Left v. Liberal

I was at a talk tonight on the consequences of the "war on terror," the extreme violations of human rights being committed by the U.S. government in the name of freedom and safety. The speaker was David Cole, who is a constitutional lawyer who has been working with the ACLU for years.

While I agreed with most of his talk, I was bothered by his unquestioning assumption of the rhetoric of the war on terror. He assumed that Iraqis who resist U.S. occupation are indeed terrorists, rather than opting for a more sophisticated reading of the unrelated invasion of Iraq, the fabrication of the war on terror, and the subsequent elision of terrorist and enemy combatant that has enabled the U.S. to illegally imprison tens of thousands of people without charging them or giving them fair trials.

The other unsettling element of the talk came when a woman asked (in a way that was a provocation; that is she intended it to be a challenge) the speaker why he did not address the theory that 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government. The audience reacted immediately, with several people booing or otherwise indicating their disbelief. Cole himself answered the question well, by arguing that focusing on conspiracy theories side tracks people from the larger issue of human rights violations that have been occurring since the WTC attack.

But this question clearly split the room; people who had seemed fairly united in their interest in the political question Cole raised and in their political identities became hostile to each other. Liberals who celebrate the founding fathers and the U.S. system of government as the best in the world would not tolerate any question about government-sponsored terrorism against its own people; torturing, illegally detaining, and killings foreigners, its seems, are acts that Americans can understand and even expect its government to commit, as long as they're committed against Other people. But a government that kills its own people cannot be conceived, and if it were it could have the power to undo the great American exceptionalism. The gap between the two sides was filled with the ringing of cognitive dissonance.

Talking this over later with my partner, we came to the realization that no matter what Cole believes happened on 9/11, to remain a credible, and to continue to straddle the gap between left and liberal, he can never give any credence to the theory. In fact, he must actively disavow it to emphasize that he is not fringe. The inability to publicly entertain a theory without the risk of being defamed and discredited seems to belie the delicate fiction on which this democracy is based.

Bad Decisions

Today I found out a friend died. I found out in a scattered, GenTech way when I read an email that was responding to several other emails that I hadn't read because they had ended up in my spam folder. The first email I read about Liberty didn't say exactly that he was dead but I knew something really bad had happened. I patrolled my spam folder, reading backwards until I found the first message that confirmed that he had died in a hit and run. I later did a web search and found an article that graphically described the accident in more detail than I wanted. Liberty was hit in a fast food parking lot while throwing some food away; the car that hit him dragged him a while at a slow speed while his friend ran beside it yelling for them to stop. The driver panicked and sped ahead, running over and killing Liberty.

Liberty was a fourth-year PhD student like me, and we taught in the same writing program. He studied how people make decisions, and I can't help but wonder about what motivated this driver to make such a terribly bad decision, one that ended the life of a smart, funny, engaged young man. My impulse is to think, if I were in that situation, of course I would stop, I would immediately want to help the person, right? So is there something less human about a person who doesn't react like that? Do we blame it on the media, on the desensitizing we've all undergone as a result of the endless barrage of violence that we ingest nightly through the many incarnation of CSI, Law & Order, on the nightly news, at the summer blockbusters and so forth? I think that's an oversimplification. I think it's very likely the driver, and the passenger who urged him to "go, go, go," were detached from what was happening; but I also think they were very afraid. Fear is so pervasive now, perhaps more so than violence, that maybe these kids imagined they'd be arrested or deported, or thought about the financial costs of being sued, and the fear of the punishing bureaucracy was so overwhelming that they forgot about the life that lay beneath them and focused only on preserving their own.

Of course the irony is that had they stopped, Liberty would have lived and the punishment they would have faced would have been much less severe. I hope when they're found, someone asks them why they made such a bad decision.