Requiem for the Unreal Real World - by Christopher Deliso

The last few weeks of carnage and hubbub in London left me with both a shudder and a sigh of relief: "At least here in Macedonia, we don't live in the 'real world,'" I thought to myself. "Hey, who cares about the shoddy infrastructure, sluggish economy, and all-around backwater nature of the place? At least the terrorists, like everyone else, have forgotten us!"

Then, however, I realized that, if not by name then by implication Macedonia must have been included on al-Qaeda's new list of all the "other" European countries that have troops in Iraq – unnamed states that have been put on notice for attack, somewhere down the line after Italy and Denmark. Please, Osama, we don't have a subway or important buildings!

But before I could get too worried about the inherent risks of living in a small country that vigorously supports the war on terror, I learned that the war on terror is now officially over. Hooray!

And so in retrospect, the optimism of the very first Get Your War On (Oct. 9, 2001) now seems totally justified:

"Oh my God, this war on terrorism is gonna rule! I can't wait until the war is over and there's no more terrorism!"

Bizarro World Redux

If you're a politician, and have been proven to be absolutely and irredeemably wrong, the only thing to do is not apologize, but to change course entirely, something Alan Bock describes as the "politicians' capacity for switching policies on a dime while claiming they haven't changed at all."

If the last four years of Bush administration terror war hysteria have resulted in a "Bizarro World," as Justin Raimondo has attested on several occasions, then their latest tactical shift could actually be called Bizarro World Redux: now, they're not trying to tell us that night is day, they're trying to say that night is night, except for when it was day, but nobody said that anyway…

So despite President Bush's declaration of July 11, right after the bombings in London, that "the war on terror goes on," we now have Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announcing the end of the "war on terror": According to the N.Y. Times, he "told the National Press Club that if something is a war 'then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.'" Rummy himself has rechristened the campaign as G-SAVE, "The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism."

Uh… Afghanistan? Iraq? What about all that "smoke them out of their holes" stuff? "Bring 'em on?" Anyone?

No Wars, No Terrorists

Actually, these armed invasions were never declared "wars" – though of course in reality they were – because of all those messy legal and constitutional details about who has the authority to declare war and what are the ramifications if such a course of action is undertaken. But nowhere in the Constitution, I guess, is it specifically stated that Congress alone has the power to declare war over abstract nouns.

The equally unreal inversion of the original Get Your War On sarcasm cited above was pointed out by CBS' Harry Smith:

"Well, the War In Iraq is a war. But, does this mean these guys are admitting that when they started it, it really wasn't a war on terror because there weren't any terrorists in the first place?

"Google this when you get home tonight. It sounds to me like the administration is trying, in the words of a marketer, to 'reposition a brand.' Americans were more than happy to support the war in Iraq because they believed, and old polls bare this out, that it was part of the greater war on terrorism.

"Support for that war has plummeted. So do we change its name and assume that no one will notice or that it doesn't matter? How about we go back and call the war in Iraq 'The Perilously Dangerous Mission To Unseat Saddam Hussein And Install Democracy In A Country Full Of People Who Really Hate And Distrust Each Other?'"

Indeed. With the Bush administration, the denial of reality has been perfected. Encouraging constitutional democracy in other countries requires first nullifying our own, with bills like the PATRIOT Act, and reaches its grand culmination in pushing Iraq to constitute itself as an Islamic state run by government intimidation. To avoid being permanently divided by civil war, the new Iraq will have to become Iran, or find itself a new Saddam, in which case we would be morally obliged to invade again, if only we had never actually left. Verily, day is night is day is night is day again…

And you can be sure that the media, with an institutional memory only as long as the previous 24-hour news "cycle," will be there to breathlessly document all of the "news" and "developments" spinning restlessly and remorselessly inside this vacuum of reality.

Creating Reality

At bottom, this growing unreality of the "real world" – that is, the U.S.-led Western world of technological leadership and consumer comfort – owes just as much to the bona fide insanity of the neocons now running the show as it does to political face-saving. The now infamous quote provided to Ron Suskind by one White House official, that the U.S. "creates its own reality" as it lumbers along, cuts to the very heart of the problem.

When the world is being run by people – and above all, by a president – who believe in their own infallibility and divinely ordained mission, no event or development can escape being swept into the black hole of a self-assured teleology. Any deviation from the plan, any apparent contradiction, any seeming mistake or disaster, is seamlessly sucked back in by the devouring mass. There is no need to apologize, because chance or the accidental do not exist, except for in the misled minds of the "historicists" and other naïve, reality-based sorts. For our fearless leaders, marching in lockstep toward a future of "all for freedom and freedom for all," there is but one unique path: theirs.

It is symptomatic of nationalism to construct grand historical narratives long after the dust has settled. But the Bush administration's narrative, like that of Lenin, is of another order; it is being celebrated victoriously long before it has succeeded. And, just like with the Communist experiment, it won't. The only question is what the world will look like after American hegemony implodes. The scene probably won't be pretty, but at least it will be more real.

In Praise of Communist Dictatorships

The one great advantage of a Communist or other totalitarian dictatorship is that the line between true and false, real and unreal, is very clear: whatever the state says is bound to be a lie. This dependable propensity for state falsification was pointed out long ago by dissident writers, for example by the Czech Milan Kundera. In a totalitarian state of whatever stripe, contrary opinions and explanations are stifled; thus they exist as absent, glittering truths.

Real-world states (and especially America) came out on top, however, by achieving the Communist result through opposite tactics, chiefly through the "free press." Here, the almost viral proliferation of contrasting opinions and information creates a sound and fury that in the end balances itself out, so that the only message that can rise triumphant must be the most focused, well-funded, and aggressively pitched one – i.e., the government's – simply because it becomes impossible to make sense of the rest.

Indeed, the Department of Defense did not know how clever they were when they invented the Internet. Many today are of the noble opinion that it is a liberating force for promoting democratic debate and "people power." However, more often than not, with the Internet we merely become buried under an oppressive overload of information heavier than any Iraqi quagmire, a fatiguing phenomenon that works directly in favor of the government.

Ironically, in the end, the people's freedom to dissent actually helps the government's cause. Take 9/11, for example, where a spirited debate still exists over what really happened on that fateful day. Yet even before the debate, reality itself had long been MIA, buried under the weight of images and public outcries.

Now, the existence of so many crackpot theories negates the believability of all the other arguments questioning the government line, some of which might actually be true, and so the whole thing dissolves back into its original state, that is, the raw media spectacle of images and rhetoric given meaning by government (note the irony) historicism.

This phenomenon is by no means new; it has been witnessed after every presidential and celebrity assassination in American history. The upshot of this, of course, is that Mr. Bush can indeed tell the dissenting citizen "Why are you complaining? You are allowed to have your own opinion and vote!" – as if these things ever translated into anything in terms of practical changes.

Across the Pond, an Unreal Pattern Repeats Itself

But we cannot limit these forays into unreality to the United States, or to the neocons, for (aside from the European Union, the fundamental unreality of which would require a whole article of its own) there are honorary neocons such as King Tony of Britain who have also indulged of late in a passion for Bizarro World-style insanity. Writes Andrew Murray in The Guardian:

"Tony Blair appears to be on the brink of a Brechtian moment, in which he will need to dissolve the people who have lost his confidence and elect another.

"Certainly, if he claims that anyone who believes there is a connection between the government's foreign policy – above all, Iraq – and the July 7 massacre in London is a 'fellow traveler of terrorism,' then he has his work cut out. Fully 85% of the public do, according to a Daily Mirror/GMTV poll.

"The government's refusal to associate cause and consequence, which would be childlike were it not so obviously self-serving, is sustained only by hysterical warnings against the new evil of 'root-causism' from the residual pro-empire liberals."

"This attempt to close down debate as to why Britain – London above all – is now fighting the misbegotten 'war on terror' on its own streets, is doubly dangerous. Not only does it block the necessary reevaluation of foreign policy, it also places the onus for preventing any repetition of July 7 on the 'Muslim community,' which – in a form of collective responsibility – is accused of breeding an 'evil ideology' in its midst."

Official denial of simple cause and effect is really unreal, and it benefits from the Blair-sponsored sense of shock and surprise that a complicit media has helped to spread. However, as the above poll showed, most Britons were well aware of reality; as the exemplary D-Squared Digest dryly put it,

"If you expect something to happen then the fact that it has, in fact, happened, is not new news to you. Since we had all expected that London was going to be bombed, sooner or later, it is clearly wrong to say that 'everything has changed' as a result of the bombing. If it is a good idea now to pass laws against 'glorifying terrorism' and to allow the police to hold terrorist subjects for three months without charge (it isn't) then it was a good idea three weeks ago (it wasn't).

"This makes it slightly more heartening that we introduced our shoot-to-kill policy a long time ago, on the basis of proper planning, although I suppose that at least if we'd introduced it in a panic this week we would have known that we were doing it."

Weenie Blair's vision for a Britain devoid of civil liberties is of course modeled on America's experience of Sept. 11. Intelligent people knew well in advance that it was only a matter of time before America would be attacked, because of its unconditional support for Israel and its military presence in Muslim countries. It's not as if the terrorists haven't been saying this all along. If, as it so happens, the government was well aware of the risk many years before 2001, then why wasn't the PATRIOT Act brought in long ago? I guess Americans had always just been in mass denial all along, assuming that their Constitution was good enough for them.

The Resurrection of the Real

It's both horrifying and entertaining to see, from over here in the Balkan wilds, but every day the "real world" most of you inhabit is becoming less and less real. I suspect no one will care too much about it until the American economy tanks under the weight of war costs and a foreign debt owned by China. As usual, so long as the people can purchase plasma screen TVs on credit and take pride in buying cars with the lowest possible gas mileage, mass denial of reality can fester unchecked. When the whole thing goes to hell, however – just imagine! race wars, martial law, marauding militias, empty ATMs, an orgy of looting! – perhaps reality will be resurrected, if only to mock its tormentors.

But let's not deceive ourselves further, by believing that the Iraqis are somehow incapable of enjoying Western values; even as Americans turn to a fictional miniseries and NFL-style graphics to understand the war on Iraq, the arrival of reality TV in that troubled land has kindled new hope, according to the Times online:

"Good news in Baghdad is as rare as the electricity that has largely failed to flow two years after the invasion. In the face of relentless grimness, television companies have decided to conjure up their own happy endings and have tapped into a lucrative market at the same time. …

"Unused to such tabloid fare and bored with bombs but too afraid to leave their homes, Iraqis have turned to 'reality' in droves. Sharqiya's shows are now carried on three satellites, beaming Iraq's meager ration of happiness across the region."

Looks like even if universal values are hard to implant on foreign soil, reality, at least, can be enjoyed by all. There is hope after all.