As I write this, there are two news headlines fresh in my mind from the Yahoo! home page:
NASA awaits Rover’s color photos of Mars. And Brittany Spears annuls Vegas Marriage.
I can’t admit to which one I want to click on first. A couple of weeks ago, I faced the same dilemma. Two headlines: One announced the discovery of new books from the Bible. The other discussed litigation over topless pictures of Jennifer Aniston.
I can’t admit to which one I clicked on first.
And I’m one of the smart ones. I’ve blown a lot of time keeping myself up as an educated citizen. I’ve read Moby Dick TWICE. Still, when newscasters go undercover to expose strip clubs at sweeps time, I’m as helpless to say no as a hillbilly with plane reservations to the Jerry Springer Show.
That tendency to become completely immersed in the fun news story is what made so many people jump for joy when Saddam Hussein was captured.
I was a benchwarmer on our ragtag 7th grade basketball team.
My teammate Dave, a wiry guard, controlled the ball, letting it fly at the halftime buzzer.
Swish!
He sunk the half court shot.
We erupted in cheers. What a shot! We began to lift Dave on our shoulders. Our coach frowned. “Calm down, fellas,” he saud, “We’re still twenty points behind.”
Cut to Iraq. “We got him!” says Paul Bremer. Iraqi reporters leap with glee. They know what it’s like living (and dying under this Saddam.) American GIs and their families shout hallelujah. Saddam’s capture might hasten the return home for these only ones in the country who are forced to sacrifice for George W. Bush’s military maneuvers.
But what about the old lady behind the counter at my local bakery. “We got him!” she declared to every customer. She didn’t have any loved ones overseas, she said. She was just caught up in the excitement of the headlines, like when Cal Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s record. She has a beehive hairdo. She remembers Lou Gehrig the first time around. (She reminds me of the old woman I saw on C-SPAN at a New Hampshire political rally who responded to John Edwards’ speech by shaking the candidate’s hand and saying, “You are SO cute.”)
Her enthusiasm reminds me of the night in 1989 when Arsenio Hall opened his show by shouting, “WE GOT NORIEGGA!” The studio audience and woofed as if it had just seen a tie-breaking field goal in overtime. Arsenio Hall was not trying to give David Brinkley a run for his money. Arsenio Hall was simply caught up in the excitement of the moment, like the old woman at the bakery, and the old woman who thinks Senator Edwards is cute.
The healthiest response to Saddam's capture came from a Time magazine reader said, essentially, hurray -- now that George Bush has won his personal vendetta, can we all get back to fighting terrorism? Saddam’s capture is the exclamation point to this statement by Dennis Miller: "I wish there was a country called al-Qaedia that we could have invaded, but there wasn't. [Saddam was] the only one who had a home address."
This is idiotic logic -- (and even if it made sense, wouldn’t Saudi Arabia be the address to seek out?) -- but it perfectly fits the Bush plan.
The War on Terrorism had to be redefined in order for it to be conducted in a way that this administration could fight it. General Wesley Clark calls it “bait and switch” and I agree.
But for the Bush administration, it has worked. Like the joke about the undertaker who had two bodies in adjacent rooms dressed in each other’s burial suits but no time to fix the problem, the Bush administration simply took Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- and switched heads.
The powerful people who guide the Bush administration understand that their success is contingent upon our being scared, not knowing what to do next. They know how heartbeats quicken at the sound of a siren, or how people pause nervously when a warning from the national weather service interrupts a television broadcast. After a weekend of Code Orange on the terrorist alert chart, we can heave a sigh of relief when Tom Ridge tells us its safe to come out of the storm cellars.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt assured American that there are no bogeymen in the closet, that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” In 1968 Robert F. Kennedy said, “No nation hiding behind locked doors is free, for it is imprisoned by its own fear.” Our current administration tells us to buy duct tape or be sorry.
That Saddam is evil and murderous didn’t preoccupy America on September 10, 2001. That he didn’t have anything to do with what happened the next day doesn’t preoccupy enough of us now. That he wound up just a guy in a dirty hole in the ground accurately describes his ultimate power and the threat he posed to the United States all along.
“We got him!” is the geopolitical equivalent of the swish my 7th grade classmate Dave’s half court shot made, a sugar high for a malnourished team with no game plan who lost by more than thirty points. (Even I got to play.)
We got him. But for all the money and blood spent for this, it is no more of an approach to dismantling terrorism than going room to room clanking a skillet with a ladle to rid the house of termites.
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