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some degree of heightened surveillance might be a good idea, but there is no reason why that surveillance should go outside existing legal strictures.
there is no state of emergency, nor is there any justification for a state of emergency.
i have been thinking since the afternoon of 9/11/2001 (i remember this clearly) that it seemed most likely to me that the entire organization that planned those attacks were on the planes, that there was no basis for thinking in terms of wider conspiracy simply because none was necessary to explain the events.
the war on terror is a war on ghosts.
the interesting thing about this war on ghosts is that if you assume that the point of the attack was not purely symbolic (which is a stretch, but folk make this jump all the time regardless of its illogic) and was instead to disrupt the "amurican way of life" then it seems to me that bush-hysteria is the logical extension of the attacks and not a preventative.
in other words, this administration, with its assumption of a state of emergency and its violation of law upon law in the name of national security, is the best ally such organizations could possibly have. you could even extend this into a rationale for the iraq war, which might have been thought about as a way to make the rest of the "war on terror" appear rational, appear more war-like, so as to rationalize responses that otherwise could not be justified. of course, this was all predicated on fiction, but no matter.
the administration itself completes the work that they assign to these folk "terrorists"---disruption of the way folk live in the states (again assuming this motive is not arbitrary--i think this is a wholly arbitrary motive, which is more about american narcissism than about a rational assessment of the politics behind an action like the attacks on 9/11/2001)---that folk on the right choose to live in paranoia, in fear is the opposite of a victory over an phantom enemy--it is rather the extension and fulfillment of the project the right assigns to "terrorists" themselves. that the bush squad has tried for 4 years to instrumentalize this project for its own political purposes is transparent--except for folk who really see the world they live in in the about-to-explode terms that the bush administration lays out in order to justify its arbitrary responses.
these responses are arbitrary because there is no event "war" in a conventional sense that can function to make strategy coherent.
contingency is a bummer for folk who are afraid of it. accidents on the highway, natural disasters, meteors, comets, spontaneous combustion, showers of frogs, terrorist attacks. there are an unlimited number of contingent events that you could be afraid of. you could talk yourself into never getting out of bed if you follow this line to its conclusion. contingency is just that--you cant plan it away. you can prepare in some ways to reduce possibilities or impacts, but these preparations cannot be understood as a strategy because of the matter of continuity.
so what to do?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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