September 23, 2001

 mfinley.com   
"United States"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley  

Two weeks ago, within minutes of hearing about the Twin Towers and Pentagon, I erupted in a bitter condemnation of our leadership for allowing this violence to befall us, and for responding in what I took to be an unleaderly fashion.

Lots of people agreed with what I said. Others, including people whose opinions matter deeply to me, came down on me very hard.

So I have spent many days brooding over the big act, and my little reaction to it.

One rule of thumb I have is that what you see is often a mask for something else. My anger, for instance. How could our government let this happen? What kind of superpower military headquarters allowed itself to be attacked? And couldn't the president say something more to the point than to promise to catch and punish the "folks" who perpetrated the deed?

After some reflection, I realized that my reaction was in keeping with another thing I have done, that you will also consider very inappropriate. As a father of young children, when they would fall and hurt themselves, I used to blow my top at them. Stupid as it seems, I used to abuse them at their very moment of anguish.

What can I say? I loved my little babies, and a part of me blamed myself for letting them fall -- I was probably off in my room writing something. And I truly, truly, truly did not want them to suffer or be scarred.

I was doing the same thing with the World Trade Center. Not that I was in charge of national security, but I thought the president was doing about as crappy a job of it as I would have done in his place. I truly hated him in that moment for not sparing us this.

Of course, none of you could have been aware of this psychological peculiarity. Which I am not saying as an excuse, just to signal that it came from a deeper part of me than not liking President Bush very much, to which I also plead guilty. It came from a kind of whacked-out, twisted, immature love deep inside me.

But it was too late. I then had to put up with scores of letters of condemnation and reproof. These are the assumptions I bridled at:

§         In time of attack, true patriots intuitively know the only proper response is unity and quick-strike retaliation.

§         People who criticize their country do not love their country. There is something wrong with people who criticize leadership in times of crisis.

§         People who call the country to introspection at a moment of attack are "blaming America" and letting the true malefactors off the hook.

§         People who write about puppy dogs and roadside attractions ought not take on issues of national security.

All these points confuse me. So I am taking the time -- introspection to the contrary notwithstanding -- to think them through. Not for you, because you likely have your own psychopathology to sort out, but for my own satisfaction.

WAR AND PEACE

Let me take the last point first. It is made in an outwardly kindly, but inwardly controlling way -- "You write charming stories about your dog and family, why not shut up on matters pertaining to the national defense?"

Vanity, of the very sort we have been called to repent, forces me to point out that this, too, is my business.

It is my business, first, because I am a citizen and a voter and a parent. I was wounded in the attack just like you were, and I am entitled to respond, it being, for the time being, a free country.

Second, this is an area that I do know something about. What we are facing in the days since September 11 is a period of very rapid social change. I write a column that plucks at the emotional and intellectual tensions underlying change in technologies, institutions, and culture. I have co-written several books with psychologist Harvey Robbins on the perils of change, and most particularly, a book titled Transcompetition (McGraw-Hill) on the psychological problem of simultaneously combining war and peace.

Our principle claim in Transcompetition is that neither 100% peaceful collaborative tactics, nor 100% warlike competitive tactics, tend to lead satisfactorily to success. All-out peace often leads to impotence and irresolution (too many on-the-one-hand's); all-out war, because it tends to duplicate the original crime, alienates key constituencies and invites escalation and multi-generational retribution.

Instead we prescribed an artful uniting of these two states of mind, war plus peace, in the same moment. We discussed three E's of transcompetitive strategy:

§         Exchange information with other stakeholding partners;

§         Encircle the offending party in a lasso of public opinion and political alliance;

§         and Exact from the tyrant the terms which will prevent him from tyrannizing again.

The book used the example of Yugoslavian president Slobedan Milosevic, then waging war against neighboring Bosnia. Hawks and doves everywhere sought his downfall, but neither group by itself was able to do this. He was ultimately toppled, three years after our book came out, by the kind of combination we described in the three E's -- military violence plus political solidarity across Europe. The aerial campaign that ensued appears to be a rarity in world history -- a war that may lead to general peace. Instead of enraging Serbians and guaranteeing future generations of conflict with them, we prevailed upon them to overthrow their tyrant and usher in an age that they controlled.

That is what is needed in this new campaign, against globally scattered terror cells. Before we fire our guns, we must create our own network of shared information. Then we hang that information around the offenders' necks -- their crimes are not crimes of religion or culture, but of egotism and sadism. Then we exact from the tyrant, with brutal force if necessary, the outcome that the entire world agrees on.

When you think transcompetitively, you cannot be unilateral. The task of leadership first and foremost is to communicate -- with citizens, with allies, and even with one's enemies. No one may be unclear on what your goals are. You may attack with many weapons, but their great power is less their explosive megatonnage than that they come with the concerted agreement of the entire world.

It is not a perfect solution to the problem of brutality, but it is an emerging approach that shows greater promise than bombing a country that is already brutalized beyond our comprehension into an even more deplorable state.

FREEDOM

Most of the remaining points hinge on the words freedom and patriotism. My original outburst was about us being free versus them being against freedom. I felt this was presumptuous and sloganeering. What difference does it make if the people who are murdered are "free" or not? When we kill the civilians in targeted nations, will it be OK because they are not free? I felt that the moment of disaster was not the moment to get ideological. We did not need to unify by creed because were already unified by shock and grief. In saying so, people came down on me for being ideological, for withholding my consent from the hour of patriotism.

I have since come to agree with the freedom thesis, with a few tweaks of my own. My understanding is that the terrorists in question, if they are who we think they are, besides being malevolent narcissists, do indeed despise our way of life. What they despise about it, however, is less that they hate freedom than that our freedom inevitably undermines their way of life. Fundamentalism of every faith, including Christianity, is threatened by Western modernism. The information revolution may be global, but it is our view of globalism that is prevailing -- American movies, American culture, American values -- and that so offends these extremists. We are the big wave rolling out of California, and it is swamping their little boats. One more generation of a growing, secular middle class in these Third World nations and the critical mass for sustaining a strong fundamentalist culture --and their chance of retaining power there -- will likely vanish forever.

The call to introspection I was accused of making -- asking why this violent fate had befallen us -- leads to this conflict between cultures. And I do believe that the very quality that we think makes us innocent -- our exuberant ignorance, as we pursue our objectives, in our global language and irresistible culture, of the yearnings of other peoples -- is the fulcrum of this murderous misunderstanding.

Even our allies in the West fret about retaining their identities and their hegemony against the breaking of the American wave. France thinks it makes better movies than we do, but they can't rent screens in their own country to show their own products to their own people. American distributors have marginalized the French out of their own market. Take that proud and resentful sentiment and magnify it a hundredfold and you have an inkling of the dislike non-Western groups feel for us. Not us as persons, as mothers and children and dads, but us as an inevitability because of our wealth and technology, and our cheerful willingness to export and conquer.

Freedom is the issue. But it is a specifically American brand of freedom -- gladhanding, back-slapping, freewheeling, boob-implanting, touchdown-scoring, gas-guzzling, carbon dioxide producing, big-hair-wearing, deal-making, amplifier-blasting, product-placing, bomb-dropping, global portfolio trading freedom. Naturally, we love it because its very essence is us expressing our robust selves on a worldwide stage. It is the measure of either our innocence or our arrogance that we can’t comprehend how people who are downwind of our freedom might find it repulsive.

PATRIOTISM

I am still struggling with patriotism. Al Gore, who has little to chuckle about these days, used to chuckle about "extra-chromosome conservatives" -- meaning they seemed imbued at birth with political intuitions that liberals just don’t get.

I feel that way about patriotism. As near as I can tell, it is an emotion, more than a thought, like homesickness or being in love. I think I love my country in a low-level way. But I sure don’t feel it in the tearful or giddy way I can feel about my mother or my wife or my children or even baseball.

Patriotism seems illogical. Am I so big that I can get my arms around all forty-eight states, and still wink hospitably at Hawaii and Alaska? Can I imagine even for a second how many people 250 million are, and give the thumbs-up to their cumulative aspirations? In the aggregate, what is America exactly, that we can say we love it?

Maybe that's why we avoid the aggregate and focus on little portmanteau stories and emblems for us to meditate on, like Parson Weems' story of George Washington and the cherry tree, or Nathan Hale's pronouncement on the gallows, or the image of GIs handing our chocolate and nylons as they trek through rubble of someone else's making.

But you know, as you get older, you learn that a lot of that stuff is made up. Then you get alienated, and attempts to fan the flames of love-of-country must overcome earlier deceptions. Some people never get beyond these early betrayals.

The flag? It's an interesting flag. I like how when the country was young the stars were in a circle, like wagons under attack, and as we got older we straightened them into factory lines -- our entire evolution on a field of blue.

As a child I pledged allegiance to it every morning, sort of understanding the words, but not really. How does one pledge allegiance to a flag? Allegiance means duty and commitment and affection. I liked those ideas better than I liked the flag itself.

It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that I have plenty of patriotism in my life, if you mean duty and commitment and affection. Just not that feeling for the country as whole.

In fact, since I went to a Catholic school, there was a faint scent of idolatry every morning -- first bow heads and pray to God, then put hand on heart and face the flag standing in the corner of the room. I wasn't a liberal then, just a kid who was told that God is greater than any effort of man. Even the church screwed up from time to time. Only God was God.

I think other kids were patriots because their dads or brothers were in the service. This was after World War II and Korea, so many pianos had pictures of men who never came back to sit at them, or who came back broken and unable to sing. My dad spent the war protecting us against invasion in Sault-Ste. Marie. Maybe if he had lost more for his country, his life or his foot, I would have invested more in it. I would have needed to, for it to make sense.

But not having had that experience, and lacking the natural chromosome, I have had to sneak up on big-P patriotism through a series of small-p feelings. I have had to unite many states of mind, fitting many little pictures together to create the bigger view.

I feel patriotic to my dog, and to all dogs. I love their helplessness in the face of emotion. They teach valuable lessons of directness, devotion, and fun. In the way I admire introspection, I love dogs for their inability to do any.

I feel patriotic to the little town I grew up in, in Ohio. When I visit it every year, I drive slowly along the little avenues and back roads, from the buildings and cemeteries and playing fields where so many of my memories and lessons sprang from. If harm befell my little town, I would rush to its defense -- even though I hardly know a soul there any more. It is just that., because it has so much to do with me, it will always be somehow perfect in my heart.

I feel patriotic to music. Music is how we encode what we love, without the entanglements of words or ideas. Our joys, our griefs, our deepest desires are there, suspended in the notes in and the silences between the notes. It's why I love folk music, but it's also why I feel patriotic about the Beatles, and the Velvet Underground, and a scratchy old record of piano preludes by Shostakovich, and the odd song you heard on the radio ages ago, and forgot, but when it comes on again all the feeling comes flooding back. I used to think that if you got warring countries together and had them play one another's songs, you were halfway to where you needed to be. When true patriots get a lump in their throats at the flag being furled, is it like me listening to the sweet sad songs on "Surrealistic Pillow"?

I am patriotic to my family. I can’t tell you how deep this goes, but it is how you feel about yours. It is like describing the taste of water or the smell of fresh air. They are everything that is good and that keeps you from being alone. They are your only real job -- to do right by them.

I feel patriotic about stories -- not the ones about chopping down cherry trees and splitting logs, but the dozen stories we hear and tell every hour about what is in us. I, like you, have been moved to the deepest feelings of respect for the firefighters, cops, mayor and people of New York. I think I loved New York before the attack, and before the bumper sticker even.

As a child I looked up under the back window of the car at the hundred-storied Empire State Building rising impossibly above Fifth Avenue, convinced I was at the apex of everything mighty and wonderful. My father dangled me from the observation deck later, and I screamed in terror. To be up high is to be in danger. To venture up so high is to live bravely. Our lives are tall towers of stories like this, which may be why the attack cut so deep -- a city of memories wiped out in a flash. All that wisdom washed away by fire.

I feel patriotic to friends who have opened up their hearts to me over the years. As we get older, and the notion of mortality has begun to rub against us, the meeting has deepened, the conversation become sweeter. We are all in this together, and there is a sense in which we are all holding hands all through life.

I feel patriotic to the world, and I have ever since the pictures came back of the earth taken from the Apollo moon shots. In these pictures, it’s just like in the John Lennon song (which I never much liked), all ocean and swirling cloud, no borders, no crayon-colored countries. We are like a luscious piece of fruit, shining in the sun. In this world we are all countrymen, and while it was America that took the picture, and I love America for doing that, the picture is of us all.

The attack on the Big Apple was an attack on the even bigger apple, and I reckon people from all over will link hands now -- exchanging information, encircling the attackers, and exacting a penalty for the terrible crime.

Let's do it right. And if my patriotism seems to be flagging, give me a moment to catch up.

mfinley.com 
_{COPYRIGHT (c) 2001
by MICHAEL FINLEY}

Mike is available to write for your publication or organization right now. Call him at 651-644-4540. Or e-mail him.

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