I’ll start with something that’s been bugging me but that I haven’t had a forum to write about: this idea, almost universally agreed upon, that Americans mustn’t let terrorism change our way of life. I disagree. Our way of life had its problems before Osama appeared, and we probably could have stood to change it then, but now that we have the added impetus of being collectively attacked in ways that we never dreamed about in past years, I think it’s high time that we did a few thing differently that maybe we should have done already
Like, say, spread out a little geographically. I live in Montana, way out in the country, near towns that have been abandoned and depopulated and could use a few resources from the threatened cities that have made themselves sitting ducks for sabotage by building their infrastructures so dense and tall that a pellet gun could knock them over. There’s a price for supersaturating small areas with people, wealth, and technology, and now we’re paying it by trying to secure in thousands of ways targets that are inviting as they come. This folly of rebuilding the World Trade Center proves that we’d rather be proud and stubborn than safe. Here we go piling up the blocks again just to show how bloodied but unbowed we are instead of learning our lesson and reshaping things. It’s not the de-urbanization of the cities that I’m dreaming about here, it’s the re-urbanization of the towns — places where strangers can easily be spotted and people can’t be vaporized by the hundreds merely by stuffing a few bombs into some backpacks.
IDEAS, PLEASE: Maybe I don’t sound serious. I am. At least in this respect I am: responding to terrorism with inflexibility isn’t going to work, I fear, and unless we start entertaining notions as wild and possibly half-baked as situating our treasure and our people in places where they don’t invite assault we’re not only daring the bad guys to bring it on, we’re forgetting that the beauty of our society is that it can mold itself to new realities rather than march in lockstep like the Redcoats toward all-too-predictable catastrophes.
I guess I’m just weary of hearing that beating terrorism means doing what we’ve always done but a whole lot harder, with more firmly gritted teeth. That’s what Iraq’s about, it seems to me: fighting the Gulf War over again, but this time with feeling. It’s like rebuilding the World Trade Center and calling it The Freedom Tower or whatever. Why not call it the Lack-of-Imagination Tower? And while we’re at it, why not call The Energy Bill that does almost nothing to address the fact that our fuel supply is being pumped directly out of our children’s veins and arteries while enriching our enemies’ war chest The Out-of-New-Ideas Bill?
I’m a fiction writer and a book critic, not a professional political journalist, and the behavior of our leaders nowadays reminds me of Captain Ahab or King Lear and doesn’t prompt thoughts about issues and philosophies. I think I know megalomania when I see it, in literature and also in life, and I think I know too when when a plot has swerved toward tragedy. It happens when events reveal a flaw in the basic approach of the protagonist and he reacts to the bad news by clinging to that flaw more strenuously. Aside from the Bill of Rights, which protects our very ability to change, let’s change what we can as quickly as we can and see what works and what doesn’t in this fight instead of going all stiff and stern. That’s our advantage, after all: we can revise our doctrines and they can’t.
Ideas, please, the kookier the better. Mine, as I’ve said, is scatter, reduce our profile, go to work in our homes as much as possible instead of converging every morning on Wall Street and Times Square, and let them try to hit a moving target. And don’t build that foolish Freedom Tower thing. Change doesn’t mean the terrorists have won. Not changing does. Ask the Redcoats. Or better yet, ask the Native Americans. They stood tall too, once, here on the very spot where I’m sitting now.
– posted by Walter
The Dish 