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SEEING RED
Published February 21, 2003
For the second time in the last six months, the nation's color-coded
threatometer has been raised to orange.
The first time this happened, fear abounded and rumors swirled,
with
every sudden unexplained unpleasantness the subject of suspicious
whisperings. I even heard people speculate that terrorists were
behind
the outbreaks of mass diarrhea on cruise ships. The theory here
was a
rare amalgam of paranoia and wishful thinking: that having already
attacked our cities and crippled our economy, their new master plan
was
to ruin our vacations.
This time it's different, though, because this time the government
wants us to know that it's really, really, really serious. So serious
that whereas in the past the president settled for telling us to
go
shopping, this time we're being told what to buy.
Forgive my cynicism, but as someone who grew up being assured that
I
could dodge a flesh-melting thermonuclear shock wave simply by
crouching under my desk with my head between my knees, what's going
on
right now has a drearily familiar ring to it.
I happened to be watching cable news when the dour "General"
Ashcroft
(as he prefers to be referred to) announced the new alert level,
which
as we all know means that we'll be removing boots, shoes and belts
at
the airport for the time being, with a much greater chance of being
body-wanded as well. We still have a few steps to go before they
start
strip-searching Sister Mary Helen in her wheelchair.
Of course, all of this information is flowing from the same
intelligence apparatus that not only can't find the person of Osama
bin
Laden or the weapons of Saddam Hussein, but also hasn't even been
capable of manufacturing a quasi-convincing link between the two.
The one thing we are 100 percent positive they have in common is
that
both used the U.S. Treasury to help finance their rise to power.
It's
actually less remarkable that the CIA can't put bin Laden and Saddam
together today than that the agency didn't introduce the two men
in the
mid-1980s, when it was helping the Butcher of Bagdhad amass the
world's
fourth-largest army, while christening al-Qaida as the mother of
all
federally funded, faith-based organizations. We're now reaping the
dividends of those investments, and they're decidedly not tax-free.
During the Cold War, the government's campaign to convince Americans
of
the survivability of a full scale nuclear exchange eventually collapsed
under the weight of its own absurdity, taking down with it the very
idea that there could be an acceptable version of "post-nuclear."
The
sirens fell silent, the drills stopped, and the short-lived underground
construction boom fizzled (though it, too, has experienced somewhat
of
a renaissance recently, at least at Vice President Dick Cheney's
residence). The failure of that propaganda assault helped avert
a
catastrophic miscalculation by policy-makers.
Here's hoping that past is soon to be prologue in the War on Terror.
Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge announced that the current
homeland threat level may soon be lowered again, and indicated that
he's considering revising the structure of Generalissimo (as I like
to
think of him) Ashcroft's domestic psy-ops brainchild. It's a small
light at the end of the tunnel, and still much too soon to hope
this
marks the beginning of the end to the administration's hard sell
tactics, even though to date their most impressive result has been
the
breathtaking transformation of near-universal sympathy and support
for
the United States into an almost equally widespread disdain, distaste,
and distrust (all in under 18 months).
Not that we're completely without allies and admirers. The president's
preventive war principle, for example, was recently warmly embraced
by
North Korea, which is roughly equivalent to having Michael Jackson
for
your character witness in a custody battle.
This is also not to say we're without threat. But the truth is
that
about the most any individual citizen can do to protect himself
or
herself is to pay a bit more attention. (Also, if you fly as much
as I
do, it can't hurt to plaster your carry-ons with Canadian flag decals.)
Meanwhile, color me orange: favorite of hunters, clowns and Carrot
Top,
and the only hue to have both a fruit juice and a chemical defoliant
named after it. Of all the colors in the rainbow, it's the ideal
choice
for painting oneself into a corner.
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