Nuclear Annihilation Writ Small

TNT's promos for its new series-thingie, The Grid, feature Dylan McDermott announcing that the reason he works so hard on anti-terrorism stuff is that "All I want is for my kid to grow up in a world where he isn't afraid."

I begin to suspect that I may have a glimmer into what turned Dennis Miller into a Bush-worshipping pussy after 9/11.

When I was growing up, in the 1970s and early 1980s, for people my age and also for the Boomers and late Boomers ahead of me in years, there was a constant sense in the United States that it was entirely possible for everybody to be killed in a nuclear holocaust (and, later, we also had the realization, thanks to Carl Sagan and his climatologist buddies, and the Alvarez extinction hypothesis, that the few survivors of a nuclear attack would freeze to death in a thousand-year winter.)

That fear went away when Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union into perestroika and glasnost. America's enemies stopped being our enemies, and most of them signed up on our side as fast as they could purge the Communists. Since, roughly, 1985, we have not had to live with a realistic fear of nuclear annihilation.

And then came September 11th. Even though the attacks of that day were four orders of magnitude below a nuclear attack, they were large compared to what we had to compare them to. Humans, especially in aggregate, have non-linear senses of perspective and it is abundantly clear that the attacks of September 11th were as large in our apprehension as the nuclear fears of the previous two generations.

And that might explain the phenomenon we see, of adults otherwise apparently capable and intelligent, engaging in the intellectual equivalent of clinging to the knees of anyone who could possibly stand in the role of Daddy, desperate for protection from dangers too frightening to conceive, and being as incapable of assessing "Daddy's" success in the role as a child.

Have people rediscovered the fear of destruction that underlay the nation's zeitgeist for three and a half decades? Is it easier for us to slip back into that mode because it's so familiar?

When Dylan McDermott's character wants a world without fear for his child, he's only referring to a specific kind of fear, a fundamental human fear that there are other tribes than ours and that they hate us. (I suspect, in fact, that we distinguish between, and have different qualities of fear of, tribes that wish to steal from us and tribes that wish to kill us; compare the movies Gung Ho and Red Dawn.)

I even suspect that the fear does not care that the Cold War was against states and the War Against Terrorism is against ghostly extranational entities with little concrete to strike back against. After all, our only defensive strikes during the Cold War were against proxies. The fear is psychologically the same because we cannot defeat either tribe. We fought in Korea and Vietnam against tribes that were not the tribe we feared because we could not attack the tribe we feared. Phrased that way, our attack on Iraq falls into an obvious analogical position, an attack on a proxy for the enemy we actually fear. In Vietnam, did we link the Viet Cong with the Soviet menace with the avidity that we have linked Iraq to al-Qaeda? Of course we did.

So, I think that's why we are behaving as we have: faced with a threat that frightens us at a primal level, we have relapsed to the posture we held when we last faced that threat, even if it is inappropriate and disproportionate. Ann Coulter and Dennis Miller play the roles played by Joseph McCarthy and the red-hunters; Paul Wolfowitz and the neo-conservatives fill the role that the architects of containment did.

Now, what does this tell us about how to effect change?

Posted by Greg at July 10, 2004 5:46 PM | TrackBack