A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  The aftermath of the attacks did not offer a flattering exhibition of America’s leaders. For most of the day the only Bush who looked composed and in control was Laura, who happened to be waiting to testify on Capitol Hill. Her husband gave a timid and stilted initial reaction in Sarasota, Florida, then disappeared for an hour before resurfacing at Barksdale airbase in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he gave another flaccid address with every appearance of bring on tranquilizers. He was then flown to a bunker in Nebraska, before someone finally had the wit to suggest that the best place for an American President at a time of national emergency is the Oval Office.

  Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remained invisible most of the day, even though it would have taken him only a few short steps to get to the Pentagon pressroom and make some encouraging remarks. When he did finally appear the substance of his remarks and his demeanor were even more banal and unprepossessing than those of his commander in chief. At no point did Vice-President Cheney appear in public.

  Absent national political leadership, the burden of rallying the nation fell as usual upon the TV anchors, all of whom seem to have resolved early on to lower the emotional temper, though Tom Brokaw did lisp a declaration of War against Terror. One of the more ironic sights was Dan Rather talking about retaliation against bin Laden. It was Rather, wrapped in a turban, who voyaged to the Hindu Kush in the early 1980s to send back paeans to the Mujahedeen (trained and supplied by the CIA in its largest ever operation), which ushered onto the world stage such well-trained cadres as those now deployed against America.

  The eyewitness reports of the collapse of the two Trade Center buildings were not inspired, at least for those who have heard the famous eyewitness radio reportage of the crash of the Hindenberg Zeppelin in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937 with the anguished cry of the reporter, “Oh the humanity, the humanity.” Radio and TV reporters these days seem incapable of narrating an ongoing event with any sense of vivid language or dramatic emotive power.

  The commentators were similarly incapable of explaining with any depth the likely context of the attacks. It was possible to watch the cream of the nation’s political analysts and commentating classes, hour after hour, without ever hearing the word “Israel,” unless in the context of a salutary teacher in how to deal with Muslims. One could watch hour after hour without hearing any intimation that these attacks might be the consequence of the recent Israeli rampages in the Occupied Territories that have included assassinations of Palestinian leaders and the slaughter of Palestinian civilians with the use of American aircraft; that these attacks might also stem from the sanctions against Iraq that have seen upward of a million children die; that these attacks might in part be a response to US cruise missile attacks on the Sudanese factories that had been loosely fingered by US intelligence as connected to bin Laden.

  September 21

  Faced with the great challenge of his speech to the joint session of Congress on Thursday night, the President managed the task capably enough. The speech was a declaration of lawlessness, with the concept of “justice” being reduced to that of the freedom to shoot the other guy on whatever terms America may find convenient. How else are we to interpret the much quoted line that “whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” This is the language of terrorism.

  “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make,” Bush declared. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” Thus has the founding charter of the United Nations been finally discarded, even as a fig leaf, and the founding charter of NATO been reduced to a line from a western.

  In terms of substance Bush has committed America and its allies to the overthrow of the Afghan Taliban, with occupation of Afghanistan apparently part of the schedule. Bush pronounces the forthcoming war as one between freedom and fear, with God most definitely on America’s side. We are now witnessing the opening volleys of an assault on constitutional freedoms in this country by a government in which opposition has effectively been suspended.

  As Bush talked about unified national purpose, the news cameras lingered on Rep. Barbara Lee of Berkeley, everlastingly to her credit the only member of Congress to vote against authorization of open-ended retaliation. Aside from Lee, there were few independent voices in Congress. Among them was the Texas libertarian Republican, Ron Paul, who told his colleagues, “Demanding domestic security in times of war invites carelessness in preserving civil liberties and the right of privacy. Frequently the people are only too anxious for their freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure.”

  Of great concern is Attorney General John Ashcroft’s agenda, now being rushed to Congress. There are three components to what has been described as “the mother of all anti-terrorism bills”: immigration; wiretapping and domestic intelligence surveillance; search and seizure. The bill sought by Ashcroft vests virtually unlimited authority in the US Attorney General to target non-citizens with arrest, indefinite incarceration, and deportation. The arrests can be made on the basis of secret evidence with little or no opportunity for meaningful judicial review.

  Ashcroft is seeking expanded wiretapping power, plus enhanced ability to snoop on e-sites. The bill seeks roving wiretap ability, meaning that the police could tap any phone used by their target, no matter to whom that phone might belong. As usual, an emergency is being used as the pretext for a far wider assault on basic constitutional rights.

  Absent dropping a Big One, how can the necessary revenge be exacted? Cruise missiles, used by Bill Clinton as a way of expressing his displeasure at Sudan, may be useful for destroying pharmaceutical factories, hospitals, even defense ministries, but the body counts are not dramatic. But who or what is there to bomb in Afghanistan? A land invasion in force, a blitzkrieg sparing nothing and no one? Afghanistan is famously the graveyard of punitive missions embarked upon by the Great Powers, as the British discovered in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the 1980s.

  One familiar way extricating oneself from confrontation with an unsuitable foe is to substitute a more satisfactory one. Already there’s a lobby, the most conspicuous of whom is former CIA chief James Woolsey, pressing the case for Iraq as possible sponsor or co-sponsor of the World Trade Center attacks. So sanctions against Iraq could be strengthened, its cities bombed and perhaps even another invasion attempted.

  Bush’s entourage have been talking in Mao-like terms about “protracted war,” or a “war in the shadows.” The purely nominal ban against US government-sponsored assassination (there have been numerous CIA-backed attempts against Castro since the mid-1970s ban, if you believe the Cubans) will be lifted.

  On the morning of September 11 Judge Henry Wood was trying, of all things, an American Airlines crash-damage case in the Federal District court in Little Rock, Arkansas. In the wake of the attacks there were orders to close the courthouse. All obeyed, except Judge Wood, aged eighty-three, who insisted that jury and lawyers and attendants remain in place. Turning down a plea for mistrial by the defendant, Wood said, “This looks like an intelligent jury to me and I didn’t want the judicial system interrupted by a terrorist act, no matter how horrible.”

  Wood’s was the proper reaction. America could do with more of what used to be called the Roman virtues. A monstrous thing happened in New York, but should this be a cause for a change in national consciousness? Is America so frail? People talk of the trauma of another Pearl Harbor, but truth to say, the trauma in the aftermath of the Day of Infamy in 1941 was far in excess of what the circumstances warranted, and assiduously fanned by the government for reasons of state. Ask the Japanese Americans who were interned.

  Why, for that matter, ground all air traffic and semi-paralyze the economy, with further interminable and useless inconveniences promised to travelers in the months and possibly years to come? Could any terrorist have hoped not only to bring down the Trade Center towers but also destroy the airline industry? It
would have been far better to ask passengers to form popular defense committees on every plane, bring their own food and drink, keep alert for trouble and look after themselves. A properly vigilant democracy of the air. Remember, even if there were no X-ray machines, no searches, no passenger checks, it would still be far more dangerous to drive to the airport than to get on a plane.

  What sort of accommodation should America make right now? How about one with the history of the past hundred years, in an effort to improve the moral world climate of the next hundred years? We use the word accommodation in the sense of an effort to get to grips with history, as inflicted by the powerful upon the weak. We have been miserably failed by our national media here, as Jude Wanniski, political economist and agitator of conventional thinking, remarked in the course of a well-merited attack on “bipartisanship,” which almost always means the obdurate determination to pursue a course of collective folly without debate: “It is because of this bipartisanship that our press corps has become blind to the evil acts we commit as a nation.”

  America has its enemies circling the campfires and threatening the public good. They were rampant the day before the September 11 attacks, with the prospect of deflation, sated world markets, idled capacity, shrinking social services. Is ranting about Kabul and throwing money at the Pentagon going to solve those national emergencies?

  There is no compelling reason to accept that bin Laden is the Master Terror Mind of the World. On some fairly persuasive accounts, his resources have dwindled, both in terms of money and equipment. He lives in a cave without phone or fax or email, hungrily devouring long-outdated editions of newspapers brought by visitors. He may be an inspirational force to the terrorist cadres, but we strongly doubt that he is the hands-on master of terror portrayed by the administration, manipulating world financial markets.

  A great nation does not respond to a single hour of terrible mayhem in two cities by hog-tying itself with new repressive laws and abuses of constitutional freedoms, like Gulliver doing the work of the Lilliputians and lashing himself to the ground with a thousand cords.

  September 22

  Deliberating on a back road whether to make a detour and visit the Gila Cliff Dwellings, I finally decide it’s too late and swing back onto a larger road. Red lights promptly go on and I see a state patrol car with two cops in it. After a long interval during which they check me out, a young cop comes over and leans through the passenger window. He alleges I rolled past a red stop sign and then asks me what I’m doing in this part of New Mexico.

  His ferrety little eyes swivel around the back of the station wagon, linger on some cactuses I’ve picked up in a nursery in Truth or Consequences, linger further on my Coleman ice chest and then come back to my car papers. Either this is a training session for Ferret Eyes or a pretext stop to see if I’m carrying drugs. Armed with my license and car papers the two spend another twenty minutes on their radio. Finally Ferret Eyes comes back and lays a $49 citation on me, inquiring as to whether I plead guilty as charged or want to fight it out in the courts. This all seems hurried and devoid of due process, but I tell him I won’t fight it. I roll on my way, soured on New Mexico.

  In contrast to the carefree posture of the Baptists, leaving God to sort it all out, the signs outside the high schools mostly flaunt the worry-ridden “Have a Safe Summer,” until I get to Globe, NM, a mining town on State Highway 70, whose high-school sign dares to say, “Have a Happy Summer.”

  September 24

  Along State Highway 70 I rolled through Globe. And later on route 60 I was afforded a definitive vignette of the role of environmental regulation, in the form of a vast, awful mine, like a cross between something out of Caspar Friedrich and a Fritz Lang nightmare. A mountain of shale, its base oozing green puss, topped by a mining building, the whole thing a thousand feet high, and right at the bottom, next to the highway, a tiny shack labeled “Environmental Compliance” and next to this the cryptic sign, “Zero and Beyond.”

  Then came more mines and astounding red-rock sandstone formations, before, ten minutes later, on the other side of the range, a sign for the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. I rolled right past it and then, always a sucker for gardens and arboreta, made a U and went in. So glad I did, since these 1,075 acres of the Sonoran desert nestling at the base of Picketpost mountain now comprise one of the premier horticultural attractions of the country, for which we can thank William Boyce Thompson and, no doubt, Mrs. Thompson.

  Thompson was a mining engineer from Montana, who made his pile figuring out where to dig some of the big holes I had been gazing at a few minutes earlier. Flush with income from the Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company at Globe-Miami, Thompson won his honorary title of “Colonel” by leading a Red Cross expedition to Russia in 1917.

  As he marched across the arid Asian steppes towards St. Petersburg, the Colonel became mightily impressed not only by the extreme hunger he witnessed on all sides but also by the fact that what little food the locals had often came from plants. All foods, the Colonel suddenly appreciated, come originally from plants. Back in Arizona he swiftly laid plans for an arid land arboretum where plants from the world’s deserts could be brought together, their uses assayed and their seeds distributed.

  Work began in 1923 and by 1929 it was up and running as a joint project of the arboretum, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. These days there are over 3,000 different plants flourishing at Boyce Thompson, and among the beneficiaries of the Colonel are sperm whales, a substitute for whose oil is the oil pressed from seeds of the desert jojoba bush, now planted on a large scale in Arizona.

  I wandered about in the 105 degree heat and soon saw in the distance the tapering trunk, some thirty-five feet high, of an Idria columnaris, otherwise known as the Boojum, whose erroneous identification proved so fatal to the baker in Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, The Hunting of the Snark. All around were marvelous cacti and kindred succulents such as euphorbias and agaves.

  September 26

  I had been planning to head straight across Texas to El Paso with a detour south to Big Bend Ranch State Park which sits on the north bank of the Rio Grande, also passing through Marfa which used to, maybe still does, feature Rock Hudson’s house in Giant, then coming north again to the Balmorhea springs, with beautiful stone work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. I was there years ago, in 1988, while driving a 1960 Plymouth Valiant across country. But this July it was ferociously hot and though the ’62 Plymouth station wagon was running well, its venerable air conditioning more than satisfactory, I didn’t fancy the thought of breaking down in the middle of the Cuesta de Burro mountains.

  So, prior to the visit to Midland, I headed northwest for the Texas hill country, the region of the Pedernales often associated with the ranch and memory of LBJ, and an hour later found myself in Fredericksburg, which offers the curious traveler not only the Admiral Nimitz museum of the Pacific War, plus the George H. Bush Gallery, but also a profusion of German restaurants, each displaying meat-heavy, schlag-strewn menus in the broiling Texan forenoon.

  Consulting the copy of Roemer’s Texas I’d found in the public library in Midland I found out why. This same Friedrich von Roemer is noted as the father of Texan geology, hence grandfather of the delighted cries of Texan oilmen whenever the geology of Texas yielded its proper bounty. In 1845 Roemer visited Texas and published an excellent account of his explorations four years later, correctly deprecating most previous writings on the state as “crude untruths and fabulous exaggerations.”

  Across the Guadeloupe mountain range and down into Alamogordo, sixty miles south of the Trinity site, I found point zero for the explosion of America’s first nuclear device. It’s hard to drive far across the American West without passing a military base or a prison. I drive into White Sands National Monument, which is surrounded by the White Sands Missile Range, some 4,000 square miles of desert which hosted America’s first efforts to adapt German rock
ets, with Nazi scientists toiling happily in their new homes, spirited westward by the same US intelligence services that extricated Klaus Barbie and sent him to Bolivia.

  One such scientist was Georg Richkey, who was the supervisor at the Mettelwerk missile complex that used slave labor from the Dora concentration camp. In retaliation against sabotage to the plant—prisoners would piss on electrical equipment, causing spectacular malfunctions—Richkey would hang them twelve at a time from factory cranes, with wooden sticks shoved into their mouths to muffle their cries. Later US intelligence officers obstructed efforts by the Allies, and the US State Department, to try Richkey as a war criminal, and brought him to the US where he resumed his missile work at Wright AFB.

  I drove for a while through the white gypsum dunes that constitute the prime allurement of the Monument, whose best feature is actually the adobe reception and office buildings designed and put up by Hispanic laborers under the supervision of a Kansas journalist who had successfully campaigned for the Monument in the 1930s. The buildings are now deservedly on the register of historic structures. That evening I drive along the main street of Truth or Consequences. I notice that the South West Pharmacy has a sign below it, “Ask Us About Free Prozac.” Below is another sign for the Wellness Store, “A Neural Pharmacy.” Across the street I see the Hot Springs Health Center. I pick the Trail motel ($24, good wide front court, nice sign, Christians, no phone in the room).

  As for the town’s name, I’d always imagined it came from some cowboy bet in the 1880s. Not a bit of it. In 1950, so the Chaparral Guide in my motel told me, NBC TV and radio producer Ralph Edwards took the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his program “Truth or Consequences” to put out the word that he wished “some town in the US liked and respected our show so much that it would like to change its name to Truth or Consequences.” The Mexico State Bureau of tourism promptly relayed his hope to the manager of the Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce—at long last an opportunity to shake off the town’s status of second-best to Hot Springs Arkansas, playpen of Boy Clinton. In a special election, 1,294 of the citizenry voted for the change with 294 opposed. Amid cries from the vanquished traditionalists there was soon a second poll with the same result. The people were asked to vote again on the matter in 1964 and yet again in 1967, which suggests the diehards were still fighting.