Police State Patriotism

Two days after September 11th, I was walking around the deserted streets of lower Manhattan. Like others, I was disoriented and yet more present than ever. One of the small but significant things I dislike about living in New York is how rarely one can walk down the middle of the street. I was surprised, on September 13th, how few people left the sidewalks for the street even when there was no traffic. I was beginning to understand how little I understand about liberty and constraint in America. On Canal Street a few days later, where the only traffic was brightly-lit emergency vehicles and dark, unmarked government sedans, I saw a woman walking her Doberman. She picked up her dog's shit, in compliance with the city statute, from the middle of a street still gray with ash from the burning World Trade Center. An isolated act upholding the values of civilization. I felt reassured and disturbed.

Often, in those first days and weeks after September 11th, I found myself recalling Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, about love and politics and the siege of Beirut. Darwish's book is about the incommensurables of life. He writes erotically of making his morning coffee at the stove -- he has no choice but to do it -- though an Israeli rocket could come through the kitchen window at any moment. And on a more intangible plane, he writes of that which "awakens in me a sadness so pure it is the very substance of happiness." Destruction and creation are not always antonyms. It is difficult to explain to people who have not lived in New York how the violence and death of September 11th led so directly to a new humaneness in daily contact. Sadly, that openness and connection in the most crowded and public spaces has closed down again. And frighteningly, the more simplistic and dangerous legacies of sentimentalism and patriotism -- the latter, I think, a category of the former -- have not only survived but metastasized. I am not proud of America, because I don't know what America is, and because I don't know what it means to be "proud" of a country, anyway. During the Gulf War, the moronic slogan "Support our Troops" actually meant "Do Not Question the President." But that was nothing compared to what is happening now. Today I think "America" might mean: quick to sentimentalize, and secretly desiring more authority than one consciously admits. But then, like so may definitions of America, perhaps this one has less to do with an "imagined community," in Benedict Anderson's indispensable phrase, than with the provincial thoughts of one commentator who lives here.

Like other confused intellectuals, I have been searching for solid ground from which to make some solid proclamations about the balancing act of constitutionally-guaranteed liberties and the need for restricting them at times in the interest of security. My problem is that, as with "America," I don't know what any of the crucial words really mean. Going back to my college course books on American history, I find an intriguing review in Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution of the literature on power and liberty: "The one was brutal, ceaselessly active, and heedless; the other was delicate, passive, and sensitive," Bailyn writes. And: "Power to [the colonists] meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion. And it was, consequently, for them as it is for us 'a richly connotative word': some of its fascination may well have lain for them, as it has been said to lie for us, in its 'sado-masochistic flavor,' [quoting K.R. Minogue] for they dwelt on it endlessly, almost compulsively . . ."

Seeing how vulnerable our liberties left us, we want more authority than ever. We want the trappings of protection. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich wrote (in my memory's version) that the clean, faceless forms of authoritarianism gratify a certain sexual dysfunction. No wonder the city of New York tore down the memorials and banners and homemade declarations of independence from Union Square Park. This urban gathering space had become a living memorial and a place of communication, of singing, crying, and arguing in the weeks after September 11th. Then the Parks Department swept up the organic clutter and contradictions because democracy is too messy for the public face. Local and national museums dare to say they are preserving the "archive" of materials taken from Union Square (banners, flyers, poems, manifestoes) and still deciding what is the most appropriate place for it all -- now that they have stolen it from its only appropriate place.

WE COULD HARDLY EXPECT DIFFERENT IN WARTIME NEW YORK, considering the so-called "quality of life" repressiveness of peacetime New York under authoritarian mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- a campaign against the poor and homeless which his successor Michael Bloomberg has now revived. Many were quick to praise Giuliani's take- charge and calming response to September 11th. Like other New Yorkers, I made a point of being friendly to the cops who suddenly had an increased presence (not to mention stress-inducing double shifts), even after I was pushed in the back by one who told me to stop taking photos of another officer harassing a TV cameraman who was filming an anti-war demonstration in Times Square. "Be kind to cops; they're not cops, they're people in disguise who've been deceived by their own disguise," Allen Ginsberg suggested in 1963. I also stood on the corner of 6th Avenue and Houston St. one evening and joined the applause for firefighters returning from the still- burning war zone downtown. Nevertheless: even as we admit emotional reality into the political process, we need to contain it or it will be distorted. Thus even Giuliani's "opponents" agreed to the idea of extending his term because of the crisis (the idea was scuttled). In November, the new sentimentalism stumbled when firefighters protested a city-ordered reduction in their numbers at the site of the terrorist attack. The police were pitted against them to prevent access, and punches were thrown. New York Times writers Dan Barry and Kevin Flynn unironically described this as "a familial brawl," and noted admiringly that Giuliani "served as the understanding but determined father." The would-be dictator, meanwhile, took to wearing a cap bearing the insignias of the police department, the fire department, and the Yankees: a coalition of false families to calm us and give our lives meaning.

Instead of such fantasy, let's face the realities of law enforcement. "The CIA chief would be the declared king of the US" if law enforcement culture had its way, one observer told me. Leftist zealot? No, that's from a fifteen-year federal law enforcement officer, who, I might add, lost friends in the September 11th attack. "If you're going to give me too much power, believe me, I'm going to do the wrong thing," he said. Several years ago, I profiled a US Border Patrol Supervisor for the London-based Index on Censorship. "We're not a police state," the agent smiled as we cruised along the steel border wall in the San Diego Sector. But he wouldn't mind if we became one, he added, "since I'm the police."

On Capitol Hill, as the legislation which would become the USA Patriot Act was being secretly crafted, with normal committee meetings bypassed, one liberal legislative aide privately complained about having to mouth a mantra for credibility: Yes, we all agree we must "give law enforcement the tools they need." She kept mouthing it, though, so here we are: expanded wiretap powers, authorization for monitoring of some attorney-client conversations, and the secret detention of undisclosed numbers -- probably in the thousands -- of legal and illegal "aliens," who could be subject to the new military tribunals and the possibility of indefinite detention. Racial/ethnic profiling is not new, but it is newly acceptable. Less widely reported are changes which allow nonviolent political activity and unpopular political opinion here in the homeland to form the basis for "terrorist" smear-charges.^*

None of this is really about security. As Vice President Cheney said, the military tribunal "guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve." That is the logic of the lynch mob, pure and simple. And it sums up the reinvigorated license and legitimation of abuses of power already long at work in the Justice Department. I would feel a lot safer if we were allowed to feel a little less safe.

* See Nancy Chang, "The Silencing of Political Dissent: How the USA Patriot Act Undermines the Constitution," Open Media Pamphlet Series (Nov. 2001), available through http://www.sevenstories.com. return

Contents of No. 32

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