union as bad. This simple dichotomy presented a standard metanarrative used in all presidential rhetoric to justify foreign intervention. The cold war narrative consisted of an automatic answer to any foreign intervention; even if it appeared only vaguely related, deterring communism was always the guaranteed justification. Because the threat of the enemy was always present and always perceived as threatening to the American way of life and national security, foreign intervention was rarely questioned by the majority of Americans. With the end of the cold war, the shift of threats demanded consistent rewriting of the threats toward American national security, and new justifications for foreign interventions and use of force. As the Soviet Union crumbled in the summer and fall of 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration was unsure of what direction to take in terms of national security threats, potential enemies, and U.S. foreign policy. Bush’s “New World Order” rhetoric had assumed the continued threat of communism and a slightly less threatening Soviet Union, so when the cold war came to an abrupt end, Bush announced that “Out of this change in the Soviet Union, if we handle it properly and if things keep going forward instead of slipping back, there’s an opportunity for a vastly restructured national security posture. It’s way too early—way too early—to get into that.”22 Yet that is exactly what happened—a new national security narrative had to be created to fill the vacuum where the threat of the Soviet Union had left. Who were the new enemies of the United States? Saddam Hussein of Iraq had already worked his way up the ladder of enemies of the United States when Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, leading to the Gulf War in early 1991. Bush was successfully able to utilize the enemy image of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, because national interests (access to oil) were clearly threatened. Yet, due to the success of the Gulf War, the United States quickly forgot about Saddam Hussein and did not reward Bush with a second term. At the same time, the perception of Islamic terrorism as the new enemy had not yet crystallized. At a June 1992 speech, Assistant Secretary of State Edward Dejerejian stated that “The Cold War is not being replaced by a new competition between Islam and the West,” and that “the United States Government does not view Islam as the next ‘ism’ confronting the West or threatening world peace.”23



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Over the next few years, it appeared that the government under President Bill Clinton was scrambling to define the new enemy of the United States, the new threat to U.S. national security. Because post-cold war dangers and threats in the 1990s were ambiguous and uncertain, long-term modes of traditional interpretation used during the cold war were no longer applicable.24 All through the cold war period, presidents could justify U.S. intervention “as a stalking horse for the Soviet Union,”25 but in the 1990s, the means of justifying U.S. intervention and use of force was not so simple. President Clinton was the “first atomic-age president unable to draw upon the Cold War meta-narrative.”26 Early in his presidency, Clinton joked, “Gosh I miss the Cold War . . .” because “we had an intellectually coherent thing. The American people knew what the rules were.”27 Because the red menace no longer existed in the 1990s, political leaders had to frame foreign threats as they occurred—Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Serbia’s actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, Somalia, and most significantly, the rising threat of Islamic terrorism pursued primarily by al Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden. The result is that with each threat, political leaders had to frame foreign policy responses by using rhetoric that used the concept of the enemy image to explain why the threat was threatening to America’s national interests and why use of force was justified. In response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1996 al-Khobar towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killing 19 servicemen, the Clinton administration’s rhetoric on the threat of terrorism was strong, but it had not yet emphasized that Islamic terrorism was “the” new enemy. It was only in 1998 after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania did the Clinton administration match its tough rhetoric about terrorism with use of force against suspected enemies. All through the Clinton years, despite the uncertainty of an enemy, the political rhetoric continued to apply the concept of the enemy image and that foreign policy actions were justified by such threats. By the late 1990s, it became evident to scholars and policymakers that the most threatening enemy in the post-cold war era was radical Islamic terrorism. In a September 1998 speech, U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen announced, We no longer face a single, powerful enemy, as we did during the Cold War. We don’t live with a balance of terror. But we do face terrorists and we do face the terrorizing possibility some nation or group will try to use a deadly chemical or biological weapon against our forces or our homeland.28

Since terrorism aimed at the United States was clearly anti-American, the Clinton administration had to make little effort to emphasize the status of



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terrorists as the enemy. With such a blatant enemy to mold, the American government was able to take full advantage of the status of radical Islamic terrorists to gain support for their foreign policies and actions. In the first nine months of the George W. Bush administration in 2001, the political rhetoric about terrorism was minimal, focusing instead on states perceived as enemies, particularly Iraq. All of that changed immediately on 9/11. The Bush administration responded to the attacks with full strength rhetoric emphasizing the same enemy image, threats to American national identity, and dichotomies that were used throughout the cold war to describe the Soviet Union and communism. In his first address to the American public after the attacks, Bush’s opening words were: Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts . . . Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror . . . America was targeted for attack because we’re the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world. And no one will keep that light from shining. Today, our nation saw evil—the very worst of human nature—and we responded with the best of America.29

President Bush followed this rhetoric emphasizing dichotomies with an address to Congress, aired on live national television on September 20. In this speech, he clearly identified the enemy, paralleling the acts of 9/11 with acts of brutality in the twentieth century, including that of the Soviet Union. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated . . . We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—by abandoning every value except the will to power—they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.30

Because the attacks of 9/11 were brutal and egregious, it was relatively easy for the political rhetoric to label Islamic terrorism as the new enemy. The very brutality of the acts alone made it easy to sell the enemy image to the American public. By the end of 2001, the rhetoric was already in place to effectively justify the new “war on terrorism” in Afghanistan and other parts of the globe.



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Yet, within months of the attacks, the Bush administration began shifting the rhetoric to focus on the alleged threat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, linking him with Islamic terrorism to justify use of force in Iraq. Despite weak intelligence, the Bush administration latched on to the fear of homeland security that resulted from 9/11 and linked these two problems to attain public support. Just a year after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush addressed the nation on primetime television in an attempt to persuade the American people that there was an imminent threat against the United States from Iraq and therefore, it was necessary to attack Iraq using force and remove Saddam Hussein from power. In that speech, he said the following: Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a grave threat to peace . . . the threat comes from Iraq . . . The entire world has witnessed Iraq’s 11-year history of defiance, deception, and bad faith. We must also never forget the most vivid events of recent history. On September the 11th, 2001, America felt its vulnerability . . . We know that Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy—the USA. We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high level contacts that go back a decade. . . . Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists . . . Some citizens wonder: After 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? There is a reason. We have experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing—in fact, they would be eager—to use a biological or chemical weapon, or when they have one, a nuclear weapon. Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us.31

In a 29-minute speech justifying the reasons why Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power, Bush used the words terror, terrorism, or terrorists 35 times. Interestingly, the terms “weapons of mass destruction” and the term “September the 11th” were both mentioned five times. The indirect links between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/11 eventually persuaded 70 percent of Americans that Saddam Hussein, not al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden, had ordered the 9/11 attacks.32 A study from 2004 found that the White House intertwined the threats of Iraq and al Qaeda on a regular basis.33 The rhetoric worked—more than 70 percent of Americans supported the war in Iraq in the first few years due to the successful attempt to link Saddam Hussein and Islamic terrorism.34 In this case, the enemy of Islamic terrorists became the scapegoat for the problems in Iraq with Saddam Hussein.35 Today Saddam Hussein is gone and the threat from Iraq does not exist. There have been no attacks against the United States by Islamic terrorists



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since 9/11, but the political rhetoric continues to remain as strong as it was in 2001. Americans have found themselves in a similar place they were in during the cold war—complacency about U.S. foreign policy actions when it comes to dealing with the enemy and national security threats. Due to the continuation of political rhetoric about potential enemies and foreign threats despite the end of the cold war, the Bush administration was able to build on the same rhetoric used by Presidents Bush, Sr. and Clinton, with only a shift in the enemy. As a result of the use of skillful political rhetoric, the American public will likely continue to support actions taken in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism for years or decades to come. Notes 1. The earliest study of the enemy image appeared in 1946 in a wartime case study of identification with the enemy (Sanford). The early decades of the cold war provided a number of studies by psychologists and political scientists on the enemy image of the Soviet Union. See Boulding (1956, 1959), Brofenbrenner (1961), Holsti (1967), Deutsch, Osgood, Smith, White (1965, 1968), Kelman (1965), and Frank (1967). 2. Richard K. Herrmann, James F. Voss, Tonya Y. E. Schooler, and Joseph Chiarrochi, “Images in International Relations: An Experimental Test of Cognitive Schema,” International Studies Quarterly 41 (1997): 412. 3. Brett Silverstein and Catherine Flamenbaum, “Biases in the Perception and Cognition of the Actions of Enemies,” Journal of Social Issues 45 (1989): 52. 4. Robert R. Holt and Brett Silverstein, “On the Psychology of Enemy Images: Introduction and Overview,” Journal of Social Issues 45 (1989): 8. 5. Gerald N. Sande, George R. Goethals, Lisa Ferrari, and Leila T. Worth, “Value-Guided Attributions: Maintaining the Moral Self-Image and the Diabolical Enemy Image,” Journal of Social Issues 45 (1989): 92. 6. Silverstein and Flamenbaum, 71. 7. David Campbell, Writing Security: USFP and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), 3. 8. Jim Kuypers, Presidential Crisis Rhetoric and the Press in the Post-Cold War World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 17. 9. Campbell, 3. 10. Riikka Kuusisto, “Framing the Wars in the Gulf and in Bosnia: The Rhetorical Definitions of the Western Power Leaders in Action,” Journal of Peace Research (September 1998): 606. 11. Campbell, 8. 12. Kuusisto, 605. 13. Ibid., 604.



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14. Paul A. Chilton, “The Meaning of Security,” in Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in IR, ed. Frances A. Beer and Robert Hariman (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 194. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Cori Dauber, “The Practice of Argument: Reading the Condition of CivilMilitary Relations,” Armed Forces & Society: An Interdisciplinary (Spring 1998), 435. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 436. 20. Kuypers, 18. 21. Ibid., 15. 22. Andrew Rosenthal, “Soviet Turmoil; Farewell, Red Menace: U.S. Starts Altering Its Perspective on the World,” New York Times, September 1, 1991. 23. Edward Djerejian, “The U.S. and the Middle East in a Changing World; Address at Meridian House International,” U.S. Department of State Dispatch, June 2, 1992. 24. Campbell, 7. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 3. 27. Charles Krauthammer, “Engaging the World, At America’s Expense,” Raleigh News & Observer, October 31, 1999, A35. 28. William S. Cohen, “Security in a Grave New World,” Speech presented to the Council on Foreign Relations. News Release. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), September 14, 1998. 29. George W. Bush, “9/11 Address to the Nation,” September 11, 2001, White House, www.whitehouse.gov. 30. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress Following 9/11 Attacks,” September 20, 2001, White House, www.whitehouse.gov. 31. George W. Bush, “Remarks by the President on Iraq,” October 7, 2002, White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html. 32. Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, “Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,” Washington Post, September 6, 2003, A1. 33. Shana Kushner and Amy Gershkopf, “The 9/11-Iraq Connection: How the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric in the Iraq Conflict Shifted Public Opinion,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, April 15, 2004. 34. Alvin Richman, “The Public on Iraq: An Overview from the Polls, January-August 2007,” Public Opinion Pros, September 2007, http://www. publicopinionpros.com/features/2007/sep/richman.asp. 35. See Jerome D. Frank, “The Face of the Enemy,” in Culture, Communication, and Conflict: Readings in Intercultural Relations, ed. Gary R. Weaver (Needham Heights, MA: Ginn Press, 1994).



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Escape from 9/11: Back to the Future of the Mass Society James F. Tracy*

There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it. —John Dewey1

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ne risks invoking a “cliché of a cliché” when noting that September 11 and the ensuing “war on terror” has been characterized by a plethora of government propaganda and distorted information. Nevertheless, deceptive and misleading publicity appears to have become increasingly manifest alongside a news media and citizenry either resigned to their fate or helpless to contest such communication. Hence there is cause for calling up and reassessing an idea sociologist Daniel Bell once called “probably the most influential social theory in the Western world.”2 Mass society theory is summarily dismissed by a majority of communication and media studies scholars for its alleged conceptual simplicity and derogation of media content and audiences. This chapter argues that the ideas behind mass society theory and its contemporary variants remain realistic, compelling, and practical ways of thinking about media and society in a world increasingly characterized by unreason, uncertainty, and crisis. * James F. Tracy is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research areas include examination of the relationship between media and society and the history of labor in media industries. Dr. Tracy’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Journalism & Communication Monographs, Journalism Studies, Canadian Journal of Communication, and European Journal of Communication.



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Mass society denotes a loosely connected set of social and political ideas that cannot be delved into at length here. A common argument among intellectuals pertinent to mass society’s relationship to 9/11 is that the vast majority of the public is hopelessly ignorant, impressionable, and subject to wreaking calamity if left to their own devices. The idea that the masses require guidance particularly in affairs of state has antecedents in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham, and David Hume, and it was famously applied to the media/public equation in the modern era by Walter Lippmann, who argued that the average “self-centered man,” cannot make sense of “the world outside” because of her/his narrow, vicarious, and illusory grasp of issues and events.3 This paternalistic and untrusting approach to democracy denies a polity the hope of positive freedom, or genuine self determination, condemning it forever to negative freedom, to a “mob” or “mass” status whose irrational energy must be dissipated in amusement or channeled toward nationalistic endeavor. Mass society also relates to a political economy approach to the study of media that addresses how relations of social power influence the production, distribution, and consumption of information and cultural forms.4 This approach received considerable notoriety when Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman explained that the commercial economic orientation of major United States-based news media as the foremost factor for understanding the content and construction of news about U.S. foreign affairs. Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda Model,” which accounts for how ownership, advertisers, use of officials as quotable sources, the disciplinary power of “flak” from right-wing media watchdog groups, and the strong ideological component of anticommunism or championing of “free market” capitalism, together contribute to news that tends away from questioning authority and instead upholds and legitimates entrenched political and economic power.5 An additional factor, the idea that news media and journalists themselves are “liberal,” is itself the product of a movement conservative agenda that has taken on a life of its own despite the questionable evidence offered in support of such a thesis.6 9/11 has been an opportunity by the George W. Bush administration and the formidable array of unabashed right-wing news outlets, such as Fox News and the Washington Times, to transform the ideological tendency accounted for in the Propaganda Model from anticommunism and free market orthodoxy to “antiterrorism,” which, like its forebears, is driven by a deeply held fear and suspicion of “Un-American” others (i.e., non-Christian, non-Caucasian) who are seemingly plotting our country’s destruction from without, or may even may be lurking among us. In this regard especially, 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror is a new means of a very long tradition of reducing a public to a mass through



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fear and anxiety, a tradition that includes the 50-year cold war and its perpetual warfare state, and provides the rationale for accelerated public spending on intelligence and the military. “The whole aim of practical politics,” H. L. Mencken observes, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”7 Indeed, the foremost hobgoblins of the war on terror are appropriately Islamic—“America’s major foreign devil” due to a limited comprehension of a religion and culture practiced by more than seven hundred million of the world’s inhabitants.8 The American media system is an especially willing accomplice in this regard, perhaps more so than at any time in history, and thus if we are concerned with understanding the possibilities of democracy in light of 9/11, reconsidering the notion of the mass society is of crucial significance.

From Cold War to War on Terror A classic textbook definition of the mass society is “one in which the masses are continuously indoctrinated by the mass media in the interests of the elite.” Such a condition may emerge in either totalitarian societies or liberal democracies.9 Mass society is also, according to Morris Berman, “tied to a critique of popular culture that points to the existence of a large mass of people who are unable to think for themselves, operate out of an emotive basis, confuse entertainment with education, and desperately want to be ‘filled from the outside.’ ”10 Presented in this way, the notion of mass society appears vulgar—particularly to media studies scholars who often must train their students in skills for potential employment in the media industries—because it suggests that a majority of a given population are willingly duped by government propaganda. These definitions, however, overlook mass society’s origins in European social thought and its affinity with political economy through an attention toward evaluation of the underlying institutional elements of the public sphere. The notion of mass society is largely based on nineteenth-century continental philosophy and social theory concerned with the uncertain transition from community to society. Yet it was not until the 1950s at the height of the cold war that C. Wright Mills provided a concise definition of the characteristics of contemporary mass society through four criteria that discern a “public” from a “mass.” First, in a public there is correspondence between the expression and reception of opinion from one individual and interest group to another. Second, there is the means to publicly respond to any opinion without fear of reprisal. Third, opinions articulated are potent and self-evident in shaping political decisions of



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consequence—thus members of the public are empowered by observing the dialectic of thought and action. And fourth, the public is protected from powerful institutions penetrating (or controlling) the space where public discourse proceeds; in other words, the public must be free from terror or coercion to reach an optimal and expansive speech situation.11 A mass society, on the other hand, is deprived of the freedom to communicate and lacks access to effective and unhindered means of communication. Lacking the means of expression, citizens are isolated individually and collectively because of their inability to influence social and political conditions affecting their overall welfare. In this regard a public is conducive to democracy and a mass society to despotism. The then ascending television medium and suburban lifestyle were central factors behind this “atomization” of the body politic over the past half century, accelerating the process whereby individuals, as Erich Fromm has suggested, are systematically deprived of a clear will to communicate because of a misidentification of her/his human needs, a point to which we will return.12 Mills’ analysis remains compelling in light of 9/11 and the war on terror because terrorism is in many ways the very hobgoblin that distracts from the program of wealth redistribution that over the past 30 years has shifted the tax burden to the poor while accelerating wealth to a tiny fraction of powerful individuals and institutions. Today wealth is at least as concentrated as it was in 1929, and this economic disparity is a central though seldom acknowledged element of the divisive nature of American political life further signaling the public’s demise.13 A way out of the mass society is meaningful education and effective social organizations capable of articulating a general will about important affairs influencing a polity’s well being. Such a condition, however, is antithetical to the prevailing socioeconomic system of which the media are a central part. Indeed, the time and activity invested in building labor unions, community groups, and grassroots political parties that were once capable of providing a voice for common public concerns throughout much of the post-Second World War era is often spent working or watching television.14 The ebbing of such organizations has been inversely proportional to the concentrated ownership and control of media outlets. Indeed, as Carpignano et al. observed after the 1991 Gulf War, “The media that had become the embodiment of the public sphere” during the Vietnam War era, for example, are now reduced to the function of mouthpiece of officialdom . . . If Ted Koppel or Thomas Friedman seems a surrogate secretary of state, and James Baker a surrogate anchorman, it is because their difference is in the formalities of their roles and not in the substance of their performance.15



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The Bush administration, whose policies are seldom vigorously challenged by major news media, has taken this contempt for citizens and public opinion to entirely new levels, with its undertakings often having Orwellian titles that contradict their intent. The program that undermines publicly funded educational institutions is called “No Child Left Behind,” and the set of environmental laws and regulation that gives major polluters carte blanche over the environment is the “Clear Skies Initiative.” Yet the war on terror is the cruelest irony perpetrated on the public because its showcase event—the invasion and occupation of Iraq—has dramatically increased terrorist activities and left Americans and their counterparts around the world far more vulnerable to terrorist violence.16 Though far more brash, these propagandistic measures come from a long tradition of blatant subterfuge. As Michael Sullivan points out, the post-9/11 creation of a Department of Homeland Security “expos[es] the pretense that the Department of ‘Defense’ was for something other than the projections of global power.”17

The Poverty of Technology The mass society might seem in many ways part of the distant past; its meaningfulness surely must be outmoded, especially given the progressive notions of communication and information technology regularly conveyed in advertising and other popular communication. Indeed, development of the foremost means of communication technology—the Internet—promises a wealth of information and the potential for connectedness with others that was unknown just a decade ago. Yet such a fixation on technological salvation can be deceiving because the typical individual’s dependence on “mass” media for important news and information still far outstrips the growing sophistication of new media gadgetry. A democratic country’s journalistic and informational apparatus can in many ways be seen as a de facto extension of its educational system. Both seek to enfranchise a nation’s constituents and contribute to the full development of each individual’s potential through the cultivation of certain capacities and orientations toward the world. Given that the United States is the most powerful country in the world economically and militarily, it is of no comfort to citizens in other nations that the United States is among the most impoverished in terms of access to meaningful information and discussion. Moreover, because of the United States’s cavalier foreign policy, which following 9/11 and under the George W. Bush administration has grown even more extreme, there is a greater need than ever for Americans to understand geopolitical events, particularly those



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transpiring in the Middle East. Yet the U.S. media system’s extremely poor informational regimen leaves its constituents misinformed or oblivious to news of grave significance, an understandable phenomenon given the institutional proximity of such media companies alongside government and corporate power.18 A Gallup poll conducted shortly after the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 found that almost 86 percent of respondents received their news about the Persian Gulf region from electronic mass media—media owned by powerful transnational corporations with interlocking boards of directors19 and almost completely dependent upon major advertisers who benefit significantly from either remaining acquiscent to or actively supporting Bush policies. In contrast, only 3.6 percent of those polled received such information from the Internet.20 Although this figure has grown somewhat in the past several years,21 corporate-controlled media have a preponderant influence over the body politic vis-à-vis other media. More than half of Americans (53 percent) claim to receive their overall news from television and only 18 percent from newspapers.22 Of those newspaper readers, 74 percent read local versus national or international papers (8 percent) the latter of which typically offer more in-depth coverage, especially of international affairs.23 Thus in the midst of the most advanced information and media technology ever developed the population lacks necessary information for recognizing tremendous threats to its survival. In an open society that seeks to preserve and foster a vibrant public discourse, and in light of the serious implications of 9/11, journalists would ideally proceed in a sober fashion to ask pressing questions of leaders and delve into exactly what went wrong on that day. They would inquire about how the world’s most sophisticated and well-financed intelligence apparatus and military forces allowed such a series of events to take place against those with whose welfare it is entrusted. Accountable parties and questionable circumstances would then be cast before the tribunal of public opinion for the utmost scrutiny so they might be remedied. In short, rigorous research and analysis would provide the public with a multifaceted explanation of the event so that potential future events of this nature can be prevented. Instead, “the media—television, radio and newspapers,” Sheldon Wolin writes, “acted in unison, fell into line, even knew instinctively what their role should be. What followed may have been the modern media’s greatest production,” for it proceeded to establish “the principal reference point by which the nation’s body politic was to be governed and the lives of its members ordered. From the crucified to the redeemer nation.”24 A scenario and set of rationales was presented for an endless



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A benevolent, democratic, and peace loving nation was brutally attacked by insane evil terrorists who hate the United States for its freedoms and affluent way of life. The United States must immediately increase its military and covert forces, locate the surviving culprits and exterminate them; then prepare for a long-term war to root out the global terrorist cancer and destroy it.25

This simplistic narrative, the “clash of civilizations” in Samuel Huntington’s phrase, provided broad justification for a comprehensive and ostensible war against the Third World; a war, Edward Herman argues, that “has helped reduce moral barriers to barbarism” to such a degree that the threat of resort to nuclear weapons is now a central ingredient of U.S. diplomacy.26 The U.S. news media’s acceptance of this theme and its attendant fearmongering endured long after 9/11—from the lead-up to and the invasion of Iraq, passage of the Patriot Act, and the use of the terror attacks as the principle backdrop to the Republican Party’s 2004 convention in New York,27 through 2008 and the revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Following the Democratic Party’s appointment of John Kerry as its presidential candidate, the Department of Homeland Security’s elevation of the terrorist threat level scale alert to Code Orange provided fear on-demand, “remind[ing] voters that they saw the Republicans as strong on national security.”28 Due to the use of fear as the main technique for disciplining journalists and political foes alike, the “War on Terror” never received the critical scrutiny it deserved from major media outlets, and it has thus become an unquestioned mantra and policy imperative of Republican and Democratic Party leaders alike. Like the proverbial antagonist of superhero comic books, bin Laden issues obscure warnings of pending attacks from locations unknown, and though not seen in public for many years his mediated existence remains a tremendously effective propaganda device. Following a misinformation campaign of six months duration in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, 80 percent of Americans concluded that it was “certain[ly]” or “likely true” that “Iraq has ties to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda.”29



war on terror seemingly prepared in advance by the Bush administration. To impose this agenda, sociologist John Bellamy Foster notes, a good-evil, “Manichean” understanding of the events akin to Bush’s conception of the world was dutifully accepted and relayed by American news media.

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As we have noted, mass society has often been categorized along the lines of paranoid science fiction where the population amounts to a set of mere automata. Yet it was never that simplistic or one-dimensional, having instead considered the interplay between institutions and the lesserunderstood human condition as a primary site for mass society-like tendencies. For example, in the framework of political economy Mills’ public/mass dichotomy looks to socioeconomic structures and relationships to explain how they shape human existence. Others have similarly questioned how such structural constraints more subtly exude into the psychic development of the individual qua mass media and culture. In his compelling treatise on technocracy, nuclear war and antinuclear activism psychiatrist Joel Kovel observes that Western society “is the product of various permutations of violence and dehumanization,” which are “direct outcomes of the way society is organized.” As acts of physical violence can threaten the individual body, so can falsehood and the manipulation of fundamental reason harm the body politic. When one alters or simply ignores the facts about civilian casualties or weapons of mass destruction, about civil liberties or the flouting of international law, it is the national and global body politic that suffers incalculable harm. Members of a public are thus weakened in their ability to recognize or even care about their collective interests. “They lose their freshness and curiosity,” according to Kovel. “Eventually human nature is itself destroyed, just as a violated landscape is destroyed: the powers of selfexpression and self-recognition disappear; and with them goes the capacity for self-determination.” A society thus ceases to resemble a public and “a mass is created, passive, fearful and readily led.”30 In this way, identifying and coming to terms with the mass society is motivated by a profound humanism foregrounding the communicative in the development of self and society. “As a child,” Erich Fromm observes, “every human being passes through a state of powerlessness, and truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power.”31 Modern systems of education and communication contribute to the psychic underdevelopment and inability to think critically through the beclouding of ideas and phenomena, thereby setting the stage for paranoia, hobgoblins, and blind nationalism. This condition has been a decisive factor in what Chalmers Johnson terms “blowback”; a condition where U.S. citizens remain generally unaware of the implications of events such as 9/11 because they lack the knowledge necessary to understand their country’s often destructive role in foreign affairs over the last 60 years.32 Naomi Klein has



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similarly pointed to how aggressive economic programs coincide with the dynamics of events such as 9/11 and the “War on Terror” because the latter involve “shocking” a population into submission.33 President Bush can thus declare how the terrorists hate the United States because of its freedom. Attempting to understand 9/11’s broader implications in such an environment is close to impossible. The prevalence of pundits and experts devoted of late to terrorism, “defense,” and “national security,” for example, gives the impression “that only a ‘specialist can understand them,” Fromm notes, “and he only in his own limited field.” This “tends to discourage people from trusting their own capacity to think about those problems that really matter”34 to the human species and its odds of survival—nuclear proliferation and even holocaust, severe environmental changes, and the collapse of existing economic institutions and systems. The media also discourage intellectual activity through the sheer disorientation that comes from parcelizing information about the world. This involves, according to Paolo Freire, an “emphasis on a focalized view of problems rather than on seeing them as dimensions of a totality.”35 When facts lack any coherent relationship, their purposefulness for better understanding the world is diminished to such a degree they “lose the specific quality which they can have only as parts of a structuralized whole and retain merely an abstract, quantitative meaning; each fact is just another fact and all that matters is whether we know more or less.”36 Commercial media are particularly well suited to such a process because their very nature serves to trivialize serious phenomena. “The announcement of the bombing of a city and the death of hundreds of people,” Fromm notes, “is shamelessly followed or interrupted by an advertisement for soap or wine.”37 The fragmented, focalized nature of news is the foremost mode of information dissemination especially in the United States, where it is reinforced by breaking up programming with commercials. “Radio and television news is characterized by the machine-gunlike recitation of numerous unrelated items. Newspapers are multipaged assemblies of materials set down almost randomly, or in keeping with arcane rules of journalism,” Herbert Schiller remarks.38 Perpetually disoriented and insecure, the subverted public remains uncertain of who or what to believe at a time when its need to know is greater than ever. The more intense the process of massification the more one sees the real interests and concerns of citizens trivialized or explained away. Thus the hosts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have been overwhelmingly successful in lampooning American politics and journalism. Their popularity suggests the contemptuousness and detachment a critical cross section of the public feels toward news and politics. Yet as in any state with increasingly



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authoritarian tendencies, Stewart, Colbert, and their employer, Viacom, are compelled to present their critiques under the guise of slapstick so as not to challenge or infuriate the real powers that be. Indeed, in many instances their commentaries are too thoughtful and interesting to be included into the official political discourse that is designed in such a way as to discourage genuine public participation and debate.39 Americans’ dissatisfaction with their news outlets’ performance is reflected in public opinion polls. When Gallup gauged “[h]ow much trust and confidence” respondents “have in the mass media—such as newspapers, T.V., and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly,” only 14 percent stated “a great deal,” while almost 46 percent responded “not very much,” or “none at all.”40 Gallup found in another poll that 74 percent of respondents felt that news media were spending too much time on O. J. Simpson’s 2007 arrest.41 Outside of such polls, which are seldom invoked by mainstream outlets, the public’s views and concerns are reduced to far more abstract indicators, such as presidential approval ratings and consumer spending indices.

Conclusion Confronting elements of the mass society and reviving public discourse in the United States will require that citizens seize control of the means of communication presently managed by the corporate entities whose primary interest—serving to accelerate the investments of their shareholders, and thus necessitating favorable government regulatory measures toward their industries—are at complete variance with observing, analyzing, and critiquing their own actions or those of government. Such a proposal seems outlandish especially in America, where individuals perceive major media as natural, monolithic, and overall intractable institutions. Yet these same outlets provide a picture of the world that often does not conform with the everyday realities faced by everyday people, the foremost among these being workplace-related issues and financial tribulation. “Economically powerful groups and companies,” Schiller notes, “quickly get edgy when attention is called to exploitative practices in which they are engaged.”42 The same wariness is evident regarding 9/11, which is almost entirely taboo for major media, even though a majority of Americans appear dissatisfied with the 9/11 commission’s conclusions. A recent Zogby poll found that more than half (51 percent) of Americans still want for Congress to investigate the Bush administration for 9/11, while 67 percent think that the commission was wrong for not investigating the anomalous collapse



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of World Trade Center Building 7 several hours after the fall of the Twin Towers.43 Conspiracy theories abound particularly when governments fail to produce—or believe they are above producing—plausible explanations for momentous events they are supposed to prevent, as they well should. Tellingly, none of these theories are the product of mainstream American journalism, which should not just apprise the public of events and issues, but also make sense of them and explain their implications.44 In many ways the social movement that has developed around alternative, nonofficial explanations of 9/11—“conspiracy theorists”—was born out of media and government indifference toward more substantive examination of the event, an indifference that is shared by most of the liberal American intelligentsia. It suggests a suppressed yet vital counterpublic which through its very existence works against the tendencies of the mass society while instantiating the continued significance of the idea in the twenty-first century. Notes 1. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), 167. 2. Quoted in Dan Schiller, Theorizing Communication: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 65. 3. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 181. 4. Vincent Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication: Rethinking and Renewal (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). 5. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002). 6. For an excellent historical explanation of this phenomenon see David Brock, The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (New York: Crown, 2004). 7. The Quotations Page, Quotation #33072 from Classic Quotes, http://www. quotationspage.com/quote/33072.html (accessed August 3, 2008). 8. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Vintage, 1997), 7. 9. Arthur Brittan, “Mass Society,” in The Social Science Encyclopedia, ed. Adam Kuper and Jessica Kuper (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 500. 10. Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 312. 11. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 303–304. Mills’ analysis is of particular interest in considering the intellectual ties between mass society theory and the public sphere, especially since it is a central inspiration for philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).



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12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1941/1965). Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). Ibid. Paolo Carpignano, Robin Andersen, Stanley Aronowitz, and William DiFazio, “Chatter in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: Talk Television and the Public Mind,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 101–102. Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, “The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide,” Mother Jones, March 1, 2007 http://www. motherjones.com/news/featurex/2007/03/iraq_effect_1.html (Accessed August 3, 2008). Michael J. Sullivan III, American Adventurism Abroad: Invasions, Interventions, and Regime Changes since World War II, Revised and Expanded Edition (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 21. There is an abundant amount of literature within and without media studies critiquing how and why much of what passes for journalism in the United States serves the public so poorly. For example, see Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004). For a detailed schema of the shared members on boards of directors of corporate institutions see www.theyrule.net. Gallup Poll Question qn21, “Which of these is your main source of information about the war in the Persian Gulf regions—Newspapers, or Radio, or Television, or The Internet? March 22–23, 2003, http://institution.gallup. com/ (accessed May 6, 2008). Gallup Poll Question qn35, “What is your main source of news—Television, or Radio, or Newspapers, or The Internet?” June 25–28, 2007, http:// institution.gallup.com/ (accessed May 6, 2008). Ibid. Gallup Poll Question qn21, “Which of these is your main source of information about the war in the Persian Gulf regions—Newspapers, or Radio, or Television, or The Internet?” March 22–23, 2003, http://institution.gallup. com/ (accessed May 6, 2008). Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 5–6. John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance (New York: Monthly Review Press), 26. Edward S. Herman, “The Triumph of Lunacy,” Z Magazine, June 2008, 21. Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush (New York: Free Press, 2006). Craig Unger, The Fall of the House of Bush (New York: Scribner, 2007), 318. Gallup Poll Question qn32. “Which of the following statements best describes your view of whether—Iraq has ties to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization known as al Qaeda? Would you say—You are certain that this is true, You think it is likely that this is true, but you are not certain, or You think it is



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40.

41.

42. 43.

44.

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unlikely that this is true, but you are not certain, or You are certain that this is NOT true?” Jannuary 31–February 2, 2003, http://institution.gallup.com/ (accessed May 6, 2008). Joel Kovel, Against the State of Nuclear Terror (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 134–135. Fromm, 275. Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt, 2004). Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007). Fromm, 275–276. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), 137–138. Fromm, 276. Ibid. Herbert I. Schiller, The Mind Managers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 24–25. Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 220–228; Wolin, Democracy Incorporated. Gallup Poll Question qn16, “In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media—such as newspapers, T.V. and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly—a great deal, a fair amount, not very much, or none at all?” September 8–10, 2003, http:// institution.gallup.com/ (accessed May 6, 2008). Gallup Poll Question qn18, “Given the history of O.J. Simpson, do you think the news media are justified in the amount of attention they are paying to his recent arrest, or are they paying too much attention to it?” September 24–27, 2007, http://institution.gallup.com/ (accessed May 6, 2008). Schiller, 18. Zogby International, September 6, 2007, “Zogby Poll: 51percent of Americans Want Congress to Probe Bush/Cheney Regarding 9/11 Attacks,” http://www. zogby.com/search/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1354. In terms of this discussion, projects of Internet-based “citizen journalism” concerning September 11, such as the 9/11 Timeline, are effective in illustrating the shortcomings of conventional journalism, particularly its fragmented nature. Paul Thompson and the Center for Cooperative Research, The Terror Timeline: A Comprehensive Chronicle of the Road to 9/11—and America’s Response (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).



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The Resurgence of U.S. Public Diplomacy after 9/11 Nancy Snow*

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eptember 11, 2001 was a day that changed everything for this woman’s career. I was living in Southern California and working at UCLA when a friend from back East called to wake me up with a “turn on your television” command. She said that we were under attack and that I would not believe my eyes. Shocked to see the stunning footage, I was even more startled to hear from a reporter within a few hours of the attacks. He asked me to place the day in a propaganda context. His business-as-usual attitude set me back a moment. I declined to be interviewed, explaining that I was still too shaken up by what I was witnessing. Despite my initial refusal to be a source on a news story, I was soon hearing from reporters more than any previous point in my academic career. In 2001, there were few American scholars focused on U.S. persuasion, propaganda, and influence in the world. At the time I had been thinking about international communications since my graduate school days commenced 15 years earlier. A Fulbright scholarship to the Federal Republic of Germany at the height of the cold war reinforced my worldview that the United States needed to recognize its propaganda image, not only among its enemies, but also among its allies and close friends. Ever since my educational exchange experience, I felt that the United States

* Nancy Snow is Associate Professor of Public Diplomacy in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University on professional leave as tenured Associate Professor of Communications at California State University, Fullerton. She is the author or editor of six books: Persuader-in- Chief; Propaganda Inc; Information War; The Arrogance of American Power; War, Media, and Propaganda (with Yahya Kamalipour); and the Routledge Handbook on Public Diplomacy (with Philip M. Taylor).



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held a mostly naïve view of its national image and how others perceived it. By 1992 I had received a two-year federal fellowship to work at the Department of State and United States Information Agency (USIA) and four years after leaving the U.S. government, I published a small volume titled Propaganda, Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World. In it I laid out the role and function of the USIA, my previous employer. Following 9/11, my publisher Seven Stories Press came out with an updated edition in 2002 to explain what happened to our nation’s image agency. USIA, which was known as the U.S. Information Service (USIS) overseas, was an independent government agency responsible for “telling America’s story to the world,” or at least that was our purported mandate displayed on the front of our building in the southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. It was a little-known billion dollar propaganda agency in the service of information about America prepared exclusively for an overseas audience. Our euphemistic term in the 1990s for what we did was called public diplomacy, although the term had been around in U.S. circles since the 1960s. You would not hear us refer to ourselves as government propagandists, though my own digging into the history of American propaganda uncovered both an acknowledgment and reverence for the term “American propagandist.” Thomas C. Sorenson, the brother to John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter, Ted Sorenson, penned a volume about the USIA during the Kennedy/Johnson years that he aptly titled The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda. Alvin A. Snyder, former director of Worldnet Television for USIA, said that “[P]ropagandizing means advocating a point of view favorable to one’s own position, and that’s precisely what we at the USIA did.”1 Fitzhugh Green, a senior Foreign Service Officer in the USIA, openly called the work of USIA propaganda: Despite critics who eschew the term, a composite definition of propaganda for current dictionaries and experts in the subject looks something like this: Any organization or movement engaged in the propagation of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc., for the purpose of helping an institution (the United States in USIA’s case) or a cause (the principles in which Americans believe, and the U.S. foreign policy, in USIA’s case). This definition jibes with most of the numerous statements of mission under which the agency has labored.2

Much of the rhetoric that followed the events of 9/11 referred to public diplomacy in the same context as propaganda. A high-profile op-ed by former Clinton Administration official Richard Holbrooke published just a month after 9/11 explained that the U.S. communication efforts post-9/11 were more important than how we chose to label them: “Call it



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public diplomacy, or public affairs, or psychological warfare, or—if you really want to be blunt—propaganda. But whatever it is called, defining what this war is really about in the minds of the 1 billion Muslims in the world will be of decisive and historic importance.”3 Holbrooke challenged the U.S. leadership with the disappointing reality that America’s number one enemy and most wanted criminal Osama bin Laden was winning the battle for hearts and minds among Muslims. The al Qaeda leader had a convincing message to the world’s Muslims that the Bush-directed war on terror was really a war against Islam. And Bin Laden was able to mount this information offensive from a remote cave somewhere in the mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, not from a highrise executive suite on Madison Avenue. Bin Laden exploited the preexisting rage that many Muslims had toward their despotic regimes, most of which received allied support from oil-thirsty America. He played on the asymmetrical imbalance of support that the United States gave toward Israel in the Middle East. As Holbrooke noted, however, these two messages were not even open to discussion and debate in U.S. foreign policy circles, certainly not at the time. What America could control were two things: its own message to the Arab and Muslim world and how it chose to carry that message. Just what was the public diplomacy core message after 9/11? If you asked the president of the United States, the message to Muslim-Americans was “We stand with you.” President George W. Bush was the first American president in history to visit the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. While such a personal face-to-face meeting with Arab and Muslim leaders did impress, simultaneously the U.S. military was mounting a public information campaign in Afghanistan warning the radical Islamic Taliban and their supporters that their death was imminent for having supported the terrorists who attacked the United States. The message here was “We do not stand with the enemy.” As is often the case, the message sent was not always the message received. The U.S. military was embarrassed to discover that the yellow cluster bombs used to detonate over enemy territory appeared to some innocent people as food packets. While Bush was saying on the one hand this was not a war on Islamic people, on the other side of the world U.S. psychological operations (Psyops) had its own radio message: Attention, noble Afghan people, the coalition countries have been airdropping daily humanitarian rations for you. The food ration is enclosed in yellow plastic bags. They come in the shape of rectangular or long squares. The food inside the bags is Halal and very nutritional. In areas away from where food has been dropped, cluster bombs will also be dropped. The



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color of these bombs is also yellow. We do not wish to see an innocent civilian mistake the bombs for food bags. All bombs will explode when they hit the ground, but in some special circumstances some of the bombs will not explode. The cluster bombs are 6 cm in diameter and 16 cm in length and they are cylindrical in shape. Of course in future cluster bombs will not be dropped in areas where food is air-dropped. However, we do not wish to see an innocent civilian mistake the bombs for food bags and take it away believing that it might contain food.4

Back in Washington, President Bush tasked a former advertising executive Charlotte Beers to head up the State Department operation for all things public diplomacy. Her formal title was undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, but in short order she became known as the propaganda czarina. Beers was a prominent female legend in advertising circles, but with no foreign policy aptitude or any experience maneuvering the corridors of government bureaucracies. She was famous for promoting the accounts of Jaguar and Uncle Ben’s Rice. She would do the same for Uncle Sam as she did for cars and food, only this time she called her most famous product, the $15 million dollar advertising campaign called “Shared Values,” which consisted of half a dozen adverts portraying Muslim-Americans talking about their lives and how good life was in America. The ads were designed to be shown during the Ramadan period of 2002, but someone in Washington failed to do some simple research. Foreign government advertising is considered propaganda and cannot be broadcast overseas. The ads were briefly aired in Indonesia but never shown in other target Muslim markets such as Lebanon or Morocco. Beers resigned her position in late February 2003, just weeks before Operation Iraqi Freedom got underway. The United States of America had been actively engaged in propaganda during wartime since the period of the American Revolution, but the first official propaganda agency did not get off the ground until World War I with the creation of George Creel’s Office of War Information (OWI). Creel was a FOW (Friend of Woodrow) who convinced the American president that the U.S. public needed to be persuaded into becoming warriors for democracy. Creel later wrote about the propaganda efforts by prominent government information agents of the day, including Walter Lippman, Edward Bernays, and Harold Lasswell. His 1920 book, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information That Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe, could well win an award for hubris in book titling, but its value today is that Creel documents the coordinated multimedia efforts of the day (film, radio, postering, pamphleteering, speechmaking) that told the world about America in quasi-religious terms.



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To this day, the tone and rhetoric of American propaganda and public diplomacy is still characterized in moral overtones first used by Creel. A modern day version of Creel who shares his journalism background is the prominent face of public diplomacy, Karen Hughes. Hughes was appointed undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs in September 2005. She followed the legacy of Charlotte Beers (2001–2003) and the short-term tenure of former James Baker acolyte and ambassador to Morocco, Margaret Tutwiler (2003–2004). Unlike Tutwiler, who at least had ambassadorial-level diplomatic experience overseas, Hughes was not appointed for her foreign policy prowess. She was appointed because of her reputation as having guard-dog like devotion to President George W. Bush. I once had a limited sighting of Hughes when George W. Bush was first running for president of the United States. While a professor of political science at New England College, I served as executive director of Common Cause of New Hampshire, a part-time devotional duty in service to citizen activism. At a 2000 rally, I was within a 10-foot pole from Hughes in Concord, New Hampshire, when Bush was campaigning in the first-in-the-nation presidential primary. Hughes made a lasting impression that I just might be zapped into vapor if I got too close to then Governor Bush when Hughes was around as his unofficial governorin-chief bodyguard. Luckily I kept my distance and remain intact today. She was certainly good at protecting Bush far from the madding crowd, a tactic that failed to win the hearts and minds of many New Hampshire voters as they mass exited for John McCain’s straight talk and open door Town Hall policy. As public diplomacy undersecretary post-Iraq war and post-Hurricane Katrina (a public diplomacy debacle), and not without irony, Hughes was tasked in 2005 with promoting a more open dialogue between the United States and global publics. Her past pedigree suggested that she would do everything to support Bush-Cheney administration objectives over any global public relations campaigns. Shortly after 9/11, Hughes earned her information warfare stripes while heading the White House day-to-day duties of the Coalition Information Centers (CIC) that coordinated the message of the day from London to Washington to Islamabad during the bombing raids over Afghanistan. She was identified then as one of the main players in what the New York Times called the largest communications war effort since the Second World War. Hughes was also credited with the public relations massaging of Bush’s moniker as a “compassionate conservative.” During the 2002 buildup to war in Iraq, Hughes was part of the White House Iraq Group, which coordinated strategy for selling the war to the American people. Previously, she coordinated government information from Kabul to London in the newly created war on terror.




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At the time of her appointment in September 2005, Hughes held a Town Hall meeting for State Department employees in which she described her plans to improve U.S. image abroad in militaristic phrases, outlining a “rapid-response unit” and “forward-deploy regional SWAT teams” to “formulate a more strategic and focused approach to all our public diplomacy assets.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported: “One of her underlings rose to ask how this effort squared with the administration’s famously tight control over its message. . . . Hughes replied that ambassadors are free to talk—if they use the talking points she sends them. ‘If they make statements based on something I sent them,’ she said, ‘they’re not going to be called on the carpet.’ ” Hughes later sent a memo in November 2006 to all consular and diplomatic posts who speak on the record. Among the rules was the following: Rule #5: Don’t Make Policy. This is a sensitive area about which you need to be careful. Do not get out in front of U.S. government policymakers on an issue, even if you are speaking to local press. When in doubt on a policy shift, seek urgent guidance from your regional hub, public affairs or your regional public diplomacy office. Use your judgment and err on the side of caution.5 So what would Hughes have the diplomats, much less the American people focus on as it relates to explaining and influencing global publics? If not policy, then what? In 2007 Hughes introduced the U.S. State Department and Bush administration’s new paradigm for public diplomacy, “Waging Peace.” Three priorities in this campaign included that America must continue to be the beacon of hope for the rest of the world. Second, the United States would seek to isolate and marginalize the violent extremists who continue to threaten the civilized world and confront their ideology of tyranny and hate with the U.S. message of respect for the contributions and cultures of others. Third, the United States would seek to nurture the common values and common interests that the United States has with the world. “What we are seeking to do with public diplomacy—nurture the sense that Americans and people of different countries, cultures, and faiths have much more in common than the issues that divide us.”6 After 9/11, the U.S. government realized that even without a USIA agency in place, the country needed a public diplomacy mission more than ever. In principle, the best public diplomacy emphasizes a two-track process of informing, educating, and understanding global publics in the interest of the nation state. U.S. public diplomacy promotes the national interest and national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics abroad and broadening the dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad.7 With the continuation of a Global War on Terror (GWOT), the U.S. government favors one-way asymmetrical approaches to communication



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over a second track that favors two-way symmetrical approaches that value equal partnership. More than 30 white papers and government reports have concluded that official U.S. approaches to gaining positive ground in global public opinion is at an all-time low. In a sense, Brand America has lost its gleam. The resurgence of public diplomacy has been too closely tied to the vagaries of globally unpopular policies such as the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Global publics are viewed more as malleable targets of influence than partners in a dialogue about foreign policies. U.S. public diplomacy emphasizes getting out a pro-US message (informing) and amplifying a pro-US point of view (influencing), while limiting or neglecting the most salient directive of public diplomacy—engaging and valuing the public voice. But any novice knows that any successful marketing campaign must engage the consumer and in a way that feels natural and not too manipulative. Who can forget the 1971 Coca-Cola TV commercial that featured young people on a mountaintop singing, “I’d like to teach the world to sing (in perfect harmony).” The reworked radio version of the song became so popular that Coca-Cola waived the royalties and donated the proceeds to UNICEF. More than 35 years later, Brand America’s song is less inclusive, especially since it is perceived as closely aligned with unpopular military and counterterror campaigns. From 1992 to 1994, I worked at USIA in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the “E” bureau. We were responsible for branding America through exchanges, notably Fulbright, arts and writers, international visitors, and youth. Today the “E” bureau is part of the U.S. State Department [http://www.exchanges.state.gov/]. It is now known as “ECA” (we love acronyms in the government) and its purpose is quite succinct: to foster mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries around the world. That concept of mutual understanding is one tailor made for debate. Are we fostering mutual understanding when we underwrite an advertising campaign like Shared Values that was the brainchild of Charlotte Beers? Are exchanges the mainstay of fostering mutual understanding? How do we protect the brand value of mutual understanding from the vagaries of foreign policy and national security concerns? These are broad questions that still are unanswered but in any Rebranding America campaign one should be mindful of defining and programming mutual understanding as a two-way exchange of ideas and dialogue. The USIA was officially abolished as an independent agency of the U.S. government in October 1999. Two years later, we experienced the events of 9/11. While many bemoan the loss of an independent agency that oversees official efforts to inform, influence, and engage global publics, in one large respect it has been a bonus for bringing more public attention to public diplomacy efforts. When I worked at USIA, none of




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my friends had ever heard about it and certainly would not have had a clue about public diplomacy. Everything we did at USIA was for an overseas audience. The Smith-Mundt legislation from 1946 precludes the U.S. government from propagandizing its own people and so everything we made for an overseas audience was not available for distribution in the United States. After 9/11, the American public developed a conscious awareness about U.S. public diplomacy and branding America efforts. The Bush administration appointed some high-profile women to engage the American people on public diplomacy efforts. Charlotte Beers sat down with Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America. Karen Hughes did interviews with Parade magazine, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Karen Hughes gave Greta Van Susteren of Fox News a personal tour of the State Department’s Rapid Response Unit that monitors foreign media coverage about the United States. To have our former USIA programs integrated with official diplomacy efforts of the U.S. government is a continual struggle. That struggle is to make sure that there is a firewall of protection between those who advocate and inform about America (culture, people, education, and ways of life) and those who conduct the day-to-day diplomatic negotiations of U.S. foreign policy objectives. Public diplomacy refers to outreach to unofficial communities with a strong primary emphasis on public over diplomacy. We have to be careful that our exchange programs and arts and culture exchanges are not too closely aligned with any particular foreign policy outcome; otherwise we risk propagandizing when we intend to engage. When I worked at USIA we felt at times like the poorer and less noticed stepchild to the State Department. But we would have never had the attention of the world as a Karen Hughes or Charlotte Beers did before her if they were not exalted to the titular status of under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. We had no such title at USIA other than director of the agency. Although there have been a number of memorable former directors of USIA, including Charlie Wick under Reagan and Edward R. Murrow under Kennedy, one could argue that several prominent women with close ties to the current White House have done a superb job of bringing a face to public diplomacy. That does not mean, however, that I have always agreed with their rhetorical approaches that tend to overplay our national interests over collective security interests. Whether it was Beers from 2001 to 2003 or Hughes from 2005 to 2008, the rhetorical emphasis of the ECA Bureau at State has been attached closely to war on terror outcomes and regional areas of strategic importance such as the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In emphasizing “critical and strategic” trees, we are overlooking our global forest.



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The special initiatives of the State Department in public diplomacy include a 2006 White House summit on international education with university presidents. The Edward R. Murrow Journalism Program brings 100 prominent foreign media journalists for engagement with their counterparts at approximately a dozen prominent university campuses, including Syracuse University and the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication where I am affiliated as a senior fellow in the Center on Public Diplomacy. Other programs include a global cultural initiative to engage organizations like the Kennedy Center, NEH, and NEA in American cultural diplomacy efforts. Ongoing programs include the prestigious Fulbright program of which I am a merry alumna, as well as the International Visitors Leadership Program that brings over high-profile young leaders to the United States for short-term visits of approximately three weeks. The IVLP program themes reflect U.S. foreign policy goals such as economic competitiveness, free press, and free elections. None of these programs is the subject of my critique in this chapter. My concern is that such efforts underplay our ability to actively listen to the world. While we can monitor foreign press coverage and what others are saying about the United States, what efforts are we making to truly understand and digest the full gamut of global public opinion? Are we quick to dismiss some of the most virulent criticism as just part of a global “hate America” campaign? We need to get over the naïve dream that somehow just talking more or turning up the volume will move the world from misunderstanding to understanding. I believe that the world hears quite a bit from the United States. It just may not like what it is hearing. And we need to do a better job of informing ourselves about that world we seek to influence. We Americans need to listen more and talk less. Remember, there is a two-to-one ratio between ears and mouth, something I need to keep reminding myself. We need to become more global, and not just in our material goods. Allen Goodman, President of the Institute for International Education, said this around the time of the 2007 Academy Awards: “For citizens of a global power, Americans are woefully uneducated about issues beyond our borders. The average adult American doesn’t have a passport and can’t locate France, let alone Iraq, on a map. Our TV networks devote less than five minutes a night to international news. Less than 1% of all Americans in college study abroad each year. Perhaps going to the movies can help. Movies today are a microcosm of our shrinking world, depicting global issues and taking viewers to far-flung locations.” Public Diplomacy as defined by the U.S. government emphasizes a twotrack process of informing, educating, and understanding: It promotes the national interest and national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics abroad and




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broadening the dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad. This second track of public diplomacy, sometimes called citizen diplomacy, is what J. William Fulbright emphasized in his vision for the Fulbright program: The Fulbright Hays Act of 1961 incorporated provisions of Senator Fulbright’s amendment in 1946 and the Smith-Mundt Act to establish a new educational and cultural exchange policy: to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange; to strengthen the ties that unite us with other nations by demonstrating the educational and cultural interests, developments, and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement; and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and the other countries of the world. American public diplomacy is not just about advocating our side to foreign publics or delivering the best spun message of the day to target markets overseas; it is about what the business of public institutions of higher learning is—to understand, to inform, to educate. In the classroom, students and teachers listen to learn as much as they talk. The dimensions of public diplomacy include (1) news management (Karen Hughes’ Rapid Response Unit in the State Department that monitors the foreign press); (2) strategic communications, including the international broadcasting efforts like Voice of America, Al Hurra, and Radio Sawa; and (3) relationship building. Relationship building is an old medium and a slow medium. If you look over the budget, the U.S. government favors the fast over the slow and the short-term measures over long-term gains. We need better measures in all three dimensions, but the third dimension of public diplomacy—relationship building is of particular note to me as a Fulbright alumna to Germany. What has been called the Fulbright “ideal” or the Fulbright “difference” needs further analysis. There is some evidence that participants in government-sponsored exchanges are more inclined to participate in multilateral efforts to build global civic society. More than 200 former or current heads of state are Fulbrighters. As former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, Charlotte Beers, observed about the program: “Coming from the private sector, it’s hard to find anything comparable to the sheer productivity of our Fulbright and International Visitor exchanges.” The $237 million spent in 2002 for approximately 25,000 exchanges, was magnified by the 80,000 volunteers in the United States and matching support from many countries such as Germany and Japan. Considering that some 50 percent



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of the leaders of the International Coalition were once exchange visitors, this has got to be the best buy in the government. Public diplomacy efforts that are clearly a national interest of any government will never go away, nor should they. I do not believe in either/or dichotomies. The U.S government’s efforts in public diplomacy will remain important for oversight, policy direction, and leadership, but nongovernmental organizations, the academic community, and certainly the business sector should step up to fill the gap and develop their own public diplomacy strategies that may at times complement U.S. government efforts and at other times compete. In the United States, there is a paucity of research on international education and educational and cultural exchanges effects, approaches, including what other countries are doing. The paradox is that every college campus from the smallest to largest, least to greatest—touts the global mission of its curriculum, the value of study abroad, and most recently the need for learning strategic languages such as Korean, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese. Unless we can honor our public diplomacy plural efforts, we will continue to have gaps in our self-understanding, much less the global misunderstandings that continue to plague us. Most recently, public diplomacy has taken on a landscaped model of communication in the form of full-spectrum or strategic communication. Heritage Foundation Senior Fellow in National Security Tony Blankley calls the new public diplomacy the information side of the war on terror. He and Oliver Horn write in a 2008 memo: “As the two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan continues, Congress is finally beginning to calibrate the nation’s instruments of foreign policy on a new front—the information battle in the war on terror. While scholars and policymakers may differ on what to call this new battlefield—the War of Ideas, Fourth Generation Warfare, or Soft Power—most would agree that the U.S. government has done a woeful job in wielding its most effective tool to engage foreign audiences: strategic communication.”8 Jeffrey Jones, former Director of Strategic Communication and Information on the National Security Council, defines strategic communication as the “synchronized coordination of statecraft, public affairs, public diplomacy, military information operations, and other activities, reinforced by political, economic, military, and other actions, to advance U.S. foreign policy interests.”9 Jones is quick to forewarn the reader in his article, “Strategic Communication: A Mandate for the United States,” about his prescription for change: This call for a national communications strategy is not an argument for a propaganda minister, but for better coordination of information efforts among agencies. The information war must be waged during peacetime, crisis, operations other than war, war itself, and in the post-conflict period.




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It should shape the informational and intellectual environment long before hostilities. The effort is not restricted to the White House Office of Global Communications or to interagency spokesmen, press officers, information warriors, or technological innovations that are shaping the digitized battlefield; it must include the public diplomacy activities of the Department of State as well as the full spectrum of global activities of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and other agencies.10

What Jeffrey Jones and I share is a commitment to the revitalization of public diplomacy. I differ from him in the strategies and tactics. Public diplomacy is too important to be left to state actors in Washington or decision makers and elites too tied to next year’s election or appropriations bill. Official Washington has its place, including the State Department and Pentagon, but it has also narrowcast the possibilities of building stronger global partnerships and actively engaging in listening and understanding the words and behaviors of our enemies and friends. We need the best hearts and minds of everyday American citizens to rebuild our credibility in the world, and not even an historic presidential election is going to overcome a damaged image and reputation whose message perpetuates as putting our interests before other nations. Notes 1. Alvin A. Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War (New York: Arcade, 1995), xiii–xiv. 2. Fitzhugh Green, American Propaganda Abroad: From Benjamin Franklin to Ronald Reagan (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1988), 53–54. 3. Richard Holbrooke, “Get the Message Out,” Washington Post, October 28, 2001, B7. 4. BBC World News, “Radio Warns Afghan over Food Parcels,” October 28, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1624787.stm. 5. Elizabeth Williamson, “Karen’s Rules on Diplomacy: Talk to the Media—if You Dare: Hughes Sends Memo on Getting the Word to the World,” Washington Post, November 8, 2006. 6. Karen Hughes, “Waging Peace: A New Paradigm for Public Diplomacy.” Mediterranean Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 18–36. 7. See www.publicdiplomacy.org for this definition. 8. Tony Blankley and Oliver Horn, “Strategizing Strategic Communication,” Web Memo No. 1939, The Heritage Foundation, May 29, 2008, www.heritage. org/research/nationalsecurity/wm1939.cfm. 9. Jeffrey B. Jones, “Strategic Communication: A Mandate for the United States,” Joint Forces Quarterly 39 (Autumn 2005), 108–114. 10. Ibid.



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Leaving the Cave: Government, Culture, and the Information Age Simon Moore and Donald Bobiash*

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ccording to the Jerusalem Post, “If the U.S. wants to deal effectively with anti-American sentiments in the Muslim world . . . the question of political boundaries is less significant than that of regional and cultural ones.”1 Communicating with regions and cultures has indeed become a preoccupation since 9/11. Diplomats, politicians, scholars, nonprofits, Web sites, grant foundations, and media attack the problem with urgent curiosity. To cross regional and cultural boundaries, cultural bridges must be built alongside their overburdened political counterparts. The arts and entertainment play an obvious part in this process. To understand culture’s new role since 2001 for America and other governments; to see how it has changed from the great cold war cultural moments—Porgy in Leningrad, Brubeck in Poland, Dizzy Gillespie in Iran—and how it has not changed, we must first ask what governments learned about global communication when the twin towers fell, and what has yet to be learned. Much analysis naturally concentrates on America. America’s “image problem” (to use a trite but truthful phrase) is often related to soft power and public diplomacy; but it is clear that communication wields independent authority. The ceaseless dump of data, events, and viewpoints melts distinctions between official and unofficial pronunciations, between * Simon Moore is Associate Professor at Bentley University. His books include Effective Crisis Management and Global Technology and Corporate Crisis. Donald Bobiash is Deputy Head of Mission of the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo and author of South South Aid.



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hard realities of politics and softer diversions of culture. In this turbulence, and in the aftermath of tragedy, official attitudes to communication have changed. Like Plato’s captive freed from the cave, governments everywhere are emerging from their prison of primitively projected messages. Outside they find not reality, but the chaotic, uncontrollable, and uncomfortable ephemera of tech-sculpted images, sounds, and words. Oddly appropriate then is U.S. envoy Richard Holbrook’s question about Osama bin Laden. “How can a man in a cave out-communicate the world’s leading communications society?”2 It might be answered that this is not only possible, but probable. Isolated individuals use communication as a breaker to interrupt old circuits of emotion and perception, and divert them onto more volatile routes. Many official and unofficial reports, books, and articles written with 9/11’s grim hindsight agree that successive U.S. governments ignored the advancing tide and downgraded, misunderstood, and marginalized its communication assets. More people and money, better structures and strategies were needed to fix the breaks and regain control of the current. Analyses of America’s soft power and public diplomacy requirements after 9/11 usually say three things about communication. One is that America must change how it talks. Key policy messages must be rebundled into more modern, more accessible channels, with more help from culture. This approach has produced Al hurrah TV, and Radio Sawah, blending news and popular music with mixed results among Arab audiences. The second proposition says America talks too much and too loud. It must listen more, learn what other communities really want and adjust, or at least wrap what America wants in a more sensitive vocabulary. Together the talking and listening produce a third proposition: better dialogue, taking “more care to show what the founders called a ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind.’ ”3 The desire of America’s founders to talk to the world reminds us today’s problem is a new version of a very old story. We have reached the latest phase in the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” noted of industrial society by, among others, Marx and Engels, who used it as a dialectical plank in the Communist Manifesto (1848).4 Governments everywhere must also overcome a clamor Jonathan Swift registered in 1704: “Whoever hath an ambition to be heard in a crowd, must press, and squeeze, and thrust, and climb with indefatigable pains, till he has exalted himself to a certain degree of altitude above them.”5 If a confused communication environment is nothing new, nor is the remedy. E. M. Forster famously prescribed it in Howard’s End. “Only connect”; “Live in fragments no longer.”6 But in the public arena, the personal connection he desired has generated fragmentation. New technology has certainly



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made many connections: personal, vivid, and emotive. It is also rupturing existing loyalties, brushing aside traditional filters such as old media impartiality, careful scholarship, or its corporate and political adjudicators. The Internet and especially tools such as Facebook nurture clusters of like-minded people reinforcing each other’s opinions. This makes government communication demanding and difficult. The U.S. Council of Public Relations Firms had warned members a year before 9/11 that “centralized information control will continue to decrease.”7 After 9/11 the global communication activities of all governments were exposed, miring pressing needs in risk-averse management chains. Individuals on the other hand are highly maneuverable, and effective at shaping perceptions from their rooms—or caves. Rumors, speculation, smears, cogent argument, and allegations, all convincingly spontaneous, wash back and forth for others to relay and interpret to the nonconnected global majority. These activists see inviting opportunities as global literacy rises and more communities populate the Web. There is a bigger audience to reach and a bigger space to fill, and the Information Revolution has hardly started. Governments must answer this by communicating more and faster, but there are obstacles. It is hard to go fast when tiptoeing over policy eggshells and the administrative instinct to wait rather than act is exploited by opponents. Pioneers arriving in new communication spaces often find no other occupants, and promptly entrench their own views as a spatial “truth” to be reinforced or dislodged. A second obstacle governments face is seeing communication as a support function. Wittgenstein declared we cannot advance our understanding beyond what we can speak of, and governments have only spoken of global communication as a servant of soft power and public diplomacy. However these two terms are viewed—broadly or narrowly, pejoratively or constructively—their fate hinges on communication: talking, listening, and dialogue. The prerequisite for effective communication is a plan. The prerequisite for a plan is to learn the communication revolution’s lessons. This is being attempted in several places. Russia hired a large U.S. PR agency and launched Russia Today, offering Internet and television news in English, Arabic, and Spanish. Nigeria embarked on a “Heart of Africa” image project that promoted “cultural brands” as well as tackling notorious “brand negatives.” The EU unveiled Europa, an official Web site for EU citizens in general, rather than the lobbyists, lawyers, and other special interests targeted by its jargon-infected near-impenetrable predecessor. China fluctuates between totalitarian reflexes, the legacy of pingpong diplomacy and pressure from business and society to be transparent and personable beyond the Great Firewall. The Premier of China has a page on Facebook building on his rising popularity



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as “Grandpa Wen” in the aftermath of several disasters, including China’s severe earthquakes, and which swiftly registered more supporters than the then U.S. President George W Bush. It is not clear who set the page up but like nature, communication abhors a vacuum. When the Moroccan government imprisoned a man for profiling the King’s brother on Facebook, seven more Facebook profiles promptly appeared and a protest of almost 9,000 online signatures arose until a Royal Pardon was granted. Crises like 9/11 usually reveal the condition of a government’s communication. They are also—in the case of the Chinese earthquakes in 2008—an opportunity. A sudden event might change the communications environment for a national government, going overnight from being perceived as an oppressor (of Tibet) to a victim (of natural disaster). The international media can instantly switch its coverage and focus. Volatility creates a positive or negative swirl that is larger and faster because of the Web. To survive governments cannot depend on press releases—the vast majority of which are never picked up. Instead, they must craft events with subliminal messages that are difficult to resist: President Bush’s 2003 “Mission Accomplished” landing and speech on an aircraft carrier announcing the end of major Gulf War combat operations; Australian Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 apology to indigenous peoples on “National Sorry Day,” renamed “National Day of Healing.” One strength of cultural diplomacy is that it can transcend the swirl, and counter perceptions of government as a lumbering, uncaring dinosaur when facing media driven by an angry nonprofit, or by friends of a citizen imprisoned or kidnapped in another country. Entertainment and the arts are more durable and apolitical assets. A team backed by the British Council, which promotes British culture and education overseas, recommended strategic communication should exert more influence on UK foreign policy. The French government negotiated a billion dollar deal for a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, and made plans to open an offshoot of the Pompidou Center in Shanghai. Cultural initiatives can learn from other new initiatives. Global companies and nonprofits from Microsoft and big oil to Greenpeace regularly experiment with ways to get beyond policy detail knowing that tone and form matters as much as content. The most effective approach seems to be a kind of “anti-PR” that to a degree mimics the personal, even amateurish efforts and feelings of online participants. Microsoft did this in part by encouraging a group of employees to launch their own “Channel 9,” aimed at engaging software developers. Shell has experimented with “Tell Shell,” a totally uncensored discussion forum. Corporate blogs abound; some excellent, others (the most controlled) not worth the virtual paper they are written on. The U.S. State Department also hosts blogs written by



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its own personnel and with links to affiliated organizations. State’s blogs are highly professional: they record meetings, analyses, or facts about serious issues such as aid, human trafficking, and promoting democracy. The blog of Syria’s Envoy to the U.S.A, on the other hand, is rather more subtle. It discusses art, books, music, opera, and family, using culture to create a personal relationship with a man who is apparently well-rounded, cultivated, urbane, natural, humane, open minded, and likeable. Political analysis is lightly braided into his personal interests, including this short paragraph in a longer account of a trip home interspersed with family photos: “Despite the fact that I was not planning to do any media activities, I couldn’t resist the invitation from [Hezbollah subsidized] al-Manar TV to give the Bush administration a piece of my mind. I actually enjoyed the interview tremendously. It was fun.”8 As Britain’s Guardian newspaper put it, paraphrasing a UK beer advert: “cultural contacts can refresh the parts the diplomats cannot reach.”9 It is a glimpse of a people at home. It is hard to pin down, everything that is not formal politics. It might be dance, or sport, music, a TV show, theater, film, artifacts, and art. It is a touring orchestra supported and named for a continent, country, or city; it is a national soccer team; or a poetry reading sponsored by a consulate. It is an attempt to be liked. Sensible governments, nonprofits, and corporations hitch themselves to assets with such positive emotional capital. Practitioners include semiofficial bodies of long standing like the British Council mentioned earlier, whose declared task is to “connect people with learning opportunities and creative ideas from the UK to build lasting relationships around the world”;10 or the Canada Council promoting Canadian culture at home and abroad, and working with other governments on artistic exchanges, translations, and other projects.11 The least obviously political, and therefore most politically useful, are private activities from a touring musician to a student exchange agreement between universities. 9/11 galvanized changes between governments and culture that would have emerged in any case, only more gradually. The changes amount to a new understanding—not just of communication technology, but of the communities created by that technology; more collaboration with nonprofits and companies; and—the final leg of the state’s global communication effort—attractive content. The resulting hybrid continues to be called cultural diplomacy by some, and by others propaganda. “Whatever happened to cultural diplomacy” wondered an American Jazz Web site in 2008, remembering Brubeck’s tours.12 A lot, it might be replied. American officials have learned the hard way and long overdue steps are being taken. Cultural diplomacy is “The Linchpin of Public



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Diplomacy” in the title of a 2005 State Department Report.13 In 2006, the U.S. State Department, through First Lady Mrs. Laura Bush, launched its “Global Cultural Initiative,” which showed how it had absorbed some at least of 9/11’s communication lessons: more money, more public-private partnerships, a restated recognition of engagement, and cross border dialogue. After false starts by her predecessors, Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and close advisor to the second President Bush, developed a plan embracing technology, private sector expertise, political objectives, and “apolitical” communication such as sport, the arts, and low-level personal contact. She has pointed out that with one exception her strategic objectives “have nothing to do with the war on terror”: aiming to foster a positive vision of America, isolate extremists, demonstrate respect for other cultures, and nurture common values.14 If state-backed cultural activity has been reinvigorated since 9/11, so has opposition to it. One reason for that is a typical problem of growth: the bigger and more important something becomes, the more scrutiny it attracts. Another is that target communities—or those trying to influence them— are alert to new technology’s techniques and deep-read it to extract or imagine a sneaky underlying motive. New media is not even new for many online activists: they know it well because they know nothing else. They grew up with it. Their familiarity affects the impact of cultural activity, as once-passive target audiences hunt en masse for “hidden agendas.” Some governments respond by using more social media—the technological platforms managed by the target audiences themselves. On YouTube somebody or some Body placed b-roll (unedited film footage) of Secretary of State Rice visiting Iraq—unpolished editing and poor quality sound gives the film an amateurish quality. There is no overt message. It is an attempt to be natural, non-institutional, but underneath an anonymous visitor has crisply commented “propaganda has b-rolls . . . classic.”15 The value of a cultural moment depends on its power to ease doubts in uncertain times, but modern technology means this is not always possible. Ambiguous images pass before our eyes, instantaneous testaments to an age of flux. The Olympic torch glimpsed behind a wall of French police and track-suited Chinese security guards; the New York Philharmonic playing An American in Paris, in Pyongyang; Madeleine Albright presenting Kim Jong Il with a basketball signed by Michael Jordan; Belarus children folk-dancing at a school in the Netherlands, outriders for their country’s iron-willed president. Outside Plato’s cave, away from the cool dissection of diplomatic conundrums, reasoned explanations must give precedence to managing feeling and sentiment, the unstable offspring of information overload and time pressure. Certainly, audiences able to tell each other about public relations sleights of hand, even simulated clunkiness like b-roll, make



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a positive, authentic, connection with other global audiences a daunting task; and yet the same audiences are seeking a personal connection beyond realms of well-meant data and interpretation such as those on government blogs, or cultural camouflage like Alhurrah TV. An associated problem is escalating personal fear of being “got at” overtly or covertly, by infiltration as much as assault, by love as much as control, by fear that propaganda is everywhere and hard to escape, as it was for Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, or Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “ ‘They can’t get inside you,’ she had said. But they could get inside you.”16 In this atmosphere “propaganda” is pejorative, a term used to stifle debate about content or bigger underlying issues. It hardly matters now that the word itself had respectable origins, with the seventeenthcentury Catholic mission movement “Propaganda Fides,” or propagation of the faith. Its members were instructed to respect not interfere with indigenous cultures, in a document many present day public relations practitioners and their critics might find reasonable and prescient. These reservations harm culture’s biggest communication advantage: creating “likability” by making very personal connections. It may be asked whether it makes any difference, say, that 57 percent of Brazilians hold a “mainly negative” view of Israel and 78 percent of Egyptians feel positive about Russia.17 Or that the number of Germans with “favorable” views of the United States fell from 42 percent in 2005 to 30 percent in 2007, or that 75 percent of French respondents dislike United States ways of doing business.18 It may be answered that likability is no trivial word or measure, locally or globally. If the advantages of being liked were locally insignificant, the German-American Institute for example would not have piloted its “Rent an American” program with local authorities, where U.S. exchange students at Tubingen University visit area schools to counter hostility. Globally, “dislikability” impedes America’s political reception abroad and American business. As America’s global popularity declined between 1995 and 2005, its popular corporate symbols also declined in popularity in important markets—brands such as McDonalds or Coca Cola, are globally recognizable but less liked by teens worldwide.19 Findings like that beg awkward questions: Is the post 9/11 approach to communication, or propaganda if you prefer, really making any difference by paying more attention to big picture communication, avoiding politics, making more use of the arts and entertainment, emerging technology and working with the private sector? Can states make big, invasive, international decisions and expect a student exchange or symphony orchestra to deal with the fall out? Nations like Canada and blocs like the EU who have given less offence of late may find culture more useful. Nations under intense global scrutiny such as the United States or China



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may indeed find the task harder, but that is no reason to stop. The arts and entertainment have massive communication potential, and no government can possibly ignore their power. “How strange” the American public relations pioneer Ivy Lee observed in 1934, “that nations should be so prodigal in spending money to prepare for war, and so miserly in their payments for effective measures toward international understanding.”20 We can expect then, that governments will continue to take a close interest in using culture as a communication tool. It has taken half a decade for officials to settle on a useful post-9/11 course, and new needs constantly emerge: to harness social media such as Youtube or Facebook, to work and learn from private organizations, to step back from policy explication and instead tap the deep-lying values of target audiences, to foster personal connections. At the time of writing, a BBC survey suggests global attitudes toward the United States are slightly improving.21 But the long journey has hardly started. In the coming years, all governments will refine their approach to culture to deal with the challenges mentioned here: the increased ability of international audiences to deep-read a communication event and not take it at face value; the taint of propaganda; the speed and flexibility of opposing viewpoints, and the hardest job of all: to make any communication feel honest, open, and natural. Rapid technological changes also mean that bureaucracies will become more comfortable about leading with the media rather than the message. They will learn to identify and assess each new tool for its communication value, and seek creative ways to seize a pioneering advantage. Governments will ensure that, as was recommended for the State Department shortly after 9/11, anyone seeking high-level administrative positions must be good at personal and strategic communication. Other changes will also affect arts and entertainment. Officials at all levels will learn to be less official with global communities. Their public statements will become less formal even as initiatives involving the arts and entertainment become more political. Cultural events and participants will be linked to their ultimate source and readier to risk engagement on substantial issues. For Ivy Lee, propaganda’s essential evil was “not the effort itself to disseminate ideas. The evil is the failure to disclose the source of the information.”22 Propagation can only increase, as technology erects more platforms in more places, with more access, and more participants. It will be pointless to conceal the source—and this will lead to more equal and open exchanges, clearly referenced with links to alternate viewpoints as a mark of credibility. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s international reputation is a potent precedent for this approach. What does this mean for cultural diplomacy? It seems likely that the arts and entertainment will be marbled more intimately with policy and



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new media. It will continue as a separate activity; concerts, exhibits, and exchanges will continue, but transparency and the nature of online relationships will provide culture with a new task: to bleed into and around official positions, as with the Syrian Envoy’s Web site. The arts and entertainment will be used publicly and personally by once anonymous officials, to engage with the communities who seek them out. The arts will give these communities the idea of an official: the content of a character as well as the content of a policy. The arts will also share in the risk of diluting the U.S. government’s global presence. The change to new media heralded by the State Department blogs may evolve into a wider ranging communication asset controlled and managed by lower- and middle-ranking public servants producing their own reports, their own videos, their own blogs and discussion forum, mixing the arts with these media to paint a picture of themselves, blending personality with policy, taking initiatives like Microsoft’s Channel 9 a stage further. This approach may be adopted first by governments with urgent communication needs. Government supported artists and performers will expand their own use of the Web to reach global audiences, and given space to express their views on national policy to overseas audiences. They will make mistakes and draw criticism: the by-products of natural, spontaneous, and convincing encounters; a real, untidy, and genuine rather than tightly managed relationship. The dilution and diffusion of cultural activities, the proliferation of technology, and the new latitude given to artists, will also usher in yet more ethnic and regional diversity, to produce a less monochromatic, monolithic impression of the world’s powers and superpowers. This discussion of state global communication and its evolving use of arts and entertainment after 9/11 may sound rather cold-blooded. But how else can we imagine communication in these times? Communication is a weapon in the war on terror, but it is also the conduit for exchanging ideas and creating understanding. To know this as an asset, and how best to use it, is surely a duty governments owe to their threatened citizens and other threatened communities. It would be naive to imagine that cultural activities are immune from this process. This cannot be so, in our age of 24 hour, wall to wall entertainment. At least governments are learning to be more creative about it. The twenty-first century leaves them no other choice. Notes 1. “Showdown at the State Department,” The Jerusalem Post, February 24, 2006, 15. 2. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), 377.



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3. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power (New York: Vintage, 2003), 102–103. 4. Karl Marx, and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London, Verso, 1998 edn., first published 1848), 38. 5. Jonathan Swift, “Tale of a Tub.” From Gulliver’s travels and other writings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960, first published 1704), 271. 6. E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York: Knopf, 1991, first published 1910), 195. 7. IMT Strategies, “The Impact of the Internet on Public Relations and Business Communication,” Tactical Insights. (2000): 3. 8. Weblog of a Syrian diplomat in America. (April 17, 2008). 9. “In praise of . . . cultural diplomacy,” The Guardian, London, February 28, 2007, 34. 10. British Council Corporate Web site. About Us. (April 20, 2008). 11. Canada Council for the Arts. Japan—Canada Fund. (March 20, 2008). 12. Whatever Happened to Cultural Diplomacy? All about Jazz, April 19, 2008. (April 23, 2008). 13. US State Department. “Report of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Diplomacy.” September 2005. (April 20, 2008). 14. “Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public affairs Karen P. Hughes and Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs Dina H. Powell Deliver Remarks at the Private Sector Summit on Public Diplomacy,” CQ Transcriptions, January 10, 2007. 15. “B-Roll: Secretary of State Rice Visits Iraq.” December 18, 2007. (April 15, 2008). 16. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Everyman, 1948), 303. 17. “Global Views of US Improve,” BBC World Service Poll. April 2, 2008. (April 12, 2008), 8, 12. 18. “The Pew Global Attitudes Project,” Washington, Pew Research, June 27, 2007. (May 22, 2008), 7, 9. 19. “Status of U.S. Brands Slips Globally among Teens,” The Christian Science Monitor, February 16, 2006. (May 22, 2008). 20. Ivy Lee, The Problem of International Propaganda. A New Technique Necessary in Developing Understanding between Nations. An address by Ivy Lee. London, July 3 1934. Occasional Papers, No 3. USA: Privately printed, 1934: 26. 21. “Global views of US improve,” BBC World Service Poll. 22. Lee, The Problem of International Propaganda, 10.



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A Distracted Media: Sidetracked and Hoodwinked Lisa Finnegan*

The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. —Milan Kundera

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n today’s world, with tremendous competition among networks, online magazines, and newspapers, sensationalism has become a large part of the news business. While embedded reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan could be forgiven for running from one story to another in the midst of chaotic wars, editors and producers in the United States failed to do their jobs, which is, in part, to help keep reporters on track by asking for follow-up stories and providing balanced coverage on the home front. These failures continue today and leave the public misinformed and distrustful of any information from the news media. This chapter will look at how the media confused the public after 9/11 by presenting rumor as fact. It will examine how journalists allowed themselves to be spun by government officials, how major stories got lost in the shuffle, and how this impacted public knowledge. Americans who remember Private Jessica Lynch believe she is a hero. Media coverage certainly made her out to be a shining example of America at its best. Lynch and her battalion were on patrol in Iraq when their convoy made a wrong turn near Nasiriyah. They were ambushed * Lisa Finnegan is a journalist and the author of No Questions Asked: News Coverage since 9/11.



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and 11 soldiers were killed and 5 injured. Lynch and the injured soldiers were captured and taken to an Iraqi hospital. Before the ambush, there was very negative coverage making its way into the news for the first time since the United States had entered Iraq. All the chaos and trouble was forgotten when Lynch was “rescued” from the hospital and reporters were roused in the midnight to receive the news. The Washington Post’s “exclusive” story about Lynch was a breathless tale full of hyperbole. Officials said she had amnesia and would be unable to verify the account, but that she had valiantly fought her attackers, had been stabbed and tortured at the hospital. The story was too good to pass up and The Post ran it on the front page, jumping it twice to inside pages. It was picked up by publications across the country, and stories about American heroics replaced those about American blunders in Iraq. Lynch later disputed the account, but her purported heroics gave the administration a boost when it needed it and dominated coverage for weeks. Before the breaking news of her “heroic rescue behind enemy lines” on April 2, 2003, journalists were focused on the difficulties soldiers faced in Iraq and the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein. Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, had eluded capture, and Americans were beginning to wonder where he was. Some headlines in the days before the rescue depicted the chaos of the time and the problems faced by American soldiers in Iraq: A vehicle carrying a family of 15, with 10 children under the age of 5, was fired upon by U.S. troops because of a careless error by soldiers. A reporter embedded with the battalion chronicled the brutal details in a Washington Post story. The follow-up stories told of a despondent man who lost his family and his faith in U.S. troops. The AP wrote: “Iraqi Family Had Seen U.S. Troops at Checkpoint as Protectors.” A Los Angeles Times story said American soldiers were struggling: “The war in Iraq has entered a difficult phase in which protecting coalition forces without killing or wounding large numbers of civilians is growing more difficult by the day.”1 The paper also reported that day: “Administration Is Divided over Postwar Iraq.” The New York Times ran a story saying, “A Top U.S. Intelligence Officer Admits Army Miscalculations,” and that the war would be longer and more brutal than anticipated.2 After Lynch’s rescue was announced, Hussein’s whereabouts were no longer a concern. Missing weapons of mass destruction were forgotten and Lynch dominated the news for weeks. The American Journalism Review found that, “in the fourteen days after her rescue, Lynch drew 919 references in major papers . . . . In that same period, General Tommy Franks, who ran the war, got 639 references, Vice President Dick Cheney 549, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz 389. She stood with the giants.”3



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But while the Lynch rescue slowed the flow of negative stories about Iraq in the United States, the international media continued to chronicle problems. The United States was blamed for an arms dump explosion in a residential neighborhood outside Baghdad that killed 45 people.4 A Belgian lawyer filed a lawsuit against General Franks on behalf of Iraqi citizens claiming the U.S. military committed war crimes when it used cluster bombs and fired on ambulances.5 The U.S. soldiers in Fallujah fired into a crowd of protestors, killing at least 13 and wounding 75. The British paper the Guardian wrote: “Preventing already widespread popular opposition to the American military presence turning into concerted armed resistance will also be increasingly problematic unless the U.S. Army can explain why it was justified in opening fire on a crowd comprising a large number of children and teenagers.”6 Seventy-six American soldiers died in Iraq in April 2003, one of the highest tolls in a single month since the war had begun, but even those deaths were not enough to knock the spotlight from Lynch. Then the administration began to face criticism at home. The 9/11 commission complained that it was not receiving information it had requested from the White House and was having trouble completing its investigation. Speculation about what officials knew before the 9/11 attacks began to mount. Newsweek ran a story on its Web site on April 30, 2003: “The Secrets of September 11; The White House is battling to keep a report on the terror attacks secret. Does the 2004 election have anything to do with it?”7 It was time for another “good news” story for the press. On May 1, 2003, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln dressed in full military pilot gear. He walked up to a microphone in front of a banner that said “mission accomplished,” and declared an end to “major combat operations” in Iraq. The media fawned. Bush timed his landing and his speech so it would be broadcast on prime time television, ensuring that millions of Americans would tune in. All the horror of the previous days’ news was again forgotten. “By declaring that major combat operations in Iraq have ended, President Bush has put an exclamation point on what is seen by the public as a successful war,” began the page A-1 Christian Science Monitor story.8 CBS News said, “Amid cheers from the 5,000-member crew of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush declared the battle of Iraq had ended in victory. ‘Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free,’ he told members of the military.”9 Fox News heralded the president’s courage saying that “Bush also made history as the first president to land on a ship with the help of cables that stretch across the deck. The cables catch the plane and pull it to a stop in less than 300 feet.”10



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What the media missed is obvious: Hussein was still at large, U.S. soldiers were so battle-weary they were shooting civilians, and the president may have mishandled intelligence information before the 9/11 attacks. Some journalists did note that the landing had all the markings of a campaign stunt, but that did not stop the barrage of images of the commanderin-chief on the USS Lincoln from dominating news coverage. “The president’s political advisers are building a re-election campaign plan capitalizing on his role as a wartime leader, planning to use images like these today in future campaign commercials,” Tom Brokaw said during his broadcast. “One adviser said of the president in his flight suit, quote, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’ Today, some Democrats charged politics was the real reason for his trip.”11 The next week, the debate focused on just that—whether the president was grandstanding or whether he was justified in spending the money it took to fly that plane to greet the sailors who were returning to San Diego. As debate took its twists and turns, fighting continued in Afghanistan and Iraq. That month, 37 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq, but the USS Lincoln overshadowed this news. Similarly, in the aftermath of a particularly bloody month in Iraq, Bush secretly and dramatically dropped in for a photo-op with troops eating Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad. Reporters in the United States told the public that Bush was spending a quiet Thanksgiving on his ranch. Journalists who accompanied the president were “sworn to secrecy.” They later described in detail his clandestine departure from his Texas ranch in a car with tinted windows. Bush had hidden the truth even from his wife, reporters said. According to an AP story, Bush told reporters, “ ‘I was fully prepared to turn this baby around, come home,’ . . . To everyone’s amazement, the secrecy held.”12 The president spent 27 hours in a plane and 90 minutes on the ground for images of cheering troops and proclamations that all was going well. When pictures of him ran in newspapers and broadcasts the next day, none mentioned that he was actually holding a plastic turkey and the troops were eating military rations. “You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq so we don’t have to face them in our own country,” he told the soldiers. Two days after Bush returned, his adventure remained in the news. The AP’s Siobhan Mcdonough wrote an article about presidential intrigue. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a body double to sneak away for a meeting with his British counterpart during World War II. President Johnson on the hush paid a visit to U.S. troops at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.



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President Bush’s covert trip to Iraq on Thanksgiving, when Americans were told he was at his ranch eating turkey and watching football, caught many off guard—that prime mission, accomplished. Historically, the White House often has kept details close to the vest on risky travel by presidents and sprung surprise last-minute trips on presidential entourages. Not so often has the White House openly deceived Americans as it did in saying Bush was in one place when he was someplace else.13

Before the Thanksgiving Day trip, things were not going well for Bush. Surveys showed his public support at an all-time low.14 What had occurred in the weeks before Bush’s Baghdad trip? The Pentagon had called up 10,000 National Guard members for active combat duty in Iraq. Stars and Strips printed a controversial story in which members of the military claimed morale was extraordinarily low. Troops questioned why they were in Iraq. An Italian base in Nasiriya was hit with a truck bomb, killing 10; 4 helicopter were shot down in November, leaving 39 Americans dead. A total of 82 members of the American military were killed in November, the highest number since the conflict began (topped in April 2004 when 137 were killed). The Washington Post reported that, “the surge [in military deaths] has reflected an increase in the effectiveness and the frequency of guerrilla attacks,” which averaged about 40 a day.15 Bush’s surprise visit made the public forget all that. According to a National Annenberg Election Survey, Bush’s job approval rating jumped from 56 percent before the trip, to 61 percent afterward. “Bush’s job disapproval rating dropped from 41 percent to 36 percent. His personal popularity increased from 65 percent to 72 percent.”16 These few examples show willingness of the media to allow itself to be distracted from reporting stories. There are also less obvious examples, such as the numerous leaks that bin Laden was a few days from capture. He was reported cornered half a dozen times, and his imminent capture dominated news coverage for days before he mysteriously escaped—despite reports that he was surrounded on all sides and being bombed from above. Two years after the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post noted that from July to September 2003, “President Bush has invoked 9/11 not just to defend Iraq policy and argue for oil drilling in the Arctic but in response to questions about tax cuts, unemployment, budget deficits, and even campaign finance.”17 The media was so preoccupied with the references to the terrorist attacks that it missed major news stories both in the United States and in the war zones abroad. On Saturday, December 13, 2003, the Pentagon announced Saddam Hussein’s capture. The media dropped everything and provided a myriad




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of stories about the dictator and his capture. Unreported that day was the fact that Bush had signed the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, an unusual thing for the president to do on a Saturday. Tucked inside the massive funding bill were a few sentences that dramatically expanded the powers of the FBI and reduced congressional oversight. In essence, the much debated and vehemently opposed Patriot Act II had slipped passed the press. The Intelligence Authorization Act expanded the definition of a “financial institution” to allow the FBI to inspect individuals’ records obtained everywhere from banks to the post office, real estate agents, insurance companies, libraries, car dealerships, casinos, jewelry stores, and pawn shops. There was no longer any oversight of the agency when it came to accessing personal information from places where “cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters.”18 In August 2004, the Washington Post began to look at some of the major regulatory changes implemented by the Bush administration while journalists were preoccupied with other things. “Allies and critics of the Bush administration agree,” the Post said, “that the September 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq have preoccupied the public, overshadowing an important element of the president’s agenda: new regulatory initiatives. Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards, and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly, and many others.”19 What the Post did not say was that the terrorist attack preoccupied the public for so long because the administration, through the media, continued to highlight it. Members of the press did not focus on the events that were being obscured by the alerts, such as the implementation of new pro-industry rules or the expansion of the FBI’s powers. Citizens cannot actively participate in discussions about issues when they do not know what the issues are.

Low Poll Numbers, High Terror Alerts An analysis of government terror alerts found at least 15 incidents in which the terror alert level was elevated or the capture of a terrorist in the United States was announced in the wake of bad news for officials or declining poll numbers for the president.20 Similarly, a study conducted by a Cornell sociologist found that terrorist warnings boosted the president’s approval ratings, including for things irrelevant to terrorism, such as his handling of the economy.21 While it could be coincidental that the



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terror timings came during times when the administration needed a boost, even then Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge expressed concern over the validity of some of the alerts. He said he often strongly disagreed with decisions to elevate the alert level because he felt there was “flimsy evidence.” Ridge said, “There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?’ ” In the end, Homeland Security’s objections were usually overruled and the alert level elevated. The terror alert level is raised if the majority of the president’s Homeland Security Advisory Council considers it appropriate and President Bush concurs. Among those on the council with Ridge were former Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.22 It is obviously not a bipartisan council. Occasionally, Ridge clashed publicly with other officials, which should have tipped off reporters that something was not right. Here are a few examples of suspiciously timed terrorist alerts: ●

On June 9, 2002, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley testified before Congress that she had tried to warn her superiors about the suspicious flight students before the terrorist attacks. She compared the agency’s bureaucracy to the “Little Shop of Horrors,” and told Congress the FBI could have done more to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Time magazine ran an edited version of a letter she had sent to Mueller: “I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.”23

The day after Rowley’s testimony, as questions were being raised on television and radio news talk shows, Ashcroft called a press conference from Russia in which he announced that “dirty bomb” suspect Jose Padilla had been captured and was in the hands of the Department of Defense. Ashcroft told reporters that Padilla had been captured on May 8. He did not explain why the information was being suddenly released after being kept secret for more than a month or why the press conference could not have waited until he returned from his trip. Rowley disappeared from the news, and the strange story of Padilla dominated coverage. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was labeled an enemy combatant and imprisoned. He remains in detention although he has not been charged with a crime. ●

On July 25, 2003, Congress released its assessment of the 9/11 attacks. CNN reported: “Congressional Report Cites ‘Missed Opportunities’




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Prior to 9/11. Four of the 14 people who had associated with the hijackers while in the United States were under active FBI investigation.” Twenty-eight pages of Congress’s report was deleted by the administration, and news stories said they contained information about how Saudi Arabian officials funded al Qaeda members while they were in the United States. The same day, it was reported that U.S. forces faced an average of 12 guerrilla attacks a day in Iraq, and that 8 U.S. soldiers had died in the previous 2 weeks. On July 27, 2003, American soldiers were officially charged with beating prisoners in Iraq. On July 29, the Justice Department announced it had uncovered information revealing that al Qaeda was planning another devastating attack in the United States. The threat level was elevated because “at least one of these attacks could be executed by the end of the summer 2003.” Statisticians know that correlation does not imply causation—you cannot assume two things are related just because they appear to be. But the frequency and severity of the terror alerts as the 2004 presidential election drew near was disturbing. In addition, some evidence shows that elevating public fear was in Bush’s interest. The Fearful Favor Bush Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a social psychology theory based on the idea that people adopt a certain set of cultural beliefs to shield themselves from intolerable facts. For instance, all of us know we face an unavoidable death and live in a dangerous world, but few of us wake up thinking about death or dwell on it during the day.24 Through religion, work, marriage, and family, or even patriotism, individuals suppress anxiety and are able to live productive lives. People believe they transcend death through their children, work, or charitable contributions. They associate with people who hold similar beliefs, and their self-esteem largely depends on these people. Most individuals believe they are good people, surrounded by other good people, making lasting contributions to the world.25 Individuals and societies come to believe that their way of life—the morals and values they have adopted and the gods they worship—are the right ones. In addition, most believe their way of life is better than that of people holding other world-views.26 Problems arise when something makes death salient. When this occurs, not only do people cling to their beliefs more, they also become



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hostile and violent toward those with different viewpoints.27 This applies to the media as well as the general public. War correspondent Peter Arnett described the American media’s timidity after the 9/11 attacks as a sort of psychological breakdown: “Don’t forget the American media is based in NYC, and every reporter in NYC saw the World Trade towers collapse, and they took it personally. There was a sense of revenge and fear, which was reflected in the coverage of Afghanistan and the War on Terror.”28 Several studies about TMT provide potential insight into the media’s decisions after the terrorist attacks and the public’s reaction to terror alerts. For example, in one TMT study, people were divided into two groups. Members of one group were told to write what they believed would happen to them after death and how they felt about it. Members of the other group were told to write about their favorite television program. Both groups were then given an anti-American essay to read and were asked whether they liked the author. People who wrote about death were much harsher on the author and took the words more personally than people who wrote about their favorite television program.29 The experiment was revised, and results showed that judges who were forced to think about death before going into a courtroom (under controlled conditions) imposed higher bail for prostitutes than those not exposed to thoughts about death. Other revisions of the experiment have shown that Christians were more hostile than normal toward Jews, and Americans were more hostile than normal toward Arabs.30 The terrorist attacks of 9/11 made death more relevant and real to the American public. Unfortunately, as predicted by TMT, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes in the United States increased by more than 1,700 percent from 28 in 2000 to 481 in 2001.31 In addition, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans sought refuge in churches and with family members. Newspaper articles chronicled tales of single men and women who experienced a sudden desire to settle down and start a family. Flags dotted the landscape (many stores sold out within a few days), and Americans proudly proclaimed their heritage. Many journalists wore flag pins on their lapels. Fox News anchors wore flag pins similar to those worn by the members of the administration, perhaps to show their solidarity with the president. Social psychologists Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg found in experiments at four universities that thoughts about death and terror also affected opinions about political candidates.32 In one study, students were told to think about either their own death or a neutral topic, like exams. They then read campaign statements of




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three hypothetical gubernatorial candidates, each with a different leadership style. One was charismatic, “a person who declared our country to be great and the people in it to be special,” Solomon said. The other candidates were “task-oriented—focusing on the job to be done—or relationship-oriented—with a ‘let’s get it done together’ style.” The researchers found that the students who thought about death were much more likely to choose the charismatic leader. Four out of approximately 100 chose the charismatic leader when thinking about exams, but 30 did so after thinking about death.33 Taking the study further, they decided to bring the 9/11 attacks into the picture and gauge their impact on attitudes toward President Bush and his opponent, Senator John Kerry. Half the participants were asked to think about the 9/11 attacks, the other half to think about watching TV. “What we found was staggering,” Solomon said. “When asked to think about television, the 100 or so volunteers did not approve of Bush or his policies in Iraq. But when asked to think about September 11 first and then asked about their attitudes to Bush, another 100 volunteers had very different reactions. ‘They had a very strong approval of President Bush and his policy in Iraq,’ Solomon said.”34 Another study focused directly on support for the two presidential candidates, Bush and Kerry. The result was that no matter what a person’s political conviction was, thinking about death made him or her lean toward Bush— otherwise, the subjects preferred Kerry. Participants were aged from 18 to 50 and described themselves as ranging from liberals to conservatives. With that in mind, consider the terror alerts and the change in the physical environment in New York and Washington, D.C. from normalcy before the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in the summer of 2004, to a place where police with bomb sniffing dogs proliferated afterward. Scotland’s Sunday Herald described New York during the Republican National Convention as a “city that looked as if martial law had been declared. Giant spy blimps floated over the city as helicopters patrolled the skies. On every street corner in Manhattan, there were dozens of police officers. Streets were blocked off in all directions by anticar bomb barriers. Flotillas of motorcycle cops sped around as officers on horseback and with batons drawn idled in the streets. Madison Square Garden itself looked as if it was under siege, ringed by Secret Service agents, the National Guard, and thousands of police officers armed to the teeth. This was not a city taking any chances. New Yorkers were sure that there was going to be a terrorist attack.”35 Again, the timing of the Justice Department’s terror alerts during this period is disturbing. On July 6, 2004, Kerry named John Edwards as his



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running mate, and an abundance of articles and profiles appeared in the press. Two days later, Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge held a press conference saying he had information that terrorists planned to launch an attack that would disrupt the presidential election. On July 11, 2004, the possibility of delaying the presidential election in case of a terror attack was announced.36 On July 29, the day Kerry made his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, an announcement came from Pakistan that al Qaeda member Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the FBI’s twenty-second “most wanted” terrorist, had been captured. Pakistan’s interior minister announced the news at midnight in Pakistan. In fact, Ghailani had been captured four days earlier.37 The timing of the announcement should have been noted because there had been discussions in the media that the Republicans would attempt to steal publicity from the Democratic National Convention with a major terrorist arrest. The New Republic ran a story in mid-July reporting that Pakistani security officials said the Bush administration was pushing for a major terrorist arrest around the time of the convention.38 The article received some coverage on broadcasts and was discussed on news talk shows. New Republic Magazine editor Peter Beinart discussed the article on CNN’s “NewsNight,” and CNN anchors had follow-up discussions about it the next day. However, during broadcast coverage of the arrest two weeks later—at the height of the convention—CNN and other media outlets neglected to mention the earlier report. Only Keith Olbermann of MSNBC mentioned the allegations made in the New Republic article.39 Soon after the convention ended, the Homeland Security Department announced that terrorists were targeting several large U.S. financial institutions. Ridge identified the five targets as the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup buildings in Manhattan, the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, and Prudential Financial in Newark. It was the most specific announcement to date by the administration, and the media was awash with the news. “The quality of the intelligence . . . is rarely seen, and it is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information,” Ridge told reporters. He ended his press conference by saying: “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the War on Terror.” This was new intelligence, journalists reported, based on recently discovered documents that indicated an attack was imminent. ABC News reported that the attack “could take place between now and Election Day in November.”




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ABC anchor Don Dahler astutely noted a few hours after Ridge’s announcement: “We can’t forget, of course, this is an election year. The last press conference that Secretary Ridge made happened to fall right after Senator Edwards was announced as a vice presidential candidate. There are those who are already saying that the timing smacks of politics.”40 From the moment of the press conference through the presidential election, armed guards were ubiquitous in New York and Washington. Barricades surrounded the terrorists’ supposed targets, and “rapidresponse teams” with bomb-sniffing dogs stood guard. Soldiers with machine guns patrolled the subways of New York and Washington. In Washington, streets were cordoned off, and machine gun-wielding men and women stopped civilians on the street to check their handbags. The images that dominated television screens and the front pages of newspapers were of these heavily armed guards standing amid gigantic American flags protecting civilians from another “imminent” attack. Reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks, Ridge told Americans that “we have to go on being America. Go to work. There will be additional security measures taken to protect you.”41 Bush told Americans: “We are a nation in danger,” and announced the appointment of a national intelligence director. Reminders of the horrific 9/11 attacks engulfed Americans. To its credit, the press began to question the timing of the new warnings and the validity of the information almost immediately. However, since nobody knew definitely whether the threats were real or not, the public was treated to a yo-yo of confusing information. Reporters said a terrorist attack was imminent. The next day, they said that evidence seemed to show the fears were unfounded. The following day, the media elevated the fear level again, only to deny the immediacy of the threat again the day after. By August 3, the New York Times turned on Ridge: “Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say.” A Washington Post story quoted a senior law enforcement official who had been briefed on the alert as saying: “There is nothing right now that we’re hearing that is new. . . . Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don’t know that.” The New York Times ran an editorial, “Mr. Bush’s Wrong Solution,” that said, “It’s unfortunate that it is necessary to fight suspicions of political timing, suspicions the administration has sown by misleading the public on security.”42 The British paper the Independent wondered: “A Nation in Danger. Or a President in Peril?” The conservative Wall Street Journal weighed in with its own suspicions: “Certainly the news grabbed national media attention away from



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last week’s convention and Mr. Kerry’s cross-country campaign trip. [As Kerry focused on economic issues,] the debate was yanked back to national security with the headline-grabbing alert from the Bush administration.”43 But the following day, the threat was again reported as being real and significant. The Washington Post told readers: “Seriousness of Threat Defended Despite Dated Intelligence.” Papers and broadcast journalists repeated officials’ statements that the 9/11 attacks had been years in the planning and concluded that the old information about attacking the financial companies meant the plan could be very close to fruition. The debate raged on, with headlines alternating between support of the decision to raise the alert level to yellow and suspicions about the timing. It was an exhausting display of what can happen to an unquestioning media that allows unnamed sources to volley the news without accountability. Britain’s security chief, David Blunkett, wrote a scathing piece in the Observer saying: “In the United States, there is often high-profile commentary followed, as in the current case, by detailed scrutiny, with the potential risk of ridicule. . . . Is it really the job of a senior cabinet minister in charge of counter-terrorism to feed the media? To increase concern? Of course not. This is arrant nonsense.” He said there is a difference between “alerting people to a specific threat and alarming people unnecessarily,” and made clear that he thought Ridge had done the latter in the recent warnings.44 Rolf Tophoven, director of Germany’s Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy, told the International Herald Tribune: “You shouldn’t forget that there is an election campaign and that in times of crisis, people tend to rally around the incumbent government. This is not a bad thing for Bush.” He said that the “inflation of terror warnings” in the United States was more of a distraction than anything else. “You have to ask how credible and serious this latest threat really is,” Tophoven said. “The danger is that repeated warnings are counterproductive in terms of people’s sensibility to terrorism. And the U.S. must watch out so as to not miss the real terror hot spot.”45 Doomsday headlines appeared again on August 9, including the New York Times’ “Tourist Copters in New York City a Terror Target” and the Los Angeles Times’ “Capitol Still al-Qaeda Target, Official Says.” Most stories after Ridge’s announcement relied heavily on unnamed sources. On August 16, Newsweek ran an “exclusive” 3,000-plus-word story that said, “There can be little doubt that al-Qaeda is trying to strike the American homeland before November 2. . . . The decision to raise the threat level to Code Orange [‘high’] last week was not, as partisans




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and conspiracists suggested, a Republican political stunt intended to slow John Kerry as he came out of the Democratic convention. But the announcement was clumsily handled, and the confusing press accounts that followed mostly obscured a larger and more important story. The uncomfortable truth is that a frantic, multibillion-dollar, global intelligence effort has not been able to answer—definitively, at any rate—the scariest and most basic question: Are there Qaeda operatives inside the United States?”46 Whether or not there were al Qaeda operatives inside the country, soldiers with machine guns remained on the streets and, as the Republican National Convention opened in New York, the city looked like a war zone. The New York Times reported on August 25, 2004 that “the New York Police Department and the largest armada of land, air, and maritime forces ever assembled to provide security at a national political gathering are being deployed in New York for the Republican convention. . . . [Officials] said yesterday that they were planning an intentionally huge response to intelligence that al-Qaeda hoped to carry out an attack to disrupt this year’s elections.”47 The Los Angeles Times reported that, “New Yorkers have personal safety on the brain.” Safer America, which specializes in security gear “sold out of ‘escape hoods,’ which are used to protect against chemical and biological weapons.”48 Is it a coincidence that the alerts came when the president needed a boost, or was the administration truly providing timely information that thwarted another horrific attack? Who knows—the threat may very well have been real. But the circumstances surrounding the terror alerts certainly deserved examination by the media, contemplation by the American public, and a credible explanation by the administration. As noted earlier, there were several instances in which security officials seemed confused about why terror levels were being elevated, including one occasion in May 2004 when a press conference by Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller appeared to upset. Ridge. It took two days of confusion before Ashcroft and Ridge produced a joint statement saying there was “credible evidence” of a threat to the country.

Strangely enough, the terror alerts and reports of al Qaeda’s plans to attack the United States stopped after the election. No explanation has been provided. The media did a good job in questioning the claims that al Qaeda was ready to launch another attack in the United States. But it missed the



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follow-up stories, such as what the administration was doing to make the country more secure from terrorist attacks? What has Homeland Security done to ensure that terrorists cannot board planes and ram them into buildings again? Asking pressing questions during times of national crisis requires courage from reporters who must overcome psychological pressures such as groupthink and obedience tendencies. But without a skeptical media, the U.S. public will receive nothing more than “official” news, much like the public in less-democratic countries. Notes 1. Richard T. Cooper, “As Battle for Baghdad Looms, Sparing Civilians Gets Tougher; Troops’ Safety Balanced against Humanitarian Goals,” Los Angeles Times, April 2, 2004. 2. Bernard Weinraub, “A Top U.S. Intelligence Officer Admits Army Miscalculations,” New York Times in International Herald Tribune, March 31, 2003. 3. Christopher Hanson, “American Idol; The Press Finds the War’s True Meaning,” Columbia Journalism Review, July/August 2004. 4. “US Troops Blamed for Deadly Arms Dump Blast,” Reuters in Straights Times, April 27, 2003. 5. “U.S. War Crimes Case Going Ahead,” BBC, April 30, 2003. 6. “Shadow of the Gunman; Shots in Falluja Echo Round the World,” The Guardian, April 30, 2003. 7. Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “The Secrets of September 11: The White House Is Battling to Keep a Report on the Terror Attacks Secret. Does the 2004 Election Have Anything to Do with It?” Newsweek, April 30, 2003. http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3067907/. 8. Linda Feldmann, “Bush’s Verbal Tightrope: Success, Not ‘Victory’ the US Public May Hear Bush’s Speech as an ‘End Of War’ Declaration, But the President Must Choose His Words Carefully,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 2003. http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0502/p01s04-woiq. html (accessed July 3, 2004). 9. Bush: The Tyrant Has Fallen,” CBS News, May 1, 2003. http://www.cbsnews. com/stories/2003/05/01/iraq/main551825.shtml (accessed July 1, 2004). 10. “Bush Lands Aboard USS Abraham Lincoln,” Fox News, May 02, 2003. http:// www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,85711,00.html (accessed July 2, 2004). 11. Tom Brokaw and Campbel Brown “Bush’s Speech to Mark End of Formal Combat Operations in Iraq,” NBC Nightly News, May 1, 2003. 12. Terence Hunt, “Bush Was Ready to Pull Plug on Baghdad Visit If Word Leaked out of His Plans,” The Associated Press, November 28, 2003. 13. Siobhan Mcdonough, “Presidential Trips on the Q.T., from Lincoln to Bush,” November 29, 2003.




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14. USAToday/CNN/Gallop Poll Results, Nov. 14–16 figures, http://www. usatoday.com/news/polls/tables/live/2003-11-17-bush-poll.htm. 15. Bradley Graham, “November Deadliest Month in Iraq,” Washington Post, November 29, 2003. 16. Mike Allen, “The Bird Was Perfect But Not for Dinner: In Iraq Picture, Bush Is Holding the Centerpiece,” Washington Post, December 4, 2004. 17. Paul Krugman, “Exploiting the Atrocity,” New York Times, September 12, 2003. 18. Audrey Hudson, “Bill Seen as Threat to Civil Liberties: Intelligence Provision Broadens Powers to Probe Financial Records,” Washington Times, December 5, 2003. 19. Joel Brinkley, “Bush Overhauls U.S. Regulations,” Washington Post, August 14, 2004. 20. Information found in the following 10 paragraphs is based on “Timeline for Terror Alerts” dated August 3, 2004, found on http://juliusblog.blogspot. com/. 21. Robb Willer, “The Effects of Government-Issued Terror Warnings on Presidential Approval,” Current Research in Social Psychology 10, no. 1 (September 30, 2004). 22. Mimi Hall, “Ridge Reveals Clasheson Alerts,” USA Today, May 10, 2005. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-05-10-ridge-alerts_x.htm. 23. “Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller: An Edited Version of the Agent’s 13-page Letter,” Time Magazine, June 3, 2003. 24. Thomas Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon, and Jeff Greenberg, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003). Also see the chapters by the study’s authors in the next volume of this series. Spee Kosloff, Mark Landau, Dave Weise, Daniel Sullivan, Jeff Greenberg, “Eight Years in the Wake of 9/11: A Terror Management Analysis of the Psychological Repercussions of the 9/11 Attacks,” The Impact of 9/11 on Psychology and Education: The Day That Changed Everything? Matthew J. Morgan, Ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Matt Motyl, Kenneth E. Vail III, Tom Pyszczynski, “Waging Terror: Psychological Motivation in Cultural Violence and Peacemaking,” The Impact of 9/11 on Psychology and Education: The Day That Changed Everything? Matthew J. Morgan, Ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Danny Schechter, “Mis-Covering Clarke,” MediaChannel.org, March 29, 2004. 29. “In the Wake of 9/11,” APA Books. 30. Ibid. 31. “ ‘WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY’ Hate Crimes against Arabs, Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11,” Human Rights Watch, November 14, 2002 http://hrw.org/press/2002/11/usahate.htm. 32. Reuters in CNN.com “Study: Fear Shapes Voters’ Views; Responses to Candidates Differ after Thinking about Tragedy,” July 30, 2004.



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33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. “We Don’t Want Our Loved Ones Who Died in 9/11 Used As An Excuse to Start War,” (Scotland’s) Sunday Herald, September 5, 2004. 36. Information found on “Timeline for Terror Alerts” dated August 3, 2004, http://juliusblog.blogspot.com/. 37. Tom Engelhardt “October/November Surprise?” Mother Jones, August 9, 2004. 38. John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari, “Pakistan for Bush: A July Surprise?” The New Republic, July 19, 2004. http://www.tnr.com/doc. mhtml?i=20040719&s=aaj071904. 39. Eric Altman, “Think Again: Boston 2004: The Media’s Missed Opportunity,” The Nation, August 5, 2004. 40. Don Dahler, Transcript, ABC World News Tonight, Analysis of Terror Intelligence, interview with Gen. Wesley Clark, August 1, 2004. 41. “Ridge: U.S. Ought to ‘Go to Work’ Despite Security Fears,” Reuters, August 2, 2004. 42. “Mr. Bush’s Wrong Solution,” New York Times Editorial, August 3, 2004. 43. Jackie Calmes and Jacob M. Schlesinger, “Terror Politics Dominate Debate,” Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2004. 44. Francis Elliott, “Blunkett Issues Rebuke to Bush on Terror Alerts,” The Independent, August 8, 2004. 45. Katrin Bennhold, “Europe Takes New Terror Alert with Grain of Salt,” International Herald Tribune, August 6, 2004. 46. Daniel Klaidman and Evan Thomas, “Al Qaeda’s Pre-Election Plot; Exclusive: With an Eye on Striking America, Bin Laden’s Network Is Hard at Work. On the Trail of Its Targets and Tactics,” Newsweek, August 16, 2004. 47. David Johnston and William K. Rashbaum, “Vast Force Is Deployed for Security at Convention,” New York Times, August 25, 2004. 48. Mark Z. Barabak “Schwarzenegger Wraps His Life Story around GOP Themes,” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 2004.







The Arts and Entertainment



Part II




Reading Afghanistan Post-9/11 Sophia A. McClennen*

“You’ll be cut to pieces before you’re fifty miles across the border,” I said. “You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s one mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers and no Englishman has been through it. Their people are utter brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn’t do anything.” “That’s more like,” said Carnehan. “If you could think us a little more mad we would be more pleased. We have come to know about this country, to ready a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books. [. . .] We can read, though we aren’t very educated.” —Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would be King (1888)1

S

hortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Afghanistan was in the center of media attention as officials surmised that the terrorists were al Qaeda who had found refuge within Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Marc Kauffman in a piece for the Washington Post on September 23, 2001 wrote that “Until Sept. 11 few Americans knew or cared about the people and events [of] distant Afghanistan.”2 That indifference immediately changed. The “war on terror” and its Taliban target led to a crash course in Afghan history, geography, culture, and politics. Although there were * The daughter of an Afghan economist who worked for the IMF, Dr. Sophia A. McClennen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where she teaches postcolonial literature, women’s world literature, media studies, and comparative cultural studies. She has written and edited four books.



9

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variations and differences of approach, most media sources converged in shaping a shared narrative of the state of the Afghan people. Much was heard of the brutality of Taliban rule, of the plight of Afghan women, and of the tenacious spirit of the Afghan warrior who had managed to defend his country from foreign rule for more than 2,000 years. As Corinne Fowler notes in her study of the history of British ideas about Afghanistan, rather than ground these descriptions in present-day realities, media coverage of Operation Enduring Freedom bore a striking resemblance to nineteenth-century Western views of Afghanistan.3 There were two key reasons for this practice. First, logistical constraints often meant that reporters simply did not have access to the war itself, leading to “rooftop journalism.”4 Then, “almost twenty-five years of warfare had forced anthropologists and travelers to steer clear of the country.”5 Consequently, background context about Afghanistan came in the form of literary accounts, travel narratives, and other forms of writing about the region. But these literary sources were often woefully outdated and highly prejudicial since they reflected British imperialist views of a country that had resisted British intervention more than once in extremely violent ways. The most frequently cited resource was that of Rudyard Kipling and Fowler writes that “during the 2001 conflict, references to Kipling were legion.”6 For instance, while in Peshawar at the American club, British journalist Ben Macintyre wrote that the spies, arms dealers, aid workers, mercenaries, and journalists that congregated there all had one thing in common: they all read Kipling as they lived out their “romantic fantasies.” “The works of Rudyard Kipling were required reading, for Britain’s bard of imperialism captured the wilderness and the wonder of the North–West Frontier like no other writer, before or since.”7 Kipling’s works were cited throughout media reports in the days following 9/11 as though they provided some deep insight into the mystery of Afghanistan and its neighboring countries. News reports carried multiple references from his short story “The Man Who Would Be King” (referenced earlier) and from his poem “The Young British Soldier” that portrays Afghans (including women) as particularly brutal: When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.8

The turn to Kipling may very well have made sense as the United States and Britain contemplated overt military action in a country with a reputation for rebelling superior military force. Not only had the Brits suffered military losses there three times (1842, 1841, 1919), but the Soviet



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conflict in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 arguably led to the end of the Soviet Union. Perhaps some of Kipling’s insights into these conflicts could serve as useful cautions. Nevertheless, the repeated use of Kipling as a source of knowledge about Afghanistan points to a persistent feature of Western knowledge production about the East, a practice that Edward Said describes as orientalism.9 Said suggests that one of the key features of orientalist thinking is the assumed fact that there is a fundamental distinction between “Orient” and “Occident.” But this distinction is not one of simple difference; it is one of hierarchy. This strategy means that, regardless of the relationship between West and East, the West always retains “positional superiority.”10 Thus, when U.S. Navy Seal Marc Luttrell describes his mission to Afghanistan as “payback time for the World Trade Center,” he is a “special breed of warrior” whereas his enemy is described as “lawless,” “wild mountain men.”11 Or when Afghans rebel against foreign invasion, they are described as dangerous and unpredictable, but when Western countries defend themselves from foreign invasion, they are described as righteous and valiant. Not only does such thinking depend on an absolute division between East and West, where the West is always understood as superior to the East, but it also requires that East and West be understood as static entities that do not significantly change over time and that do not have substantial variations within themselves. Such practices meant that it remained possible after 9/11 to assume that Kipling’s imperialist view of the barbarous nature of Afghanistan was still largely true, that little had changed; and they depended on ignoring Kipling’s own context of writing as one that referred to a specific historical moment that carried particular worldviews. The third key feature of orientalism is that it depends on ideas and not simply on the use of military and political power to remain in force. When orientalist statements are made in the Western media about Afghanistan, such statements themselves serve to strengthen structures of authority that are not only material but also ideological. Thus, Kipling’s legacy was continued in Western media representations of Operation Enduring Freedom not simply through references to his works, but also through the mere practice of producing truth claims about Afghanistan, the nature of the Afghan people, and their relationship to the West—truth claims that inevitably reinforced the historical legacy of occident versus orient. For obvious reasons U.S. coverage did not replicate the British media’s imperialist anxieties, but that did not deter U.S. journalists from falling into a pattern of repeatedly rehearsing a series of traits that indelibly marked Afghanistan as a threat to Western ways of life. Mahmood Mamdani refers to these practices as “culture talk.” Building on Said’s



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concept of orientalism contemporary “culture talk” takes its cues from works like Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and understands contemporary conflicts in cultural rather than political terms. Mamdani explains that “It is no longer the market (capitalism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line between those in favor of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to terror.”12 The key to “culture talk” is the assumption that different cultures have different essences and it requires that cultures be understood outside of their historical and political context. In the West post-9/11 “culture talk” meant understanding the crisis in Afghanistan as one that was culturally endemic, that of a failure to become civilized, rather than as a consequence of specific historical and political developments. As a result, post-9/11 Afghan-related reporting often included references to the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the country but rarely acknowledged the role played in Afghanistan by Saudi Arabia’s and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies (the GID and ISI) who worked during the Soviet era along with the CIA in helping train and fund the Afghan rebels who would later become the Taliban. Instead of contextually and historically specific reporting, much news relied on reinforcing a series of orientalist, culturalist features of Afghanistan. One ongoing and persistent feature of media coverage referred to the warlike nature of Afghans and to the fact that Afghans “have traditionally greeted outside armies with hostility.”13 Fowler also notes that “a striking feature of news media coverage of the 2001 bombing campaign” depicted Afghanistan as “contemporaneous with medieval Europe”—a condition that suggested the almost total lack of anything the West would call “civilization” in the nation.14 Another trope of the media was the reference to the lack of national unity in a country prone to tribalism and ethnic conflict. Ross Bensons writes, for instance, that “each ethnic group is distrustful of the other and in Afghanistan distrust is cause enough for murder.”15 Linked to descriptions of the people as barbarous, uncivilized, premodern, and dangerous, the physical geography was described as equally treacherous, sometimes due to the ominous mountains and desserts and sometimes due to the wreckage left behind by the remnants of the Soviet era.16 Most of all and for obvious reasons the mainstream media simply wanted the story of Afghanistan to justify the United States’s military response to 9/11.17 The U.S. public was still in a state of trauma after the terrorist attacks and there was an urge to see Operation Enduring Freedom as the correct response to the crisis. But, in addition to the need for revenge and payback, the bombings were also described as a humanitarian intervention. Larry Goodson wrote for the New York Times in November 2001 that



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the U.S. military was needed in Afghanistan not only to fight the terrorists and their hosts, but also for “humanitarian reasons.”18 Consequently much media attention focused on the brutality of the Taliban regime, especially its treatment of women. Most descriptions of the Taliban, though, did nothing to alter the longstanding orientalist views of the country. While women were obviously victims of extraordinary oppression under Taliban rule, the idea that these women needed to be “saved” by the West only furthered colonialist ideas and Western assumptions of paternalistic duty.19 In addition, both the revenge and the humanitarian reasons for the invasion converged in largely ignoring the role that the United States had played in creating the conditions in Afghanistan. In a rare story presenting this view, Kauffman wrote for the Washington Post that “what the American public has least understood is how directly the United States helped spawn and build the object of our wrath.”20 It is not surprising that the media painted a portrait of Afghanistan post-9/11 that justified the U.S. invasion of the country, prepared the public for a long and difficult conflict, and depicted the United States as a savior rather than an invader of the country. Nevertheless, these types of media practices meant that Western audiences learned very little about the actual impact of the bombings on the Afghan people and remained unaware of the precarious future such bombings aggravated. Former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes wrote that the greatest challenge she faced as a reporter during the conflict was not local hostility to Western journalists but rather the difficulty in reporting back to a “traumatized nation.”21 She mentions countless examples of reporters whose pieces were censored and rejected by editors at home. She writes that a Pulitzer Prize journalist told her he had been blocked from doing any reporting: “We were just supposed to dig up stuff to substantiate their foregone conclusions.”22 Added to this she mentions a CNN reporter who had received explicit instructions not to film civilian causalities.23 When she herself did a story on civilian causalities for NPR, she received “vituperative reactions from listeners”: “One said he was so angry that he almost had to pull his car off the road to vomit.”24 Another wrote that [s]he was tired of listening to the “whimpers of afghany [sic] children, the pleas of parents who have lost loved ones.”25 Rather than listen to such “propaganda,” the listener defiantly claimed that [s]he would “listen to a Mozart CD for the rest of the morning.”26 Clearly even NPR listeners, who are often imagined as liberal minded, could not tolerate the idea that there were actual human beings that might suffer as a consequence of the military strikes. Even less tolerable was the idea that their losses could compare to those who had suffered on U.S. soil. Rather, the Afghan people were seen as irremediably different and justifiably disposable. They were not quite human, or




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Literature Writes Back Against this media coverage there were a series of books that ostensibly attempted to give more depth to the issues and to describe with more detail the lives of actual Afghans. A good number of these books were written as a way of counterbalancing the biases and shortcomings of mass media accounts.27 Consequently, just as Kipling had served as a literary guide to the events of Afghanistan for the post-9/11 news media, there was a body of literature that became an early tool in the war on terror for telling a different story, one that resisted the absolute divisions of East versus West and the orientalist stereotypes that circulated in the media. These books also attempted to provide more nuance and complexity to the story of Afghanistan than could be found in the necessarily truncated stories offered by the mainstream media. There was a virtual cottage industry of Afghan-related publishing post9/11. John F. Baker writing for Publishers Weekly wrote in October 2001 that “Stories about the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban are proliferating.”28 It is worth noting that this boom did not bear out in equal measure for the case of Iraq. There was no Iraqi equivalent, for instance, of The Kite Runner. Arguably, there are two main reasons for this disparity: First, the strict laws of the Taliban, especially regarding women, were of great interest to Western readers, yielding a category of writing that some described as “burqa lit,” most of which was personal narrative.29 In addition, the centrality of Afghanistan to the geopolitics of imperialism, the cold war, and the oil rush alongside its complex cultural heritage primed the country as a rich source for a range of literary projects. By literary projects I am referring to the full range of books about Afghanistan, whether fiction or nonfiction, since regardless of their genre all of these books incorporated discursive practices that yielded “stories” about Afghanistan. But to narrow the range for the purposes of this chapter, I am leaving out those nonfiction works that fall broadly under the category of investigative journalism, political analysis, or history. Bestsellers like Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars or Barnett Rubin’s The Fragmentation of Afghanistan also represent a significant genre of writing about Afghanistan post-9/11.30 Nonetheless, my interest here is specifically on fiction and on those forms of nonfiction that are primarily



at least not human in the same way as those from the West. There might have been an interest in understanding the culture of Afghanistan after 9/11, but understanding the nation’s inhabitants as human equivalents to U.S. citizens was another matter entirely.

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comprised of personal narrative. In addition to “burqa lit,” an especially common form was the personal narrative of a Western observer who had spent time in Afghanistan—a form that often blended memoir with travel narrative with the testimonial of voices otherwise unheard in the West. In this category one finds Ann Jones’s Kabul in Winter or Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin’s Three Cups of Tea.31 Often the books were written by journalists who felt that the real story was not emerging in the mainstream media and/or who felt that they could not watch the events unfolding in Afghanistan as passive observers. This is the case of Sarah Chayes’s The Punishment of Virtue and also of Three Cups of Tea. Relin writes in his introduction to Three Cups of Tea that “this is a story I couldn’t simply observe.”32 Chayes gave up her job as a reporter to run a nonprofit in Afghanistan because she could no longer function as only a passive observer; she wanted to be an “aide and a witness” (front flap). Given my interest in analyzing the ways that literature offered an alternative to mainstream media views of Afghanistan, I am also bracketing those personal narratives that were not primarily interested in Afghanistan, but rather in the stories of a Westerner in the region. This category includes Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor, Mike Ryan’s Battlefield Afghanistan, Matthew Morgan’s A Democracy Is Born, and Craig Mullaney’s The Unforgiving Minute.33 Although these books are of interest too, they provide less insight into the use of literature to interrogate the longstanding depiction of Afghans as fundamentally different from Westerners. As a way to narrow the field of possible texts to analyze, I have selected four that offer a range of genres and viewpoints. Two are nonfiction and written by non-Muslim Europeans. The first, Scotsman Rory Stewart’s travel narrative, The Places in Between (2004) was heralded as the story of “Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban trekker.”34 Stewart opens the book by acknowledging that he is writing as Afghanistan has become “the center of the world’s attention.”35 Even though he had also traveled through India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Iran; he chose to write his book about the Afghan leg of his trip, a decision that further indicates his interest in contributing his version of the country to Western readers. The second, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul (2002, English 2003) recounts her experiences living with a Kabuli family and falls broadly into the genre of testimonial fiction.36 Similar to Stewart, she writes the book with the full knowledge that Afghanistan is now at the center of world attention. After living with the Northern Alliance for six weeks in November 2001 and reporting back to Norway, she met Sultan Khan (a pseudonym), a bookseller in Kabul. Following a dinner with his family her first thoughts were: “This is Afghanistan. How interesting it would be to write a book about this family.”37 Both of these nonfiction works offers




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insight into the complications that arise when Western observers attempt to write in ways that dismantle East-West oppositions. The second two works are novels written by Muslims who now live in the West, but were born in Afghanistan and Algeria, respectively. The first is Khaled Hosseini’s enormously successful The Kite Runner (2003).38 Hailed as the first novel by an Afghan-American, the narrative covers the life of a boy who grows up in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion, takes refuge in Pakistan and then later the United States, only to later return to Taliban-led Afghanistan on a quest for personal redemption. The second is Yasmina Khadra’s The Swallows of Kabul (2002, English 2004).39 Khadra is the pseudonym of retired Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul. He first used the pseudonym to avoid military censorship. Later when he decided to dedicate himself fully to writing, he moved to France and revealed his true identity, even though he still publishes under his pseudonym. His novel traces two couples living in Taliban-ruled Kabul whose lives intertwine in unexpected and tragic ways. These two novels are less concerned with the dismantling of orientalist views. Rather, their main focus is on the human, personal stories of Afghans who have suffered from the nation’s decades of war and from the rise of the Taliban. All four books were remarkably successful commercially. The Places in Between was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2006.40 The Bookseller of Kabul has been on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list since publication, is the bestselling nonfiction book in Norwegian history, and has a total print run of more than two million copies.41 The Kite Runner was a #1 New York Times bestseller and has sold millions of copies. The Swallows of Kabul has sold less, but has received wide critical acclaim. The New York Times called it “a chilling portrait of fundamentalism run amok and its fallout on ordinary people.”42 If the media had failed to provide their audience with sufficient context and background to the conflict in Afghanistan, and if it had relied in large part on imperialist, orientalist, and culturalist ideologies, then these counternarratives were meant to offer a different view. For the most part the authors of these books are specifically interested in writing in a way that humanizes the Afghan people as a contrast to the dehumanizing views offered by the mainstream media. Ironically, though, in the effort to give intimate and personal detail about the daily life of Afghans it could be argued that these books actually reinforce the culturalist arguments that continue to dominate mainstream Western views. Because they do not link the personal with the more broadly political, they often seem to describe the state of Afghanistan as a result of personal and cultural failings. To a certain extent, then, they



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The Places in Between Rory Stewart’s travel narrative of his trek across Afghanistan only days after the fall of the Taliban was immediately hailed as a book that would provide insight into the Afghan people and the challenges facing the West as it tried to “bring” democracy and stability to the nation. Stewart had met a wide variety of people, had crossed into a range of different ethnic communities, and had spent time with ordinary Afghans as well as government officials. He offered one of the first inside views into the daily life of the nation. One reviewer highlighted the book’s potential insight for Westerners: “Nation building in Afghanistan remains a work in progress, and this work should help those who wish to understand the complexities of that task.”43 The book’s genre of travel writing, though, establishes a key dynamic that reveals both its strengths and limits. Mary Louise Pratt explains that travel writing has come to be considered a means for making unknown places readable for Western audiences.44 In conjunction with orientalism, travel writing, according to Pratt, produces a legible story of other parts of the world for Western audiences that legitimates the belief that there are fundamental distinctions between the West and the “rest” and that it is perfectly reasonable for the West to be the source of “meaning-making” about regional identities.45 Stewart’s book is positioned ambivalently within this history of the genre. On the one hand, he clearly romanticizes the form, idealizes his journey, and frequently passes judgment on the communities and individuals he encounters, often reading them through Western conventions. It is worth mentioning that the sheer hubris of arriving in Afghanistan days after the Taliban’s fall to engage on a dangerous trek reveals a fundamental egoism that underlies his project. He tells readers that he expected to rely on Afghan customs of hospitality, where they would not be able to refuse shelter and food to travelers. In practice, though, he explains, “people often welcomed me reluctantly.”46 He goes on to explain that this was understandable given their circumstances and he expresses gratitude for their support, but he never really reflects on what would happen if the tables were reversed. How would a walking



both do and do not offer alternative versions of Afghanistan from those commonly presented by the media. In what follows I will briefly analyze the ways that each of these four books engages, at times ambivalently, at times critically, with the dominant ideas about Afghanistan that were circulating after 9/11.

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Afghan be treated in Scotland if he asked for shelter and food? Nor does he adequately reflect on the contrast of the luxury of his voluntary trek versus the extraordinary hardship endured by most Afghans daily. He entered Afghanistan as it was undergoing a massive national crisis and was one of the worst humanitarian disasters zones worldwide. At the time of his journey Afghanistan had the largest refugee population in the world; refugees who were struggling for shelter and food. Rather than help the Afghans, he asked them to give him food and shelter, and then was “disappointed by their hospitality.”47 On the other hand, he includes many self-reflexive statements that destabilize his authority thereby subverting the typical power structure of travel writing. Fowler notes that his text includes a number of “countercommentaries that compete with Stewart’s construction of his journey’s meaning.”48 In one especially telling example, he inverts the trope of portraying Afghanistan as medieval when an Afghan observer describes Stewart as a “medieval walking dervish.”49 In addition, he complicates the idea of the West as the source of knowledge about Afghanistan through his repeated references to Babur, the Mughal emperor of Central Asia, who traveled from Herat to Kabul in 1503, and who served as a role model for Stewart’s journey and its narrative. By using an Asian source as his precursor and guide, Stewart destabilizes the typical West-over-East power structure of travel writing. In a sense the symbol of Babur comes to stand in for the book’s strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis its potential challenge to mainstream Western views of Afghanistan. As a strength the book’s references to Babur and especially to his travel narrative of Afghanistan present readers with an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the country. Alongside these references, Stewart’s text is a veritable treasure trove of historical information about the country. He references almost all of the major historical texts of Afghanistan, a number of travel narratives, including that of Sir John Mandeville who wrote in the fourteenth century, and presents readers with a nuanced cultural history of the country. These images of a glorious cultural past, where Afghanistan was situated on the Silk Route at the crossroads of civilization contrasted the media images that presented the country as devoid of cultural value and steeped in Islamic fundamentalism. As reports of the Taliban’s bans on music, the arts, kite flying, and almost all forms of culture circulated, Stewart’s ethnographic and historical attention to Afghanistan’s rich cultural history served to offer readers an opposing view. This opposing view, though, remained largely historical. Despite Stewart’s claims that he “wanted to focus on modern Afghanistan, not its history,” his text favors the historical view over the contemporary one.50



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This choice means that readers learn far more about Babur than they do about the CIA, which is mentioned only four times in the text and twice in references to CIA-provided boots.51 Not once does he mention the Saudi or Pakistani intelligence services (GID, ISI) and their role in shaping contemporary Afghanistan. The result is that Afghanistan acquires a rich cultural history, but at the expense of a text that romanticizes its past and fails to engage with the complexity of its present.

The Bookseller of Kabul The Bookseller of Kabul describes the life of a middle-class Kabuli family, headed by a bookseller Sultan Khan, and it belongs roughly within the genre of testimonial fiction. Testimonial fiction takes the stories of real life actors who live in a state of precariousness and whose voices have been ignored by official history, but rather than simply record these voices and compile them, the author translates their stories into narrative. In The Bookseller’s case the status of precarity is somewhat complicated since, on the one hand, Seierstad’s family enjoys relative comfort and Sultan Khan is an educated man of means, but, on the other hand, Seierstad focuses on the family’s patriarchal structure that leaves the women and the bookseller’s sons with virtually no rights. Like travel narrative, this genre also carries with it a complex power imbalance. Not only does the author have a position of privilege vis-à-vis her subject, but the decision to fictionalize the story rather than report the specific words of the subjects obviously involves the imposition of the author’s thoughts. In addition, even though she suggests that this is the case of one family, inevitably it comes to stand in for a larger cultural generalization. Sentences like “In Afghanistan a woman’s longing for love is taboo” reiterate the notion that there is a monolithic Afghan culture that is timeless and immutable and that the author can identify and describe.52 One of the greatest weaknesses of this book in terms of its ability to offer an alternative to mainstream views of Afghanistan is Seierstad’s own lack of awareness of the potential pitfalls to her chosen vehicle of narration. She refuses to acknowledge the fact that when she describes the inner thoughts of the family members, she is necessarily reading those thoughts through herself. In the introduction she writes that “Internal dialogue and feelings are based entirely on what family members described to me.”53 But, elsewhere in the introduction she reveals two key pieces of information that belie that claim and reveal her bias. First, all of her conversations were conducted with the family in English since she did not speak Dari. This meant that she really only had close contact with the three family




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members who spoke English (Sultan, Leila [his sister], and Mansur [his son]), a fact that had to result in imperfect access to the thoughts of the family as a whole. Second, she admits that shortly after moving into the house the “belief in male superiority . . . was continually provoking” her, so much so that she “quarreled” and “had the urge to hit.”54 Such a level of emotional response necessarily interfered with her ability to provide a balanced view of the family. What began as a fascination with a man who had initially attracted Seierstad with his elegant manners, cultured intellect, and valiant struggle to defend books from hostile regimes almost immediately turned into disgust as she came to learn more about his treatment of women and his unyielding commitment to his business. Her disappointment in him becomes the guiding frame of the book, evidenced by the fact that the first chapter recounts Khan’s decision to take a second wife, an event that predated Seierstad’s stay with the family. And, while it may very well be a justified disappointment, the consequence is that Seierstad paints a picture of Afghan culture that suggests that even educated, moderate Islamic men are ultimately barbarous. A reviewer of the book for The Observer found the fact that this family ostensibly represented a more moderate and privileged version of Afghan behavior “compulsive, repulsive and frightening” leading him to conclude that “there is clearly no hope for Afghanistan.”55 While the book may have begun as an effort to break down the East-West divide, it eventually returned to that logic in force. Nevertheless, Seierstad’s book does challenge a series of stereotypes that were circulating post-9/11. While her focus is clearly Leila, the 19-year-old sister of Khan, who is treated like a servant, denied the chance to work, and has her chance at marriage thwarted, this book goes beyond a focus on oppressed women. Complicating the typical tropes of “burqa lit” Seierstad also pays considerable attention to Khan’s son Mansur, who is effectively forced to work for his father and toys with greater devotion to Islam as an antidote. By balancing the ways that the patriarchal structure of the family affects both Leila and Mansur, Seierstad avoids the practice of describing Afghan culture as oppressive men versus victimized women. Mansur’s story becomes especially tragic when he discovers that a carpenter working in the bookstore has been stealing. Mansur does not want to press charges and send the carpenter to jail, since this would mean that the carpenter would leave a family of seven children, two with polio, without anyone to provide for them, but Sultan insists that the carpenter must pay for his crime. Mansur’s response to his impotence in the matter is to mistreat his mother and the other women in the household, thereby giving readers a view of how social structures of oppression reproduce themselves. Most importantly,



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the interplay between Sultan, Mansur, and the carpenter offers readers a varied picture of Afghan masculinity. In the end, the greatest weakness of the book is Seierstad’s failure to recognize the ethical dimension to her project. Even though she used pseudonyms for the family, Khan was almost immediately recognized as Shah Mohammad Rais, a development that anyone could have easily predicted since they are not very many successful Kabuli booksellers. Rais immediately responded to the book with calls for a lawsuit, since he felt that she had abused his hospitality and misrepresented his family. This was also fairly predictable. More disturbing still is Seierstad’s treatment of Leila. By revealing Leila’s thoughts and also the fact that she had received letters from an unofficial suitor, she endangered the woman who she ostensibly most wanted to help. In fact, the publication of her book sent most of the family into exile. Perhaps the most ironic way in which her book has helped address orientalist, culturalist versions of Afghanistan has been in the robust debates about First World stories of Third World countries that emerged in the wake of Rais’s lawsuit and in response to his own book Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul. “In his tale, two hairy Norwegian trolls visit him on a fact-finding mission to discover the truth about the bookseller and to hear his version of Seierstad’s story.”56

The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner holds an exceptional place in post9/11 Afghan-related publishing. It has been the most bestselling Afghan related book post-9/11, it is the first Afghan-American novel, and it also became a popular feature film. The book recounts the story of Amir who is the son of a widowed Kabuli businessman. Shortly after the Soviets invade in 1979 Amir and Baba go into exile in Pakistan and later in the United States. Then Amir returns to Taliban-led Afghanistan in June 2001 to rescue the son of his childhood friend Hassan. Amir is Pashtun and Hassan is Hazara, allowing the book to explore ethnic conflict in ways that few accounts of Afghanistan have. One sign of the novel’s rewriting of cultural myths of Afghanistan is its nuancing of Pashtun identity. Even though Amir is from the most dominant ethnic group, his father is a moderate Muslim, educated, and highly ethical, a quality that complicates the depiction of Pashtuns (the ethnicity of the Taliban) as the most violent, lawless, and religiously fundamentalist of Afghans. Hosseini’s book balances between revealing details of Afghan life and subtleties of its cultural customs and writing a story that reflects universal themes of betrayal and redemption. Perhaps more than any other




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book about Afghanistan post-9/11, it has succeeded in bringing a sense of Afghan humanity to Western readers inclined to barely recognize Afghans as socially valuable. Most post-9/11 writing by Afghans falls into the category of “burqa lit” and, even though a number of these books, such as My Forbidden Face and Zoya’s Story, were written by women who lived in moderate Islamic homes with men who did not abuse them, these books tended to focus wholly on the brutality of Taliban rule, which often reinforced a view of Afghan barbarity.57 Hosseini’s text, in contrast, portrays Kabul before the Soviet invasion in significant detail giving Western readers a view of a moment in Afghan history when the city was “modern” and “civilized” by Western standards. Even though the novel takes a highly romantic and nostalgic tone, a stylistic feature that may be explained by Hosseini’s status as an exile from his homeland, these lyrical portraits of the city challenged assumptions that Afghanistan had been always a barbaric and medieval nation with no connection to modernity. The fact that this text is a novel in a modified form of the bildungsroman, that is, the novel of education, and that it touches on universal themes represents both a strength and a pitfall in terms of its abilities to alter Western perceptions of Afghanistan.58 First, it is worth mentioning that Hosseini chooses to write in a Western literary form, the bildungsroman, a form that dates back to eighteenth century Europe and is associated with the rise in secular notions of individual identity. The bildungsroman became an excellent literary vehicle for exploring enlightenment ideas since it traced the development of a young protagonist, who, through a series of challenges, eventually became a “modern” man. Hosseini’s text is a hybrid between a Western bildungsroman and Eastern storytelling. Even though The Kite Runner is largely written according to Western storytelling conventions and for a Western audience, Hosseini makes significant reference to Afghan (and Persian) literary texts throughout the novel. Perhaps more significantly, Amir’s redemption is partially linked to his embrace of Islam thereby altering the traditional secular themes of the bildungsroman. Unfortunately, though, the balance between Afghan specificity and “universal” (read Western) themes has been largely lost on Western readers. Meghan O’Rourke notes that most readers overlooked or downplayed those features of the novel that indicated “otherness”: “Study the 631 Amazon reviews and scores of newspaper features about The Kite Runner, and you’ll find that most fail to mention that the narrator converts from a secular Muslim to a devoutly practicing one. Hosseini’s story indulges this readerly impulse to downplay what is hard to grasp and play up what seems familiar.”59 The fact that the novel did not seem “foreign” was precisely one of Hosseini’s goals. In an interview he explained that “It goes



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back to telling a story that connects with people on a human level. When you do that, I think you get people thinking.”60 The dilemma, though, is that in order for The Kite Runner to depict Afghans as humans, as part of a universal, global community, they almost lost their Afghanness. The central conflict at the heart of the narrative, though, ultimately reflects the novel’s ambivalence toward Western stereotypes. Amir’s best friend, Hassan, is also a Hazara servant. While Amir is conflicted about his relationship to Hassan since he often imagines that his father favors the servant boy, it is another young boy, Assef, the blond, blue-eyed son of a Pashtun father and a German mother, who will force Amir to decide whether to defend his friend or betray him. The tension reaches a climax when Assef corners Hassan and rapes him since Hassan refuses to give him the kite he has “run” for Amir. Amir watches and does nothing to save his friend. Later, he accuses Hassan of stealing; knowing that this will mean that Hassan and his father will leave his family’s house because he cannot stand to be reminded of his cowardice. Amir is a jealous, insecure coward. Assef is an evil bully. Hassan is pure and innocent. These identities are reductive archetypes that do not allow for much critical reflection on the part of the reader. Later, Assef will become a leader with the Taliban and Amir will have to return to Kabul to rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab, who has been abducted by Assef and repeatedly beaten and raped by him. Amir confronts Assef, is gravely beaten, and only escapes when Sohrab shoots Assef in the eye with a slingshot.61 The morality tale has both a positive and a negative impact on representing Afghanistan, with the negative reading as the most obvious. In distilling a complicated geopolitical conflict into the battle between good (Hassan/Sohrab), evil (Assef), and morally hesitant (Amir), Hosseini only furthers culturalist arguments that imagine a world of “good Muslims’ and “bad Muslims” and that assume that terrorism is a character flaw and not a contextually specific sociopolitical response to historical events.62 Amir explains to Sohrab: “there are bad people in this world, and sometimes bad people stay bad.”63 Conveniently, Afghanistan’s problems as presented in the novel have absolutely nothing to do with global geopolitics or U.S. manipulation. At a moment when U.S. citizens had to grapple with terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, such a tale suggested a division between good and evil that inevitably palliated the violent consequences of bombing Afghanistan and that made it easier to imagine that the invasion was a just response. Nevertheless, there is another reading of the ethical dilemmas at the center of the novel that suggests that the moral focus, albeit one that is highly reductive, does challenge Western preconceptions and does




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destabilize mainstream categories of good and evil. First, it is worth noting that this novel revolves around Amir’s moral deficiency. But, in contrast to Assef, who is an amoral sociopath, Amir has a conscience, and while he does not always make the most ethical choices, he eventually learns to “be good again.” By attributing this moral dilemma to Amir, Hosseini undercuts the view of all Afghans as immoral, uncivilized, lawless, barbarians incapable of governing themselves. Amir’s problems will not be fixed by “western intervention,” but rather by his own sense of social responsibility.

The Swallows of Kabul Unlike the three books discussed earlier whose authors had varying degrees of contact with real life Afghans, Mohammed Moulessehoul, author of The Swallows of Kabul, had never set foot in the country when he wrote his novel. In an inversion of commonsense assumptions about literature and authenticity, however, this work may very well be the most successful at undermining Western stereotypes of Afghanistan of the four texts analyzed here. Space does not permit detailed analysis of Moulessehoul’s complicated literary personae, but the combination of his military background, one which included fighting Algerian Islamic militants some of whom trained in Afghanistan, and the literary voice of a woman (his pseudonym is Yasmina Khadra) creates a complex sense of authorship, one that is more fragmented and less authoritative than in the three cases described earlier. This destabilized authorial identity joins a highly layered literary style that invites the reader to take a more active role in forming judgments. Unlike the modern city of Hosseini’s pre-Soviet Kabul, Khadra’s Taliban-ruled Kabul is “a city in an advanced stage of decomposition.”64 War, drought, and famine have combined to create a geography of living hell and “[t]he ruin of the city walls has spread into people’s souls.” In contrast to Hosseini, Khadra refuses to allow readerly nostalgia or romanticized illusion: “Nobody believes in miraculous rains or the magical transformations of spring, and even less in the dawning of a bright new tomorrow.”65 The novel traces two couples who live in this desolate space. Atiq is a whip-brandishing Taliban jailer who guards prisoners awaiting execution. His wife, Musarrat, is dying of an incurable disease, barely able to tend the house or herself. The second couple comes from the educated middle-class family. Mohsen is the son of a wealthy family of shopkeepers who have lost their businesses under the Taliban. His exceedingly beautiful wife, Zunaira, a former magistrate and lawyer who



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worked for women’s rights, is now confined to her home, since what she would see would leave her “heartsick” and because she refuses to wear the burqa.66 Like The Kite Runner, an act of violence sets the plot in motion and forces the characters to face difficult ethical decisions. Mohsen leaves the house one day and finds himself participating in the stoning of a condemned prostitute. He later confesses his actions to Zunaira, who initially tries to forgive him, but eventually hides behind a burqa in their home. When Mohsen tries to force it off of her, they struggle, and he falls and dies. Zunaira is arrested for murder and condemned to death, landing in Atiq’s jail. Atiq immediately falls in love with the beautiful Zunaira and when he confesses his feelings to Musarrat she suggests that he swap the women. Musarrat is dying anyway and she would die happy knowing that Atiq was finally regaining a will to live. Musarrat is executed instead of Zunaira, but when Atiq goes to find Zunaira she has fled. Zunaira’s escape is a fleeting moment of agency, since she has no hope of survival without a male guardian. The novel ends with Atiq madly attempting to lift the burqa off of the women he sees as he searches for Zunaira, provoking a certain murder by the men accompanying them. At the end of the novel, two of the four characters are dead and the other two likely will be soon. Contrasting The Kite Runner, this novel refuses a happy ending and a fantasy of redemption. Oddly, though, this seemingly pessimistic view of the tragedy of Taliban-led Afghanistan is ultimately more critically productive than any of the other books analyzed here. There are three main reasons for this success. First, the novel presents multiple ethical conflicts that are intertwined and complicated. Each character grapples with making difficult decisions in an environment that stifles independent, moral judgment. Second, Khadra makes a point of narrating the moral decay caused by the Taliban, but complicates the evil of the Taliban by drawing a distinction between the regime as a social structure and actual Taliban individuals like Atiq. Hence, while “he never passed for an affable person,” Atiq “wasn’t evil-tempered either.”67 When he confesses to the more traditionally misogynist Mirza Shah that he is agonizing over his wife’s illness, Shah’s solution is to divorce her, but Atiq simply cannot discard the woman who rescued him when he was an injured mujahideen and who has been his companion for more than 20 years.68 What’s more, “[t]he prison world is getting Atiq down [. . .] the more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. [. . .] He is starting to doubt the mullahs’ promises.”69 Just as “the light of” Mohsen’s “conscience has gone out” Atiq, the Talib, retains his.70 By interweaving the ethical dilemmas of characters who occupy different social positions in Taliban Kabul,




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Khadra refuses to allow the reader to fall into easy moral classifications like “good” and “bad” Muslim. Even more importantly (s)he dismantles the idea of the Taliban as a monolithic, source of evil. Unlike Hosseini’s irremediably “bad” Assef, Khadra describes a Talib who refers to “Taliban thugs” and who is having a crisis of faith in the regime.71 Third, the sheer rawness and intimacy of the narrative creates a haunting environment that forces a connection between the reader and the characters that unravels the traditional distance between Western reader and Eastern subject. The key to this intimacy is the characters’ own confused reflections on how they have slowly lost their humanity, a narrative device that serves, ironically, to underscore their humanity. Zunaira tells Atiq: “We’ve already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we’ve forgotten it,” revealing a degree of critical reflection that forces the reader to recognize what she has lost.72 In another example, Atiq confesses to Musarrat that he cannot understand why the regime will not allow Zunaira to live since he has “given them the best years of [his] life, [his], body, [his] soul.”73 The appreciation of such anguish makes it impossible for the reader to picture Afghans as mindless, prehistoric, disposable beings. The distress of the characters is so disturbing that it forces readerly pathos. Moreover, the fact that the characters each face different ethical dilemmas further makes it difficult for the reader to draw facile conclusions, since we watch both Mohsen and Atiq struggle unsuccessfully to find their bearings and reclaim their humanity. Even though this extreme intimacy unravels the “otherness” common in most depictions of Afghanistan post-9/11, such a technique does run the risk of losing sight of the bigger picture. The Swallows of Kabul narrates the humanity of the Afghan people at the expense of presenting a larger macropolitical view of recent events. Although Taliban individuals are presented with greater detail and complexity, the novel still leaves the larger question of how they came to power largely unexplored. And, in contrast to the redemptive closing of The Kite Runner, the tragic ending does little to help readers imagine a brighter future.

Mispronunciations and Misunderstandings In a press briefing in February of 2002 Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld bantered with a reporter on the correct pronunciation of the capital of Afghanistan.74 Rumsfeld favored the “native” pronunciation of Kabul as “cobble” and Secretary of State Colin Powell favored the Europeanized pronunciation “Kabool.” In another venue, Rumsfeld mocked Powell for referring to the citizens of Afghanistan as “Afghanis”



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rather than “Afghans,” since “Afghani” refers to Afghan currency and not to the nation’s inhabitants.75 Nevertheless, lack of agreement over how best to pronounce the capital of a country or refer to its citizens did not deter the U.S. government from bombing it. After 9/11, both the administration and the media continued to use the term “burqa” to refer to the Taliban enforced veil, when in Afghanistan the word is “chaddari,” but that misuse of language did not limit the administration’s repeated reference to the plight of Afghan women as one of the main reasons for their intervention.76 As examined in the introduction of this chapter, these linguistic challenges accompanied an array of myths and misunderstandings about Afghanistan that inhibited public understanding of the events of 9/11 and Operation Enduring Freedom. Filling this void, a series of books about Afghanistan attempted to offer a different view. This chapter has looked at four such examples, surveying the strengths and weaknesses of each text’s literary challenges to mainstream views of Afghans as noncivilized, barely human “others.” Even though these texts have varying success in dismantling Western stereotypes, read comparatively against one another, against the literary traditions from which they emerged, and in contrast to mass media representations, they offer readers a way to critically reflect on the misunderstandings that have dominated public discourse of Afghanistan post-9/11. It is worth remembering Kipling’s Peachey and Carnehan from The Man Who Would Be King, who wanted to read books that would reaffirm their imperial mission and underscore their bravery. They could read, but they were not very educated. It is not only books that sustain imperialist fantasies, but the attitudes of their readers as well. If we want to learn to “read” Afghanistan in a way that does not replicate orientalist, culturalist assumptions, then we will need not only new kinds of stories about the country, but also new practices of reading. Notes 1. Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 253. 2. Marc Kauffman, “Whatever You Think about Afghanistan Is Probably Wrong,” Washington Post, September 23, 2001, B03. 3. Corinne Fowler, Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007). 4. Ibid., 162. 5. Ibid., 186. 6. Ibid., 49. 7. Ben Macintyre, The Man Who Would be King: The First American in Afghanistan (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004), 4.




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8. Rudyard Kipling, “The Young British Soldier,” http://www.everypoet.com/ archive/poetry/Rudyard_Kipling/kipling_the_young_british_soldier.htm, Accessed July 5, 2008. 9. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 10. Ibid., 7. 11. Marc Luttrell, Lone Survivor (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 6, 9, 10, 13. 12. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 18. 13. “War without Illusions” New York Times, September 15, 2001, 22. 14. Fowler, 64. 15. Ross Benson, “The City of the Damned,” Daily Mail, September 19, 2001, 11. 16. In an example of the first practice, Philip Caputo, who had lived in Afghanistan for a month, wrote for the New York Times in early October 2001 that “The mountains soar to 20,000 feet in the east, and endless deserts lie in the west.” (Philip Caputo, “20 Years of Training for War,” New York Times, October 4, 2001, 27). In an example of the second, Ben Macintyre wrote for the London Times that “Bloody war is sewn into the very land of Afghanistan, in the form of innumerable landmines.” (Ben Macintyre, “What Happens in Afghanistan, They Say, Decides the Course of History,” Times, September 15, 2001). 17. Space does not permit a detailed accounting for the legitimacy crisis of Operation Enduring Freedom, but it is worth remembering that the decision to attack Afghanistan represented an unprecedented turn in U.S. military action since a sovereign nation was to be invaded in response to terrorist attacks waged by individuals that were not acting on behalf of that nation. 18. Larry Goodson, “U.S. Troops Must Go In,” New York Times, November 14, 2001, 27. 19. For more on this practice see Kevin J. Ayotte and Mary E. Husain, “Securing Afghan Women: Neocolonialism, Epistemic Violence, and the Rhetoric of the Veil,” NWSA Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 112–133. 20. Kauffman. 21. Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 12. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. Ibid., 363. 26. Ibid. 27. Of course many books that appeared simply reiterated stereotypes. 28. John F. Baker, “Another Afghan Veil,” Publisher’s Weekly October 22, 2001, 12. 29. See Gillian Whitlock “The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan,” Biography 28, no. 1 (2005): 54–76. 30. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin, 2004); Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 31. Ann Jones, Kabul in Winter (New York: Picador, 2007); Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea (New York: Penguin, 2006).



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32. Mortenson and Relin, 4. 33. Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007); Mike Ryan, Battlefield Afghanistan (Kent, UK: Spellmount, 2007); Matthew J. Morgan, A Democracy Is Born: An Insider’s Account of the Struggle against Terrorism in Afghanistan (Westport, CT: Greenwood/Praeger, 2007); Craig Mullaney, The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier’s Education (New York: Penguin, 2009). 34. Rory Stewart, The Places in Between (London: Picador, 2004); Fowler, 147. 35. Stewart, xii. 36. Asne Seierstad, The Bookseller of Kabul, trans. Ingrid Christophersen (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003). 37. Ibid., x. 38. Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner (New York: Riverhead, 2003). 39. Yasmina Khadra, The Swallows of Kabul, trans. John Cullen (New York: Anchor Books, 2004). 40. http://www.rorystewartbooks.com/index.htm. Accessed July 7, 2008. 41. http://www.cappelendamm.no/main/Katalog.aspx?f=9967. Accessed July 7, 2008. 42. Khadra, back cover. 43. Jay Freeman, Rev. of The Places in Between. http://www.booklistonline.com/ default.aspx?page=show_product&pid=1610051. Accessed July 7, 2008. 44. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (New York: Routledge, 1992), 4. 45. Ibid. 46. Stewart, 210. 47. Ibid. 48. Fowler, 218. 49. Stewart, 19. 50. Stewart, 10. 51. Stewart, 30, 138, 260, 269. 52. Seierstad, 37. 53. Ibid., xii. 54. Ibid., xiv; Harper, 2003. 55. Tim Judah, “Afghan Family at War with Itself,” The Observer, Sunday August 31, 2003, http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/travel/0,,1032372,00. html. Accessed July 7, 2008. 56. http://www.khyberwatch.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-2370.html. Accessed July 7, 2008. 57. Latifa, My Forbidden Face (New York: Miramax, 2001); John Follain and Rita Cristofari, Zoya’s Story (New York: Harper, 2003). 58. For more on the novel as bildungsroman see Joseph Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham, 2007), 320–324. 59. Meghan O’Rourke, “The Kite Runner: Do I Really Have to read it?” Slate.com. Monday July 25, 2005. http://www.slate.com/id/2123280. Accessed July 7, 2008. 60. Rachel Sandor “Author Khaled Hosseini on The Kite Runner: The RT Interview,” December 5, 2007, http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/kite_runner/




61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

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news/1690461/2/author_khaled_hosseini_on_the_kite_runner_the_rt_ interview. Accessed July 7, 2008. It is hard to resist pointing out the religious symbolism of this act, one which would resonate for Christians and Muslims, since the story of David and Goliath is in the Quran and in the Bible. Also it is worth noting that Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, was one-eyed. In fact, many Afghans have been mutilated by the decades of war. Sadly, Hosseini turns this tragic violence into a symbol of evil. Assef’s wound may be justified, but surely this should not mean that the wounded citizens of Afghanistan deserve their mutilations as well. Interestingly, Hosseini explores this exact theme in his next novel when one of the main “good” characters has been wounded by a mine. See A Thousand Splendid Suns (New York: Riverhead, 2007). For more on the good Muslim/bad Muslim paradigm see Mamdani. Hosseini, 319. Khadra, 2. Ibid. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 164. Ibid., 170. http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=3849. Accessed July 7, 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/1397406/ Speculation-that-Powell-may-quit- caps-bad-week-for-Bush- cabinet.html. Accessed July 7, 2008. For an explanation of “Chaddari” as the term used in Afghanistan for veil see the Afghan Government’s Development Plan available online at http://www. ands.gov.af/. Accessed July 7, 2008.



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9/11 in the Novel Kristiaan Versluys*

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n an article entitled “Art and Atrocity in a Post-9/11 World” the JewishAmerican author Thane Rosenbaum asks himself: “Is there a proper role for the artist, and specifically the novelist, at this time in our nation’s history? Can we make art in a time of atrocity? Does the imagination have anything to say when it has to compete with the actual horror of collapsing skyscrapers [. . .]?” He himself has a categorical answer to these questions. “As a novelist,” he writes, “I wouldn’t touch the World Trade Center, and the looming tragedy around it, as a centerpiece for a new book [. . .]. I’m not ready to write, or talk, about it yet.” According to him, in the aftermath of September 11, “[s]ilence might be the loudest sound of all.”1 Rosenbaum’s plea for a “collective numbness” as the only proper response to “the horror of what happened”2 has gone fairly unheeded, however. In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., more than 30 novels have come out to date. This substantial body of 9/11 fiction, which is growing by the day, ranges from the absolutely inane to the interesting and probing. Many of the novels deal with the events of 9/11 only tangentially: as a tragic moment that punctuates other, more mainstream (mostly love) interests.3 There is also no shortage of novels, which express raw outrage and revanchist feelings. These novels—often patriotic or Christian-revival novels—sell in large numbers but have little or no literary merit. In their treatment of 9/11, they are characterized * Kristiaan Versluys is Full Professor of American literature and culture at Ghent University and the founding director of the Ghent Urban Studies Team. Versluys was president of the Belgian Luxembourg American Studies Association (1989–1992) and in 2001 was elected as a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium. He is the author of Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (2009).



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by what, in a totally different context, Eric Santner has termed “narrative fetishism.” “Far from providing a symbolic space for the recuperation of anxiety,” Santner writes, “narrative fetishism directly or indirectly offers reassurances that there was no need for anxiety in the first place.”4 The formulaic plots of the narratively fetishized 9/11 novels are always the same. The attack on the homeland is the occasion for a conversion: from a sinful or worldly attitude to a religious and pious one and/or from lukewarm citizenship to flag-waving patriotism. The terrorist attacks, in other words, are shamelessly recuperated for ideological and propaganda purposes. The ultimate aim is to suppress the trauma of 9/11. Tragedy is turned into triumphalism without proper mourning or working-through.5 Finally, there is a small group of novels that succeed in engaging the full range of the imagination. Through formal means they suggest the impact of shock—the immediate shock that causes panic or the slower realization that things have been altered beyond repair. These works testify to the shattering of certainties and the laborious recovery of balance. In a gesture that is familiar to therapists and writers alike, these novels affirm and counteract the impact of trauma. At one level, they register the moment of anamorphosis, the moment the subject loses its foothold in a world of objects, the moment the everyday sense of security and mastery is shattered, objects reveal a malign intention of their own and the human subject—deprived of its superiority vis-à-vis the world outside—is revealed in its utter vulnerability.6 But at another level, the novels also provide a context for what seems to be without context. They contain what seems uncontainable, and reconfigure the symbolic networks that the terrorist attacks destroyed. In transcending jingoistic discourse or media insipidities, the full engagement of the imagination reveals how, at the moment of traumatic impact, the known world dissolves in a flash and all that remains is bafflement and pain. By the same token, the plot is informed by the mental mechanism of recovery and repair. Language is the first healer. Expression counters obsession. Telling the tale is the first step in getting on with life, integrating what happened into a meaningful narrative. In Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, however, no such discursive redemption takes place.7 Of all the 9/11 narratives, Don DeLillo’s Falling Man is the darkest and the starkest. In psychoanalytical terms, it is a portrait of pure melancholia without the possibility of working-through or mourning. Falling Man is the account of an endless re-enactment or acting-out of a traumatic experience that allows for no accommodation or (symbolic) resolution. One of the ways in which the polysemous title reverberates, is that Falling Man has the ambition of being an updated, early twenty-first century version of the fall of man. The (post)modern condition, evoked in the novel, is one of drift. The aspirational culture, the characteristic



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American drive, and can-do mentality have come to a grinding halt. More trenchantly even, humanity, as it is traditionally defined, has vanished. The characters are so thin that their whole existence boils down to mere nomenclature. Personality has disintegrated into a mere semiotic mark, while the great achievements of modernity (romantic love, technologydriven prosperity, the small-group dynamics of happiness) are nullified by angst and mental paralysis. The novel is named after a famous photograph by Richard Drew, which shows a man plunging headfirst down along the shimmering columns of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Illustrating the true horror of the day and resisting heroization, Drew’s photograph appeared once in most American newspapers and then was summarily suppressed, as it ran counter to the instantaneous recuperation of the events by politicians and the media.8 By choosing an image of irredeemable death as the iconic moment that indicates the true place of 9/11 in the cultural repertoire of the nation, DeLillo indicates how his novel provides a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations. The falling man, standing in for the people who had no choice but to submit to their fate, is the symbol of the dark underside of 9/11, its enervating effect that the mainstream media tried to crush. As the critic Frank Rich puts it in a review of the novel: Falling Man “touches the third rail of 9/11 taboos.”9 In thus relentlessly focusing on 9/11 as the symbol of irreclaimable melancholy, Falling Man unfolds as a series of ineffective holding actions against death and despair. If, in the normal course of events, death is feared because it is the negation of life, here life is defined as a state of near-death or a state of barely escaping the condition of death. The characters are minimally alive in that they are numbed and labor under the shadow of an overwhelming sadness, which they cannot throw off. The gamble DeLillo took with this deliberately antiredemptive book is that he tries stylistically and narratively to evoke the sense of attrition and lassitude that characterizes clinical melancholia. To do so, he has gutted his style sentence by sentence, has continuously broken the narrative momentum, has tethered his characters either to their murderous, humanity-denying beliefs (in the case of the 9/11 terrorists) or, more prominently, to their future-denying traumas (in the case of the 9/11 victims). Most reviewers have been unkind to the novel, precisely because its lopsided emphasis on passive submission seems to violate the demands of narrative construction, the dynamics of human psychology, and the reality of post-9/11 New York and America. In his comics series or graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers, Art Spiegelman has opted for a different kind of 9/11 “counter-narrative.” His graphic novel consists of a narrative sequence that does not preclude



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agency and, in the presence of an all-absorbing fixation, does not succumb to unrelieved pessimism. In other words, In the Shadow of No Towers balances collapse and resurgence. The unknowability of the event and the absence of a cognitive or emotional structure that can contain it, rather than standing in the way of testimony, inspire the author’s creativity and political imagination. Spiegelman’s reaction to 9/11 is shaped in part by the fact that he was a direct witness to the terrorist attacks, and that, through hearing and recording the tales of his father, he was the indirect or secondary witness of the Holocaust. It is no wonder, then, that he viewed one event through the conceptual screen of the other. Spiegelman, as the narratorprotagonist of the tale, has a name for his post-9/11 condition. He calls it a “state of alienation” and clinically he diagnoses it as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”10 It would be more accurate still to speak of a syndrome that is doubled or aggravated by personal precedent. In reading 9/11 through the Holocaust, Spiegelman suffers a primary trauma that resuscitates the secondary one. If one sees his well-known Holocaust-narrative Maus11 and In the Shadow of No Towers as episodes in a continuing family saga, the 9/11 narrative illustrates how, at one remove, Spiegelman has been affected by the Holocaust, how it has undermined his self-confidence and made him jumpy and angst-ridden, as well as artistically innovative and politically committed. Also with regard to the stylistic means that are marshalled forth, it is possible to regard In the Shadow of No Towers as a sequel to Maus. The strategic devices Spiegelman has opted for (including the conspicuous introduction of cartoon characters) can easily be seen as an intensification of those used in the earlier narrative. Andreas Huyssen has discussed Maus—a narrative “saturated with modernist techniques of self-reflexivity, self-irony, ruptures in narrative time and highly complex image sequencing and montaging”—as a convincing example of what, drawing on Theodor Adorno, he calls “mimetic approximation.”12 The latter concept emphasizes that traumatic experience is inaccessible to language, yet there are means that witnesses can mobilize so as to avoid the terror of memory, while yet reviving the trauma for themselves and their audience. Similarly, while attempting to master the events of 9/11, Spiegelman makes sure they remain far outside the reach of simplistic comprehension. To express his inexpressible theme, the author grabs all available stylistic means (including the least likely ones) to give voice to a deep, unwaning, and ultimately unrepresentable rupture in his experience of space and time. One major difference between Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers is that the former veers away from object lessons and moral conclusions,



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whereas the 9/11 narrative is to a large extent an attack on the Bush administration, which takes the form of acerbic and at times savage spoofing and satire. Given that Spiegelman’s stance is unambiguously biased and partisan, one might get the impression that his discourse serves a didactic purpose and as such freezes the meaning of 9/11 in a way not altogether different from the one used in the official political propaganda, which is the object of Spiegelman’s scorn. On closer examination, however, it becomes obvious that Spiegelman’s political commitment is part of the working-through of his traumatic obsessions. As it remains closely allied to the originating experience, the political positioning is marked by shock and hence stays clear of self-righteousness and stasis. In the Shadow of No Towers proves that ethical commitment, seasoned by irony and self-doubt, can be staged as a heuristic process that is not dependent on a fixed ego identity or an inflexible ideological vantage point. In addition, it proves that a political awakening can serve as part of the healing process—part of the mourning or the working-through, whereby the victim or witness succeeds in loosening the coils of the traumatic fixation, gets over the psychic wound, and resumes life as a responsible and participating citizen. Also in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the recovery of mental poise after the blow of trauma is the center of the narrative.13 The novel, however, does not only explore the etiology of trauma, detailing its various symptoms. It also relates pain to the impossibility of utterance. The three narrator-protagonists of the novel are faced with an ineffable trauma, an unspeakable truth, which they try to reveal through language. Their task is made difficult by the fact that the particular disasters they are the victims of, are resistant to articulation. Foer has chosen to render his tale in three voices: the voice of Oskar Schell, a 10-year-old precocious boy, who lost his father in the World Trade Center attacks, and the voices of his old and mutually estranged paternal grandparents, Grandpa and Grandma, survivors of the Dresden firebombings in the Second World War. None of these voices is natural or normal. They are cracked and, to a large extent, also crackpot voices. The Schell family is so traumatized by the events of history that conventional utterance is no longer possible. Language is strained to the breaking point. Being forced to its expressive extremes of dense volubility, on the one hand, and ominous silence, on the other, it is barely capable of serving its traditional function as a vehicle of communication between the generations. Grandpa, in particular, is literally struck by aphasia—in itself the symptom of an unbreakable adherence to the traumatic past, to which he reacts with an unproductive withdrawal or “constriction.” His elaborate attempts to break out of his linguistic immurement fail, because, in



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the terms of the psychoanalyst Dori Laub,14 without a listener Grandpa cannot truly constitute himself as a witness. As a result, he remains deprived of the therapeutic potential of testimony. He writes thousands of letters to his son, but he cannot bring himself to send them. His enduring trauma does not come out in utterance or proclamation, but lives covertly in the interstices of his writing, as every description in the letters has the air of a looking-back. In Grandpa’s case, the “writing of the disaster” (the term is Maurice Blanchot’s15) takes the form of a phrasing that is claustrophobic, missing the dimension of a possible future. Even when reporting on the narrated present, Grandpa writes retrospectively. Grandma, just like Grandpa, is a prisoner of the past. The essential ambiguity of trauma is exposed in that for Grandma, too, the past is alldetermining and yet it cannot be articulated. When she writes her autobiography it comes out as reams and reams of blank pages. In the words of Anne Cubilié (from another context), the empty pages refer “to the silence that structures the testimony of so many survivors.”16 Yet, finally, Grandma succeeds in placing trauma within language. While Grandpa’s unsent letters dim into illegibility, she finds an interlocutor in her grandson, Oskar, to whom she addresses a long message. Unlike Grandpa’s, her writing is not intransitive. It is written with a live and loved person in mind and, as such, it adds up, not to mere self-release, but to significant communication. The case of Oskar himself vividly illustrates the problematical link between mental suffering and language. Once one realizes that all the quirkiness of Oskar’s sayings are dodges and evasions, inspired by his simultaneous need to face up to his situation and to repress it, it becomes possible to regard his long quest through the city as an attempt to initiate a dialogue with his dead father. His final act of imaginative recovery sets the stage for the reintegration of the ruptured nuclear family, and, most importantly, it reopens the blocked channels of communication. The very title of Foer’s book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, signals a signature event that language can barely contain—something so extreme and incredible that it defies description. The disruptions in the texture of the text, the strangeness of its tone, and the pyrotechnic visual devices of which it makes use (photographs, blank pages, illegibly dark pages, pages in cipher), serve to underscore the incommunicability of experiences of extremity. At the same time, the narrative fulfils its traditional redemptive function of putting things into perspective. In the quest little Oskar undertakes to come to grips with what happened, he finally succeeds in countering traumatic numbness. Through the act of speaking, he succeeds in making reality fluid again and prevents traumatic shock from rigidifying into a chronic condition.



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The French writer Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel Windows on the World, which became an instant bestseller and won the prestigious Prix Interallié in France and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in England, is a book, which like that of Foer’s, does not shy away from gimmicks and verbal pyrotechnics. But much more than Foer’s novel, it is uncertain of its tone, uncertain of its message. It communicates a definitive reading of 9/11, but this interpretation is cast in a form that defies easy comprehension. In particular, one is at a loss to know whether this novel announces the death of irony or whether it is an enactment of a sort of post-apocalyptic irony. It is partly a conversion story, but partly, too, it spoofs the possibility of conversion. It denounces the whole postmodern mentality, yet it is also a shameless exponent of it. The confusion begins with the genre. The extremely self-conscious writer-narrator “Beigbeder” wavers between registers and styles, and he is undecided about which genre conventions will do justice to his topic. By the use of individualized characters, a specific locale and a meticulously observed chronology, the novel presents itself explicitly as an attempt to render the events of 9/11 in their stark historical materiality. At the same time, the novelist acknowledges that “[s]ince September 11, 2001, reality has not only outstripped fiction, it’s destroying it.”17 Hence, in order to define his rhetorical strategy, Beigbeder invents the label “hyperrealist.”18 It is by writing a “hyperrealist” novel that he intends to circumvent the unrepresentability of the events. Obviously, if 9/11 has destroyed fiction, that is, has changed the parameters within which fiction is normally held to be capable of creating possible worlds and produce the effect of verisimilitude, the rules of the game have to be changed. Not realism, but a newly ad hoc invented novelistic form is called upon to do the job of relating the unrelatable. The construction of such a “hyperrealist” tale involves the spectralization of time and space. 9/11 is featured as an occasion of universal and lasting pain and thus as an event that, transgressing its own time frame, leaves behind ghostly presences and spectral after-imaginings, while also spatially it has ramifications that reach far beyond the few acres of Ground Zero. The text shapes a chronotope, which consists not of the welding of space and time, but the welding of time and nonspace. While the World Trade Center disappeared from the face of the earth and therefore is to be found nowhere anymore (except in the past), by the same token it is now to be found everywhere. 9/11, as an apocalyptic event, has seeped into the collective unconscious and the absent towers are present all over as symptoms of a half-buried trauma. This universalization of 9/11 turns Windows on the World into an international novel and allows Beigbeder to reconstruct the category of



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the transatlantic West. He does this negatively, by othering Islam (sometimes in a relentlessly provocative manner). More positively, the joint Western episteme gains force through “Beigbeder’s” unambiguous americanophilia. Repeatedly, he points out how culturally, historically, and linguistically, the United States and France are linked by an umbilical cord. Moreover and most importantly, the countries of the West on both sides of the Atlantic share the same postmodern condition, which through analogy the novel pinpoints as a condition resembling that of both biblical Babel and Babylon. 9/11, as an “unrelatable” occurrence, involves the disintegration of language, and thus it is staged as a discursive dispersal, a Babel-like linguistic brokenness. At the same time, it is an apocalyptic event in which chronos (mere “passing” or “waiting” time) is turned into kairos (the fullness of time), the shallowness of postmodern irony gives way to a new seriousness, sensual indulgence is replaced by spousal steadfastness, and the brokenness of language is mended. Thus Babylon potentially becomes a New Jerusalem. Apart from the relation between trauma and language, there are a number of other broadly moral and political questions that have exercised the imagination of novelists in connection with the events of 9/11: how to preserve one’s freedom of the imagination when faced with those who do not hesitate to use horrendous violence to abrogate that freedom and replace openness of thinking by prescription and religious dictate? How to practice the essential virtues of the West vis-à-vis those who hate the West and consider its regime too liberal and too lax? More pressingly even, does the writer’s duty to view a situation in its full complexity also entail the obligation to encompass the viewpoint of the terrorist? How, without condoning violence, yet to explore its roots and, without for a moment implying moral equivalency, yet to explain the grounds of the terrorist’s existence? As a legal concept, terrorism is necessarily boxed in into the dialectic of crime and punishment. Since literature creates possible worlds (and therefore is free from the strictures of the real world), there is room in novels for a more varied gamut of reactions besides (though not excluding) outright indignation. In trying to meet the Other, including the ultimate Other, the terrorist—the person whose mindset is completely “discordant with our Western ideals and humanistic values of morality and compassion,” to quote the psychologist Ruth Stein19—authors explore the tension between the terrorist as a legal concept and the terrorist as a linguistic, imaginative construct. This effort to escape binary thinking is the opposite of both the terrorist mindset (with its notions of jihadistic violence) and the counterterrorist reaction (with its notions of justified revenge).



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The short story “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” by the British writer Martin Amis illustrates the inextricable implication of the self with the Other. Even this most negative portrait of the terrorist bears the marks of ineluctable reciprocity and human interdependence. More emphatically, the call of the Other is also at the center of Michael Cunningham’s long short story “The Children’s Crusade,” a narrative in which the exigencies of justice are pitted against the demands of charity and in which the viability of Walt Whitman’s utopian message is tested in the post-9/11 present. John Updike’s, however, is the most elaborate attempt to understand the mind of a terrorist. He touches upon the subject in his short story, entitled “Varieties of Religious Experience,” and explores it in depth in Terrorist, a novel which pivots around the struggle in a young American Muslim’s soul between the directives of a radicalized and death-driven Islam, on the one hand, and the promptings of instinct and the joy-giving evidence of the senses, on the other.20 Notes This chapter is a summary of my book-length study Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), on which it draws heavily both in content and phrasing. 1. Thane Rosenbaum, “Art and Atrocity in a Post-9/11 World,” in Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World, ed. Alan L. Berger and Gloria L. Cronin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 130, 135, 132. 2. Ibid., 132. 3. Examples are Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (New York: HarperCollins, 2006); Nick McDonell, The Third Brother (New York: Grove Press, 2005); Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005); Jay McInerney, The Good Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children (New York: Knopf, 2006); Joseph O’Neill, Netherland (New York: Pantheon, 2008); Reynolds Price, The Good Priest’s Son (New York: Scribner, 2005); Lynne Sharon Schwartz, The Writing on the Wall (New York: Counterpoint, 2005); Anita Shreve, A Wedding in December (New York: Little, Brown, 2005). 4. Eric L. Santner, “History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 147. 5. Examples are Charlotte Vale Allen, Sudden Moves (Don Mills, ON: Mira Books, 2004); Rick Amburgey, United We Stand (Baltimore, MD: PublishAmerica, 2003); Karen Kingsbury, One Tuesday Morning (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2003); and Karen Kingsbury with Gary Smalley, Remember (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 2003).



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6. Louis Sass, “Lacan and 9/11,” Raritan 23, no. 1 (2003): 162–166. 7. Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2007). 8. Tom Junod, “The Falling Man,” Esquire, September 2003, http://www. esquire.com/features/ESQ0903-SEP_FALLINGMAN (accessed January 8, 2008). 9. Frank Rich, “The Clear Blue Sky,” New York Times, May 27, 2007, http://www. nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/Rich-t.html (accessed January 8, 2008). 10. Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 7, 2. 11. Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1996; rpt., London: Penguin Books, 2003). 12. Andreas Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno,” New German Critique 81 (2000): 70, 72. 13. Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). 14. Soshanna Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57. 15. Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 16. Anne Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 10. 17. Frédéric Beigbeder, Windows on the World: A Novel, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Fourth Estate, 2004), 8. 18. Ibid., 8. 19. Ruth Stein, “Evil as Love and as Liberation,” Psychoanalytical Dialogues 12, no. 3 (2002): 396. 20. Martin Amis, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta,” New Yorker, April 24, 2006, 152–163; Michael Cunningham, “The Children’s Crusade,” in Specimen Days: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 95–196; John Updike, “Varieties of Religious Experience: A Short Story,” The Atlantic, November 2002, 93–104; John Updike, Terrorist (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006).



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Poetry, a New Voice for Dissent Marguerite G. Bouvard*

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s Brazilian social theorist Gilberto Freire pointed out, power begins with the formulation of our own perceptions of reality. I would add that it increases and becomes effective when we voice those perceptions using our own language. Governments often craft it to support the most dreadful policies. “National Security” and “the War on Terror” are slogans that evoke powerful emotional responses. Policies in pursuit of these goals have steadily eroded civil rights in the United States, including the right to privacy. We have learned that our government installed special equipment at AT&T headquarters that scans all of our e-mails.1 We no longer subscribe to the Geneva Convention on Human Rights when it comes to the treatment of prisoners, and even American citizens can be classified as “enemy combatants.”2 But the worst of these policies has been the masking of the horrors of the war in Iraq by a supine press and by government officials charging anyone who happens to question them as “unpatriotic.” During the Vietnam War, television programs and newspapers were filled with the devastation of that conflict. The New York Times even printed secret documents related to the war leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. Although the government tried to stop the publication of what became known as the Pentagon Papers, the Supreme Court ruled on behalf of the newspaper, something we could hardly expect in this period of secrecy. * Marguerite G. Bouvard, a political scientist and poet, is Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and author of (17)15 books, including several on human rights.



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Since we first invaded Iraq in search of WMD and launched the fight against terrorism (two different events that the president and a supine press was only too happy to confuse), outlets for entering the political discourse have gradually disappeared. Recently I was interviewed at WGBH studios in Boston for a BBC program on the 30th anniversary of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Afterward, I spent much time speaking with the young woman who conducted the interview, learning that practically every third word concerning politics on public radio programs had to be checked with the government, and massive funding cuts have had a severe effect on staffing and programming for all of public broadcasting. A PBS program by Bill Moyers, “Buying the War,” traced the rush to unquestioningly support the president in the emotional heat of post-9/11 and our invasion of Iraq. Moyer’s investigations reveal how the few reporters who hunted down the real facts of the absence of biological weapons and WMDs or the absence of Saddam Hussein’s ties to al Qaeda were not given space in the most respected newspapers such as the New York Times or the Washington Post or their articles were reduced to a small size and relegated to the back pages. The lack of media coverage of the Iraq war, its dreadful toll on both our soldiers and on the Iraqi population, includes the prohibition of photographing coffins returning with our soldiers and the fact that reporters are “embedded” with army units and therefore must follow the route laid out for them. Though such reporters have access to the troops, soldiers who speak out too freely can be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. There is also a political climate that restricts press images that are too unsettling. When the New York Times published a photo of a mortally wounded soldier in January 2007, the paper was accused of showing disrespect for the troops.3 Newspapers that show soldiers in a bad light run the risk of being unpatriotic, or “Against the troops.” Only recently have some newspapers covered the plight of our soldiers who have returned physically and mentally disabled and who have been left untreated. In fact an article by Russell Baker in the New York Review of Books points out how over the years, the role of newspapers in our country has changed from providing news to the public to one of ensuring profits to shareholders as buy outs of prominent newspapers around the country have proliferated, causing a rift between editors and owners. He also refers to the White House practice of creating a “script,” that is, making certain that newspapers would reveal its views rather than the reality of the war. Journalists who challenged this practice are pilloried by the conservative right’s vast network of radio talk shows.4 In fact, as an article in an August 25, 2007, edition in the New York Times points out even the president’s encounters with ordinary citizens



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are scripted, most especially when it comes to the very rare antiwar rallies. The article revealed the president actually has a manual on how to manage these and that he uses roaming squads to use their own signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the press platform. Their responses are choruses of USA! USA! These practices surfaced because of a First Amendment lawsuit involving two people who refused to cover up the message, “Regime change begins at home,” on their T-shirts at a Fourth of July presidential event. One of the protestors wearing the T-shirt was handcuffed and taken to jail. To counter this cowed opposition, prominent poets and people of all walks of life—most especially families of soldiers posted in Iraq—have been writing and publishing poetry expressing the reality of the war and its impact on the lives of ordinary people. In my long study of human rights, I have discovered that it is impossible to silence a people. There are always ways to find spaces outside a truncated public discourse. Poetry breaks the silence around human rights abuses, injustice, and suffering. It creates an arena for truth and criticism, helping us to see reality in a new light and in a very intimate way. There is a tradition of poets taking on this role in Russia, Turkey, and Eastern European and Middle Eastern societies. In those countries, poets are revered and their work is widely known. This is not an American tradition, nor has it been a necessity in the United States until the present. Although poets from oppressed minorities such as Langston Hughes and Rita Dove have gained a powerful voice in the public arena, we have not turned to poets before because we have had many outlets for opposition; the media, the streets, the halls of Congress, and the courts. We tend to see poetry as an elitist and rarified expression. However that has changed drastically since the Iraq war with new Web sites where families of our soldiers can express their anguish and where dissenting poets can express their outrage over the carnage. Two of these that are widely read are The New Verse News [http://www.newversenews.org], nominated for best political blog, and Raving Dove [http://www.ravingdove.org]. What has happened has been a “democratization of poetry”—a way for the average citizen to express his or her feelings against our incursion into Iraq. Recently New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof organized two national poetry contests on the topic of the war. These were published in June and are available in his blog On the Ground [http://kristof.blogs. nytimes.com/]. He included in his column poems by a fourth grader and the mother of a soldier, along with more popular poets. A moving example of the “democratization of poetry,” is what I would call the poetry of witness, a group of poems written by Noah Pierce and



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published in the Redwood Coast Review.5 Noah enlisted in the army in 2002. He turned 19 on his first tour in Iraq and 21 during his second. On July 26, 2007, at the age of 23, haunted by what he had done and seen, he took his own life. Like so many soldiers, he was discouraged by the military from seeking therapy. But he did write a series of heart-wrenching poems about his experiences in Iraq, two of which follow and are a testament to his life and his humanity. They are also a testament to the number of young men who return from Iraq with PTSD. Statistics of soldiers’ suicides in Iraq are very high, and the administration systematically concealed the numbers, burying them on official casualty lists in a category, “accidental non combat deaths” or simply lying to the families of the dead soldiers. I did not have to go far to learn about the sufferings of the young men who return from Iraq. The son of a friend, Mathew, works with a man who recently completed a tour of duty in Iraq. “He medicates himself and drinks a lot,” Mathew told me. “Bad Planning” I sit on the Bradley turret reading a book My crew fast asleep Bush said all major combat was over I was in Baghdad and would have agreed I vaguely remember the gunshots I do remember very clearly how the bullets Felt as They just passed my head First drive-by experience, got the shooter Scared, just let the other guy get away My crew never knew Next thing I know we have to go to Fallujah Now I know Bush didn’t know What he was talking about The major combat was just beginning. “Still at War” Got home almost a year and a half ago We were so happy That beer never tasted so good Iraq was the farthest thing from my mind That was the best week of my life It crept up slowly First just while sleeping More real and Scary than when it happened After, it’s on the mind awake



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Two women poets of great prominence who have become a voice for humanity in this conflict: Lucille Clifton and Naomi Shihab Nye, as well as a number of highly published poets who do not have national reputations but powerful presences. Clifton, an African American poet, is the author of 11 books of poetry, as well as 19 children’s books. She has received a number of awards, including an Emmy, the National Book Award for Poetry, and numerous prestigious fellowships. Her books of poetry were finalists for the National Book Award and for the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. National Public Radio aired Clifton reading her sequence “(s)September song: a poem in 7 days” after 9/11. In one of these moving poems, she asks, 4 friday 9/14/01 some of us know we have never felt safe all of us americans weeping as some of us have wept before is it treason to remember what have we done to deserve such villainy nothing we reassure ourselves nothing

Throughout her book entitled Mercy6 that included these poems she reminds us: 2 wednesday 9/12/01 this is not the time i think to note the terrorist inside who threw the brick into the mosque this is not the time to note the ones who cursed Gods other name



Never 10 minutes go by without being Reminded Been home a year and a half physically Mentally I will never be home.


the ones who threatened they would fill the streets with arab children’s blood and this is not the time i think to ask who is allowed to be american America all of us gathered under one flag praying together safely warmed by the single love of the many tongued God

Her message throughout this extraordinary book is the oneness of humanity, the futility of hatred, and the need to recognize and honor all religions and races. She also cautions us against arrogance and vengeance. And in another poem: 1 tuesday 9/11/01 thunder and lightening and our world is another place no day will ever be the same no blood untouched they know this storm in otherwheres israel ireland palestine but God has blessed America we sing and God has blessed America to learn that no one is exempt the world is one all fear is one all life all death all one

Clifton’s gifts lie in her ability to render complex ideas and profound insights with great simplicity of language. She avoids syntax and punctuation thus making her words even more alive. Her poems are sparse, but accessible. They appeal to the heart and soul, urging us toward compassion and acceptance of the many races and cultures that are not only a mark, but a blessing of our humanity. Naomi Shihab Nye is yet another poet whose book of poetry, You and Yours,7 won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2005 and includes an important antiwar section. She is the author of several books of poetry and has edited seven anthologies of poetry for young readers. Her novel for teens, Habibi, won six best-book awards. A visiting writer for many



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years all over the world, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Lannan Foundation Fellow, and a Library of Congress Wittter Bynner Fellow. Nye has taken the president’s words as starting points for her powerful poems, and reminds us again and again in her book of our arrogance and our curt dismissal of the Iraqi people affected by this war. Her second poem is a response to President Bush’s statement to Bob Woodward, “I consulted my God when I entered this war.”8 “He Said EYE-RACK” Relative to our plans for your country we will blast your tree, crush your cart, and stun your grocery. Amen sisters and brothers, give us your sesame legs, your satchels, your skies. Freedom will feel good to you too. Please acknowledge our higher purpose. No, we did not see your bed of parsley. On St. Patrick’s Day, 2003, President Bush wore a blue tie. Blinking hard, he said, “We are not dealing with peaceful men.” He said, “reckless aggression.” He said, “the danger is clear.” Your patio was not visible in his frame. Your comforter stuffed with wool. from a sheep you knew. He (said), We are against the lawless men who rule your country, not you.” Tell that to the mother, the sister, the bride, the proud boy, the peanut-seller, the librarian careful with her shelves. The teacher, the spinner, the sweeper, the invisible village, the thousands of people with laundry and bread, the ants tunneling through the dirt. “The Light that Shines on Us Now” This strange beam of being right, smug spotlight. What else could we have done? asks a little one. What else? Three girls with book bags fleeing tanks.





Now that we are so bold, now that we pretend God likes some kinds of killing, how will we deserve the light of candles, soft beam of a small lamp falling across any safe bed? Orphan boy in a striped shirt trapped between two glum uncles. He carries his mother’s smooth fragrance and father’s solid voice. They were not countries, they were continents.

Again and again Nye takes the slogans pronounced by members of the military and by the president and reveals their hollowness. The following selection of “Dictionary in the Dark” illustrates this point. (The first five lines have been omitted with the permission of the poet.) “Dictionary in the Dark” “The appropriate time to launch the bombers” pierced the A section with artillery as “awe” huddled in a corner clutching its small chest. Someone else repeated, “in harm’s way,” strangely popular lately, and “weapons of mass destruction” felt gravely confused about their identity. “Friendly” gasped. Fierce and terminal. It had never agreed to sit beside fire, never.

This fine poet uses language like a boomerang, hurling it back at those who try to deceive us and reminding us of the gravity of our actions. Like Lucille Clifton, she reminds us that people caught in warfare are not abstractions. They are like us, going to the market, taking our children to school, celebrating holidays. As such she portrays the slogans that assail us on a daily basis for what they are—masks hiding the everydayness of tragedy the Iraqi people suffer and whom we claimed to “liberate.” The poet Barbara Crooker distinguishes between a true love of one’s country to a manufactured vision of patriotism that has bombarded us since the beginning of the war. Her poetry books have won numerous awards, and Garrison Keillor read 11 of her poems on the Writer’s



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flying from my doorpost or mailbox or car aerial. No thin strips of citron fluttering with every breath of the breeze to proclaim a slick cliché of patriotism to the neighbors, the mailman, the passers-by. No to cheap oil, no to the hunger of generals, undecorated, unwarred for so long. No to madmen crying in the desert with their wild dreams of power, the quick nuclear fix. No to the knee jerk of love it or leave it, my country right or wrong, those old slogans ready for unfurling. No red white and blue blooded two fisted breast-beating. No children’s blood in the sand.

One of the most unfortunate results of 9/11 has been ethnic profiling and the Justice Department’s preventive detention of thousands of young men of Arab and Muslim descent living in the United States, and its enactment of a new regulation extending the time they could be held before being charged or released. In his book Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror,9 Cole reminds us that we gave up the constitutional prohibition of preventive detention for people whose religion, ethnicity, or appearance remind us of the 9/11 hijackers. Another example of how this profiling has permeated our society occurred in November 2006 when a passenger noticed some Muslim men praying before they boarded a plane. She complained and the Muslims were removed from the flight.10 Here again, it is the voices of our poets that remind us of our common humanity. Miriam Sagan, author of more than 21 books, including 12 books of poetry, and teacher of Creative Writing also wrote about our commonality in excerpts from her poem published in the book Just Add the Moon. “Flirting with Disaster” I stood by the side of the highway holding an enlarged photograph A beautiful Iraqi girl looked out dark eyed beneath her headscarf . . . The government official claimed—it is not many men looting many vases But one man looting one vase over and over I once slit page after page with a knife of the unexpurgated “Thousand And One Nights” That was a happy time in the cabin among the pine trees . . .



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Naomi Shihad Nye has written a touching prose poem about the possibility of friendship between Muslims and mainstream Americans. That it made the round on the Internet is a testament to our hunger for community. Naomi Shihab Nye Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. “Help,” said the Flight Service Person. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.” I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. “Shu dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “You’re fine, you’ll get there, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.” We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie. And then



Plagues change from generation to generation but remain plagues. Every desert must have its goddess of water My name can be written in Greek, Spanish, Hebrew, Arabic I tell myself to have hope, the pear tree is blooming— Mary, Maria, Miriam, Maryam.

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the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. We do not hear political leaders speaking of the pain, suffering, and injustice of the war in Iraq, of its terrible toll on all of the people involved in this conflict. For Americans, the everyday lives of the Iraqi people have become statistics of the hundreds of thousands of fatalities. Not only do Iraqi’s routinely lose family members in the fighting, but also given the strife between Shiite and Sunni that the war has opened, people have had to flee their neighborhoods in search of safety. Added to the stream of two million Iraqi refugees who have taken shelter in Syria, Sweden, and Jordan, are the same number what I would call internal exile. This prompted my poem about the supposed success of the “Surge” our president has touted and that (is in my new book) of poems, The Unpredictability of Light that includes a whole section on issues around our invasion of Iraq. Nor do we hear about the destruction of a culture the war had wrought. The great French political philosopher, Raymond Aron, has written in his groundbreaking book Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations,11 that there are two forms of death, biological and also the death of a culture. When we first invaded Iraq, the museums and the National Library containing centuries of archives, rare books, maps, and photographs were looted, the library losing from 60 to 95 percent of its collections. Dr. Saad Eskander, the head of the National Library and Archives in Baghdad has carried on his own four-year battle to preserve his country’s cultural heritage. In his appearance at Harvard University and Simmons College on November 7, 2007, he spoke of struggling to keep his ground against the pressure of both occupation forces and seeking to bridge the ethnic divide in his country heightened by the war. He has documented the bombing and murder of his colleagues and their families on the British Library Web site. “We Are Making Progress” Suddenly the power goes out in the very last art gallery in Iraq.





The temperature rises to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. There will be no exhibit today. Just a few artists have gathered, those who have not fled. Noori al-Rawi12 cries out I haven’t picked up a paintbrush in two years. I want to burn my art history archives, rip my heart out. Hasan, the self-proclaimed curator of what remains, is one of the last to believe in tomorrow. There are no more hallowed spaces; golden domes where hearts once soared are shattered, neighborhoods and villages are shuffled like cards, a whole country in exile within its own borders. Here even the clouds bleed.13

In 2005, Sharon Olds, one of America’s most widely read and critically acclaimed poets, declined to read and speak at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C. She wrote a letter of regret to First Lady Laura Bush, which The Nation printed in full, along with some responses from readers.14 Her letter spoke of her strong feelings against the war and confirmed that poetry is a light that can never be dimmed. The space for morality and humanity today has been taken by our renowned poets and by ordinary people who have the courage to speak truth to power. As Avishai Margalit discusses at great length in The Ethics of Memory,15 a moral witness acts with a sense of hope that there is or will be a moral community for which his or her testimony matters. Notes 1. “For Your Eyes Only?” PBS NOW, Feb 16, 2007, available at http://www.pbs. org/now/shows/307/index.html. 2. Scott Horton, “The ‘Enemy Combatant’ Fraud,” Harpers, June 2007. 3. Michael Massing, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 2007. 4. Russell Baker, “When the Press Fails: Political Power and the New Media from Iraq to Katrina,” by W. Lance Bennett, Regisa G. Lawrence, and Steven



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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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Livingston, and “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media” by Neil Henry. New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007. Stephen Kessler, Redcoast Review 9, no. 4 (Fall 2007). Clifton, Lucille. Mercy (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2004). Naomi Shihab Nye, You and Yours (Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2005). Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004). David Cole and Julies Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (New York: New Press, 2007). “Six Muslims Removed from Plan Claim discrimination, Call for Boycott,” Chicago Tribune, November 22, 2006. Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1966). Mr. Rawi, one of the pioneers of Iraqi modern art, is also a curator and art scholar who founded four art museums in Baghdad. Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, The Unpredictability of Light (Cincinnati, OH: Word Press, 2009). Sharon Olds, “Open Letter to Laura Bush,” The Nation, October 10, 2005. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).







“all language bankrupt”: On the Poetics of Solidarity Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman*

Who’s the terrorist? I’m the terrorist?! How am I the terrorist when you’ve taken my land? Who’s the terrorist?! You’re the terrorist! You’ve taken everything I own while I’m living in my homeland You’re killing us like you’ve killed our ancestors You want me to go to the law? What for? You’re the witness, lawyer, and the judge If you’re my judge, I’d be sentenced to death You want us to be the minority? To end up the majority in the cemetery? In your dreams! You’re a democracy? Actually it’s more like the Nazis! —DAM, “Meen Erhabe”

O

n July 1, 2008, Nelson Mandela and members of the African National Congress (ANC) were removed from the U.S. terrorist watch list on the eve of his 90th birthday and some 14 years after the fall of the apartheid regime.1 The ANC was first classified as a terrorist organization by the United States in 1986 as a way to punish its resistance movement dedicated to achieving equality and liberation. Likewise, the * Marcy Jane-Knopf Newman is Associate Professor of English at An Najah National University, Nablus, Palestine, and author of Beyond Slash, Burn, and Poison.



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Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and its leader Yasir ’Arafat were awarded with the same dubious distinction on the U.S. terrorist watch list; ’Arafat was removed from the list only after he entered into negotiations with the state of Israel in 1988 and after ’Arafat explicitly renounced terrorism and recognized the state of Israel.2 Of course, as the axiom goes, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Mona Younis describes the inequity between liberation movements using armed resistance, as per their right under international law, and states using terrorism to quell indigenous uprisings: terrorism is used to demonstrate to supporters that something is being done on their behalf. This applies equally to the state terrorism carried out by South Africa and Israel, which, as noted, in Israel’s case had caused thirty times as many Palestinian civilian deaths as PLO violence was responsible for among Israeli civilians. Although such acts were by no means the rule in Palestinian resistance.3

Terrorism as defined by South Africa under its apartheid regime, by the United States, or by the state of Israel is most often a word use to criminalize and subjugate an occupied or colonized population.4 The epigraph to this chapter makes this point in provocative terms. The Palestinian rap group DAM, based in Lydd inside historical 1948 Palestine (what is now designated as the state of Israel), created this song in September 2000 in response to the beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada. DAM, which launched Palestinian hip hop, helped to create a movement and an anthem with this song in ways that traversed borders that normally keep Palestinians separated in their Israeli-enforced exile. While the song’s powerful chorus reverse the terminology to illustrate who is actually terrorizing whom, the line comparing Israeli state terrorism to Nazism is especially provocative, but it is equally instructive.5 For while the tactics that Israeli state terrorism resorts to may differ from that of Nazism, the end result remains the same: ethnic cleansing, exile, imprisonment, ghettoization. What DAM highlights in this song is the tragic irony that those who resist annihilation are criminalized for their struggle whether it is through arms or music. Palestinians, since September 11, in particular, have experienced increased state terrorism at the hands of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) as well as armed illegal colonists in the West Bank, which has been sanctioned by the United States and European Union in their call to arms otherwise known as “the war on terror.” The state of Israel capitalized on this event with renewed vigor by through the discourse of terrorism as a way to further demonize and repress an entire population through



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various modes of collective punishment. Many of these battles have an impact on the Palestinian families whose loved ones are extra-juridically assassinated, massacred, kidnapped, and imprisoned without charge or trial, whose homes are demolished, whose economy is under siege. But there is also a rhetorical battle waging on the international stage. This conflict is waged in the fight over not only who has the power to define what constitutes terrorism, but also what are the limits of analogizing historical or political parallel contexts in an attempt to highlight the struggle for Palestinian liberation. In the United States one artistic voice stands out in performing this cultural work that links Palestinian oppression and resistance to other parallel contexts. Suheir Hammad’s poetics, deeply influenced by multiethnic, Brooklyn-based hip-hop culture, offer her interlocutors various ways of understanding Palestinians through allusions to comparable political scenarios. Although her archive of poetry reveals a rich body of such analogies, this chapter focuses on two particular themes in an effort to consider some of the more menacing global manifestations of the “war on terror”: the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, and Hurricane Katrina. In crucial ways Hammad’s poetry instructs readers how to understanding these links not merely by rendering Palestinians visible, but also by highlighting the ironies involved when the state distorts language to justify its rhetorical and political violence and to lend poetic and political solidarity to those who suffer a similar fate at the hands of the state. In the aftermath of 9/11 the world’s focus shifted away from Durban, South Africa, and the WCAR. One week earlier, in the spotlight of the world stage then Secretary of State Colin Powell informed the media that Today I have instructed our representatives at the World Conference Against Racism to return home. I have taken this decision with regret, because of the importance of the international fight against racism, and the contribution that the conference could have made to it. But, following discussions today by our team in Durban and others who are working for a successful conference, I am not convinced that will be possible. I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations of hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of “Zionism equals racism;” or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world—Israel—for censure and abuse.6

This was not the first time that the U.S. government suggested that it was opposed to the ideas under discussion at the WCAR. Two months earlier the U.S. State Department indicated that it was not only resistant



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to a serious discussion of Israel’s apartheid regime but also to a debate about reparations made to people or organizations in the African diaspora for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In another communiqué from Powell’s office, his assistant informs us that Powell “stressed to the [UN] High Commissioner Mary Robinson . . . that he is anxious to see strong U.S. participation in the conference but that some serious work needed to be done to eliminate such issues as the ‘Zionism is racism’ proposition or getting into slavery and compensation and things of that nature which would detract from the purpose of the conference.”7 It is perhaps expected, though, ironic that a conference fundamentally about racism and related hatreds such as xenophobia and intolerance would be shunned by one of the states that benefited—and indeed continues to benefit— from the effects of slavery.8 What is striking for my purposes is the link Powell makes between silencing discussion of Israel’s Zionist practices as a form of racism and censoring discussions about reparations for slavery that would affect people of African descent. On some important level it suggests an historical analogy between the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli racism and the suffering of African peoples at the hands of European racism—as well as the deeply provocative nature of both colonial histories.9 Neglecting to face up to these parallel histories threatened the United States, even if the threat was merely rhetorical. In contradistinction, issues affecting African Americans and Palestinians have seemingly always been intertwined for Suheir Hammad. At the age of 14, when she watched the first intifada on the nightly news, accompanying these images were the sounds of groups like Public Enemy whose lyrics of resistance to police brutality and racism informed her understanding—as well as DAM’s—of oppression in a transnational framework.10 Lyrics from songs such as “Party for Your Right to Fight” were instructive for Hammad and it is not surprising that she gravitated toward rap artists like Chuck D’s Public Enemy who famously commented in 1988 that rap music is “the Black CNN.”11 Rap music became a way for her to see the connections across marginalized communities, something that CNN could never achieve and became a formative part of her identity construction as she explains: Chuck D’s thick voice mouthing the condition of oppressed peoples in neighborhoods similar to my own, the images of young Palestinian kids throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers helped me to understand my place in the world, my place in America, and my place in myself. I was of more than one place.12

Indeed, Hammad is of multiple places. The daughter of Palestinian refugees from Lydd and Ramle, she was born in Jebel Hussein refugee camp



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in Amman, Jordan. She arrived in Brooklyn, New York at the age of five in 1979 on the heels of the Iranian revolution as well as the birth of rap music, which excited her as a new form of storytelling. Hammad’s poetic sensibility grew out of her love of music and poetry. Although she drew much of her inspiration from the emerging rap music scene, from her father’s love of Abdel-Halem Hafez albums she understood that The English language is dry and deficient in the words of love, pride, hope, and spirit (that’s why Abdel-Halem sang in Arabic). There are just too many words for hate, poverty, hunger, and fear in English. Those are the words that wrap themselves around our tongues and squeeze the story out of them.13

Still, Hammad found the inspiration and the rhythm of her poetics not only in rap music, but also in the parallel struggles of African Americans she witnessed on the television evening news. Just as she watched the intifada from afar, she witnessed the brutal violence and criminalization of Black youth in the United States. As with music, Hammad was schooled in the poetics of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and African American poet June Jordan, whose poem “Moving towards Home” marked a transformative moment for her. The closing lines of Jordan’s poem read: I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian14

These three simple lines offered Hammad the power and possibility of engaging with difference across cultural barriers in a way that embodies political solidarity. The poem itself offered a critique of a New York Times article on the joint Lebanese Kata’eb and Israeli massacre of Palestinians living in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in 1982.15 Jordan uses an anaphora in the poem insisting “I do not wish to speak” about the daily brutalities at the hands of Israeli and Kata’eb terrorism, all the while writing the unspeakable horror of massacre until she shifts to images that she says “I need to speak” about spaces, figured in the poem as domestic spaces, which are safe and which one can call home. Home, in particular, signifies not the refugee camp in Beirut, but rather home as a symbol for Palestinian refugees’ right of return under United Nations Resolution 194.16 This poem enabled Hammad to see that the connections she made between these various struggles was voiced by one of the most prominent poets of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement. Jordan’s vision




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led Hammad to title her return the gesture by entitling her first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black. Hammad’s political coming of age merged with her musical and poetic sensibilities that grounded her writing in the spoken word poetry movement in the early 1990s when she began performing before live audiences in New York City. But in the wake of 9/11 Hammad’s poetry was catapulted on the national stage with her poem “first writing since.” The poem responded directly to the hijackings and the consequences of people affected by it in various ways. The poem was initially circulated on the Internet through e-mails and on Web sites and later on HBO television’s Def Jam Poetry.17 In the first episode of the first season, she read a shortened version of the poem for a diverse live and television viewing audience. In it she addresses the label of terrorist in some of the same ways as DAM, but Hammad’s poem is grounded in a localized American context as the fifth section of the poem makes clear: one more person ask me if i knew the hijackers. one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in. one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. one more person assume they know me, or that i represent a people. or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a flag and words on a page. we did not vilify all white men when mcveigh bombed oklahoma. america did not give out his family’s address or where he went to church. or blame the bible or pat robertson. and when the networks air footage of palestinians dancing in the street, there is no apology that hungry children are bribed with sweets that turn their teeth brown. that correspondents edit images. that archives are there to facilitate lazy and inaccurate journalism. and why when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk? if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip.18

The challenge to her audience here—both reading and viewing—is not only to get them to question the media images and rhetoric circulating in relation to 9/11, but also to do it in a wider context. The racist demonization of a population based on their identity—here Arab or Muslim and often specifically Palestinian—is made lucid through her allusion to the Oklahoma City bombings, which never led to any sort of singling out or



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conflation of white, Christian men in the way that Arabs, Muslims, and always African Americans are targeted by the state.19 Likewise, the long history of white-on-black violence by terrorist militias like the Ku Klux Klan figure here both as a way to empathize with her interlocutors and as a way to analogize with images of Palestinian children. In this way we see Hammad’s images as viewing the world macroscopically. Woven among these stanzas, then, are images that link communities vilified and scapegoated even as they suffer at the hands of state and militia inflicted violence. Moreover, these metaphors offer a reversal of the dominant discourse in the U.S. media about just who is terrorizing whom. The images in “first writing since” that reveal the heightened racial profiling affecting those who look Arab or Muslim is certainly an experience that helps people of color connect to Hammad’s powerful use of allusions. The way she exhibits this through her poems is wide ranging as can be seen in “open poem to those who would rather we not read . . . or breath [sic].” As readers we are forced to bear witness with her to a history of slavery and genocide as well as modern-day manifestations of political repression. It opens with rich allusions to the past evidenced in the present: fascism is in fashion but we be style dressed in sweat danced off taino and arawak bodies we children of children exiled from homelands descendants of immigrants denied jobs and toilets carry continents in our eyes survivors of the middle passage we stand and demand recognition of our humanity20

The blend of images in this stanza reveals not only the history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, but also ethnically cleansed Arawak people of Antilles and the Bahamas who were forcibly removed from their land by the Caribs and later Spanish colonists; their language, Taino, now extinct, and the tribe removed to Guiana. Through the pauses in her lines she demands our attention to these survivors while alluding to some form of recognition, which can be read not only as a rhetorical acknowledgment, but also as a demand for reparations. She connects these historical references to more recent ones of marginalized immigrants in the United States, many of whom are political, environmental, and economic refugees and many of whom are exiled in the United States as a result of U.S. aggressions abroad.




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in a state of police cops act as pigs treat men as dogs mothers as whores the bold youth of a nation hungry and cold an entire nation of youth behind bars grown old the mace and blood did not blind we witness and demand a return to humanity we braid resistance through our hair pierce justice through our eyes tattoo freedom onto our breasts21

The constellation of images in this stanza describe the state of affairs for refugees and immigrants alike under state scrutiny that criminalizes people of color and the working poor, particularly those who have fled as a result of U.S. foreign policy and economic practices abroad. The image of the first stanza of the “Middle Passage,” in particular, is directly tied to the image of imprisonment as a modern form of slavery targeting people of color in the United States. In this context, the repetition of the demand for humanity suggests the ways in which the subjects of her poems are always already dehumanized. She follows this stanza with one that is replete with images of resistance, justice, and freedom often written or tattooed on the body as connected to the very desires and objectives that lead to the criminalization of youth of color in the first place. The collective voice in her poem is significant, in part, because this poem does not make central references to Palestinians. Thus, her voice ensures a solidarity with whom she identifies and for whom she demands justice. Importantly, images of incarceration appear frequently throughout Hammad’s poems. As a poet devoted to giving voice to those who the state would rather silence, she regularly features their struggle in her poems as well as writes poems for organizations such as Critical Resistance, which is dedicated to abolishing the prison industrial complex.22 In what is one of her most powerful poems, “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” she takes on some of the most politically charged subjects through an empowering poem that reveals the distorted ways in which people become criminalized. The poem is written in the form of a letter to Anthony, a “puerto rican rhyme slayer”23 who has spent his youth behind bars in an American prison. The poem opens with a stanza that plays with the phrasing of a prison operator one has to endure when calling a loved one who is behind



Generations of exiles described here, forcibly removed from their land under a variety of circumstances builds to a crescendo three stanzas later when Hammad builds upon these images and histories to reveal modern modes of enslavement through the prison industrial complex:

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bars. Rather than replicating the operator’s language she negates it to highlight how deceptive rhetoric can be when twisted to its inverse, thus hiding the truth. This becomes important for the ways in which she, too, sees herself in Anthony and other friends behind bars whom she portrays in the poem. Moreover, she uses abrupt line breaks in the poem to reveal the ways in which prisons work to inhibit any form of intimacy. But it is in the second section of the poem that Hammad’s voice begins to develop a chorus that in some ways rivals DAM’s lyrics in terms of provoking her interlocutors into rethinking language and its meanings: i have always loved criminals i tell people who try to shame me into silence24

For an average American audience the notion that one loves “criminals” must certainly be jarring. The first utterance of this theme is not expounded upon, though, for another four stanzas. Instead, she moves into a series of images designed to demonstrate what imprisonment does to youth, to humanity. These lead into a poetic analysis of the prison system. She repeats this refrain one more time before contextualizing just why she loves criminals: i have always loved criminals and not only the thugged out bravado of rap videos and champagne popping hustlers but my father born an arab baby boy on the forced way out of his homeland his mother exiled and pregnant gave birth in a camp the world pointed and said palestinians do not exist palestinians are roaches palestinians are two legged dogs and israel built jails and weapons and a history based on the absence of a people israel made itself holy and chosen and my existence a crime so i have always loved criminals it is a love of self25

At the beginning of this set of stanzas, Hammad uses enjambment to heighten the anticipation of the refrain by breaking the line differently than in the previous two stanzas. The pause here forces us to emphasize




MARCY NEWMAN

the image of criminals. She then blends the aspects of hip-hop culture and the ways it gets demonized before interrupting this thread to tell the story of al nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 when Zionists ethnically cleansed Palestine to create a settler colony for European Jews.26 These initial images should easily register as specifically Palestinian for informed readers—images of expulsion and exile, of being born in a refugee camp. But the crux of the poem and her specific insistence of her father as Palestinian bears out in the next stanza. The utterances of Palestinians punctuating this stanza serve to render him visible and human in the face of Zionists—rendered here as those who deem themselves “chosen”—who at once render Palestinians as inhuman and nonexistent. The irony of these offensive images of Palestinians is the way in which they are used interchangeably by Zionists as these images all come from historical and current utterances from a variety of Israeli texts.27 Both the poet as speaker of the poem and her father as figured in the poem demonstrates the reality of Palestinian existence, ironically presented as a problem for Israelis who simultaneously deny their presence and build jails to warehouse Palestinians to criminalize an entire population.28 It is in this context that we begin to see not only why Hammad’s love of criminals is a love of self, but also how she works to eliminate the boundary between the inside and outside of what constitutes criminality. Analogizing these histories and current political realities in her poetry, Hammad’s work demonstrates the very linkages that Colin Powell, for instance, would rather not be articulated. The same may be said of her most recent work linking Palestinian refugees to those internally displaced people devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In “on refuge and language” Hammad draws similar parallels to those in “letter to anthony”: I think of my grandparents And how some called them refugees Others called them non-existent They called themselves landless Which means homeless Before the hurricane No tents were prepared for the fleeing Because Americans do not live in tents Tents are for Haiti for Bosnia for Rwanda Refugees are the rest of the world29

These images of forced removal, of homelessness reveal the striking similarity of people forced from their homes as a result of catastrophic events, catastrophes produced by man not by nature. In either context it is useful to consider historian Ilan Pappe’s suggestion that we challenge the



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term an nakba as catastrophes are merely events producing sudden disaster. Whether one is considering the premeditation of Zionists to massacre and expel indigenous Palestinians or the deliberate malfeasance of the American government to rehabilitate the levees in New Orleans in anticipation of a hurricane, in either scenario we must acknowledge that we are dealing with attempts to ethnically cleanse an area of its inhabitants based on both racism and white supremacy.30 The situation of Hurricane Katrina certainly had devastating consequences for the people of New Orleans, but its connection the “war on terror” is directly linked to the further marginalization of people in the Gulf Coast as well as in Palestine. Indeed, on the first anniversary of the hurricane, when tens of thousands of people were still denied their right to return home, the little aid that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) promised had still not been disbursed.31 And yet that same summer—on the heels of the anniversary of the storm—new homelessness and devastation besieged Gaza and Lebanon, due to Israeli aggression, and the U.S. government the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency gave the IOF $210 million worth of JP-8 fuel to cover the costs of its genocidal war rather than lend any financial or infrastructural support to the survivors of Katrina.32 The ways in which Hammad represents the interconnectedness of homelessness and refugees to Palestine by way of allusion as well as directly to Haiti, Rwanda, and Bosnia is important as it helps to emphasize the role that the state plays in neglecting populations around the globe and at home. But as Hammad makes these linkages in poetry, other Palestinian refugees made them financially. Where as the U.S. government failed the people of New Orleans, Palestinians in Ramallah’s Al Amari refugee camp raised $10,000 to aid the victims of Katrina.33 That Palestinians could see plainly how people of color in New Orleans were criminalized by the state, especially in areas like the Lower Ninth Ward, and lend solidarity—is significant to be sure. Perhaps it was far more lucid for outsiders to see the way the state rendered already marginalized people criminal through practice as well as through language; most famously the different discourses used in the media to describe people searching for food: white people “found” food and people of color “looted.”34 In many ways, though, the damage that these media representations inflict Hammad’s poetry corrects. And it connects as in her first poem after the hurricane, “A Prayer Band,” in which she anticipates what would become of New Orleans in startling ways: tonight the tigris and the mississippi moan for each other as sisters




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full of unnatural things flooded with predators and prayers

Imagining that the Tigris River in Iraq is connected to the Mississippi River offers readers other ways to imagine those devastated by U.S. willful destruction and neglect respectively. Yet, despite her powerful words lent as a gesture of solidarity to the people of New Orleans and Iraq she deems “all language bankrupt” now. Despite all the analogies and images she produces to reclaim language and render it meaningful, the shock of the hurricane as well as the U.S. response to it leaves her bereft. And yet her lines of poetry hold in them a premonition of just how deeply Iraq, New Orleans, and indeed Palestine would become intertwined in the aftermath. On one level the National Guard units that would have been deployed to assist with the evacuation of the city were fighting in Iraq and killing innocent civilians. Those in the National Guard who returned to help spoke of New Orleans as akin to the Green Zone and guarded evacuees who were kept behind barricades filled with mud and sewage. What little relief efforts that have emerged resemble American neocolonial policies in that survivors are criminalized and those mismanaging reconstruction are the same contractors wreaking havoc in Iraq, among them Blackwater and the Israeli security company Instinctive Shooting International.36 In some respects Hammad’s language, as is all of ours, is bankrupt in the sense that imagining how one’s words could begin to resist the transnational networks that are all connected in rendering the poor, the homeless, the refugees marginal, criminal, terrorist. Perhaps this is one reason why Frantz Fanon argued that “The poet ought however to understand that nothing can replace the reasoned, irrevocable taking up of arms on the people’s side.”37 And yet Hammad’s use of the pen as a weapon in the very best tradition of resistance literature—as with Ghassan Kanafani before her—is one of the tools needed as an additional mode of resistance to imperialist designs whether those are waged at home or abroad. For her language embodies the kind of solidarity necessary for Palestinians, in particular need to survive and to endure. The types of connections she forges in her poems, in the main, do not leave the reader feeling that “all language is bankrupt.” Rather, it leaves us with a renewed sense of purpose, restored, and inspired to join her in her project of connecting political struggles and resisting the powers that would rather see us separated.



all language bankrupt35


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Notes

1. See “Mandela Taken off US Terror List.” BBC News. July 1, 2008. http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/784517.stm 2. See William B. Quandt, Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the ArabIsraeli Conflict (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1993), 365–375. It is important to note that there are still Palestinian resistance organizations that remain on this list. President Clinton, for instance, took “legal action against fund-raising activities by groups and organisations that are loosely suspected of aiding terrorists. All Palestinian organizations (including, oddly, MarxistLeninist organizations that are lumped together with Islamic fundamentalist organisations), with the exception of Yasir ’Arafat’s Fatah movement, are now prohibited by law from engaging in any fund-raising activities on US territories.” See As’ad AbuKhalil, “Change and democratisation in the Arab world: The Role of Political Parties,” Third World Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1997): 149–150. 3. Mona N. Younis, Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 17. 4. There was a long history of the state of Israel’s support for the apartheid regime with respect to military—including nuclear—assistance. See Jane Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy (Boston: South End Press, 1987). 5. Jackie Salloum, director of the documentary film Slingshot Hip Hop, which chronicles the evolution of Palestinian hip hop, particularly focusing on DAM, states that the leader of the group, Tamer Nafer regrets the inclusion of that line because, she argues, non-Palestinian audiences fixate on it the exclusion of the rest of the song’s powerful lyrics. It is also important to understand DAM’s resistance as coming from a context of 1948 Palestine in order to get a sense of the apartheid regime on that side of the so-called “Green Line.” See Jonathan Cook’s Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiment in Human Despair (London: Zed Books, 2008). For an understanding of the political logic that would lead people subjected to state terrorism to repeat those same acts see Mahmoud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 6. Colin L. Powell, “World Conference Against Racism.” September 3, 2001. www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/4789.htm. Eric Mann explains the context further, “There was widespread agreement that the issue of U.S. reparations to Africa, Blacks in the U.S., and the peoples of the African Diaspora for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade had to be the main focus of our demands—a position the U.S. government had vehemently opposed. Yet, the U.S. delegation had also cloaked its walk-out in mock outrage over Palestinian



I would like to express my gratitude to those who helped me formulate ideas for this chapter: Rania Masri, Tamara Qiblawi, Dana Olwan, Nathalie Allam, Sirene Harb, Wendy Pearlman, Naji Ali, and Ian Barnard.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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demands for self-determination and the charges that the Israeli state itself was based on racist ideology and practice—Zionism as Apartheid.” Dispatches from Durban: Firsthand Commentaries on the World Conference against Racism and Post-September 11 Movement Strategies (Los Angeles: Frontlines Press, 2002), 47. Moreover, one of Barack Obama’s first gestures as President was to continue the Bush policy of boycotting the WCAR conference for the very same reasons at the 2009 conference in Geneva. See Robert Wood, “U.S. Posture Toward the Durban Review Conference and the Participation in the Human Rights Council.” U.S. State Department Press Release. February 27, 2009. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/02/119892.htm. William B. Wood, “The UN World Conference against Racism.” July 31, 2001. www.state.gov/p/io/rls/rm/2001/4415.htm. For a cogent argument about the need for reparations see Randall Robinson’s The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2001). For an overview of the parallel settler-colonial histories in what became the Americas and in Palestine see Fuad Sha’ban, For Zion’s Sake: The JudeoChristian Tradition in American Culture (London: Pluto, 2005). See Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (London: Ebury Press, 2007). Quoted in Bakari Kitwana, “The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement to Political Power,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 343. Suheir Hammad, “A Road Still Becoming,” in Becoming American: Personal Essays by First Generation Immigrant Women, ed. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 90. Suheir Hammad, Drops of This Story (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 56. June Jordan, Living Room (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985), 134. For an excellent history of these massacres see Rosemary Sayigh, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (London: Zed Books, 1994). See Naseer Aruri, ed. Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return (London: Pluto Books, 2005). Def Jam Poetry also became a Tony-Award winning Broadway play in which Hammad was included as one of the featured poets. See Danny Simmons, ed. Russell Simmons Def Jam Poetry on Broadway and More (New York: Atria Books, 2003). Suheir Hammad, “first writing since.” Za’atar Diva (New York: Cypher Books, 2005), 100. See Ward Churchill, “A Not So Friendly Fascism?: Political Prisons and Prisoners in the United States,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 1–54. Suheir Hammad, Born Palestinian, Born Black (New York: Harlem River Press, 1996), 81. Ibid., 82. See http://criticalresist.live.radicaldesigns.org/ Also see Angely Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). Hammad, “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” Za’atar Diva, 67.



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24. Ibid., 66. 25. Ibid., 66–67. 26. For a history of the genocidal way in which the state of Israel was created see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: One World, 2006). 27. See Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, “Interview with Suheir Hammad.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 31, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 71–92. 28. Since the illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, the Israeli government has imprisoned or detained approximately “700,000 Palestinians—almost one fifth of the Palestinian population living in the occupied Palestinian territory. Currently, almost 11,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons or detention camps, out of which around 9,000 are identified as political prisoners, including 326 minors and 94 women. Israel, in violation of several international conventions, continuously denies these prisoners their basic internationally recognized rights. Arbitrary arrests, imprisonment with no charges or trials, the absence of fair trials, torture, poor hygienic conditions, prohibition of family visits, and denial of medical treatment are all examples of the tragedy that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have suffered during the last 41 years.” See PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, “Palestinian Political Prisoners.” (August 2008): 1. www.nad-plo.org. 29. See Jordan Flaherty and Suheir Hammad, “Mourning for New Orleans,” Left Turn Magazine, September 9, 2005. http://www.leftturn.org/?q=node/612. 30. See South End Press Collective, What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race, and the State of the Nation (Boston: South End Press, 2007). 31. See Institute for Southern Studies “One Year after Katrina: The State of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” Southern Exposure Special Report 34, no. 2 (2006). 32. See Frida Berrigan and William D. Hartung, “U.S. Military Assistance and Arms Transfers to Israel: U.S. Aid, Companies Fuel Israeli Military,” World Policy Institute, July 20, 2006, 2. 33. Associated Press, “Palestinians [sic] Refugees donate $10,000 to Katrina refugees.” The Jerusalem Post, September 13, 2005. http://www.friendsunrwa. org/news1.html. 34. See the New York Collective of Radical Educators, “An Unnatural Disaster: A Critical Resource Guide for Addressing the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Classroom,” April 2, 2006, 9. 35. Suheir Hammad, “A Prayer Band,” Electronic Intifada, September 13, 2005. http://electronicintifada.net/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/11/4173. 36. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 410, 438. 37. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 226.







Libraries, Archives, and the Pursuit of Access Rebecca J. Knuth and Michèle V. Cloonan*

L

ibraries and archives are the repositories of civilization. The history of these institutions abounds with examples of their plunder or, in a few notable cases, complete destruction because libraries and archives are not just repositories of information; they contain the records—and embody the values—of particular cultures at particular times. To vanquish a country fully, an enemy must destroy its memory. What more apt symbol to destroy than a national library or archive? The arson of the Bosnian National and University Library in Sarajevo in 1992 that destroyed some 1.5 million books, approximately 90 percent of its collection, is one recent example of libricide—a form of cultural genocide.1 Libricide is just one way of limiting access. In this digital age other limits to privacy and access exist, such as the censoring of the Internet (in many countries) or the enactment of the USA Patriot Act in the United States. The Patriot Act expands the power of the government to conduct electronic surveillance and gain immediate access to “any tangible things” including books, records, papers, documents, and other items that the government may seek as “relevant to an investigation of international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”2 These acts are

* Rebecca J. Knuth is Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Hawai`i. Her books include Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction and Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the 20th Century. Michèle V. Cloonan is Dean and Professor at the Graduate School of Library & Information Science of Simmons College, author of several books and numerous articles about the preservation of cultural heritage. From 2004 to 2007, she led a program to train Iraqi professionals under the National Endowment for the Humanities program Recovering Iraq’s Past.



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REBECCA J. KNUTH AND MICHÈLE V. CLOONAN

less visible than the burning of libraries but are insidious because they may become more pervasive than the destruction of bricks and mortar. This chapter explores the impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on libraries and archives (with a particular emphasis on libraries) in the United States and Iraq. Further, we examine whether the events of that day “changed everything” as the title of this book provocatively asks. When Baghdad fell to American troops in spring 2003, men, women, and children swarmed, unhindered, through government buildings, hospitals, and private businesses, stealing everything, even bathtubs and ambulances. Many museums and libraries—including the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA)—fell prey to looting, vandalism, and arson, not only by the Iraqis, but by the occupying forces as well. While there was an immediate outcry in the world press, troops were not assigned to guard Iraq’s premier cultural institutions until five days later, despite the fact that archaeologists, scholars of the Middle East, and a number of professional organizations repeatedly warned the U.S. Department of Defense that culturally significant buildings and sites in Iraq should be protected, beginning in January 2003 when the U.S. invasion was imminent and up to the time of the invasion in April 2003.3 On March 19, 2003, a group of scholars and professional associations issued an Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk in Iraq.4 Iraqis, told that they had been “liberated,” were left feeling violated by the Americans’ failure to secure the nation’s cultural heritage after Saddam’s regime was toppled. Their sense of violation was shared by concerned people all over the world, particularly in light of the numerous efforts that scholars and journalists had made to warn the U.S. government of the dangers to museums, libraries, and archives that the invasion would bring. The Bush administration and many conservatives simply could not comprehend what the outcry was about. In press conferences, Donald Rumsfeld portrayed reports of looting as the exaggerated product of media hysteria and academic exaggeration. He gave absolute priority to America’s interests and in the scheme of things, the looting did not affect America’s interests; any looting (even if it had occurred) was incidental, something that happened in war, and was nothing to be concerned about. The Bush administration’s defensiveness and hypersensitivity to criticism reflected an extremism that came into play after the devastating 9/11 attack.5 Militant patriotism, nationalism, and xenophobia were justified because the nation was under attack. The invasion of Iraq was justified as a defensive response to weapons of mass destruction and, more selfrighteously, as bringing democracy to the Iraqi people and rescuing them from tyranny—one people reaching out to another. As militarism gained momentum, dissent was called unpatriotic and nonmilitary considerations



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were dismissed. The many pleas to protect Iraq’s heritage institutions fell on deaf ears and, as the U.S. government had made no plans to protect these institutions, lawlessness reigned. The failure to listen to those with alternate views was, in retrospect, an Achilles heel for the administration. In the case of the looting and destruction of archives and libraries in Iraq, Iraqis and the world community were alienated. That is, Iraqis and the world community justifiably criticized the United States—particularly its rulers who were literally and figuratively calling the shots in the war—for ignoring the institutions that held Iraq’s cultural heritage. Conservatism flourishes best when people are fearful. It is based on a constellation of values that are susceptible to extremes: a propensity for authoritarianism, sensitivity to threat, a stress on the importance of the military and patriotism, nationalism, and concern for national security. The 9/11 attacks confirmed Bush and fellow conservatives’ deepest fears: the existence of a deadly enemy that sought nothing less than the annihilation of America. In the eyes of the American government, nothing must stand in the way of national security. Militaristic rather than ethical and humanistic agendas were foremost. Certainly, with America in full defensive posture, no credence was given to the traditional opponents of conservative mindsets—intellectuals, humanists, and liberals. In terms of libraries, archives, and access to information, this placed the Bush administration on a collision course with the American Library Association (ALA).

The USA Patriot Act: Security over Privacy and Civil Liberties in the George W. Bush Administration Within hours of the attacks on 9/11, the FBI began tracking down the electronic communications of suspect terrorists by serving search warrants to the major Internet Service Providers. Within a week they had approached public libraries and requested computer sign-in lists. Within six weeks, Congress, at the request of Attorney General John Ashcroft, passed “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (the “USA Patriot Act”). Without hearings or congressional committee input, 15 federal statutes were amended to give the FBI and law enforcement authority to access business, legal, medical, educational, and library records, including electronic data and communication. There was an immediate spike in requests for library patron information, and librarians, traditional champions of privacy and confidentiality in the library, were soon pitted against the government, who was acting in the name of national security.



LIBRARIES, ARCHIVES, AND THE PURSUIT OF ACCESS


Librarians flashed back to the FBI Awareness Program that ran for 25 years during the cold war. Counterintelligence agents had attempted to enlist librarians in monitoring the habits of “suspicious” individuals, those with accents or connections with Russia and other countries that were defined as hostile to the United States. The ALA had been successful in combating these attempts at illegal searches, conducted under the cloak of secrecy and under the guise of national security. After 9/11, the ALA mobilized to counter the new fear-based threats to intellectual freedom and people’s right to privacy. The ALA, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of American Law Libraries worked to raise the issue of civil liberties in the first draft, but did not prevail. The ALA mobilized its resources and alliances to publicize and criticize the act. The Bush administration’s response was hostile with Ashcroft publicly characterizing those who opposed the act as a bunch of “hysterics.”6 ALA lobbied for the next three years for the repeal or revision of the Patriot Act. Despite months of debate and ALA testimony, the moderate constitutional reforms advocated by the ALA were not included in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill in 2006. Under the USA Patriot Act, the FBI can use National Security Letters (NSL), a form of administrative subpoena without judicial oversight, to access personal information without ever notifying the individual. Librarians served with an NSL must hand over records and are under a gag order, subject to fines and imprisonment if they inform the user of the inquiry or report any abuse of government authority. The issue of NSLs was brought to a head by the case Doe v. Gonzales, which was a challenge—by four librarians and the American Civil Liberties Union—to the FBI’s demand, in 2005, that Connecticut’s Library Consortium, a computer consortium serving 28 libraries, turn over its computer use records. The FBI ultimately dropped their demands, a federal court lifted the gag order, and the four librarians were able to speak out publicly and testify in congressional hearings. The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General investigated and found the FBI guilty of widespread abuses of authority, under-reporting of the number of NSLs used, and collection of inappropriate information. In 2007 the ALA issued a “Resolution on the Use and Abuse of National Security Letters.” 7 It reiterated that freedom of thought was the most basic of all freedoms and inextricably linked to freedom of inquiry, a freedom that could only be preserved in a society in which privacy rights were vigorously protected. ALA’s position was that NSLs strip library users and librarians of their First Amendment rights. The resolution urged legislative reforms that would assure the right to read—free of government surveillance. Although the USA Patriot Act and issues of access related to national security have raised intellectual freedom issues for American librarians,



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under the Bush administration other academic freedoms were also curtailed. An example is profound dislike for independent inquiry, especially in the areas of biomedical, public health, and environmental research. The dissemination of information that contradicts the administration’s ideologies, and public access to information in general, has led to new regulations in federal funding for research. Some of these restrictions were in place before 9/11, but the empowerment that President Bush felt after 9/11 allowed him to more effectively muzzle scientific research, in particular. Increasingly, academics whose research was dependent on government grants were forced to sign documents that they would not disclose findings that were unacceptable to the administration. Scientific findings have thus been suppressed or rewritten. This allowed the president to continue to promote health and environmental policies that reflected his religious beliefs and favored business interests, including prohibitions against stem cell research and restrictions on research on global warning.8 Librarians have protested the suppression of health information. At the 2007 ALA annual conference session, “Scientific and Health Information: The Threat Posed by Political Interference,” Dr. Susan F. Wood spoke on how misinformation, disinformation, and involvement by top level Federal Drug Administration officials had resulted in a delay in making the emergency contraceptive medication, marketed as “Plan B,” an over-the-counter product. She questioned whether a small group of officials should be able to overrule decisions they did not like and she insisted that the FDA and all health-based decisions should be based on science and medical advice.9 Librarians struggle with the issue of intellectual freedom and the ideal of freely accessible information as a cornerstone of democracy and as essential to an informed citizenry. Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law on July 4, 1966. It has been amended several times, beginning with the Privacy Act of 1974. Chemical right-to-know legislation, enacted in the 1980s after the Bhopal disaster, reinforced the premise that citizens must be allowed access to information affecting their well-being. This notion was rolled back by the Bush administration. Although such actions are not unprecedented, George W. Bush systematically sought to chip away at our basic intellectual freedoms beginning in his first term as president when, in addition to pushing for the USA Patriot Act, he severely curtailed access to George H. Bush’s presidential papers under Executive Order 13233, which he signed on November 1, 2001.10 This order mandated new and complex procedures for opening presidential records that involve the U.S. Archivist, the former president, and the incoming president. It





is clear that access to information can be pure politics. Fears of terrorism merely fed a preexisting Bush administration intent to suppress or curtail the public’s access to information. Increasingly in recent years, national security has trumped intellectual freedom and civil rights. After 9/11, agencies were asked to remove “sensitive” information from their Web sites and the Patriot Act had broadened the government’s right to review records and reclassify available information. There are 1,337 Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) libraries in the United States, many in universities. Librarians collect and provide access to print and electronic information generated by government agencies. In October 2007, a letter was sent by the Government Printing Office instructing FDLP librarians to destroy copies of the CD-ROM, “Source Area Characteristics of Large Public Surface-Water Supplies in the Coterminous United States: An Information Resource for Source-Water Assessment, 1999.”11 This was problematic to librarians whose profession holds that destroying information is censorship, and as such is unacceptable. In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) precipitously began shutting down its regional libraries as a result of President Bush’s proposals that would cut $2 million dollars from the $2,500,000 operations budget. The EPA’s plan called for shutting down 10 regional facilities and the headquarters library in Washington, D.C. The EPA headquarters library was closed to walk-ins beginning in October 2006. Its holdings of 380,000 documents on microfiche, a microforms collection, 5,500 EPA hard copy documents, and more than 16,000 books and technical reports by other government agencies were boxed up and thus made inaccessible. The premise given for the regional cuts was that everything was available online, but only 15,000 out of 40,000–50,000 documents had been digitized—and nothing produced before 1990 was available in electronic form. Further, there were no new funds for digitization projects. EPA libraries have 50,000 primary documents not available anywhere else. As libraries (Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City) began closing, there was a public outcry. The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 10,000 EPA scientists, filed a grievance, and Employees for Environmental Responsibility launched a campaign to publicize closures.12 They claimed that their jobs would be hindered by a basic lack of information; with thousands of scientific studies out of reach, emergency preparedness, antipollution enforcement, and long-term medical and environmental research would be affected. In 2007, ALA President Leslie Burger testified to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about the potential loss of information, lack of a plan for digitization, and the effect of limited access on the public’s right to know regarding environmental health hazards, technologies, regulation, and litigation.



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Closings were halted. In 2008 the Government Accountability Office decided that the decision to close was unjustified and deeply flawed in implementation. A Federal Labor Relations Board arbitrator found the EPA’s plan “insular in nature to the extreme.”13 Congress appropriated $2 million to restore services.14 In the 2007 hearings, it became evident that the EPA was serving politically conservative policies in general, some actions rationalized on the basis of national security, others to help businesses. Hearing Committee members lashed out at the EPA for rolling back environmental protections mandated by law: closing libraries, destroying documents at the EPA’s Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances Library, and attempting to raise the limit on the amount of toxic chemicals that a company can produce before triggering public-disclosure requirements.15 Republicans argued that the curtailment of information was designed to help small businesses; Democrats argued that it endangered public health. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. government’s clear political agenda allowed for the sealing of information that those in power do not want the public to see; the opening of formerly protected information to any official who claims that a knowledge of that private information will help the country fight terrorism even when there is practically no evidence to support this claim; and the government’s taking control of any information it wishes to control. A great outcry has resulted against this power grab by the executive branch of the government, which has written and reinterpreted laws so that the president has unprecedented powers and is essentially above the law—ignoring certain constitutional protections for the general populace and upsetting the checks and balances that the United States Constitution guarantees.

Libraries in Post-9/11 Iraq The U.S. invasion of Iraq has had a devastating effect on libraries and library services in Iraq. However, the current situation regarding libraries in Iraq is complex. In the 20 years before Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq in 1979, and at the beginning of his administration, schools and libraries were expanding. Iraq could boast that it had some of the best libraries in the Middle East. However, resources for all cultural and educational institutions began to erode in the 1980s during the nearly decade-long Iran-Iraq war. Further, Iraqi students were no longer being sent abroad to do their graduate work in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. By the time Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 most of the funding for universities, and their libraries, had disappeared.16 Adding to





these dire circumstances for Iraqi higher education, the 1991 UN sanctions cut off nearly all contact that Iraqi librarians and faculty had with the rest of the world. Few new books and journals made their way into Iraq during the embargo, and the Iraqis were cut off from almost all technological advances in the information world. By spring 2003, Iraqi libraries had not received new materials in nearly 20 years. Only one university in Iraq offered graduate programs in library and information science: Al Mustansiriyah. Many of the professors there had studied in North America or the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s. They were teaching from the books they had acquired during their graduate years abroad.17 The American invasion of Iraq in 2003—which led to the plundering of the Iraq National Library and Archive as well as of many other libraries—is the latest episode in a steady 30-year decline. The ongoing instability in Iraq will continue to adversely affect the fate of its libraries in the short term. Jeff Spurr18 and Ian Johnson19 have each written lengthy reports that document the current state of libraries throughout Iraq as of 2005; Spurr updated his report in 2007.20 No other report of such scope has been published. These reports show the Iraqis to be terribly behind their colleagues in most of the rest of the world with respect to information access. On a brighter note, a number of continuing education initiatives and books and online resources have been offered to Iraqi librarians and archivists by individuals and organizations in the United States, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and several other countries. Notable work was carried out by a law librarian, Kimberly A. Morris, from the DePaul University College of Law to establish new technologies for legal research in Iraqi law libraries. (She was probably the only American librarian who was able to work in Iraq outside the Green Zone immediately following the invasion.) If some of these initiatives can be sustained, Iraq may once again regain its stature in the world of letters.21 The invasion and occupation of Iraq has brought up many issues concerning the post-invasion disposition of the country’s books and archives: For instance, have confiscation, smuggling, and preservation efforts been about rescue or plunder? Millions of records of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, which ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003, were taken from the basement of party headquarters by Kanan Makiya and others in 2003. Makiya (a refugee writing under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil) was the author of the best-selling Republic of Fear, an exposé of Saddam’s regime.22 Makiya set up the Iraq Memory Foundation and removed the documents to the safety of Baghdad’s Green Zone, with the intention of setting up a museum for the Iraqi people. However, in 2006 the documents were



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shipped to the United States, to be stored, and digital copies were made. The originals have recently been placed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The nonprofit think tank will hold the records for five years and then examine the possibility of repatriating them to Iraq.23 This is unacceptable to Iraq’s national archivist Saad Eskander, who demands their immediate return and, as well, the return of 43,000 to 48,000 boxes of Iraqi state documents (100 million pages) that the U.S. government had taken to the United States. Makiya’s Iraq Memory Foundation also wants these records. Makiya believes that Iraq is too unstable to provide security for records that reveal decades of tyranny and implicate many Iraqi officials and informers. Eskander claims that the records are inalienable public property and should be returned immediately because international law forbids the confiscation of cultural materials in war. A similarly acrimonious debate is taking place over ownership of Iraqi-Jewish print records and books. After the fall of Baghdad in 2003, a massive trove of Jewish documents and sacred texts was discovered in the flooded basement headquarters of Saddam’s secret police. These eclectic materials, some rare, included prayer books and commentaries, law books, primers, and some Arabic materials pertaining to the Jewish community in Iraq—that had lived there for 2,600 years. The materials had been confiscated from the 123,000 Jews who were persecuted, stripped of their assets, and driven from the country after Israel was created in 1948. By 2003, only two dozen or so Jews remained in Iraq. The newly designated “Iraqi Jewish Archive” was removed, dried, sorted, placed in 27 metal trunks, and frozen to stabilize the collection and prevent further growth of mold. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) visited Baghdad and issued “The Iraqi Jewish Archive Preservation Report, Oct. 2, 2003.”24 According to the project plan, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was responsible for the collection, but NARA would assume leadership in repairing and microfilming the collection. It would cost an estimated 1–2 million dollars. The materials are currently at the Library of Congress in Washington. There has been an outcry that as Iraq heritage, these materials should never have left the country. Although most of the Jewish materials confiscated by Saddam Hussein ended up in Washington, 300 rare and valuable books, including 2 from 1487 and 1617, recently surfaced in Israel. In the chaos of the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, they had ended up in the hands of thieves. Mordechai Ben-Porat, an Iraqi-born Jew and founder of Jerusalem’s Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, sent a representative to post-invasion Baghdad to buy the books from the dealers and ship them to Israel, but the Americans





quickly forbade further exportation and the remaining books had to be smuggled out. The center spent some $25,000.25 With press coverage came an outcry from Iraqi librarians that these books belonged to the Iraq nation and were smuggled out in contravention of the Iraqi Law of Antiquities and international prohibitions. The issue of who should possess and control Jewish materials surfaced again in 2008, when a Jewish congregation in Maryland proudly put on display an old gazelle-skin parchment Torah.26 During a lull in fighting in Mosul, Iraq, in March 2007, an 82nd Airborne unit found what they thought was a dump. Alerted by Hebrew inscriptions on the walls, they thought it might be a synagogue and dug beneath the floor. They unearthed an ancient torah wrapped in tissue paper, apparently long abandoned by the congregation. They called Rabbi Menachem Youlus, scribe and co-owner of a bookstore, and the Save a Torah Foundation. Youlus has restored 572 torahs, and they have been placed in 50 communities around the world. The Save a Torah Foundation was set up in 2004 to support his efforts. The Mosul torah was broken into 60 parts and sent to the foundation, where it was painstakingly repaired and sold for $20,000 to a Jewish Congregation in Maryland. Again, Iraqis protested and advanced national claims to cultural heritage. The Israelis who acquired the rare Jewish books and the American Jews who sponsored the Torah saw themselves as fulfilling a religious mandate to preserve Jewish heritage, a mandate made particularly cogent by the persecution the Jewish people had undergone in Iraq. They claimed that by expelling the Jews, the Iraqi nation had forfeited any claim to Jewish items as national patrimony. These circumstances—regarding Iraqi and Jewish documents—are part of a much larger issue: who owns cultural heritage? The country where items currently reside? The country or region in which the object was created? Or, in cases where a particular religious, social, or ethnic group no longer resides in the country of manufacture, the country or countries in which they do reside?27

The Road Ahead in Iraq and at Home Information professionals in Iraq and in the United States are facing similar problems with respect to the retention and control of the materials under their responsibilities. In the United States, libraries and archives must retain and make accessible all kinds of information while respecting and protecting the privacy of those who create and use that information. In Iraq, their counterparts want to get control,



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once again—after 40 years—of information alienated from them. In the United States the control battle is with the government; in Iraq it is additionally with other political and religious entities, as well as with the United States, which has physical possession of documents that Iraqi librarians and archivists believe they should have in their own hands. Only through having such control can they offer access to their patrons. The title of this chapter mentions the “Pursuit of Access.” We are writing about what all librarians and other information professionals see as their ethical duty: linking users with the information they need while protecting the privacy rights of users. The problem, the challenge, is universal. In his extensive report about the effect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on Iraqi academic libraries, Spurr noted that his work is an effort to address the critical role libraries have played in history, with a particular nod to Iraq, and to emphasize that a flourishing and developing society has always been one that privileged libraries since the dawn of civilization, despite destructive and totalitarian episodes. Finally, that despite their importance, such critical cultural institutions have been especially vulnerable when power has been exercised arbitrarily, or when those seeking it have resorted to violent means to achieve their end.28

We have described violent acts that have harmed—or even destroyed— libraries and archives in Iraq. In the United States, it is the nonviolent acts such as censoring the Internet or enacting sweeping legislation—such as the USA Patriot Act—that threaten access to our cultural heritage. In the case of Iraq, continuing political instability and meager resources are stifling access to information. Did 9/11 “change everything?” The destruction of cultural collections has been too pervasive in history to claim that 9/11 had more impact on cultural collections than, say, the First World War, the Second World War, or more recent civil wars around the globe. Similarly the USA Patriot Act was not the first attempt by the American government to exercise broad-based control of access to information. However, the systematic attempts to curtail access to information by the George W. Bush administration are a reminder to librarians and archivists that they must always be ready to fight against attacks on access to information. In the post-post-9/11 era, the balance between security and privacy will need to be revisited if civil liberties in the United States are to be fully restored. Since Iraq is struggling with the control of its information, we must assist our library colleagues to help them to achieve a comparable level of civil liberties with respect to their own information practices.




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1. Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the 20th Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 105–134. 2. The Library of Congress, “H.R. 3162.” http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/ z?d107:h.r.03162: or Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). “The USA PATRIOT ACT” http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/usapatriot (accessed July 28, 2008). 3. Museum-Security.org has a chronology of articles that appeared about cultural heritage in Iraq from January 4, 2003–June 18, 2003. See http://www. museum-security.org/iraq.html (accessed July 28, 2008). 4. “Open Declaration on Cultural Heritage at Risk in Iraq,” published in The Guardian, March 21, 2003. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/ mar21/highereducation.iraq (accessed July 28, 2008). 5. Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 201–221. 6. Brook Stowe, “The American Library Association’s Response to the USA PATRIOT Act: ‘Everyday Americans’ or a Bunch of ‘Hysterics’?” http:// theater2k.com/ALA_PATRIOT.html (accessed July 30, 2008). 7. American Library Association, “Resolution on the Use and Abuse of National Security Letters.” http://www.ala.org/template.cfm?section_ ifresolution&template=/contentmanagement/co (accessed July 30, 2008). 8. Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholars Rena Steinzor and Wendy Wagner with CPR Policy Analyst Matthew Shudtz, “Saving Science from Politics: Nine Essential Reforms of the Legal System,” (CPR White Paper 805, published July 2008) http://www.progressiveregulation.org/scienceRescue. cfm (accessed August 30, 2008). 9. “ALA 2007: D.C. Welcomes ‘Radical, Militant Librarians.’ ” Information Today 24, no. 7 (July/August 2007): 31–38. 10. The National Security Archive, “Historians, Public Interest Groups Sue to Stop Bush Order.” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20011128/ (accessed August 30, 2008). 11. Gena Asher, “In the Shadow of 9/11, The Issue of Censorship, a Continuing Discussion for Librarians: Is it Security or Is It Censorship?” in April 3, 2008, issue of the Indiana University homepages. http://www.homepages.indiana. edu/042602/text/censorship.html (accessed August 8, 2008). 12. American Libraries online, modified September 18, 2006. “EPA Library Closings Continue Despite Protests.” http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/ currentnews/newsarchive/2006abc/september2006a/epaclosings.cfm (accessed August 10, 2008). 13. Norman Oder, “Arbitrator Criticizes EPA for Library Closures; Reopening Plan Due,” 2008. Library Journal.com. http://www.libraryjournal.com/ article/CA6537619.html?rssid=19 (accessed July 28, 2008). 14. American Library Association, District Dispatch 3/27/08, “EPA Libraries to Reopen by September 30, 2008.” http://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/ ?cat=16 (accessed July 31, 2008).



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15. Darren Goode, “Democrats Say EPA Actions Limiting Pollution Disclosure,” February 6, 2007, p. 10. CongressDaily, National Journal. http://www. nationaljournal.com/njonline (accessed August 21, 2008). 16. Jeffrey Spurr, “Indispensable yet Vulnerable: The Library in Dangerous Times: Report on the Status of Iraqi Academic Libraries and a Survey of Efforts to Assist Them.” (Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, 2005) http://oiuchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/mela/indispensable. html (accessed July 28, 2008). 17. Michèle V. Cloonan and David Hirsch, “Professional Development Courses for Librarians: A Case Study of Iraqi Librarians,” unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Human Resources for Archives, Libraries and Information Centers, Abu Dhabi, UAE, February 19–21, 2008. 18. Spurr, 2005. 19. Ian M. Johnson, “The Impact on Libraries and Archives in Iraq of War and Looting in 2003—A Preliminary Assessment of the Damage and Subsequent Reconstruction Efforts, The International Information & Library Review 37, no. 3 (September 2005): 1–63. 20. Jeffrey Spurr, “Iraqi Libraries and Archives in Peril: Survival in a Time of Invasion, Chaos, and Civil Conflict,” A Report. (Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, 2007). http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/ IRAQ/mela/update_2007.htm. 21. A brief description of Morris’s work is contained in, “Highlights This Week: USAID Renovated the Law Library at a Northern Iraqi University as Part of the Higher Education and Development (HEAD) Program.” USAID/IRAQ Reconstruction Weekly Update (January 6, 2006): 5. http://www.usaid.gov/ iraq/updates/jan06/iraq_fs12_010606.pdf (accessed September 2, 2008). 22. Samir Al-Khalil, Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 1989). 23. John Gravois, “Disputed Iraqi Archives Find a Home at the Hoover Institution,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 23, 2008. http:// chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1335n.htm (accessed August 21, 2008). 24. National Archives and Records Administration, “The Iraqi Jewish Archive Preservation Report, Oct. 2, 2003.” See http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/ mela/IraqiJewishArchiveReport.htm (accessed August 19, 2008). 25. European Jewish Press, “Rare Iraqi Jewish Books Surface in Israel.” http:// www.ejpress.org/article/culture/28368 (accessed August 19, 2008). 26. The Jewish Bugle, “A 400 Year old Sifrrei Yorah’s Journey from Iraq to America.” Posted October 28, 2007. http://www.thejewishbugle.com/community-news/ a-400-year-old-sifrrei-torahs-journey-from-iraq-to-am-2.html. 27. For fuller discussion see James Cuno, Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Michèle V. Cloonan, “The Moral Imperative to Preserve,” Library Trends 55, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 746–755. 28. Spurr, 2005.







Hollywood 9/11: Time of Crisis Thomas Pollard*

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he terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq impacted all aspects of society, including cinema. Or did they? Even now, many years after those events, debate still rages over the long-range effects of these events. Some expected producers to tone down graphic violence while others hoped that Hollywood would examine and lay bare festering issues underlying the terrorist attacks. For many, the events of 9/11 seemed too sensitive for cinematic depiction, destined, like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Nazi death camps, to remain taboo for years to come. In fact, no one could have predicted Hollywood’s eventual reaction to these events. Immediately after 9/11, Hollywood producers, fearful of offending a public shocked and in mourning for the attack’s victims, suspended many productions but months later it seemed to be business as usual. Eventually a few filmmakers began depicting the 9/11 attacks themselves, while others turned once more to the time-tested genres of patriotic and combat films. Have the events of 9/11 and the War on Terror inspired new genres? Have mainstream films been affected subtly and indirectly, altering their mood and increasing or decreasing movie violence? Will future critics look back to a “post-9/11” era of films?1 Now, the answers to these questions begin to emerge, and audiences might be surprised at the trends they suggest. * Thomas Pollard is Professor of Social Sciences at National University at San Jose and author of Sex and Violence: The Hollywood Censorship Wars, and with Carl Boggs, The Hollywood War Machine and A World in Chaos.



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Post-9/11 movies reveal filmmakers’ perspectives on a variety of foreign and domestic issues, especially terrorism. However, Hollywood’s war on terrorism began much earlier than the 2001 attacks, and the recent movies inspired by them owe debts to terrorism movies that preceded them. As early as the First World War, a film depicting foreign terrorists, I Want to Forget (1918), generated audience interest. Alfred Hitchcock pioneered the British terrorist-related thriller in the 1930s with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The 39 Steps (1935), and Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) emerged as the most memorable of the Second World War terrorist films. Hitchcock’s protagonist, Barry (Robert Cummings), a factory worker, encounters a Nazi terrorist cell run by Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger). Like more recent filmmakers, Hitchcock chose his subject from the headlines, featuring a group of homegrown Nazis called America Firsters. The film evokes real Nazi saboteurs who landed near New York City in 1942 armed with a boatload of explosives intent on blowing up a war production plant, and it includes shots of the SS Normandie lying on its side, a victim of a real act of sabotage (terrorism).2 By the 1960s, a new cycle of cold war inspired terrorist films arrived— the James Bond thrillers—depicting clandestine terrorists preying on American interests and, ultimately, subjecting the United States and the rest of the world to nuclear blackmail (Dr. No, 1962; Goldfinger, 1964; Thunderball, 1965; You Only Live Twice, 1967). The villains in these films, including the infamous Spectre organization, posed cold war style threats to the United States that suddenly seem current in the wake of 9/11. Unlike today’s terrorist films, though, James Bond and British intelligence agents of the 1960s easily defeat the terrorists, who appear motivated by greed (nuclear blackmail). Spectre and Dr. No stand in stark contrast to today’s terrorists, motivated by ideology, not personal greed. John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), starring Bruce Willis, launched a new terrorist action film cycle. McTiernan’s film features John McClain, an overworked New York policeman who stumbles upon a group of German terrorists that have commandeered an office building and taken hostages. Even now McClain remains a model for today’s superheroes, joining more recent heroes who thwart terrorist attacks. A few years later the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995, and other terroristic acts inspired films focusing on such diverse subjects as the IRA (Patriot Games, The Devil’s Own), attacks on commercial airliners (Passenger 57), hijacked city buses (Speed, The Siege), nuclear blackmail (True Lies, Broken Arrow), blackmail using conventional explosives



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(Die Hard = 3), chemical attacks (Executive Decision, The Rock), the capture of the president’s aircraft (Air Force One), and home grown terrorists (Arlington Road). However, in the aftermath of 9/11, attacks in most of these films appear strikingly quaint and naïve. Most pre9/11 terrorists share old-fashioned greed as their motive, but today they appear strikingly dated and naïve.

Hollywood’s Initial Response to 9/11 Initially, the 9/11 attacks stunned Hollywood filmmakers, and major studios immediately suspended work on a number of feature films that suddenly seemed too sensitive. Critic David Sterritt reported soon after the terrorist attacks that Hollywood was “scrambling to regain its balance.” Warner Brothers pulled Andrew Davis’s thriller Collateral Damage starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a firefighter battling terrorists, slated for release on September 12. Sterritt speculated that the film would never reach the screen. In fact, after the terrorist attacks Warner Brothers pulled all advertising of the film that had included a mock newspaper clipping alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger’s face featuring the word “bombing” and the tagline “What would you do if you lost everything?” The film finally appeared in 2002 with a revamped ad featuring a shot of an explosion in the background and Schwarzenegger’s face in the foreground and the film’s original tagline missing. The Web site was completely revamped and the planned video games and other materials disappeared. The original movie included the famous Colombian actress Sofia Vergara, who played an airplane hijacker, but producers scrapped the hijacking scene entirely, along with other scenes deemed too sensitive for release. The film, originally scheduled for October 5, 2001, finally appeared in a truncated version on Friday, February 8, 2002. 3 In addition, Barry Sonnenfeld eliminated a dramatic World Trade Center climax in Men in Black 2, a sequel to the popular 1997 comedy. Disney shelved Big Trouble, another Barry Sonnenfeld film scheduled to appear in late 2001, until 2002 because its key plot element—a nuclear bomb in a suitcase headed for a plane—seemed too sensitive after the 9/11 events. Disney eventually released this movie with little fanfare and sparse advertising. On a similar note, Sony pulled posters and coming-attractions trailers for its popular Spider-Man (2002) because they showed New York’s twin towers reflected in the hero’s eyes. Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, depicting nineteenthcentury gang warfare in New York City, originally scheduled for release in September 2001, finally appeared on Christmas 2002, delayed because



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Docudramas While Hollywood producers attempted to shield the public from depictions of terrorism, a few decided to risk delving into the attacks themselves. Brian Trenchard Smith’s DC 9/11: Time of Crisis (2003), a made-for-TV movie that evoked partisan controversy during the 2004 presidential race, became the first 9/11 film to appear. Written by conservative scriptwriter Lionel Chetwynd, Smith’s film follows the 9/11 attacks from George W. Bush’s (Timothy Bottoms) perspective immediately after the attacks as the president sat with elementary school children and ends with his impassioned speech on September 20. In a blend of documentary, docudrama, and partisan propaganda, Smith juxtaposes actual news footage of the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks with reenactment of Bush’s dramatic flights around the country on September 11 and the comments he made as he went. Contrary to current views, in Smith’s film Bush emerges as a decisive superhero whose quick thinking and decisive actions save countless lives. The Bush of DC 9/11 forcefully distances himself from the Clinton approach to terrorism, scornfully promising to do much more than fire a missile into an empty camp. “I want to inflict pain,” he explains. “Bring enough damage so they understand there is a new team here, a fundamental change in our policy.” In Smith’s film, President Bush emerges as a political superhero, instantly assessing the gravity of the situation and taking decisive actions. When an aide attempts to persuade him to remain in hiding, Bush snaps, “Try commander-in-chief. Whose present command is: Take the president home!” Democrats complained that Smith’s film delivered a well-timed partisan plug for Bush’s reelection campaign, while film critics berated the film for poor quality production values as well as for its blatantly pro-Bush perspective. J. Hoberman of The Village Voice labeled it “a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar President.”5 If Smith’s film functions as a ringing endorsement of George W. Bush, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2003) serves as an angry indictment of the president. Far from glorifying Bush, Moore’s film charges the existence of a close personal relationship between the Saudi government and the Bush family, and that the Bush White House orchestrated a secret flight out of the United States for Osama Bin Laden’s influential family. Moore’s film also charges that the Bush administration became distracted by the war in Iraq and committed too few troops and resources to the war in



of its “violence in New York” theme. However, the New York Times critic Stephen Holden noted that Scorsese’s film, although begun before the terrorist attacks, still seems to evoke indirectly the events of 9/11 “as a historical watershed.”4

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Afghanistan. It presents President Bush as dumbfounded and inert upon learning about the hijackings, strangely choosing to remain in a primary school classroom instead of confronting the hijackings right away. Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (2006), also originally made for TV, became the first feature film released chronicling the 9/11 hijackings. Greengrass’s film focuses on the hijacked United Flight 93 that many have speculated was intended to crash into the White House. Instead, according to the film, the passengers revolted against the hijackers and attempted to retake the plane after learning about the other hijacked airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center. The United Airlines Boeing 757 was one of four planes hijacked as part of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It never reached its intended target, crashing instead in an empty field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, approximately 150 miles northwest of Washington, DC. The 9/11 Commission (through testimony, tapes of passengers’ phone calls, and the flight data recorders recovered from the crash) determined that crew and passengers, alerted through phone calls to loved ones, had attempted to overpower the hijackers. The commission concluded that the hijackers crashed the plane to keep the crew and passengers from gaining control.6 Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006) focuses on the rescue of two Port Authority police officers trapped in wreckage at Ground Zero. John McLoughin (Nicolas Cage) and William A. Jimeno (Michael Pena) manage to hang onto life, hoping to be discovered by rescue workers. Stone’s film pleased some critics, like Variety’s Brian Lowry, who credited Stone as “Attempting to convey a macro vision of Sept. 11 through a micro lens.” However, Lowry pointed out that the plot elements by their very nature “result in a claustrophobic film.”7 The dramatic rescue at the end conveys a theme of persistence and heroism in the face of terrorism. Despite the claustrophobia, Stone’s film serves as an answer to terrorists: “We will survive!” Stone followed his 9/11 feature two years later with biopic that surveys George W. Bush’s adult life. Stone’s W (2008) stimulated intense controversy. To some, Stone’s film functions more like a paean to the 43rd President instead of a criticism of the Bush approach to terrorism (invade, threaten, cajole). Although George W. Bush comes off better than many felt he should be depicted, Stone’s empathy appears akin to camaraderie for a fellow Yale alumnus. The 9/11 Indies Beginning in 2002 a number of independent filmmakers released documentaries about 9/11. One of the most interesting is Steven Rosenbaum’s 7 Days in September that collects the recollections and footage of “nearly 30” independent filmmakers who happened to be close enough to turn their




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cameras on the Trade Center attacks. Rosenbaum interviews each filmmaker, connecting the often graphic, occasionally surreal images of the destruction of the towers with voice-over narration by the filmmakers. Scores more independent documentary also appeared over the years. More than sixty 9/11-oriented indies may be viewed for free.8 The subjects include conspiracy theories, mysteries, Building 7, survivors, eyewitnesses, attacks on civil liberties, and so on. A few of these, including 7 Days in September and Loose Change achieved a limited theatrical distribution in art house theaters and at film festivals, but the majority of them is available for free public viewing on the Internet. If questions persist about the 9/11 attacks and the government’s responses, these indies might ultimately be viewed by fairly large audiences. The majority of independent 9/11 documentaries raise direct or indirect questions about the terrorist attacks. A number evoke conspiracy theories involving covert government involvement in the attacks. Loose Change (2004–2005), a series of low-budget documentaries written and directed by Dylan Avery, charges that covert U.S. government agents bear responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, basing these claims on perceived anomalies in the collapse of Trade Center buildings and in the Pentagon attack. The films received widespread attention after Loose Change 2nd edition appeared on a Binghamton, New York, local television station, prompting selected theatrical releases in several cities. In 2007 Avery released yet another edition, which may be viewed in its entirety free of charge on the Internet.9

Post-9/11 Terrorist Films Instead of squelching the public’s desire for terrorist film, the 9/11 attacks apparently whetted their appetite for films depicting government officials and private individuals combating terrorism. Philip Robinson’s The Sum of All Fears (2002) returns to nuclear terrorism but goes far beyond older spy thrillers like Thunderball. Robinson’s film, begun before 9/11 but withheld from release until months later, depicts Islamic terrorists in 1991 detonating a nuclear warhead at the Superbowl in Denver. U.S. President Fowler (James Cromwell), in attendance at the game, escapes but other American officials are killed. The terrorists also plan a false attack on U.S. forces in Berlin by East Germans disguised as Russian soldiers, therefore provoking a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, eliminating those two nations as superpowers, thus punishing them for bringing an end to the cold war and betraying World Socialism. Robinson’s film, while evoking Islamic terrorists, seems descended from



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Post-9/11 “Anti War” Films In previous wars filmmakers nearly always followed an unwritten code prohibiting criticisms of the war as long as American forces remained locked in combat. However, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan now elicit negative responses form the electorate, as does the presidency of George W. Bush. These wars eventually became so unpopular that they inspired antiwar films even as combat rages in those countries. In 2007 critic Ewen MacAskill noted that current antiwar films, including Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and Grace Is Gone appeared even as the wars continue to rage, unlike films about past wars that were either patriotic feel-good movies or, if antiwar, appeared long after the cessation of hostilities.11 Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs (2007) stars Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, and Derek Luke. Cruise plays Jasper Irving, a Republican U.S. senator dedicated to fighting terrorism. Senator Irving, his eyes on a race for the presidency, convinces the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to launch a new strategy in Afghanistan—have special ops forces establish strategic mini-bases on mountain peaks and other “high ground.” The elite forces would then command the territory below. At Senator Irving’s behest, the military rushes the new strategy into action prematurely, only to see its first operation end in chaos, loss of life, and defeat. Irving interviews a veteran journalist, played by Meryl Streep, who expresses strong misgivings about the new strategy: “Do you want to win the war or terror, yes or no? This is the quintessential ‘yes or no’ question of our time. Yes or no?” Redford’s film also depicts two idealistic American college students who volunteer their services in Afghanistan, where they become involved in a struggle for survival after the two sustain injuries. Not only does this film attempt to depict the war in Afghanistan with somewhat realistic detail, it is only one of several major Hollywood films appearing in 2007 and 2008 that focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah (2007) stars Tommy Lee Jones as Hank Deerfield, a retired army sergeant whose son disappears after returning from active duty in Iraq. Police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) helps Deerfield search for his son. Deerfield suspects that his son may have met with foul play after partying one night with fellow platoon members. In the end, his suspicions prove well grounded as hidden events



the cold war era. Despite these anomalies, Robinson’s film became the third top grossing terrorist film in history, ranking behind only Air Force One (1997) and True Lies (1994). Its success points to a surge in audience interest in terrorism.10

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Deerfield: Do you know what it means when a flag flies upside down? Janitor: No . . .? Deerfield: It’s an international distress signal . . .

Peter Berg’s The Kingdom (2007) starring Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman, depicts terrorist bombings at the Riyadh compound on May 12, 2003, and the Khobar housing complex on June 26, 1996, in Saudi Arabia. The story follows a team of FBI agents, headed by Roland Fleury (Jamie Foxx), who investigate the bombing of a foreign-workers facility in Saudi Arabia. A trail of blood leads them to an apartment building that functions as a labyrinthine terrorist network. In his film Berg depicts Wahhabi extremism as well as U.S. greed for Saudi oil. At times, his message appears heavy-handed. Critic Ty Burr called Berg’s film “Syriana for Dummies,” but added, it is “fairly close to the truth, a taut, slickly made thriller about an FBI team solving a terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia.” Burr speculates that the movie’s “game plan” might involve “using a hard-boiled action flick as a Trojan horse to pick apart our assumptions and anxieties about the Middle East.”12 Although depicting terrorist events of the past, Berg’s film raises questions about the terrorists’ motives, which remain poorly defined in the movie. Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007) stars Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, and Meryl Streep. It chronicles Isabella Fields Al Ibrahini’s (Reese Witherspoon) increasingly emotional search for her Egyptian-born husband Answer Ibrahimi (Omar Metwalli) who has been kidnapped (renditioned) and sent to a foreign prison for torture. Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep) asks a government official, “Why don’t you ask your boss how badly he really does want to stick his neck out for a terrorist?” Smith replies, “Well, he might for due process. Maybe I should have a copy of the Constitution sent to your office?” At one point CIA agent Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) asks Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep), who heads the secret renditions program, “In all the years you’ve been doing this, how often can you say that we’ve produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times?” Hood’s film provides a convincing back story to the shadowy interrogation techniques implemented after 9/11 in which terrorist suspects, even U.S. citizens, experience secret deportation to foreign torture prisons for the purpose of eliciting vital information in the fight against terrorists. To accentuate his charges, Hood attaches a set of interviews to the DVD of real suspects who underwent



gradually reveal themselves. Deerfield eventually accepts his son’s murder but protests U.S. policies by hanging his son’s American flag upside down at a school. Deerfield explains his actions to a janitor:

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rendition, containing detailed descriptions of the tortures each endured, just as Answer Ibrahimi endures at the hands of his CIA torturers. The attachment fills in some of the graphic torture scenes involving slicing a suspect’s genitals that could not be included in the movie. In 2007 Brian De Palma (The Untouchables, Scarface, Mission: Impossible) released Redacted, a powerful docudrama based on the notorious case of American soldiers who raped and murdered a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and killed her family in 2006. Redacted evokes De Palma’s 1987 Casualties of War that also depicts wartime rape (Vietnam). De Palma includes a section in Redacted of grizzly photographs of Iraqi war victims titled “Casualties of War,” a reference to his earlier movie. Critics accused De Palma of reveling in the sensationalism of the crimes rather than exposing their heinousness. The director, however, maintains that he made this film in order to expose the brutal reality behind the media-managed war. “The pictures are what will stop the war,” he wrote shortly after the movie’s release. “One only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to motivate their Congressmen to vote against this war.”13 (De Palma’s newest project, Print the Legend, also focuses on Iraq.)

9/11 and Mainstream Films Viewing recent movies from the perspective of 9/11 reveals a number of indirect influences in mainstream movies. Many films now appear darker, more dystopic, and more paranoid. And, in the aftermath of the Patriot Act and military decisions regarding combatants’ rights, a noticeable distrust and fear of intelligence agencies appears in a recent subgenre of thrillers depicting glaring defects in intelligence agencies, including rogue, out-of-control agents to illegal torture. Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) follows the exploits of charter members of the fledgling CIA at the start of the cold war. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, who becomes a senior operative in the agency and De Niro plays Bill Sullivan, an agency director. At one point Sullivan visits Wilson at home to inform him his misgivings about the formation of the CIA. In his frank conservation he suggests that unscrupulous intelligence officers might lie about or exaggerate potential enemies if it is in their interest to do so. In another episode Wilson tortures a Russian defector suspected of lying about his identity, at one point using waterboarding (a medieval torture technique in which subjects experience simulated death by drowning), an obvious reference to techniques used in the War on Terror. The tortured man, unable to convince his attackers of his innocence, finally leaps out a window to his death, driven to suicide by torture.




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In another manifestation of post-9/11 darkening, recent movies rank among Hollywood’s most violent. In 2008, 26 years after the premier of the original Rambo: First Blood feature, Sylvester Stallone directed, stared, and co-scripted the fourth installment of the franchise, this time titled simply Rambo. The film’s tagline reads, “Heroes never die. . . . They just reload.” In this episode, John Rambo (Stallone) enjoys a curmudgeonly semi-retirement in Thailand, dividing his time between capturing dangerous snakes for entertainers and ferrying others in a rickety jungle boat. A group of Christian missionaries led by Michael Burnett (Paul Schulze) and Sarah Miller (Julie Benz) ask Rambo to rent his boat to travel up the river to the war-torn Karen region of Burma (Myanmar). They plan to minister to the Karen people, whom the film depicts as Christians (however, the Karen divide their religious loyalty between Buddhism, Christianity, and Animism). Initially cautious, Rambo refuses to help. When he learns from Sarah that the Christians carry no weapons he asserts scornfully that “you won’t change anything.” In the post-9/11 world, diplomacy appears weak and ineffective and only forceful, military-type actions succeed. Eventually, attracted by Sarah, Rambo joins a team of mercenaries and almost singlehandedly wipes out the Burmese forces. Images of violence in the Rambo films incrementally climbed with one critic counting in the 2008 Rambo 83 “bad guys” killed by Rambo, 40 bad guys killed by accomplices of Rambo, 113 good guys killed by villains for a total of 236 people killed almost doubling the 132 people killed in Rambo III (1988) and more than tripling the amount killed in Rambo II (1985).14 Rambo joins a number of other recent violent films wallowing in violence (Saw I-IV, There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd). This wave of 9/11 inspired films that crested in 2007, including The Bourne Ultimatum, Rendition, and Redacted, testifies to the continuing media fascination with the terrorist attacks. Richard Allen of Texas Christian University believes that, after an initial hiatus, the effects of 9/11 are only now percolating through pop culture. “There’s the shock, and then it becomes part of the culture and it becomes the thing to do. Filmmakers are trying to be as contemporary as possible as they deal with issues like terrorism. It’s an age-old thing. Think of the ’50s Cold War and how it inspired science fiction.”15 Because torture features so prominently in post-9/11 films, its presence in movies automatically evokes the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), the third installment in this popular thriller series, follows up on his United 93 success and depicts assassinations and waterboarding. Bourne is an intelligence agent who has undergone behavior modification and assumed a new, created identity as a CIA undercover operative. However, things go wrong and



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Bourne/Webb begins to experience flashbacks to his earlier identity, sending him on an epic identity quest. In this post-9/11 action/adventure saga, the intelligence community has spun out of control, resorting to waterboarding and other forms of torture for training and interrogation purposes, and as Deputy Director Noah Vosen (David Strathairn) explains to an underling about the current permissive atmosphere regarding government oversight, “That’s what makes us special: no more red tape!” Of course, no more red tape also means no more civil liberties and the rule of law. Bourne/Webb exposes the rogue operation that operates outside of government supervision, and he casts aspersions on its stated tactics of “rendition” (spiriting away captives to secret foreign prisons) and “waterboarding.” Webb/Bourne steals the files from the CIA and releases them to the world, stimulating congressional hearings into the intelligence excesses and occasioning the arrest of Deputy Director Vosen for conspiracy to assassinate Americans. Greengrass’s film serves as an update of John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a Kennedyera film suddenly withdrawn from theaters after JFK’s assassination. Frankenheimer’s film vilifies shadowy Chinese and North Korean intelligence agents who brainwash an American assassin, whereas Greengrass’s film depicts rogue American intelligence agents, not foreigners, as villains. In post-9/11 films, intelligence agents and agencies fare poorly in Hollywood. The Bourne Ultimatum depicts once again controversial intelligence tactics like waterboarding and rendition, both of which leave lasting scars on Bourne’s psyche. Only Rambo can match Bourne’s martial skills, as well as his expert motorcycle driving, car driving, lock picking, hot wiring, and other feats of technical acumen. He displays a mastery of technology and navigates successfully through the shadowy world of intelligence agents using cell phones to his advantage. He embodies contemporary fears of an intelligence community, military, and government gone out of control. To Ross Douthat, “Bourne marries the efficiency of James Bond to the politics of Noam Chomsky. He’s imperial overreach and blowback personified—the carefully brainwashed product of a covert CIA program who goes off the reservation and starts taking down his superiors, a succession of jowly, corrupt agents of the American empire.”16 Billy Ray’s Breach (2007) provides yet another example of a film depicting lapses in intelligence in its depiction of the traitorous American FBI agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), arrested in 2001 after selling agency secrets to the USSR for 25 years. His case finally cracks due to the efforts of FBI agent Eric O’Neil (Ryan Phillippe). Although Ray’s film ends with Hanseen’s capture and arrest, one of the most unfortunate in




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the Bureau’s history, it also engenders additional doubts about the trustworthiness of intelligence agencies in the Iraq War era. With traitors like Hanssen peddling military secrets to the Soviets, the intelligence community’s lapses in the wake of 9/11 appear less than surprising. Breach reminds one of The Bourne Ultimatum and many others lately in its bleak assessment of the intelligence community. The current rage for films depicting larger-than-life superheroes also owes a huge debt to 9/11. After those attacks audiences flocked to films like Spider-Man, Superman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Hancock, Hellboy, and The Dark Knight. A.O. Scott believes that “this decade has been a somewhat golden age of large scale action movies featuring guys in high-tech body suits battling garishly costumed, ruthless criminal masterminds.”17 Fascination with powerful superheroes appears to be increasing. What explains the popularity of these superheroes in the post-9/11 world? Perhaps they represent stability and order in an increasingly chaotic and dangerous environment? Hollywood’s response to worldwide terrorism in part consisted of powerful superheroes capable of destroying evil, chaotic forces. Filmmakers find themselves increasingly gravitating toward either the attacks themselves or the subsequent wars. Paul Greengrass’s Green Zone (2009), for example, a sequel to his earlier United 93 and Bourne films, joins others now in production. What was the long range impact of 9/11 on Hollywood? In 2002 some predicted little tangible impact from the terrorist events. However, filmmakers responded by producing some of the most pessimistic, violent, cynical movies of all time. “Post-9/11” movies, not the peaceful, nonviolent fare desired by many, appear to be the norm. Warren Epstein notes that despite producers’ vows to eliminate or reduce violence and depictions of terrorist acts, the current crop of movies contained higher than usual levels of violence and depictions of terrorist attacks, including The Sum of All Fears, XXX, Collateral Damage, Blood Work, Changing Lanes, Insomnia, Enough, Bad Company, The Road to Perdition, Rollerball, among others. Epstein observed ironically that instead of retreating from graphic depictions, today’s movies contain even higher doses of violence.18 At the same time, audiences flock to films featuring superheroes that single-handedly defeat terrorists and other nasty villains. If Hollywood projects an increasingly violent world, it also projects powerful fantasy heroes capable of redressing all wrongs. Apparently, widespread fear engenders strong characters, pessimistic moods, critical examinations of intelligence agencies, and a cynical perspective on a variety of social institutions, including U.S. corporations, military, and government. Will it come to be known in the future as an age of paranoia as well?



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1. Cole Hadden, “Post 9/11 Movies—the Hits and Misses,” film.com, November 12, 2007. 2. www.leninimports.com/hitchcock_saboteur. 3. Steven Keane, Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (London, UK: Wallflower Press, 2001), 82. 4. Stephen Holden, “Film; Post-9/11 and Pre,” New York Times January 5, 2003. 5. J. Hoberman, “Lights, Camera, Exploitation,” The Village Voice, August 26, 2006. 6. The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). 7. Brian Lowry, “World Trade Center,” Variety, July 31, 2006. 8. www.911docs.net. 9. Cary Darling, McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) October 1, 2007. 10. www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=terrorism. 11. Ewen MacAskill, “Hollywood Tears up Script to Make Anti-war Films While Conflicts Rage,” The Guardian, August 14, 2007. 12. Ty Burr, “Political Thriller with Plenty of Firepower,” Boston Globe, September 28, 2007. 13. Reuters, September 13, 2007. 14. John Mueller, “Dead and Deader,” New York Times, January 20, 2008. 15. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7E3oIbO0AWE. 16. Ross Douthat, “The Return of the Paranoid Style,” The Atlantic Monthly, April 2008), 52–59. 17. A. O. Scott, “How Many Superheroes Does It Take to Tire a Genre?” New York Times, July 24, 2008, B1. 18. Warren Epstein, “Despite Pundits’ Predictions, 9/11 Had Little Impact on Hollywood,” The (Colorado Springs) Gazette, September 12, 2002.



Notes




Screaming Her Way into the Hearts of Audiences: Dakota Fanning as Post-9/11 Child Star Kathy Merlock Jackson*

I

n the waning years of the twentieth century, the American mind-set began to change, enveloped by a growing sense of uneasiness. In The Culture of Fear, Barry Glassner notes that although statistics showed that crime and violence were down and life expectancy was higher than ever, people remained afraid and pessimistic. “The final years of a millennium,” Glassner asserts, “provoke mass anxiety and ill reasoning . . . . So momentous does the calendric change seem, the populace cannot keep its wits about it.”1 Foremost in people’s minds, in an age defined by computer technology, was the uncertainty of YK2: what would happen to our modern way of life if our online networks faltered? January 1, 2000, came and went without incident, but the arrival of a new millennium still triggered concern. The news media’s heightened reporting of isolated events such as school shootings, rare deadly diseases, and air disasters inflated people’s fears, making them feel vulnerable and unsafe. These incidents provided the cultural backdrop when a cataclysmic event began to unfold on September 11, 2001, as terrorists hijacked four American commercial airliners and wreaked havoc and destruction, * Kathy Merlock Jackson is Professor and Coordinator of Communications at Virginia Wesleyan College, where she specializes in media studies and children’s culture. She is the author of Images of Children in American Film, Walt Disney: A Bio-Bibliography, Rituals and Patterns in Children’s Lives, and Walt Disney: Conversations. She also edits The Journal of American Culture.



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resulting in more than 3,000 deaths in Somerset County, Pennsylvania; the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the World Trade Center in New York City. In an era marked by the media’s rapid dissemination of news, the events of 9/11 reached millions via television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, triggering an instant connection to the disaster and feelings of shock, horror, and disbelief.2 The public’s already uneasy feelings intensified in a way more extreme and poignant than anyone could have imagined. In modern society, one way in which people deal with complex emotions is to embrace elements in popular culture that encapsulate what they feel. As Dana Heller writes in the introduction to her edited volume, The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, “Consumer goods, objects, commercial memorabilia can all play instrumental roles in human processes of reflection, mourning, and healing.”3 So too can media personalities. Thus, in this atmosphere of postmillennial angst, an unlikely celebrity was introduced, a young actress named Dakota Fanning. “You think we’re kidding,” wrote Karen Valby in the July 29, 2005, issue of Entertainment Weekly. “But stay with us here. By the end of 2005, she will have starred in three major motion pictures this year—Hide and Seek, War of the Worlds, and . . . Dreamer—and for street cred, the indie Nine Lives. She’s got several movies in the works, including . . . Charlotte’s Web. She outacted Tom Cruise and Robert De Niro (and was given equal billing as the Raging Bull legend in some Hide and Seek ads), and there’s already genuine Oscar buzz for her WOTW performance. Since 2001, her movies have grossed . . . wait for it . . . nearly $650 million domestically. Which is why, at 11-years old, she already makes $3 million a picture, a figure her agent says keeps rising. And, in perhaps the truest indication of industry clout, she’s the only actress in Hollywood who no executive can say is too old.”4 The highly touted performer Valby describes is, of course, Fanning, whose box-office record in the years following her feature-film debut in 2001 surpassed those of Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Julia Roberts. In 2005, she earned $15 million, as 3 of her features placed among the top-100 moneymakers of the year: War of the Worlds at #5, Hide and Seek at #51, and Dreamer at #79.5 All told, her 2005 features made three-quarters of a billion dollars worldwide.6 At the age of 12, Fanning held the distinction of being the top-grossing female at the box office and, according to Entertainment Weekly, “the most powerful actress in Hollywood.”7 While the lineage of the child star dates back to the earliest days of film—when names like Jackie Coogan, Our Gang, Jackie Cooper, Judy Garland, and Jane Withers graced movie marquees—not since Shirley



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Temple in the 1930s has a child so dominated the box office. However, while Shirley Temple clearly fit the mold of the child star, Dakota Fanning, appears different. She adopts the role of a serious actress, not a star, and her movies’ storylines revolve around other characters, not hers. Although not driving the action, she responds to danger and the vulnerabilities of those around her, embodying our society’s post-9/11 culture, characterized by fears, concerns, and insecurities linked to threats both outside and within the American family. This role is reflective of Bianca Nielsen’s characterization of contemporary horror and thriller films as “arenas for the reassessment of conventional gender roles and the expression of cultural anxieties. While as industrial commodities Hollywood films might address conflicts in a simplistic and reactionary way, on another level, as texts shaped by collaborations between authors, they can reveal social tensions.”8 To understand the position that Dakota Fanning holds in film’s galaxy of child stars, it is useful to compare her to her most important predecessor, Shirley Temple, to whom she presented a special achievement award at a recent Screen Actors Guild ceremony and called her “role model.” Temple began making movies in 1932 at the age of four. She was ranked among the top-ten actors at the box office for six consecutive years, from 1934 to 1939, holding the number-one spot for four years from 1935 to 1938, at a time when both females and children were more likely than today to be on the list.9 Temple’s big breakthrough came in the 1934 film Stand Up and Cheer, in which the adorable five-year-old, wearing a polka-dot dress that became a national sensation, sang and danced to the song “Baby, Take a Bow” with James Dunn. From then until she was 12 and her box-office appeal began to take a nose dive, she made 20 feature films. From 1936 to 1939, when she was at the peak of her popularity, all of her films were star vehicles created or adapted expressly for her,10 in which she appeared with reputable co-stars such as James Dunn, Alice Fay, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Gary Cooper, Carol Lombard, and Lionel Barrymore, while maintaining her status as the main draw. She sang, she danced, she pouted, she persuaded, and she delighted, proving herself to be the ultimate fix-it child, one who wailed, “oh, my goodness,” but ultimately solved not only her own problems but those of the people around her. Usually an orphan or the child of a single parent, she yearned to be a part of a traditional family, and by the end of her movies, she created one. She embodied optimism and resilience, and Depression audiences always knew that things would turn out fine. Images of Temple that resonate decades after her box-office reign suggest her intrinsic innocence, happiness, cuteness, charm, and perseverance. In Bright Eyes (1934), for example, Temple sings her signature song,



DAKOTA FANNING AS POST-9/11 CHILD STAR


“On the Good Ship Lollipop,” on a plane filled with male aviators who are so enchanted that they marvel at her every word. By the end of the film, she has won the heart of a crotchety old grandfather, who invites her to become one of the family. In The Little Colonel (1935), she does the “stair dance” with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, as he demonstrates for her how to ascend the stairs to go to bed. In The Littlest Rebel (1935), set during the Civil War, she dons a hoopskirt, ruffles, and lace pantaloons and sings “Polly Wolly Doodle” with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Later, she sets off to Washington, DC, to ask President Abraham Lincoln to free her father, who has wrongly been accused of spying on Union troops. Touched by the little girl’s tearful story of her mother’s death and her father’s trying to lead her to safety, President Lincoln shares alternate slices of an apple with her and agrees to pardon her father. Such are Shirley Temple’s memorable movie moments, ones that contrast dramatically with those of Fanning, who, although recognized for the movie Dreamer, should perhaps more appropriately be dubbed “screamer.” Best known for her expressions of distress, Fanning serves as a marker for another age and a different sensibility, and her popularity raises important questions regarding childhood, gender, and stardom in post-9/11 America. Americans typically embrace actors who not only seem larger than life but are also ordinary like us.11 If so, Dakota Fanning fits the bill. Born in Conyers, Georgia, on February 23, 1994, she proved to be an active child who began reading at age two and enjoyed putting on home plays with her younger sister Elle. When her parents enrolled her in a local community playhouse, the directors thought she displayed remarkable talent and encouraged them to find her an agent. They did, and the agent recommended taking her to Hollywood, where Fanning landed a role in a Tide commercial. With her career looking promising, her family moved permanently to Los Angeles, and Fanning scored small parts in two feature films, Tomcats and Father Xmas, both appearing in 2001. The year appears significant. Robert Windeler has noted that Shirley Temple was born in 1928, “the year that sound films really took over,” and made her first one-reelers in 1932, the year that Mary Pickford, “America’s Sweetheart,” whose impressive reign at the box office was tied to her little-girl roles, retired from the movie business.12 If Temple’s timing proved precipitous, so too was Fanning’s, recalling the opening line of Dana Heller’s book, The Selling of 9/11: “When it comes to effective marketing, timing is everything.”13 Appearing on America’s cinematic radar in the wake of postmillennial uneasiness and 9/11, Fanning exhibited a quality that everyone felt—vulnerability—exemplified by her slight physical stature and terror-filled blue eyes. Classic child stars such as Shirley Temple, Elizabeth Taylor, and Margaret O’Brien awed audiences with



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their sheer magnetism and rare beauty, while young Tatum O’Neal and Jodie Foster exhibited a sexual precocity, marking them, as Molly Haskell described in the late 1970s, as “perfect sex symbols for a country that has arrived at decadence without passing maturity, that is disillusioned without ever having been fulfilled.”14 Fanning, on the other hand, appears sweet and pleasant, but also thin, pale, and waiflike, more like a helpless child in need of protection rather than a movie star or symbol of moral corruption. Her fragility on the screen serves as her greatest asset. If Temple, at age five, broke into the movie industry by captivating Depression audiences wanting to feel happy again with her song and dance routine in a short, poofy, polka-dot dress, Fanning, at seven, undertook darker roles and reflected a nation’s pain. In her breakthrough film, I Am Sam, released in 2001, she played opposite megastars Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer as the daughter of Sam Dawson, a single, autistic father with the mental ability of a seven-year-old, whom child welfare authorities believe incapable of raising his daughter. In the role of Lucy Dawson, Fanning works through a wide range of challenging emotions—uncertainty, fear, rage, and feelings of isolation and rejection—as she moves from a comfortable, familiar way of life to a new, distressing one. By the end of the film, thanks to the efforts of her persistent father, a good attorney, and a group of supporters, Lucy is reunited with her father, flanked by a host of cooperative caregivers. Although Fanning’s character does not solve her own problems as Shirley Temple’s did, the result is the same: she finds a family. While the movie focused on the plight of Sam, played by Penn, Fanning’s role required intense displays of emotional distress. Her performance, which made her the youngest person ever to be nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for best supporting actress, proved to be a lightning rod for high-profile film offers and a prototype for her subsequent movie roles. In 2002 and 2003, Fanning’s formative career years, she played in an impressive array of films: Trapped (2002) with Charlize Theron; Sweet Home Alabama (2002) with Reese Witherspoon; Taken (2002), the miniTV series directed by Steven Spielberg; Hansel and Gretel (2002); and Uptown Girls (2003) with Brittany Murphy. She also landed a starring role as Sally in The Cat in the Hat (2003) with Mike Myers, Elisabeth Shue, and Alec Baldwin. In this film, her role, once again, is to scream and react to the chaos around her caused by her badly behaved and destructive brother Conrad and the mischievous cat. By the end of the film, Sally has ceased being a “control freak” and Conrad a “holy terror” as they are happily reunited with their proud mother. “It looks like everything is in balance,” says the Cat, who was instrumental in bringing about family harmony.





These performances led to Dakota Fanning’s groundbreaking year, 2004–2005, in which the actress moved to Hollywood’s A list and assumed coveted roles in high-profile projects that bore direct connection to terrorism and invasion. These performances solidified her on-screen persona as the vulnerable child at the center of a troubled family who tries to act grown up but needs to be saved herself. In 2004 Fanning co-starred with Denzel Washington in Man on Fire, the story of a family in Mexico City that hires a bodyguard to protect their young daughter in a place where a kidnapping occurs every 60 seconds. Fanning, in the role of Pita, must win over her bodyguard, Creasy (Washington), a troubled alcoholic who wants to be left alone, asserting that he is being paid to protect her, not be her friend. Pita senses his sadness and names her teddy bear Creasy Bear after him. He helps her to become a champion swimmer by training her not to flinch when the gun signaling the beginning of the race is fired. The two bond, and in a key scene, Pita screams his name in horror as Creasy is brutally shot and she is snatched away by kidnappers. Creasy recovers, and believing that Pita is dead, vows revenge and tortures those responsible for her abduction. He eventually discovers that Pita’s own father, who subsequently commits suicide, had a hand in the crime in a desperate attempt to save his financial situation. Ultimately, Creasy learns that Pita is alive and trades his own life for the girl’s. As Pita is released, they reunite, Pita tearfully shouting his name once again, before meeting her mother at the bottom of the hill. Themes of the horror of atrocity, the memory of a loved one presumed dead, the attempt to rescue a victim, and the quest for revenge bear resemblance to the catastrophe of 9/11. Through her screams, Fanning as Pita reflects a nation’s terror. Fanning is again under siege in several 2005 films. “Is it the terrorists?” she gasps in War of the Worlds, in which she plays 10-year-old Rachel Ferrier, whose estranged father Ray, played by Tom Cruise, must save her from an alien invasion. The film, in the words of its director Steven Spielberg, was inspired by the image of everybody in Manhattan fleeing across the Brooklyn Bridge in the shadow of 9/11, which is something that is a searing image that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. This [the movie] is partially about the American refugee experience because it’s certainly about Americans fleeing for their lives after being attacked and who is attacking them.15

At the onset of this film, Fanning, as Rachel, appears more mature than her father, a New Jersey blue-collar worker who, when his pregnant ex-wife and her husband drop off the children for their scheduled weekend visit, arrives late to his messy house and leaves Rachel and her teenage brother



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Robbie to fend for themselves while he lumbers off to take a nap. Robbie openly despises his father, but Rachel tries to act cooperatively, ordering take-out food because there is nothing to eat in the house. Rachel’s air of responsibility ends quickly when the aliens attack: she yells, cries, and has a panic attack, while her brother tries to calm her. In a scene reminiscent of 9/11, Ray tries to lead his children out of the mayhem, encountering debris, falling sediment of the vaporized dead, and stunned survivors holding pictures of missing loved ones. After Robbie goes off to join the military and fight the aliens, Rachel is left alone with Ray, as events turn more bizarre. Ray assumes fatherly responsibilities, trying to protect and calm Rachel and shielding her when he kills a deranged maniac in an underground bunker who poses a threat. In a key scene in the film, the aliens lift Rachel—small, alone, frightened, and vulnerable—into the sky, and her piercing scream summons her father, who fights for her safety. Ultimately, he delivers her unscathed to the arms of her mother at her grandparents’ home in Boston. Cruise describes War of the Worlds as “a very small movie inside a very big movie. It’s about a family. About a father and his kids. About the emotional journey they take.”16 Cruise’s character dominates every scene, the world destroyed so that the deadbeat father can finally learn from his mistakes and grow up; however, Fanning’s character exists to show the horror of being under attack. “Ms. Fanning,” writes New York Times writer A.O. Scott, “[is] Hollywood’s favorite endangered child . . . [she] screams her head off, an appropriate enough response.”17 Spielberg has marveled at “how quickly [Fanning] understands the situation in a sequence, how quickly she sizes it up, measures it up and how she would really react in at real situation.”18 She encapsulates the emotions of Americans caught in a crisis. Fanning’s other 2005 roles take on even more ominous tones. In Hide and Seek, as Emily Callaway, Fanning appears to be demonically possessed, following what appears to be the bloody suicide of her mother, but she is really the victim of her schizophrenic father, played by Robert De Niro, who tries to kill her. By the end of the film, she has a new family and, apparently, traces of her father’s mental illness. In the last segment in the indie film Nine Lives, Fanning, as Maria, visits what appears to be her grandfather’s grassy grave for a picnic lunch with co-star Glenn Close, but in a strange twist, it is really Maria who is dead. Thus, in each of these films, Fanning’s character appears frightened, threatened, crying, helpless, screaming, or dead, her fair face, tangled hair, saucer-shaped, sunken eyes, piercing shriek, and slight body used to optimum effect. She reacts to but does not dominate the main action, serving to make others confront their inadequacies. The plots revolve around the lives of her high-status co-stars whose characters drive the





action and undergo the greatest change. The family appears to be troubled at first; then the real troubles—brought about by dangerous threats from the outside world—begin. In her final movie of 2005, Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, Fanning is not in her typical role, as one New York Times reviewer observed, “kidnapped by bandits” nor “menaced by aliens,”19 but again the scenario bears resemblance to her other projects. Fanning plays a major role as Cale Crane, but the story really belongs to her worried, out-of-work horse trainer father, played by Kurt Russell, who achieves professional and economic success, reconciles with his own father, and becomes closer to his only child through Cale’s love and caring for her horse Sonador. Cale at one point loses her horse and realizes that she, alone, cannot get her back or restore her scarred family, but with one another’s help, all achieve their dreams. Her role is to be saved and, in the process, bring the family back together. Elisabeth Weis, in her introduction to The Movie Star, writes that “our stars tell us a lot about ourselves and the national self-image . . . each generation alters the specifications for its stars, reflecting new currents and aspirations in the society at large.”20 If this is the case, Dakota Fanning holds the distinction of being the poster child for the sensibilities of 9/11. In the years immediately following the disaster, she exemplified more than any other actor the prevailing culture of fear. Experiencing outside threats on the American family, as well as the pain of fragmentation within, Fanning’s characters emote, displaying extreme reactions, functioning as modern-day replicas of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream. Dakota Fanning’s on-screen persona embodies a nation’s outcry and perceived vulnerability. In more recent years, Fanning has continued in this vein, assuming the roles of troubled characters under attack. In Charlotte’s Web (2006), as Fern, she saves her pet pig from slaughter. In Hounddog (2008), her character, Lewellen, is raped. In Winged Creatures, as Anne Hagen, she sees her father murdered. Dakota Fanning entered the American psyche as an angst-ridden child star as the nation was coming to terms with the post-traumatic stress of 9/11. One wonders how this image will serve her as she matures as an actress and assumes adult roles. Typically, very few child stars sustain their popularity once they hit their teen years, in part because the public has difficulty accepting them in more mature roles. However, Fanning, although her appeal is based on her small, frail stature, never ascribed to the cute child star image. Unlike Shirley Temple, whose star status was so powerful that she made more money from character merchandise than from her movies, Dakota Fanning does not inspire dolls or lunch boxes, nor does she attract the same fervor as youthful female celebrities



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such as the Olsen Twins, Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, or in past years, Britney Spears. When Fanning turned 12 on February 23, 2006, the syndicated “People” section of American newspapers reported the birthday of “Actress” Dakota Fanning, not “Child Star” Dakota Fanning.21 The nomenclature is significant. There is no question that Fanning’s appeal has been linked to her tiny, vulnerable, little-girl body, and her popularity could diminish with her physical maturation. On the other hand, Fanning seems poised to make the transition to an adult career, as did Jodie Foster, Diane Lane, and Brooke Shields. Already the public takes her seriously, paving the way for her move to adult character roles. Mary Pickford, although dubbed “America’s Sweetheart” for her little-girl movie parts, appeared likable, hospitable, competent and very shrewd in matters of business in public. Fanning fosters a similar off-screen maturity. Her agent, Cindy Osbrink, is widely quoted as saying, “She’s the oldest soul I’ve ever worked with.”22 Osbrink notes, “I used to say she was 30. . . . Now . . . I say she’s 105. She gets more mature and thoughtful and expressive.”23 Unlike youthful performers such as McCauley Culkin and Lindsay Lohan, Fanning’s parents do not control and attract attention away from their talented offspring to themselves. At the same time, Fanning’s advisers market her wisely, carefully casting her not as a cute face but already as a grand dame of Hollywood, doing award presentations, interviews with Barbara Walters and Katie Couric, animated character voices, voiceovers for documentaries, and late-night talk shows. In a recent article in Time magazine, Joel Stein observed, “Never has a kid had such a wellplanned path to becoming a serious actress. She reportedly took a pay cut from her million-plus fee on Hide and Seek to get her name above the title right next to De Niro’s. She took the movie, she told reporters, because she had ‘never done a psychological thriller before.’ ”24 Unlike traditional child stars, Fanning appears only occasionally in movies geared to a family audience, trying to extend her range and make her name in blockbuster genres not generally associated with children, such as action-adventure, horror, and thrillers, securing second billing to stars like Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, and Denzel Washington. Her co-stars readily sing her praises. “Listen,” Kurt Russell told Dreamer director John Gatins, who changed the role in his film from a boy to a girl to accommodate Fanning, “I’ve f—-ing worked with them all. I’ve worked with Meryl Streep! I guarantee you, (Dakota) is the best actress I will work with in my entire career.”25 Denzel Washington, who worked with her when she was nine, called her “a bright young woman,” later adding, “Dakota is a child, but she is a wonderful actor. And that’s what we were doing together: acting. I don’t know what a child actor is.





She’s an actor who’s a child.”26 Kris Kristofferson said she was like Bette Davis reincarnated.27 The child-under-attack films that Fanning is associated with often thrust her in the realm of R-rated entertainment, smoothing her transition into adult roles. It is often said that the meatiest parts for women in Hollywood, those that earn Academy Award nominations, are for characters who are drowning in misery: prostitutes, prisoners, criminals, alcoholics, physically and emotionally abused lovers, the dying, and the mentally ill. Fanning has already perfected her ability to play the child in jeopardy needing to be saved, usually by a man. In mainstream Hollywood films, women are likely to be cast in similar roles. The 9/11 attacks forever changed America, confirming its deepest fears. In the years following that catastrophic day, Dakota Fanning emerged as the prominent child star, encapsulating a nation’s sense of vulnerability and terror. Although screen legend Shirley Temple saw her box office appeal plummet when she was 12, Fanning, now a teenager, is effectively carving out a Hollywood career as an adult. Expressing an emotional state of angst and uncertainty, reflective of the events of 9/11, she seems neither too young nor too old. Her persona is unique: onscreen she is the adult playing the child, off-screen the child playing the adult. She holds the distinction of being the actress who not only reminds Americans, immersed in their culture of fear, of the dangers they face, but also, importantly, of their will to survive. Notes 1. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999), xx. 2. Charles A. Corr, Clyde M. Nabe, and Donna M. Corr, Death and Dying: Life and Living, 4th ed. (Toronto: Thomson Wadsworth, 2003), 219. 3. Dana Heller, ed., The Selling of 9/11: How a Tragedy Became a Commodity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 5. 4. Karen Valby, “The Most Powerful Actress in Hollywood Is . . . Dakota Fanning,” Entertainment Weekly, July 29, 2005, 10. 5. “The Top 100,” Entertainment Weekly, January 27, 2006, 23. 6. Joshua Rich, “Box Office Surprises,” Entertainment Weekly, January 27, 2006, 22. 7. Valby, 10. 8. Bianca Nielsen, “Home Invasion and Hollywood Cinema: David Fincher’s Panic Room,” in The Selling of 9/11: How a Tragedy Became a Commodity, ed. Dana Heller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 234. 9. Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records, updated ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 57.



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10. Robert Windeler, The Films of Shirley Temple (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1978), 38. 11. Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 29. 12. Windeler, 13. 13. Heller, 1. 14. Molly Haskell, “Jodie Foster and Tatum O’Neal,” in The Movie Star, ed. Elisabeth Weis (New York: Penguin, 1981), 229. 15. Quoted in Andrew M.Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 253. 16. Quoted in “This Means War,” Entertainment Weekly, June 17, 2005, 24. 17. A. O. Scott, “Another Terror Attack, But Not by Humans,” New York Times, June 29, 2005. 18. War of the Worlds: Spielberg & Cruise—Part I. comingsoon.net. 19. A. O. Scott, “A Filly and a Family, Out to Battle the Odds,” New York Times, October 21, 2005. 20. Elisabeth Weis, ed. The Movie Star (New York: Penguin, 1981), x. 21. “Today’s Birthdays,” The Virginian-Pilot, February 23, 2006, E12. 22. Quoted in Valby, 11. 23. Quoted in Joel Stein, “The Million Dollar Baby,” Time, March 7, 2005, 76. 24. Ibid. 25. Quoted in Valby, 11. 26. Todd Gilchrist, “Interview: Denzel Washington and Dakota Fanning.” http:// filmforce.ign.com.articles/508/508550pl.html. 27. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (2005) DVD Review. reel.com.







Sporting Spectacle and the Post-9/11 Patriarchal Body Politic Michael L. Silk and Mark Falcous*

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hroughout history, sport has been deployed in the service of numerous geopolitical trajectories across a range of sites (from integrating immigrant communities, heralding particular ideological regimes, or, substantiating various forms of, often repressive, body politics). In this sense, sporting experiences, practices, and forms are mapped onto, and appropriated within, popular forms of culture—sport thus serving as an economy of affect through which power, privilege, politics, and position are (re)produced. Within this chapter we center on understanding sporting spectacle in the post-9/11 era as a site through which intersecting discourses are mobilized in the organization and discipline of daily life in the service of particular political agendas.1 Clearly, there were multiple, competing, and complex initial reactions to 9/11.2 As Dallmayr notes, September 11, 2001, “struck America [sic] as a thunderclap, disclosing something that had been excised or repressed before: namely, the vulnerability of the country in the midst of a relentlessly globalizing world.”3 Subsequent to the U.S. sense of ontological security being disrupted, there was a recognition and realization that the United * Michael L. Silk is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Bath and an Associate Professor in Physical Cultural Studies at the University of Maryland. His research and scholarship centers on the production and consumption of space, the governance of bodies, and, the performative politics of identity within the context of neoliberalism. Mark Falcous is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. His work focuses on intersections of sport, nationalism, media and global processes.



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MICHAEL L. SILK AND MARK FALCOUS

States is part of a finite world that stimulated a reexamination and reentrenchment of U.S. nationhood at a fundamental level. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, U.S. sporting events became key public sites for assertions of nationalist unity. The baseball “World Series” in October 2001, for example, featured an “opening pitch” from President Bush and symbolic pregame ceremonies featuring the national flag, symbolism, and military and service personnel prominently. The potent significance of sport at this time and subsequent entwinement with post-9/11 trajectories in the United States thereafter has been marked. As King notes “a range of sporting events, institutions, celebrity figures, and texts have become key vehicles for reproducing and channelling militarist and nationalist identification— and the range of supremacist forces that attend them.”4 Such processes have stimulated a burgeoning literature.5 Elsewhere we have interrogated how sporting spectacle, magnified by the “gigantic abreaction”6 to the events of September 11, 2001, has become entwined in the symbolic and discursive armoury in the (re)entrenchment of a “new imperialism.”7 Complimenting this, the present chapter centers on the production of a post-9/11 U.S. “national fantasy,”8 a space in which a normalized masculine national corpus was reconstituted—a constitution of a highly mediated and thus highly visible national “we” that which clearly distinguished between those bodies that mattered and those who did not properly belong,9 or were far from productive and functional, to this conjunctural moment. We offer two short sketches of highly seductive media sport moments in the post-9/11 aftermath; “sanctioned” sporting discourses that were mobilized in the affective substantiation of a post-9/11 corporo-political U.S. rhetoric.10 Deployed through multiple agents (television, advertising, Olympic Committees, National governing bodies of sport, film, presidential appearances at sporting events, and the rhetoric of key political leaders), who seemingly operated with a “collective affinity” to mobilize sport within dominant definitions of “nation” and “other,” these mediations stressed the enduring resonance of nation and offered occasion for potent significations of locality.11 The first moment focuses on the mediation of two major sporting events that took place in the first week of February 2002—the delayed Super Bowl and the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games. We follow with a consideration of the 2004 Disney film Miracle, depicting the 1980 Olympic U.S. ice hockey victory over the USSR in Lake Placid.

Sporting Spectacle and the Symbolic Revision of the Post-9/11 United States The main (in both a qualitative and quantitative sense) component of the Fox Sports Super Bowl pregame broadcast centered on the retelling of 10.1057/9780230101616 - The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment, Edited by Matthew J. Morgan


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selective national histories12 spliced with footage of the “terror attacks” of 9/11. Fox constructed a highly selective pastiche of the past, which was acted out through the sporting spectacle. Framed through the retelling of the “Home Depot Declaration of Independence” and through various “representative subjectivities” of the U.S. nation (American footballers and Hollywood stars spliced with political leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of state), Fox announced that the United States was “united more than ever.”13 As an additional element in the selective recollection of past events from the archives of collective historical memories, Fox retold snippets of speeches from Abraham Lincoln through the living past-presidents of the United States (with Nancy Regan standing in for her husband, Ronald Regan). This was something of a significant moment, for, with the exception of Britney Spears in a Pepsi commercial, this was one of the few times where a female was present, let alone featured as anything other than “victim”14 within the commercial rendition of the (re)imagined national “we.” These sporting representations thus became another moment in which constructions of new heroism celebrated the American male worker and soldier—historical and contemporary. Women alternatively became passive receptors of historical moments despite the ironies of the war on the Taliban being, according to official rhetoric, about the liberation of Afghan women.15 Just six days later, the Salt Lake City Olympic Games opened. Following the narrative constructed through the Super Bowl, NBC’s representation of the opening ceremony, enhanced the performance of the past within the present—this time centered on a retelling of the “Pioneers,” the settlement and “winning of the West,” and the blessing of athletes by Native American tribes who made up Utah’s original inhabitants (represented by participants in “traditional” costumes and speaking indigenous languages). Such performances, on the surface, offered an endorsement for cultural pluralism.16 Yet, through the recuperation of history, a fabricated and inauthentic aura of the U.S. nation was reconstituted along pluralistic and multicultural lines that reformulated regional and ethnic differences and diversity. Such performances did little to challenge existing power relations; rather such “collective memories” offered a boutique or folkloric spectacle, a managed or sanctioned multiculturalism in which power (economic or otherwise) monoculturally deployed defining ontological existence for “ethnic” communities.17 What is perhaps most telling about these media narratives is their seemingly unquestioned masculinized and militarized organization. Structured within what Giroux has termed a “military-corporateindustrial-educational complex,”18 the broadcasts, as powerful components of a post-9/11 public pedagogy, were embedded with values 10.1057/9780230101616 - The Impact of 9/11 on the Media, Arts, and Entertainment, Edited by Matthew J. Morgan


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supporting a highly militarized patriarchal and jingoistic culture.19 The interface of a patriarchal body politic and the reassertion of a “national narrative”20 was asserted by those chosen as representative subjectivities of nation. In both broadcasts, against images of the Stars and Stripes flag that endured the 9/11 attacks, fire-fighters, police, post-office workers (due to the “Anthrax threat”), and sporting “heroes” were embedded with militarism. Indeed, based around the narrative of “Hope, Heroes and Homeland,” Fox’s Super Bowl pregame show opened with a “live” satellite image of the globe, with two points marked: Afghanistan and the Louisiana Superdome (the Super Bowl venue). Whilst the satellite image gradually zoomed in on the venue, Afghanistan was far from forgotten throughout coverage. There were numerous visits to Kandahar, Afghanistan, where U.S. troops on active duty were gathered (i.e., were “strategically placed” by Fox producers) to watch the game. Indeed, one soldier, improvising with a hand-grenade ring, proposed to his fiancé live on air from “the most-heavily armed super-bowl party in the world.” Straddling this narrative, archive footage of those lost in Vietnam was utilized, as were graphics—which depicted soldiers and their weapons— that sutured American footballers with their military counterparts. This hypermasculine aesthetic built upon common histories and memories, which no matter how exclusionary and fabricated, through particular reconstructions of the history, linked the present to the past.21 In this sense, the broadcasts provided a seamless connection between the rugged and brave pioneers and settlers (with atrocities suitably forgotten and erased through a blessing), the bravery of those lost in the Vietnam conflict, and an apparent sine qua non masculinst, “violent” and “intolerant”22 leitmotif necessary to wage war on those abject internal and external populations in the post-9/11 aftermath. Albeit with infamous bomber jacket in absentia, before the Opening Ceremony, NBC aired an interview with President Bush who framed the Salt Lake City Olympic Games as “a statement of peace and unity in reestablishing the nationhood . . . and a chance to move beyond the evils.” Bush argued, “the Games must go on, if [the] games weren’t held it would be a victory for the terrorists, [and we are] not going to let them have any victories.” Bush’s statements became the mantra of commentator Jim McKay who frequently referred back to the commander in chief’s interview throughout the event. Centered on visions of “shared” histories and values and the corporo-political economic “needs” of the state through reinforcing, and legitimating, military intervention, the narrative was closely allied to the determination of friends and foes (ensconced in a binary rhetoric of “good versus evil”). Bush’s oft cited post-9/11 ultimatum was simply: “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”23



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This definitive polarization was entrenched in his subsequent identification of an “Axis of Evil,” posited as a threat to the “free world.”24 The narrative continuity between these two events was perhaps best exemplified through the performance of the national anthem and God Bless America (sung by New York City Policeman Daniel Rodriguez at both events).25 Further, during the “parade of nations” at the Salt Lake City Olympics, accolades were reserved for some countries over others. French athletes, for example, entered the arena holding double-sided flags that revealed both the Tricolore and the Stars and Stripes, which led to an excited commentator Bob Costas urging viewers to “look at the flags, look at the flags.”26 Uzbekistan also received a rapturous response from Costas who informed the audience of the shared border with Afghanistan and praised the nation for allowing their land to be used to launch U.S. military strikes. The biggest accolade, however, was reserved for the British who were celebrated for their political and military alignment with the United States Commentator, Katie Couric, clarified: “there’s no doubt the great appreciation for this team tonight, because of the tremendous support Tony Blair and the British have given the U.S. in the aftermath of September 11.” Yet, and importantly, these nations were framed by the rhetoric accompanying the normally moribund and anonymous bearers of the placard that announced the name of paraded team. While Olympic narrative is normally reserved for the flag bearer of individual nations, NBC were ready and waiting with a graphic and commentary lauding the honor afforded the British team who were lead in by Steve Young, former NFL quarter back for the San Francisco 49ers. The choice of Steve Young is significant for he embodies the neoconservative, “wholesome” righteous morality so associated with the Bush regime.27 Not only did Young play for Brigham Young University, hence establishing his link to the Mormon Church and Utah (something he has carried on through charitable work with his “Forever Young” organization), he is renowned for his “scrambling” style of play, overcoming adversity in the face of the pass rush. Furthermore, and in the much played upon link between the nation’s founding fathers and the present, Young was presented to the consumer as great-great-great-grandson of both Brigham Young and his brother Joseph Young. Other nations received a vastly differing representation by NBC’s commentary team. When Afghanistan should have been next in the parade of nations, Bob Costas reaffirmed their nonpresence due to the “policies of the Taliban.” As Iranian athletes entered the arena, commentators framed their presence by focussing on President Bush, sitting “stone faced” in his box, while commentary discussed why the other members of the “axis of evil,” Iraq and North Korea, were not present at the Games.



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The sporting spectacles that took place in February 2002, can be located as an element in the ongoing construction of the epistemological space of the West—a space in which domination is no longer legitimized solely by direct colonial subjugation, but also by hyperextensive discourses and representations.28 Through the performance of the collective social memory and the refinement of the external “other,” the sanitized nation was narrativized; a televisual spectacle that asserted sport as an affectively charged sphere of mediated popular culture, and played a seductive and visceral role in the affective mobilization of a militarized American national “we.” Collectively, these broadcasts positioned viewers, legitimated foreign policy goals, symbolically realigned the United States with certain nations in the interests of global (read United States) capital, authorized military intervention, and defined the operation and execution of a global police force (militarily conceived as the “International Coalition Against Terror”) under the rubric of universal values against terrorism. Most importantly, and somewhat rearticulating Butler and Berlant,29 through rendering visible those who properly belong to the national “we,” the sports broadcasts operated as a form of ocular authoritarianism that names and shames the abject—both internal and external—making discernable those nonproductive post-9/11 bodies who became exemplary of all obstacles to “normal” national life.

The Miracle of Miracle As might be expected given the apparent collective affinity between Hollywood and the White House,30 film releases in the post-9/11 period “negotiated”31 this geopolitical landscape in familiar ways. Our brief comments here are centered on one such release, Disney’s “emplottment”32 of the 1980 Winter Olympic Ice Hockey semifinal contested between the U.S.A and the USSR.33 Following Hardt and Negri and Baudrillard, 34 at the conclusion of the cold war, nation-states no longer cloud our view and “we” are faced with a ghostly enemy, which, like a virus, haunts “us” and “infiltrates” the global capitalist order. As Morris suggests, while this present war—perhaps more infinite in scope and endless in duration than previous evocations of war—does constitute something of a break with cold war policy, it relies on the rhetoric and ideology of binarism.35 That is, for Bush and allies, the populace must be convinced that the enemy is out there, a tangible collective (in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, or wherever), that can be identified as the “other,” not “us.” In this sense, as Wang argues, there has been a return to the rugged terrain of cold war conflict, to paranoia, to phobia, to security, to the bloody conflict of



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giant powers, the tightening of boundaries, and the hysterical assertion of national identity.36 We thus propose Miracle can be read as part of the collapse of the temporal and ideological gulf between past and present. In this sense, the film can be seen as part of a reinvocation of a cold war binarism that fits post-9/11 trajectories; as Sardar and Davies note, the assertion of “an ideological conflict on a global scale with its echoes and footprints everywhere.”37 Herein lays the miracle of Disney’s Miracle. Not only does it reassert a sense of self—a remembrance of what it means to be “we”—it takes “us” back to time when things were apparently a lot simpler. For U.S. citizens, the world felt like a more hostile place after 9/11—Miracle’s appeal is that it takes us back to a time when things were simplistic—“us” against “them.”38 Miracle, similar to the cinema release of Seabiscuit, “offered [Americans] solace in films and perhaps even presidents that seduce us through promises of easy victories and performances of innocence (past, present, and future) through ignorance.”39 It does so through a historical amnesia that diminishes who “they” were—the Russians were not explicitly demonized; rather they were presented as a nebulous and vacuous enemy in Miracle—allowing for a reassertion of the spectres of the cold war. Through forgetting, through representation of the 1980 Lake Placid Olympic games as being almost devoid of real, menacing, realized cold war rhetoric, the film provides viewers a space in which a relatively bland and not especially threatening enemy (Soviets as represented in Miracle) were juxtaposed with “freedom loving people” making it all the easier, as Hogan argues, with regard to the Salt Lake City games, to slot “terrorists” into the space previously reserved for “communists”—a symbolic assertion of U.S. power, a promise to once again defeat its enemies in the “war on terror.”40 Drawing on a “simple dichotomy of good and evil that made all calculations simplistic, straightforward and enriching for the vested interests they represent”41 the film paints a “typical Disney picture of innocence”42 in which “victory” could be achieved by an appeal to an untroubled white American masculinity. Focussing on the U.S. players as good, white, family “boys”43 plucked by coach Herb Brooks from college hockey, who achieve against the odds, the narrative settles on the myth of meritocracy, individualism, and hard work in subservience to the higher national cause. Brooks, in turn, is represented as a tough, determined, uncompromising coach, yet also a family-oriented benevolent patriarch. That is, the person at the heart of striking a symbolic blow against “communism” is constructed as a depoliticized “hockey-man,” absent of political agenda. Miracle is male soap opera in every way; masculine melodrama is played out in the aspirations of the college kids picked for the Olympic



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dream, the trials, tribulations, traumas, fraternal bonding that these boys engage in, and most importantly, in the efforts, willingness, hard work, sweat, guts and blood required to achieve victory. In this sense, the narrative provides a space in which the hardwork ethic, the willingness to push the male body to extremes, the individual rivalries and differences (played out in the film through the colleges the players attend) are subsumed to the greater national cause: manifest in the inexorable rise from minnow to “Reaganite hard body”44 capable of defeating the all-powerful “enemy”—whoever we imagine that to be in our present.

Coda: The Post-9/11 Patriarchal Physical Body Politic Our observations suggest a wider militarization of public space and culture in which the line between war and entertainment has become increasingly blurred. While sport has often been conflated with war, it is important to place the commercial sporting spectacle—lest we forget such representations were interspersed with a thirst quenching circuit of automotive, financial, and alcoholic commodities—alongside the apparent ubiquitous embeddedness of militarism with educational, penal, civic governance, fashion, toy sales, and, family life.45 Thus, alongside the rather glib treatment of 9/11 in popular cultural texts such as 24 or films such as World Trade Center and United 93, it has become “normalised” for ABC’s 2003 Super Bowl XXVII to be hosted, in part, on the U.S.S Midway, and on numerous other warships at “undisclosed Gulf locations” for the kick off of the 2003–2004 National Football League to be presented live from the national monument in Washington (prefaced by President Bush’s announcement that it was “time to play some football”). Likewise, for ESPN to present Sportscenter live from Camp Arifjan, Kuwait; for NASCAR to become a depository for a militarized, racialized, neoconservatism; for the “friendly fire” death of Pat Tillman to be treated so differently than the death of every other soldier, due to his putting on hold his NFL career to enlist; for the 2004 Olympic coverage of Iraq’s first soccer game to be framed by NBC as U.S. “liberation” making it possible for the team to compete; for paramilitary fitness instructors to publicly refine the bodies of the obese on “The Biggest Loser”; or, for cyborg corporals to stabilize our core strength through the Wii console. Clearly, the impact of 9/11 has seen mediated sport in the United States become entrenched within the machinations of the “violent politics of truth concerning America [sic] and the so-called threats by terrorists to democracy and freedom.”46 Perhaps most significantly, the insidious reach and appropriation of the geopolitical tentacles of the “Day that Changed Everything” within



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normalized and seemingly banal, if not innocent, popular cultural sporting spectacles has been felt in the elevated place of male athletic performance. Sporting spectacle—itself already a hypermasculine domain47—provides a fictive solution or response to what Faludi has termed America’s lack of masculine fortitude.48 Faludi’s engaging argument reveals the paradoxes of how the last remaining hyperpower, attacked precisely because of its imperial preeminence, responded through fixation on its weaknesses and ineffectuality. Like Giroux and Bhabba, Faludi’s discussion centers on the loss of the image of the tightly hewn worker using his body and labor to create the neccesities for everyday life. Rather, replaced by the “masses of weak-chinned BlackBerry clutchers,”49 the white male body has transformed into a receptacle for consumption facing increasing uncertainty and insecurity; a life in which ennui and domestication define their everyday existence.50 Through the reassertion of the specters of the cold war, the revision of the frontier, and, the rousing tributes to Vietnam veterans in the sketches disscussed earlier, and fully ensocnced in a heightened military sensibility, these sporting spectacles champion the return of the “manly man.” In this sense, and playing an important visceral and affective role in reestablishing national fantasy predicated on a myth of invincibility in which capable women are denigrated and manly men magnified,51 sporting spectacles reassert an old, if not forgotten, masculinity. This is a productive and patriarchal body politic as the post-9/11 zeitgeist, a rejuvinated and xenophobic phallus capable of penetrating even the most nebulous, viral like enemy in our viagra fuelled, neoconservative, present. Notes 1. David L. Andrews, “Excavating Michael Jordan: Notes on a Critical Pedagogy of Sporting Representation,” in Sport and Postmodern Times: Culture, Gender, Sexuality, the Body and Sport, ed. Genevieve Rail and Jean Harvey (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); Henry Giroux, “Cultural Studies as Performative Politics,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 1, no. 1 (2001): 5–23; Laurence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Laurence Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 2. See e.g., Michael Giardina and Mary Weems, “ ‘Not in Our Name!’: From 9/11 to ‘War’ with Iraq,” Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 4 (2004): 481–492; Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Gloria LadsonBillings, “It’s Your World, I’m Just Trying to Explain It: Understanding Our Epistemological and Methodological Challenges,” Qualitative Inquiry 9 (2002): 5–12; Mario Rocha, “Undoing the Blindfold of Old Glory: Observations of



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3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11.

12.


9/11 and the War on Terrorism from Lockdown U.S.A,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 4, no. 2 (2004): 143–151. Fred Dallmayr, “Lessons of September 11,” Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 138. Samantha King, “War Games: The Culture of Sport and the Militarization of Everyday Life” Paper presented at Crossroads in Cultural Studies 5th International Conference, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: np (2004). Mark Falcous and Michael Silk, “Manufacturing Consent: Mediated Sporting Spectacle and the Cultural Politics of the War on Terror,” International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 59–65; Mark Falcous and Michael Silk, “Global Regimes, Local Agendas: Sport, Resistance and the Mediation of Dissent,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41, nos. 3 and 4 (2006): 317–338; King, 2004; Mary McDonald, “Do You Believe in Miracles? Ice Hockey and the Lake Placid 1980 Olympics,” in East Plays West: Essays on Sport and the Cold War, ed. S. Wagg and D. Andrews (London: Routledge, 2006); Michael Silk and Mark Falcous, “One Day in September / One Week in February: Mobilizing American (Sporting) Nationalisms,” Sociology of Sport Journal 22, no. 4 (2005): 399–421; Carl Stempel, “Televised Sports, Masculinist Moral Capital, and Support for the U.S. Invasion of Iraq” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 30, no. 1 (2006): 79–106. Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Le Monde (2nd November, 2001). Available at: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spiritof-terrorism.html Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso Books, 2003). Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Lauren Berlant, “The Face of America and the State of Emergency,” in Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies, ed. C. Nelson and D. Gaonkar (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), 397–440. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, New York and London, 1993); Joanna Zylinska, “The Universal Acts: Judith Butler and the Biopolitics of Immigration” Cultural Studies 18, no. 4 (2004), 523–537. We offer a fuller empirical account of these broadcasts in Silk and Falcous, 2005. See David L. Andrews and C. L. Cole, “The Nation Reconsidered,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 26, no. 2 (2002): 123–124; David Rowe, “Sport and the Repudiation of the Global,” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 38, no. 3 (2003): 281–294; Michael Silk and David L. Andrews, “Beyond a Boundary: Sport, Transnational Advertising, and the Reimagining of National Culture,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 25, no. 2 (2001): 180–202. James Brow, “Tendentious Revisions of the Past in the Construction of Community,” Anthropology Quarterly 64, no. 1 (1990): 7–17; Rudolf De Cillia, Martin Reisgel, and Ruth Wodak, “The Discursive Construction of National Identities,” Discourse and Society 10, no. 2 (1999): 19–173; Chris Healey, From



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14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This segment, with minor modifications, was repeated in the 2005 Super Bowl pregame show on Fox. In the 2005 incarnation, the segment, presented by former Presidents William Jefferson Clinton and George Herbert Walker Bush, was dedicated to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces who have lost their lives in the “liberation” of Iraq. See Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about American Culture (London: Atlantic Books, 2008). See Muneer Ahmed, “Homeland Insecurities: Racial Violence the Day after September 11,” Social Text 72, no. 3 (2002): 101–115; Zillah Eisenstein, “Feminisms in the Aftermath of September 11,” Social Text 72, no. 3 (2002): 79–99; Jasbir Puar and A. Rai, A “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots,” Social Text, 72, no. 3 (2002): 118–148. Jackie Hogan, “Staging the Nation: Gendered and Ethnicized Discourses of National Identity in Olympic Opening Ceremonies,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27, no. 2 (2003): 100–123. Subhabrata Banerjee and Stephen Linstead, “Globalization, Multiculturalism and Other Fictions: Colonialism for the New Millennium,” Organization 8, no. 4 (2002): 683–722; Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 378–395; Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. A. D. King (London: Macmillan, 1991): 19–39. For a paper length discussion of this issue in these broadcasts, see Michael Silk and Mark Falcous, “ ‘United We Stand, Divided We Fall’: Sporting Spectacle and the Normalized National Corpus,” in Anthology of Physical Cultural Studies, ed. D.L. Andrews and M. Silk (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, forthcoming) where we address the racisms, degraded images of Arabs, Muslims, and those who “look Arab or Muslim,” official immigration policies, the directives of the Department of Homeland (In)Security, racial profiling on highways and at airports, or the physical and psychological abuse on the bodies and minds of abject U.S. citizens. See also Ahmed, Homeland Insecurities; Giroux, The Terror; David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Peter McLaren and M. Martin, “The Legend of the Bush Gang: Imperialism, War and Propaganda” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 4, no. 2 (2004): 281–303; Debra Merskin, “The Construction of Arabs as Enemies: Post September 11 Discourse of George W. Bush,” Mass Communication and Society 7, no. 2 (2004): 157–175; A. Sivanandan, “Race, Terror and Civil Society,” Race and Class 47, no. 3 (2006): 1–8. Henry Giroux, “War on Terror: The Militarising of Public Space and Culture in the United States” Third Text 18, no. 4 (2004): 211–221; Giroux, Cultural Studies. See also Susan Willis, “What Goes Around Comes Around: A Parable of Global Warfare” Social Text 77, no. 4 (2003): 127–138.



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20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.


Hall, The Local and the Global. Hall in De Cillia et al., The Discursive Constitution. Giroux, “War on Terror.” President Declares Freedom at War With Fear. Address to joint session of Congress by President George W. Bush. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html (September 20, 2001). The “axis of evil” (first invoked in a State of Union Address, January 29, 2002) was apparently constituted of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. For a debunking of the concept see Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Henry Holt, 2003). Emphasis was also placed on the performance of former Beatle Paul McCartney’s song “Freedom”; host James Brown informing the audience it was dedicated to those who lost their lives in the attacks. Such responses are ephemeral. A few months later when France refused to join the U.S. resolution on Iraq, American restaurants rewrote menus, replacing “French Fries” with “Patriot Fries” and the New York Times referred to France (alongside Germany) as part of an “axis of weasels.” Giroux, The Terror; Harvey, The New Imperialism. Paul Smith, “Visiting the Banana Republic,” in Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. A. Ross (Ed.), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 128–148. Butler; Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy; Berlant, The Face of America. cf. Joseph Kay, Hollywood’s Ideological War. Available at http://www. wsws.org/articles/2002/mar2002/war-m23.shtml. Mile Klindo and Richard Phillips, Military Interference in American Film production. Available at: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/holl-m14.shtml. Hall, The Local and the Global. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, ed. V. Sobchak (London; New York: Routledge, 1996): 17–38. A fuller empirical account of our reading of this film is in Michael Silk, Jaime Schultz, and Bryan Bracey, “From Mice to Men: Miracle, Mythology and the Magic Kingdom,” Sport in Society 11, nos. 2 and 3 (2008): 279–297. Maurice Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and democracy in a time of Empire (London: Penguin Press, 2004); Baudrillard, np. Rosalind. Morris, “Theses on the Questions of War: History, Media, Terror,” Social Text 72, no. 3 (2002): 150–175. Ban Wang, “The Cold War, Imperial Aesthetics, an Area Studies.” Social Text 72, no. 3 (2002): 46. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wynn Davies, M-W. American Dream, Global Nightmare (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004): 249–250. Paul Clinton, “Olympic hockey film ‘Miracle’ a winner.” Available at http:// www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/05/review.miracle/. C. L. Cole and Shannon Cates, “The People’s Horse,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 27, no. 4 (2003): 327–329.



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40. Hogan, 117. 41. Sardar and Davies, 250. 42. Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). 43. M. Aloff, “Letter from New York,” Dance View Times 2, no. 9 (2004). Available at http://www.danceviewtimes.com/dvny/aloff/winter04/030104.htm. 44. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 2004). 45. Giroux, “War on Terror.” 46. Norm Denzin, “The War on Culture, the War on Truth,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 4, no. 2 (2004): 137–142. 47. See e.g., Eric Anderson, In the Game: Gay Athletes and the Cult of Masculinity (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004); Michael Messner, Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). 48. Faludi, 14. 49. Henry Giroux, “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence,” Journal of Advanced Composition 21, no. 1 (2001). Available at http://www.henryagiroux.com/ online_articles/fight_club.htm; Homi Bhabha, “Are You a Man or a Mouse,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. M. Berger, B. Wallis, and S. Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995): 57–65; Faludi, 6. 50. Faludi, 8; Giroux, “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders.” 51. Faludi, 8.



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NASCAR’s Role Post-9/11: Supporting All Things American Paul Haridakis and Lawrence Hugenberg*

O

ne could argue that the relationship between the U.S. military and NASCAR is an outgrowth of significant similarities they share. NASCAR owes its roots, in part, to a group of stock car drivers who could be described as rebels. Some early drivers honed their racing skills running moonshine down the dangerous winding roads of the Appalachian Mountains, often chased by law enforcement (e.g., sheriffs, federal agents, “revenuers”). Racing provided the opportunity to display their driving prowess to each other and their fans in a legitimate forum. The U.S. military owes its roots to a group of citizen soldiers comprising a continental army led by a renegade General, George Washington. They, too, could be described as rebels, fighting for a revolutionary self-described nation that had yet to be recognized as legitimate by the rest of the world. These two institutions sharing a “don’t tread on me” attitude arguably have become entities with no equal in their respective realms of influence. Today, the U.S. military may be the most powerful in the world. NASCAR, owned by a single family, controls an entire sport. Such similarities suggest why they would become cohorts in reaching out to a U.S. public in support of ideals for which each stand—freedom, individualism, independence, and, at the same time, teamwork. * Paul Haridakis is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Kent State University. Lawrence Hugenberg was Professor of Communication Studies at Kent State University. This chapter is dedicated to his memory and love of NASCAR.



17

PAUL HARIDAKIS AND LAWRENCE HUGENBERG

But, there also are striking dissimilarities between the U.S. military and NASCAR, and its fan base, that make the symbiotic relationship they have forged with each other over the years less easy to explain. For example, while the U.S. continental army was rebelling against a foreign power from which the American people ultimately gained their independence, the moonshine drivers who were part of early stock car racing were rebelling against a domestic government bent on demanding conformance to laws to which some were unwilling to conform. More striking, the regional fan base that comprised NASCAR’s early core of fans came from the same region of the country that separated from the United States in the 1860s and formed its own government and army. In this chapter, we suggest that the bond formed between NASCAR and the U.S. military, particularly since 9/11, is a story of the transformation of a fan base, a culture, and a relationship between a single sport and the U.S. government that may be without parallel in U.S. history. In addressing the progression of this relationship, we first address briefly NASCAR’s courtship with America that has resulted in its transformation from a sport catering to a regional fan base to a national sport garnering national appeal. Second, we discuss the early loose connections between the military and NASCAR since the incorporation of the latter. Third, we review how the bonds of this relationship have become stronger in the twenty-first century, as the military has become integrally involved with NASCAR, ranging from sponsoring cars and recruiting to developing relationships with individual drivers and other members of military-sponsored NASCAR racing teams. Finally, we consider some possible explanations for the remarkable connection between NASCAR and all things American that make its relationship with the military something that was almost predestined to happen.

NASCAR’S Courtship with America History Early stock car racing in the United States was rooted in the moonshine runs up and down dirt roads throughout the Southeast. Moonshine runners prided themselves on developing their cars to be faster than those of the local police and the revenuers. Some of these whiskey runners would take their cars to local tracks and compete on the weekends, in part, to earn some extra money, but more importantly to demonstrate the speed of their car. In fact, at the conclusion of NASCAR’s first “strictly stock” division race, the



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winner, Glenn Dunnaway, was disqualified because his car had been modified, allegedly borrowing a moonshiner’s tactic,1 to increase its speed. NASCAR’s roots with moonshining were highlighted again recently when it was announced that Junior Johnson’s Piedmont Distillers brand, “Midnight Moon” would sponsor the no. 70 Chevrolet Impala SS in the 50th running of the Daytona 500 in February 2008. As Johnson, a former moonshiner who won the 1960 Daytona 500, exclaimed, “my history in the moonshine business is no secret.”2 Nonetheless, on the whole, NASCAR has distanced itself from the perception of its connection to such illegal activities. In addition, the regional popularity of NASCAR in the southeastern United States has spread to be a national pastime. The popularity of NASCAR shifted at the end of “the perfect storm” when the 1979 Dayton 500 was broadcast to a nation paralyzed by winter storms. At the end of the race a good ol’ fashioned fistfight broke out between drivers Donnie Allison and Cale Yarborough on national television. Although the combatants were fined by NASCAR, this one incident appealed to viewers all over the country. Now, for 36 weeks each season, millions of fans attend NASCAR races in person or watch the races on television. Retail Merchandiser reported that NASCAR’s fan base was 75 million fans in 2001.3 Fans flock to NASCAR-ready tracks across the United States to have a NASCAR weekend race experience full of patriotism and religion—and, oh yeah, racing. NASCAR and its fans have grown from a purely Southern phenomenon drawing good ol’ boysto tracks all over the Southeastern United States to a national sport drawing fans to track from coast to coast.4 Ronfeldt argued many NASCAR fans are now “urbane, well-educated, middleclass professionals.”5 Although the geographic center for NASCAR shifted North and West over the past 30 years, today’s NASCAR fans are no less passionate and devoted than the fans following the pioneers of NASCAR. Retail Merchandiser observed, “NASCAR attracts 17 of the top 20 live sporting event audiences every year, with attendance at a NASCAR race averaging 180,000.”6 To illustrate further the success of NASCAR, it recently reached its most lucrative broadcasting contract with major cable and network stations.7

Politics Because of the popularity of NASCAR, during the 2004 presidential election campaign (the first after 9/11), political strategists and candidates engaged in a mass scramble to identify and reach out to NASCAR fans. In



NASCAR’S ROLE POST-9/11


February 2004, President George W. Bush not only attended the Daytona 500, he uttered those four famous words, “Gentlemen, start your engines.”8 Bush’s visit led then-NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. to declare, “This is George Bush country here.”9 NASCAR’s calculated decisions to matriculate from a regional sport in the Southeastern United States to a national sport with tracks from coast to coast provided opportunities for tremendous financial growth. Breaking the stereotypes of being a good ol’ boy sport for rednecks moved NASCAR into the national spotlight. The sport continues to draw new fans outside the Southeast and races take place at tracks from New York to California. These new tracks and accompanying fan base created new television marketing and broadcast opportunities. NASCAR continues to market to broader and more diverse populations and audiences. Recognizing this, candidates for national political offices court this audience through NASCAR, and the stereotypical phrase “NASCAR dads” has entered the national political jargon as evidence of their political importance.

Tobacco Ties Up in Smoke Strategic moves have been responsible for expanding NASCAR from its regional roots. For example, in addition to distancing itself from the lore of its connection to moonshine, NASCAR also moved away from its storied connection with another southeastern regional product—tobacco. NASCAR’s initial competition-wide sponsor was R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Corporation (RJR), which purchased the rights to NASCAR’s championship, the Winston Cup, in 1971. This business opportunity came on the heels of the 1969 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette advertising on television and radio.10 RJR had to find new advertising media. In the early 1970s, Junior Johnson, the famous ex-driver and former bootlegger who now owned a team desperate for financial support, approached RJR to be a sponsor. RJR executives embraced the idea of advertising in NASCAR, but decided to sponsor the entire series and the Championship Cup.11 By 1997, American tobacco companies spent approximately $202 million on sponsoring motorsports.12 However, after President Bush took office in 2001, there was a major downturn in federal antismoking action, and the tobacco industry was crippled financially by large punitive damage awards, increasing legal fees, and fines. In 2003, RJR announced, with the approval and support of NASCAR, that it would no longer be the series sponsor if a new sponsor could be found. RJR simply could not afford to sponsor NASCAR



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anymore. The 2004 season was the first in decades in which NASCAR was not supported by the tobacco industry.

Despite the distancing of NASCAR from regional products of illegal whiskey and tobacco, perhaps nothing symbolizes NASCAR’s firm embrace of all things American more than its relationship with the U.S. military. That relationship has become firmly institutionalized since 9/11, as all branches of the military sponsor racecars and work with NASCAR to recruit soldiers and advertise. However, the origin of the relationship between stock car racing and the military predates 9/11. The Second World War provided particular informal links. The Second World War had a pronounced effect on stock car racing. The automobile industry converted production capacity from producing passenger cars for a civilian population to producing war goods such as jeeps, trucks, and engines (e.g., for tanks and airplanes). During the war, several of the early figures and founders of NASCAR served the country in one capacity or another. For example, Robert “Red” Byron (who became NASCAR’s first points champion after the war) served in the air force as an engineer and tail gunner.13 Early stock car owner, Raymond Parks served in the army, and was in the Battle of the Bulge.14 Legendary stock car mechanic, Jerome “Red” Vogt, worked stateside as a mechanic on trucks for the military. Future NASCAR President, Bill France, Sr. worked stateside as a foreman for a contractor that built ships for the Navy.15 Over the years, numerous mechanics who were trained in the military joined stock car pit crews when they returned home from service.16 Once the Second World War ended, stock car racing provided a ready vocation for returning soldiers and mechanics. Within a month after the Office of Defense Transportation rescinded a wartime ban on motor sports events, stock car racing returned to Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta.17 The end of the war and the return of the automobile industry to civilian car production also triggered an interest in newer and faster passenger (stock) cars. Thus, the impact of the end of the war was the spark that stock car racing and NASCAR needed. In December 1947, amid the postwar boom in prosperity, fast cars, and enthusiasm for them, Bill France organized a meeting in Daytona Beach Florida that resulted in the formation of NASCAR.18 The first NASCAR-sanctioned race was held in February 1948. It was won by the Second World War vet, Red Byron. NASCAR was incorporated a few days later.19



The Military Comes to NASCAR


Since the beginning, France maintained a relationship between NASCAR and the military. Today, NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races are rife with a military presence. Races are introduced each week with military flyovers and the playing of the national anthem, often choreographed and punctuated with fireworks.20 The military also provide color guards at races and each branch of the armed forces sets up recruiting booths.21 Yost noted that events staged at Charlotte Motor Speedway have included reenactment of a scene from the Gulf War, the façade of a U.S. Battleship firing at mock forces of Saddam Hussein, U.S. Ranger parachutists, Black Hawk helicopters, and members of Special Forces rappelling down onto the racetrack.22 Clearly, though, the military’s relationship with NASCAR has become much more pronounced since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Nowhere is the relationship between NASCAR and the military more evident than in the armed forces’ sponsorship and recruitment activities at NASCAR racing events.

NASCAR, Patriotism, Military Sponsorship, and Recruitment in the Post-9/11 Era Whereas baseball and football played their games in the aftermath of the tragic terrorist attacks on 9/11, NASCAR suspended its races that week. In the first post-9/11 race run, Dale Earnhardt Jr. won. Earnhardt had one of his crew members give him a U.S. flag from center field, and he drove around the track displaying the flag to a rousing response from the crowd.23 Recognition of the patriotism among NASCAR fans has been well documented.24 The military has catered to and nurtured this patriotism through NASCAR-related activities ranging from sponsorship of racing teams to recruitment and information activities to providing various military-related activities for fans. Today, between NASCAR’s current three divisions—the Camping World Truck Series (formerly Craftsman Truck Series), the Nationwide Series, and the Sprint Cup Series—every branch of the military sponsors racecars and/or teams. The marines and air force were the first branches to do so. Each began sponsorship in 2000. The navy’s sponsorship began in 2002. Both the army and National Guard began sponsorship in 2003, followed by the Coast Guard in 2004.25 In addition, the U.S. Border Patrol has sponsored a car since 2007. The military commitment to NASCAR is not cheap. For example, in 2003, the army’s total marketing budget devoted to motor sports was



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estimated at $16 million.26 It recently was reported that the navy pays $5 to $6 million to sponsor JR Motorsports’ No. 88 Chevrolet in NASCAR’s Nationwide series and that the army’s Cup Series sponsorship of more than 30 of Dale Earnhardt Inc.’s races can cost $8 to $10 million.27 The sheer military expenditure on NASCAR suggests the branches of the military and their marketing consultants estimate that the amount spent on sponsorship (which includes a logo on the sponsored racecars) is equivalent to many more millions spent on advertising airtime. Although sponsorship of cars and/or teams provides the military with good public relations and advertising, recruitment of soldiers is a major objective. Recruitment is one of the major military activities at NASCAR races, and it is very sophisticated. Recruiters create a very entertaining and involving ambience for potential recruits and other fans who may have influence with those potential recruits. At some NASCAR-sanctioned races, military-themed interactive displays and activities have become a component of the military recruitment practice. MacQuarrie reported that at a 2005 Nextel cup race at Michigan International Speedway, fans could participate in military-provided interactive activities such as going on a virtual patrol of a Baghdad-looking city, shooting at insurgents, and riding in a Humvee simulator.28 In addition to video games in which players could fight apparent insurgents in cyberlocales with Arabic writing on the walls, races have included paraphernalia such as a replica jeep or a film that compares the military and NASCAR.29 Military recruitment efforts are not just aimed at recruits. Military recruiters at NASCAR events also target those who may exercise some interpersonal influence over those potential recruits such as parents and other family members, referred to as “influencers.”30 Such a practice can be very effective. As early as the 1940s, researchers uncovered what they referred to as the two-step flow of communication.31 The basic premise is that certain people, referred to as opinion leaders, pay attention to mass media messages and disseminate the information interpersonally to others in a second step. Of course, later researchers noted that the media effects process is not so simple or unidirectional. There actually is a multistep flow of communication. Regardless of the complexity of the communication process, research has shown rather consistently that in some of the best campaigns, mass communication is good at getting persuasive messages into the hands of people, but that actual attitude change or adoption of the persuasive message is best accomplished when those who attend to the message relay it interpersonally to others with whom they have some influence (e.g., are trusted).32 Thus, the most successful communication campaigns utilize both mass and interpersonal communication.





By targeting both recruits and their “influencers,” the military effectively reaches its market. According to a navy motorsports program manager, 72 percent of NASCAR’s fan base (ages 17 to 53) comprises the navy’s “target market plus influencers: moms, dads, aunts, uncles, friends of the family, former military.”33 In addition to positive public relations and recruitment, the military benefits from its relationship with NASCAR in other ways. For example, the military has recognized the potential benefit of adopting technology used in NASCAR. One example is the army’s adoption of Mylar plastic sheeting that has been used on NASCAR cars since 1997 to protect windshields from abrasion. The army is using it to protect Black Hawk helicopter windshields from problems such as pitting from sand and other debris.34 In addition, it has been reported that Carlson Technology, a company that advises race teams, and Roush Industries, a company that manages teams, have advised the army how to save time when changing the engine of a humvee.35 In 2005, another company, Trijicon, announced it was awarded a contract to supply optical gunsights for the Marine Corps. It also signed on as an associate sponsor of a Team Marines Ford that Team Rensi Motorsports raced in the Busch Grand National Series.36 Besides their relationship with NASCAR, specifically, branches of the armed forces also establish relationships with individual drivers, other team members, and the teams they sponsor. For example, former driver of the army-sponsored car, Jerry Nadeau has visited troops in Afghanistan.37 Joe Nemechek, who replaced Nadeau as the driver of the army-sponsored racecar after Nadeau was injured in 2003, has been referred to as “G.I. Joe” and his mother has appeared at races wearing battle fatigues.38 Earnhardt has done television specials and television ads for the National Guard. Members of NASCAR teams have visited boot camps, flown on military aircraft, ridden in a submarine, and visited various military bases and other facilities.39

Possible Explanations for the Successful Marriage between NASCAR and the Military As the second presidential election since 9/11 unfolded, the United States was fighting a self-described War on Terror and was immersed in a war in Iraq. In this heightened state of national security war invariably brings with it, the United States continues to rely on an ostensibly all-volunteer armed services. In such an atmosphere, the government relies on support for the war effort by its citizenry. However, some polls suggest discontent with the prolonged war in Iraq.40



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In some instances military recruiters have not always been welcomed with open arms. For example, in 2006, the government was forced to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to defeat a challenge by an association of law schools that the law requiring that schools grant equal access to military recruiters or face the threat of losing federal funding violated their First Amendment rights.41 In early 2008, the city of Berkeley, California city council declared military recruiters to be “unwelcome intruders” within city limits.42 Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that tying federal funding to the requirement that schools permit recruiters on campus did not violate the First Amendment, and the Berkeley city council ultimately rescinded its anti-recruiter declaration, such actions evidence resistance military recruiters sometimes encounter. The atmosphere at NASCAR races, NASCAR television programs, and NASCAR advertising could not be more disparate. The military and armed services recruiters are welcomed and accommodated. NASCAR’s embrace of the military is steeped in patriotism. As Hugenberg and Hugenberg explained, “NASCAR has draped itself even more in the American flag since the tragedies of 9/11 and the outbreak of the war in Iraq in March 2003. At racetracks today, during the prerace rituals there are always multiple representatives of the American armed services on display, always a military color guard carrying the flag, and a military fly-over during the national anthem. Patriotism is one of the values NASCAR tries to emulate for its fans, and arouse in its fans.”43 Such pageantry and patriotic appeal arguably evidence a coalescence of values embraced by both institutions. Though that coalescence might be particularly visible since 9/11, it transcends a single war. Pure and simple, American values and all things American are engrained in both institutions. As Wright contended, “NASCAR is America, and increasingly, America is NASCAR.”44 Therefore, consideration of a few basic attributes and values fostered and exhibited by NASCAR, its drivers, and its fans may offer some perspective for why NASCAR is so military-friendly and help in understanding the relationship it has forged with the military. One obvious connection fans have with NASCAR is with the drivers themselves. Howell asserted that “drivers have become symbols of the character traits that Americans admire.”45 They are “folk heroes and media celebrities.”46 Howell compared drivers to the scouts of the old west. He claimed that “[t]here is little difference between dodging bullets along a trail in Wyoming and dodging concrete walls along a straightaway at Daytona.”47 One could extend that to say there is little difference between dodging bullets in Iraq and the hazards of the racetrack. Hagstrom described NASCAR racing as “action-packed combat.”48 Thus, certain perceived attributes of racecar drivers are easy to translate to a soldier.





In recent years, the idea of athletes as heroes or role models has been questioned in light of allegations of steroid/drug use and other misconduct. NASCAR has not been marred by such adverse publicity, and its drivers have retained role model/hero status. They are approachable and routinely sign autographs before races. Fans are invited into their inner circle via pit passes and the availability of scanners that permit fans to listen to communication between the drivers and their team members during races. In addition to individualistic values exhibited by drivers, Howell claimed that racing itself “addresses the nature of American society—a society occupied with automobiles, technology, consumption of material goods, and competition.”49 It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the national NASCAR sponsor that replaced RJR was technology giant, Nextel. The military appears to be particularly aware of this connection to technology. Livingstone suggested that the military tries to make the connection between technology and speed, reporting that the military sees many fans as the mechanically inclined or high-tech crowd they are seeking. 50 Thus the connection between a technology-driven sport and a technology-driven military is a neatly packaged symbiotic whole. A particularly salient value embraced by both NASCAR and the military is loyalty. Hagstrom said he believed “loyalty” was the “characteristic that best defines NASCAR and the France family.”51 NASCAR uses the phrase “NASCAR family” to refer to everyone and everything associated with it (e.g., the corporation, employees, sponsors, etc.).52 NASCAR is extremely loyal to its “family.” France has ensured over the years that track owners have retained races. NASCAR and drivers promote sponsors’ products.53 Fans are aware of and buy products of sponsors of their favorite drivers and teams.54 The armed services, like all sponsors, benefit from this loyalty. Loyalty to the nuclear family is particularly apparent in NASCAR.55 NASCAR itself is a family business. Currently, Big Bill France’s grandson, Brian, is CEO and chairman of NASCAR. His son’s adopted daughter, Lesa Kennedy, is president of the family’s International Speedway Corp. This loyalty to family extends to the drivers and their families. Wives and children often accompany drivers to races. Race tracks provide a specific area for racing-family RVs. Numerous activities such as Sunday church services for racers and their families are provided at the tracks.56 In addition, NASCAR boasts a tradition of multigenerational racing families. The Pettys, Bakers, Jarretts, Bodines, Earnhardts, and Labontes are just a few families that have produced more than one generation of drivers. Hagstrom speculated that one reason for this multigenerational



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tradition is the fact that children of racers spend so many of their weekends at the track with their fathers.57 When the opportunity arises, NASCAR puts this tradition on display. For example, when Dale Jarrett completed his last competitive Sprint Cup race at Bristol TN in 2008 before retiring, his father, former Grand National Champion, Ned Jarrett, drove his son around the track to a standing ovation. Similar to NASCAR, each branch of the military endorses core values. They emphasize factors such as commitment, service, and loyalty to the nation, fellow Americans, the public trust, and fellow soldiers.58 In addition to specifically articulated core values to which branches of the armed services adhere, as in the case of NASCAR, commitment to family is emphasized. Recruiters at NASCAR races and elsewhere emphasize reaching families of potential recruits. The military also maintains familial involvement after enlistment. For example, the army stresses family support via programs such as its Morale, Welfare, and Recreation program for soldiers and their families.59 There is an educational publication for parents of Marine Corps boot camp graduates entitled “Parents Guide to Surviving Marine Corps Boot Camp.” The last two days of boot camp are designated “Family Day and Graduation.”60 Like stock car racing families, the military also has a tradition of multigenerational military service. A prime example is the family of 2008 U.S. Presidential candidate John McCain. McCain, his grandfather, father, and son all have served in the military.61 Interestingly, although both the military and NASCAR applaud and promote competition and individualism, neither the driver nor the soldier is independent. Both rely on and share a commitment to teamwork. The creeds and/or core values of the various armed services emphasize the fact that a soldier is a member of a team, and the commitment never to leave a fallen comrade behind.62 Teamwork in NASCAR is put on display via close collaborative work among crew chiefs, spotters, pit crews, and drivers. NASCAR drivers are successful because of the teamwork exhibited by their teams.63 Without successful teamwork between driver and pit crew, racing strategy would be inconsequential because the necessary adjustments needed to make the car race better could not be made. Without successful teamwork and communication between a driver and his spotter, there would be more wrecks during NASCAR races. Although NASCAR highlights the drivers as the stars; it is not by accident that when drivers do well during a race, one of the first things they do is thank their crew chief, pit crew, and spotter. Drivers also work together. One example of this is the strategy of drafting; which means drivers competing against each other need each other to race around super speedways at the highest speeds possible.




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It is difficult to identify let alone assess all of the factors that have led to the strong mutually beneficial relationship between the military and NASCAR. Clearly, patriotism and nationalism are on display at NASCAR events. Among sports, this is not necessarily unique to NASCAR. But, no other sport puts patriotism on display quite like NASCAR. No other sport is as completely sponsor-driven and puts U.S. capitalism on display like NASCAR. And no other sport applauds the military and all things American like NASCAR. NASCAR and the military not only share some rather basic core values—such as loyalty, service, teamwork, and staunch defense of America and all values for which it stands—they work in tandem to communicate those values. NASCAR races and related activities provide a unique context within which the military and NASCAR work in concert to do so. Hugenberg and Hugenberg described a unique confluence of factors surrounding a NASCAR event that one could argue provides NASCAR’s connection to fans, and by extension, the military’s connection to fans. According to Hugenberg and Hugenberg, “NASCAR fans make a pilgrimage out of their NASCAR experiences.”64 They often drive great distances in order to see a particular race. Race weekends are events with no parallel in U.S. sports. Fans park their RVs, pitch tents, and picnic at races. They engage in all-American activities such as playing horseshoes, barbecuing, and waving U.S. and NASCAR flags. They are not tied to a geographic loyalty. Their loyalty transcends geographic location. They find and interact with other fans of their favorite drivers and teams, and sponsors. They visit souvenir trailers parked down the racetrack midway. Some by pit passes. Some wear military regalia. Tens of thousands of fans spend multiple days, often an entire week, at NASCAR races. Often there is more than one race during a race weekend. On top of that, there are time trials. Vendors set up at race week flea markets to sell U.S. and NASCAR memorabilia. Thus the armed services and their recruiters have significant time to interact with potential recruits, their families, and other fans. Given this pro-America atmosphere, it probably was inevitable that the military and NASCAR would forge a strong relationship. Perhaps the tragedy of 9/11 has drawn attention to the connection between NASCAR, America, and its military. Perhaps 9/11 has brought to light that NASCAR values are not regional—they are mainstream American values. Perhaps before 9/11 the majority of Americans were not overtly cognizant of that. NASCAR may have been partly responsible for any lack of awareness. Though NASCAR has been described as a good ol’ boys’ sport, it was not



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originally. A significant number of early NASCAR races (e.g., in the early 1950s) were run on Northern tracks. For example, 10 of the 19 Grand National Championship races in 1950 were in the North.65 NASCAR sort of reverted to southern racing for economic reasons in the 1960s. In the last 20 years or so, NASCAR again broadened its scope. It returned to garner northern racers, northern fans, and northern races. During this same time there has been a clear resurgence in the United States of spiritual and family values displayed at races. Today, NASCAR is rife with families and portrayals of Christian values (e.g., the pre-race prayer). NASCAR voters are courted by politicians, they and/or their family members are recruited by the military, and the NASCAR nation is courted by America. Although the relationship between NASCAR and the military has been highlighted since 9/11, particularly with the increase in the military’s recruitment activities and sponsorship of NASCAR teams, the connection was there long before 9/11. The values embraced by both NASCAR and the military transcend 9/11 or any particular war. Although such values tend to be highlighted more zealously during a time of national crisis, maybe we won’t forget them once the War on Terrorism and the War in Iraq wane. Perhaps NASCAR and the military will continue to do their part to remind Americans that the values that undergird each institution are America’s values and that the Republic for which America stands is truly one nation—indivisible. Notes 1. Mark D. Howell, From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A Cultural History of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 118–119. 2. “Moonshine Company Will Sponsor Cup Car,” USA Today, February 7, 2008, 15C. 3. “FAN-tastic Fans: NASCAR Fans Are Younger and More Affluent than the U.S. Population and Spread Coast-to-Coast,” Retail Merchandiser, July, 2002, 14. 4. M. Graham Spann, “NASCAR Racing Fans: Cranking up an Empirical Approach,” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2002): 352–360. 5. David Ronfeldt, “Social Science at 190 MPH on NASCAR’s Biggest Speedways,” First Monday 5, no. 2 (2000): 1–29. 6. “FAN-tastic Fans, 14. 7. “Eight-Year, Multi-Network TV Deal Announced,” NASCAR.com, December 7, 2005. Available at http://www.nascar.com/2005/news/headlines/ official/12/07/tv_deal/index.html (accessed July 29, 2008). 8. “Bush Courts ‘NASCAR Dads’ at Daytona 500,” SI.Com, February 15, 2004. Available at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/racing/specials/ daytona500/2004/02/15/bc.campaign.bush.nascar (accessed July 15, 2008).





9. Ibid. 10. David A. Locke, “Counterspeech as an Alternative to Prohibition: Proposed Federal Regulation of Tobacco in American Motorsport,” Indiana Law Journal 70 (1994): 217–253. 11. See e.g., Larry Woody, “The End of Tobacco Road: NASCAR Will End the 31-Year Winston Era and Opt for a Breath of Fresh Air with Nextel,” Auto Racing Digest, December 2003. 12. See e.g., Corinne Economaki, “Still Smokin’ at the Track,” Brandweek, March 22, 1999, 20–21. 13. Neal Thompson, Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR (New York: Crown, 2006), 162. 14. Ibid., 149–158. 15. Ibid., 149. 16. Mark Yost, The 200-MPH Billboard: The Inside Story of How Big Money Changed NASCAR (St. Paul, MN: Motorbooks, 2007), 228. 17. Thompson, 171. 18. Randall L. Hall, “Before NASCAR: The Corporate and Civic Promotion of Automobile Racing in the American South, 1903–1927,” Journal of Southern History 68 (2002): 629–668. 19. “It’s Come Far,” Racing One Digest, Spring 2008, 12. 20. See e.g., Viv Bernstein, “In Bid for Recruits, Military Has Allies in NASCAR and Fans,” The New York Times, July 2, 2005, D1; Lawrence W. Hugenberg and Barbara S. Hugenberg, “If It Ain’t Rubbin’ It Ain’t Racin’: NASCAR, American Values, and Fandom,” Journal of Popular Culture 42 (2008): 632–654. 21. Yost, 232. 22. Ibid., 229. 23. Nancye L. Bethurem, “Environmental Destruction in the Name of National Security: Will the Old Paradigm Return in the Wake of September 11,” Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law & Policy 8 (2002): 109–133, 127. 24. See e.g., Howell, From Moonshine to Madison Avenue; Hugenberg and Hugenberg, 632–654; Yost, The 200-MPH Billboard. 25. Bernstein, D1. 26. Yost, 229. 27. Josh Pate, “Military Sponsors Pushing New Lifestyle, Not Product,” NASCAR.com, February 6, 2008. Available at http://www.nascar.com/2008/ news/headlines/cup/02/04/military.sponsorshipsbkeselowski.dearnhardtjr. mmartin.jwood/index.html?eref=/rss/news/headlines/cup (accessed May 25, 2008). 28. Brian MacQuarrie, “Army Scouts NASCAR Circuit for Recruits,” Boston Globe, August 28, 2005. 29. Bernstein, D1. 30. Ibid., See also, Yost, 230; and Seth Livingstone, “Military Drives to Enlist at NASCAR Venues,” USA Today, May 24, 2006.



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31. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). 32. Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2003). 33. Quoted in Pate. 34. See e.g., Stephanie A. Gardin, “Army Adopts NASCAR Technology for Helicopters,” Defense AT&L, 34 (May–June, 2005): 78–79; Joe Pappalardo, “Pit-Stop Smarts: NASCAR Windshield Laminates Gaining Military Following,” National Defense, November 2004, 42; Douglas Waller, “NASCAR: The Army’s Unlikely Advisor,” Time, July 4, 2005, 16. 35. Waller, 16. 36. “Trijicon Awarded Marine Contract, Sponsors NASCAR,” Shooting Industry, November 2005, 10. 37. “Nadeau: Afghanistan ‘Great Experience,” NASCAR.com. Available at http:// www.nascar.com/2003/news/headlines/official/01/08/jnadeau_afganistan/ (accessed July 29, 2008). 38. Livingstone. 39. Yost, 233. 40. “Iraq War Still Unpopular Even as U.S. Deaths Plummet,” CNN.com, July 31, 2008. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/07/31/bush. iraq/index.html?iref=newssearch (accessed August 2, 2008). 41. Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights Inc., 547 U.S. 47 (2006). 42. John M. Glionna, “Berkeley Reverses Policy against Marines; The City Council Votes Not to Yank Welcome Mat from Military Recruiters,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 2008, B5. 43. Hugenberg and Hugenberg, 645. 44. Jim Wright, Fixin’ To Git: One Fan’s Love Affair with NASCAR’s Winston Cup (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 277. 45. Howell, 109. 46. Ibid., 110. 47. Ibid. 48. Robert G. Hagstrom, The NASCAR Way (New York: John Wiley, 1998), 3. 49. Howell, 110. 50. Livingstone. 51. Hagstrom, 123. 52. Ibid., 154. 53. Wright, 38. 54. Howell, 194. 55. Ibid., 112. 56. Hagstrom, 155. 57. Ibid. 58. For links to online sources for ethical codes, core values, and creeds of each branch of the armed services, see Air University, “Air War College Gateway to the Internet.” Available at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/




59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.


awcgate.htm (accessed July 18, 2008). See also, Web sites for each branch of the armed forces: www.navy.mil, www.af.mil, www.usmc.mil, www. uscg.mil, www.army.mil. John Siemietkowski, “To Infinity and Beyond: Expansion of the Army’s Commercial Sponsorship Program,” Army Lawyer (September 2000): 24–40. “Parents Guide to Surviving Marine Corps Boot Camp.” Available at http:// www.mcrdsd.usmc.mil/parents_guide_rev05.pdf. (accessed August 2, 2008). Massimo Calabresi, “The McCains and War: Like Father, Like Son,” Time, July 30, 2006. See supra note 58. Hugenberg and Hugenberg, 648–652. Ibid., 640. Wright, 73.



250

Abu Ghraib, 40, 46 Academic Freedom, 185 Afghanistan, 2–3, 5, 32, 38–39, 42, 45, 53, 58, 79, 81, 87, 99, 102, 104, 107, 119–140, 195, 199, 201, 224–226, 242 African National Congress, 165 Al Amari Refugee Camp, 175 al Qaeda, 4, 17, 37–47, 57–59, 69, 79, 106, 109, 111–112, 119, 152 American Library Association, 183–185, 187, 191 an nakba, 174 Apartheid, 165–168 Arafat, Yasir, 166 Arawak, 171 Ashcroft, John, 105, 112, 183–184 Baker, James, 66, 81 bin Laden, Osama, 39, 41–42, 44, 47, 57, 59, 69, 74, 79, 90, 100, 103, 198 Blogs, 30, 92–93, 95, 97, 153 Bosnia, 57, 174–175, 181 Britain. See United Kingdom. Bush doctrine, 53 Bush White House. See Bush, President George W., administration of. Bush, Laura, 94, 162 Bush, President George H.W., 56, 60 Bush, President George W., 9–10, 17, 19, 26, 38, 58–59, 69, 71, 79–81, 92, 101–106, 108–111, 154, 157, 183, 185, 198–199, 201, 222, 224–226, 228, 238, administration of, 2, 18, 31, 37, 39, 42, 45, 58–60, 64, 67, 69, 72, 82, 84, 93, 104, 109, 111, 145, 182–187, 191, 198

Campus Watch, 31 Canada, 12, 93, 95, 187 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 122, 129, 201, 203, 205 Cheney, Vice President Dick, 100 Child Stars, 5, 210–228 China, 12, 38, 47, 91–92, 95 Chuck D, 168 Churchill, Winston, 16, 41 civil liberties, 15, 27, 32, 34, 70, 183–184, 191, 200, 205 Clinton, Hillary, 19 Clinton, President William J. (Bill), 57, 60, 198 cold war, 11, 27–28, 31, 34, 37, 41–42, 46–47, 51, 54–58, 60, 65, 77, 89, 124, 184, 196, 200, 201, 203–204, 226–227, 229 communication technology, 67, 93 Communism, 41, 51–56, 58, 64, 90, 227 Congress, 3, 10, 58, 72, 87, 104–106, 153, 157, 183–187, 189, 203, 205 Counterinsurgency, 43 Counterterrorism, 43, 83, 148 Critical resistance, 172 Cruise, Tom, 201, 210, 214–215, 217 De Niro, Robert, 203, 210, 215, 217 Def Jam Poetry, 170 Democracy, 17, 27, 40–42, 45, 52, 64–66, 80, 93, 122, 125, 127, 165, 182, 185, 228 Democratic party, 18–19, 32, 69, 102, 108–109, 112, 187, 198 Department of Defense, 105, 182



Index

INDEX

Department of Homeland Security (DHS), 29–30, 67, 69, 105, 109, 113 Department of Justice, 106, 108, 159, 184 Department of State, 42–43, 78, 80, 82–86, 88, 92, 94, 96–97, 167

Hammad, Suheir, 167–176 hip-hop, 167, 174 Humanism, 70, 148, 183 Hurricane Katrina, 81, 167, 174–175 Hussein, Saddam, 42, 53, 56, 59, 100, 102–103, 152, 187–189, 240

Egypt, 37, 95, 202 enemy, 10–11, 13–17, 27, 33, 40, 42, 48, 51–52, 79, 100, 105, 121, 151, 168, 181, 183, 226–229 enemy image, 53–54 England. See United Kingdom. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 186–187 European Union (EU), 28, 91, 95, 166

India, 125 Internet, 29, 40–41, 47, 67–68, 91, 160, 170, 181, 183, 191, 200, 210 Iran, 38, 46, 89, 125, 169, 187, 225–226 Iraq, 2–3, 14, 17–20, 27–29, 31–32, 39–40, 42, 44, 53, 56–59, 67–69, 80–81, 83, 85, 87, 94, 99, 100–104, 106, 108, 124, 151–154, 157–159, 161, 176, 182–183, 187–191, 195, 198, 201, 203, 206, 225–226, 228, 242–243, 247 Iraq National Library and Archive, 182, 188 Islam, 28, 37–41, 43–44, 51–59, 65, 79, 122, 128, 130, 132, 134, 148–149 Islamic terrorism, 1, 3–4, 51–52, 57–59, 200 Islamofascism, 28, 39, 53 Israel, 45, 79, 95, 156, 166–169, 173–176, 189–190

Fanning, Dakota, 5, 209–218 Fear, 45–46, 48, 53, 59, 64–65, 69–70, 95, 106–07, 110, 143, 156, 169, 183–186, 203, 205–206, 209, 211, 213, 216, 218 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 104–106, 109, 112, 183–184, 202, 205 Federal emergency management agency, 175 First Amendment, 153, 184, 243 First World War. See World War I. Forster, E. M., 90 France, 52, 85, 126, 147–148 France, Bill, 238–240, 244 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 185 Fromm, Erich, 66, 70–71 Ghassan Kanafani, 176 Global War on Terror (GWOT), 37–38, 42, 82 Government Accountability Office (GAO), 187 Great Britain. See United Kingdom. Greenberg, Jeff, 107 Ground Zero, 147, 199 Guantanamo, 28, 31–32, 40, 42, 46 Gulf War. See Persian Gulf War.

Japan, 1, 11, 51, 86 Jihad, 39, 41, 43, 148 Jordan, 37, 39, 161, 169 Jordan, June, 169 Jordan, Michael, 94 Justice Department. See Department of Justice. Kata’eb, 169 Katrina. See Hurricane Katrina. Ku Klux Klan, 170–171 Lee, Ivy, 96 Mandela, Nelson, 165 Manhattan. See New York City. mass media, 11, 65, 67–68, 70, 72, 124, 137, 241



252

INDEX

National security, 15, 34, 43, 47, 51–52, 54, 56–57, 60, 69, 71, 82–83, 85, 111, 151, 183–184, 186–187, 242 National Security Letters, 184 Neoconservatism, 225, 228–229 New Orleans, 175–176 New York City, 2, 43, 108–109, 111, 170, 196–197, 210, 214, 225 New York Times, 81, 100, 110–112, 122, 126, 151–153, 169, 198, 215–216 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 38, 41 Obama, President Barack, 19 Olympics, 225 Optimism, 211 Pakistan, 37–38, 45, 79, 109, 122, 125–126, 129, 131 Palestine, 156, 166, 174–176 Palestinian Liberation Organization, 166 Patriot Act, 29, 69, 104, 181, 183–186, 191, 203 Penn, Sean, 213 Persian Gulf War, 4, 10, 39–41, 56, 66, 92, 240 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 213 Plato, 90, 94 political economy, 64–65, 70 Powell, Colin, 44, 105, 136, 167–168, 174 Preemptive war, 28 prison industrial complex, 172 propaganda, 41, 63, 65, 69, 77–81, 87, 93–96, 123, 142, 145, 198 Propaganda Model, 64 Public Enemy, 168

public opinion, 40–41, 44, 67–68, 72, 83, 85 public, the, 10–11, 17, 27, 29, 31–32, 54–55, 64–68, 71–73, 99, 101–104, 107, 110, 113, 123, 152–153, 186–187, 198, 200, 203, 210, 216–217, 245 rhetoric, 11–12, 26, 34, 51–60, 78, 81, 84, 147, 167–168, 170–171, 173, 222–227 Risk, 32, 63, 84, 91, 96–97, 103, 111, 136, 152, 198 Rumsfeld, Donald, 43, 105, 136, 182, 223 Russell, Kurt, 216–217 Russia, 38, 91, 95, 105, 153, 184, 200, 203, 227 Saudi Arabia, 39, 42–43, 57, 106, 122, 129, 198, 202 Second World War. See World War II. Shatila refugee camp, 169 South Africa, 166–167 Spielberg, Steven, 213–215 Sport, 221–229 State Department. See Department of State. Stone, Oliver, 2, 199 Superbowl, 200 Swift, Jonathan, 90 Taliban, 44, 53, 79, 119–120, 122–128, 131–132, 134–138, 223, 225 Temple, Shirley, 211–213, 216, 218 Turkey, 37, 39, 153 United Kingdom (UK), 4, 12, 39, 51–52, 93, 111, 120, 147, 187–188 United Nations (UN), 167 USA Patriot Act. See Patriot Act. Vietnam, 2, 4, 18, 42, 44, 52, 66, 102, 151, 203, 224, 229 War on Terror. See Global War on Terror.



mass society, 63–67, 70, 72–73 McCarthyism, 15 Mexico, 214 Microsoft, 92, 97 Mills, C. Wright, 65–66, 70 Miracle, 222, 226–227 Munch, Edvard, 216

253

254

INDEX

World War I, 10, 16–17, 80, 191, 196 World War II, 4, 10, 27–28, 52, 66, 81, 102, 145, 191, 196, 239 Zionism, 167–168, 174–175 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03

Washington, Denzel, 214, 217 World Conference Against Racism, 167 World Trade Center, 1–2, 10, 26, 38, 57, 73, 121, 141, 143, 145, 147, 167, 196–197, 199, 210, 228, 240


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