Democracy's Dark Side

John Buell is a columnist for The Progressive Populist and a faculty adjunct at Cochise College. His most recent book is Politics, Religion, and Culture in an Anxious Age.

When liberals, progressives, or leftists of any stripe criticize our contemporary economic order, they are accused of class war. They are rebuked with the claim that gaps in income and wealth reflect the operations of the market and are therefore fair. Both of these contentions are false. Unfortunately American democracy has failed to address these falsehoods and in fact contributes mightily to inequities it is committed to address.  Our democracy’s failings and the classic and modern theoretical perspectives that might mitigate these are the subject of a provocative new book by Steven Johnston, American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics.

If there is a class war, it is one being waged on behalf of the wealthy. Its vehicles are law, federal and state courts, administrative agencies, state and federal legislatures, and the corporate media. The ideology governing this class war is called neoliberalism. Perhaps the most obvious instance of this neoliberal agenda is the Trans Pacific Partnership. Though purportedly a “market friendly” instrument, one of its central goals is to achieve protected status for patents and trademarks. Nations that strive to make medication more affordable by providing generic drugs would be subject to countervailing suits and huge damage judgments. Similarly, banking regulations, more strict in many of our foreign competitors, would be reduced to the lowest common denominator. As for labor unions, even though the agreement purportedly contains some language about the right to organize, there is no enforcement means parallel to those regarding patents and copyrights. So much for the argument that these agreements should not interfere with domestic politics. Such interference is acceptable, even to be encouraged, when “intellectual property” is involved.

These legal and political structures lie at the heart of income and wealth inequality. Yet even these phrases sugar coat the state’s real impact. Johnston avoids the cool euphemisms. Neolliberalism maims and kills. It takes citizens in both the developed and especially the developing world. When financial markets collapse, houses are foreclosed on and families risk homelessness, especially as rental costs escalate. Healthcare denied leaves citizens to die.

Though a variety of liberals, socialists, social democrats may with good reason blame corporate capitalists, their think tanks, and their massive and self-reinforcing political contributions for neoliberalism’s casualties, democratic majorities both today and from our very founding should not be exempted from responsibility.

For starters, the market in land that bolstered a middle class society was founded in violence against Native Americans, takings that have never been adequately compensated. Even the Constitution stood as no barrier to exploitation of Native peoples. As Andrew Jackson replied to a Supreme Court decision supporting Native American land claims: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” These takings represented more than a redistribution of property. The settlers eradicated native systems of land use and tenure. These were not recognized as legitimate because they did not conform to emerging bourgeois notions of land as a commodity that could be exploited, bought and sold. Then, as Johnston puts it, “the nation to be secured its freedom thanks, at least in part, to weapons purchased by the wealth slavery generated.”

To Johnston’s analysis I would add that further economic reforms, including general laws of incorporation, and limited liability helped turn a society that used markets into a market society, one in which land, labor, and money itself were treated as speculative commodities.

Johnston suggests US citizens need not only reforms that would challenge these market consolidations but more broadly a new counter-class war. History provides some potent examples—such as the Roman Tribunate, an institution giving Rome’s poorer citizens the ability to block legislation that would harm them. Finally we need a new democratic ethos, one informed by a tragic vision that recognizes democracy’s limits.

Democracy is caught in several related paradoxes. It promises much but given its exacting standards it cannot deliver. It thus produces periodically inordinate resentments.

Given its commitments to mutual self-rule, equality, it suggests a brand new day in politics. Democracy seems content to allow patriotism free reign insofar as patriotism obscures the tragic dynamics that bedevil it. Democracies see themselves as uniquely vulnerable and resort to tactics worthy of their enemies. Abuses are considered incidental, regrettable, and correctible, thanks in part to democracy’s reigning principles, especially procedural norms. Can theorists and activists fashion an ethos and practice that will address these systematic injustices?

Recasting Democracy

With its overarching confidence in itself, democracies often produce dubious outcomes in emergency situations. Often these emergencies are consequences of policies pursued by elites and then subsequently inflated in the mainstream corporate media. Or they are manufactured by elites in support of the reigning ideology. Think: the Gulf of Tonkin.

Steven Johnston, author of American Dionysia, provides a powerful reminder of democracy’s systematic faults, but he is no anti-democrat. His goal is to articulate and defend a tragic sensibility that might enable a more sustainable and mature democracy, one that would inflict less harm on its own citizens as well as the world. Democratic life involves taking on the burdens of success. Success mandates the continuation of politics because victory is made possible by those who suffer defeat, loss, injury and death. Injury is inevitable and unavoidable. It does not necessarily result from evil intentions. It “flows from the incompatibility of equally worthy goals… from the injustice that justice often entails, the unpredictable character of action in concert, and the stubborn nature of things.”

Such a sensibility engenders and is engendered by a view of the nature of the cosmos. The world is a “difficult, forbidding, uncertain, volatile, resistant, dangerous, and lethal” place. He adds: “A world so composed must be navigated with care and concern.”

Tragedy properly understood does not foster resignation but rather new bursts of creative energy. We act knowing that success and failure await us, but failure itself creates new options and possibilities.

Democracy must be forced to reflect on itself, which can be done though both through new memorials and rituals. Several imaginative examples, inspired by both classical tragedy and contemporary culture are presented. Thus, following from some of Rousseau’s institutional suggestions, Johnston advocates an annual reparations assembly mandated by law. This assembly would be duty-bound to hear the grievances of citizens who have been harmed by politics. Though such as assembly might well become an occasion for wealthy landowners, real estate developers, and financial tycoons to trumpet the harms of redistribution, even the most thoughtful reforms can be carried out with needless cruelty and have unintended consequences. In any case such an assembly today is hardly likely to strengthen resistance to egalitarian redistribution, and since many income disparities today are the result of state action rather than pure free markets it will give the voices of egalitarianism more opportunities.

Desmond Tutu

Reparations assemblies might have changed some of our troubled history. I am led to ponder the fate of those who once engaged in what are now almost universally recognized as evil pursuits.  Reparations assemblies might have serve as a kind of truth and reconciliation commission. Following the Civil War, union soldiers received pensions. Those who fought for the Confederacy received no such benefits, and their taxes helped fund these pensions. This benefit of course was denied to slaveholders, but most of the Confederate soldiers were not slave owners and often suffered in competition with slave labor. What might our history have been like if at some point such an assembly had awarded generous pension to former slaves and at least modest amounts, to poor and working class veterans of the Confederacy. Would these citizens been so easily recruited for Kevin Phillips' southern strategy?

Democracies need to curb their foreign abuses as well. Democracies must make the effort to see themselves though the eyes of the enemy. He suggests placing a commemorative plaque including the names of the perpetrators at the site of 9/11. When Americans look up at the site of the rubble they may have more of a sense of what others see when they think of us.

In what is likely to be at least as controversial, Johnston argues for a reassessment of the relation between violence and democracy. Violence and democracy are usually seen as antithetical. Yet contemporary democracy practices violence on a daily basis. Equally our democracy, which purports to be the world’s example, was founded in violence against both property and people. What were the original Tea Partyers but precursors of today’s much- reviled “looters” and “takers?” Though nonviolence is often portrayed as the key to the success of the Civil Rights movement, the threat of violence helped create an incentive to deal with these protests, just as the threat of violence encouraged Roman patricians to accept the institution of the Tribunate. Johnston is not advocating any shoot out with highly militarized police, but there may be situations in which strategic violence, violence that would not spiral out of control, could avert even far greater death.

I would add two points. Even nonviolence is not as pure as it purports. Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out in Moral Man and Immoral Society that even such nonviolent actions as blocking a train could deny needed food to those at the end of the line. He also added that the success of nonviolence depended on the moral ideals of those on the receiving end.

In today's continuing rush to foreclosure on delinquent mortgages the Occupy movement in cities as diverse as Atlanta and Detroit has engaged in actions designed to prevent foreclosures. In escalating rental markets, these actions might evolve into citizen patrols that would forcefully resist evictions.  Violence might flow from such encounters, but the public attitude would not necessarily treat these patrols as disreputable lawbreakers. And how would local governments react? One who has imbibed a tragic view of politics realizes there is no certain answer. We can thank Steven Johnston for making these questions clearer and more pressing.

The Quiet American

Steven Johnston
is author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

American Sniper has racked up $500 million in global receipts, including over $100 million overseas. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor, and it won for best sound editing. American Sniper has also generated impassioned debate to match its half a billion dollar sales. An article from The Guardian is titled, “The real American sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?” The New Republic published a piece that stated, “The Real ‘American Sniper’ Had No Remorse About the Iraqis He Killed.” Salon disclosed what it called “7 heinous lies ‘American Sniper’ is telling America.” These responses appear mild by comparison to many other reviews found on the Internet. The film is not without its admirers, of course. A.O. Scott in The New York Times praises much about the film (it is almost a great movie), though he also expresses serious reservations—which he doesn’t care to develop or emphasize. Ann Hornaday in The Washington Post argues that the divergent reactions the film has engendered testify to its quality as a film.

What made American Sniper the highest grossing film of 2014 as well as the highest grossing war movie ever made, surpassing Steven Spielberg’s romantic war porn epic Saving Private Ryan? Many Americans love to affix yellow ribbons to their cars and hang flags from their houses; the same faux sacrificial gesture leads them to buy movie tickets to support their troops. But Eastwood did something American audiences desperately wanted in a contemporary war film of a violent unstable world they do not understand and cannot abide. He enacted an America that takes for granted its essential, unquestioned goodness. This is not to deny that Eastwood folds a bit of moral nuance into the film, especially through Chris Kyle’s cinematic double (Bradley Cooper). Eastwood’s departures from Kyle’s memoir, a fairly basic Hollywood whitewashing, were necessary to make the idea of a movie based on Kyle’s service palatable. No one wants to watch a war movie about a racist psychopath. Yet Eastwood’s introduction of minimal moral complexity serves a much greater political master, American thoughtlessness, which is one key to the maintenance of America’s national self-conception, its way of life, and self-assigned role in the world.

The film opens with Kyle on the roof of a building in an Iraqi city providing protection for American troops on the streets below. In a post-apocalyptic landscape, what appear to be a mother and son emerge from a building in the path of slowly advancing American forces. She looks suspicious to Kyle and he is right. She is concealing a grenade which she hands to her son who then makes a move toward Kyle’s comrades. He has no hope of success whether or not Kyle is watching. Nevertheless, Kyle drops him. The mother picks up the grenade and Kyle drops her, too. These kills impress Kyle’s bodyguard, but not Kyle. He wants no plaudits for what he’s just done. This is his duty, his profession. He’s supposed to be good at it. Circumstances alone dictate how his skills will be deployed. Kyle’s modesty, moreover, enables American audiences to take undue pride in what he does. Throughout the film, Kyle merely tolerates the praise that he generates and the reputation he earns. His nickname, the Legend, does not seem to please him very much. Again, the more he seems unimpressed, the more an American audience will insist that he is a true American hero. He saves American lives. No criticism can trump that brute fact. Of course, German snipers protected their own soldiers during World War II in the foreign cities the Wehrmacht invaded and conquered and they don’t tend to be subjects of admiration, as far as I know.

Yet American Sniper has touched a (raw) nerve in American audiences. We are effectively forced to see Iraq through Chris Kyle’s apparent God’s-eye view. Without warning we find ourselves thrown onto a rooftop looking through his sniper scope. The spatially superior position mimics and reinforces the moral superiority we (Americans) feel. The scope also induces a sense of claustrophobia. This is unlike Apocalypse Now, which folds dissonance into the operatic assault that launches the film when the eye of the helicopters joined to Wagner’s “Die Walküre” is punctuated by another view of the villagers as the attack is about to commence. Coppola disconcerts: are we appalled by a thrilling attack or thrilled by an appalling attack?  In American Sniper the world seen through the rifle scope is reduced to a simple matter of life or death, where violence must be employed for good (for life, for American life). A split second before Kyle registers his first kill shot, Eastwood pauses to offer Chris’s backstory. The interruption feels interminable. We know we’re being manipulated. American troops are in mortal danger. We want the war to continue. We want him to pull the trigger—now. We feel the urgent necessity of violence. Eastwood has seized hold of us at a visceral level, no matter what we think of the war.

Since Kyle is credited with 160 kills, we know what’s coming next. But Eastwood makes us experience it right along with Kyle—often as Kyle. We see what he sees. We hear what he hears. We breathe when he breathes. We’re calm if he’s calm. We’re tense if he’s tense. We decide as he decides. We kill as he kills. Eastwood draws us in cinematically, forcing us to identify with Kyle. He also forces us to react. We anticipate Kyle’s kill shots. In his baptism of fire, having killed the son, we can’t believe he hasn’t shot the mother already. What is he waiting for? Shoot! She actually manages to throw the grenade in the direction of American troops. That was (too) close. He’d better do better next time, we say to ourselves. To make sure of it, as he watches over American troops, we watch over him. The film is called American Sniper, after all. It refers to Kyle, but only to Kyle?

Either way, one function of the opening scene is to disclose the tactics to which the enemy resorts. It’s matched by a later scene of the Butcher, a resistance leader fighting American occupation, disciplining with a power drill Iraqis who collaborate with the invaders. What kind of upside down world has America entered? What kind of people does these things to their own? Kyle refers to Iraqis as savages and speaks of the evil he sees. Kyle tolerates no criticism of America, of the occupation, of his commitment to his calling and saving American lives, including from his wife. He even blames one fellow soldier’s death on a letter he wrote home that was dubious of the American war.  Kyle’s narcissistic callousness is so profound that he routinely talks to his wife while in combat, a sadistic habit that on more than one occasion leaves her wondering whether she’s listening to his death, especially when he’s unable to respond to her pleas to know what’s happening and if he’s alright. He is an unthinking patriot. His shallowness poses no problem, however, because he is right. America is the greatest country in the world. What we do is justified because we decided to do it, anywhere in the world. Do you actually need to think to reach these self-evident positions? Indeed, thought might get in the way and complicate things. Chris Kyle is one degree separated from Forrest Gump.

Kyle served four tours in Iraq out of a burning hatred for a world that does not recognize, let alone appreciate, American exceptionalism. While the bombings of American embassies in eastern Africa in the 1ate 1990s may have triggered Kyle’s enlistment, the September 11 attacks on the United States extracted a more visceral reaction from him. Having just learned the news, while his wife is in tears, he stares at the television screen—not unmoved but enraged, no doubt thinking that someone has to answer for these attacks on America. He will make sure of it. Kyle is the right man for the job. He has been hunting and killing living creatures since he was a young boy with his father unmoved by the taking of life. His father divides the world into three: sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. He insists that his son be a sheepdog, a protector, but he has raised a wolf, a predator. Does the military make him a serial killer? Or does the killer in him find a home in the military? A moment of undecidability in the film.

What does seem certain is that the likes of Chris Kyle make it possible for the United States to fight imperial wars, which means that the putative warrior class to which he aspires does not serve American democracy but routinely endangers and compromises it. Not only do they unthinkingly serve their imperial overlords; they also reflexively support them at the ballot box to keep them in office and in position to wage their wars. The true democratic heroes of this era were those young people like Ehren Watada, who refused to serve in Iraq and risked court martial and jail as a result. As William James once remarked, it doesn’t take much to rush into battle and kill when you are joined by tens of thousands of others hell-bent on doing exactly the same thing. Refusing to join the military herd and participate in its depredations, on the other hand, is a genuine act of civic courage, perhaps one that a democracy should value above all others.

Not Eastwood, though. The American military has been assigned a task, perhaps an impossible one, and it will execute it to the best of its ability. If it finds itself in distant urban wastelands, don’t ask how it is that cities have been emptied in the wake of America’s liberation. It doesn’t matter. Eastwood focuses the narrative on narrowly defined missions—clear Iraqi cities of murderous fanatics house by house and kill them; locate the Butcher, an al-Qaeda in Iraq leader of those fanatics, and kill him; hunt Mustafa, Kyle’s rival superhero sniper hunting American soldiers, and kill him, too—the war is reduced (and distorted) to simple, immediate terms: us or them. In this context, Kyle represents American military power and efficiency on full display. Thanks to several tense battle scenes, America can let itself believe it is winning a war it should not have waged in the first place and “concluded” disastrously. And even though American forces suffer some horrific casualties, they succeed in their assignments and, in Kyle’s last, most daring and dangerous mission, escape in the nick of time. It has all the characteristics of a classic western with a reluctant hero.

Like John McCain in Vietnam, however, Chris Kyle in Iraq is no hero. He can’t be. The illegality and illegitimacy of the Iraq aggression won’t allow it. But Eastwood’s film is structured to allow American audiences to reach that conclusion anyway at a visceral level. One veteran who runs into Kyle in Texas thanks him for saving his life and makes a point of telling Kyle’s son that his father is a hero. Once again, Kyle is uncomfortable with any such praise. This only means the audience has to do the work of accepting it for him, which Eastwood arranges. On his last tour he is once again faced with the prospect of shooting a young boy, this one perhaps only 6 or 7 years old. That he does not have to impose the penalty of death to which all Iraqi males have been tentatively sentenced on another child provides him with a deep sense of relief. The war has taken its toll on him and he is no longer capable of fighting it. Nor is he comfortable with what he has had to do to win it, his bluster to the contrary notwithstanding. We have to do terrible things to protect our country and those who defend it, but we suffer moral loss in having to do them. American goodness shines through even heinous actions. American Sniper thus approaches a limited grandeur and simultaneously sabotages it. Perhaps most important of all, accordingly, whatever damage war does to the people who fight it, they soon recover, as Chris Kyle did. Having shown signs of PTSD, they soon disappear as he spends time with other vets who revel in his mere presence. They heal each other. Thus, neither the country nor its mercenaries have to live very long with the consequences of their morally problematic actions. Any sense of moral loss is temporary, which is not how moral loss works. The film plays with moral complexity but ultimately privileges comforting resolutions, that is, thoughtlessness.

Would it occur to American audiences that Kyle’s beloved country had laid waste to a sovereign nation for no good reason, that it put him in a position to murder mothers and sons and treat it as self-defense? Would it occur to an American audience that Kyle’s first victims were right to do whatever they could to resist and inflict damage on the foreign army that occupies but cannot conquer their country? Would it occur to an American audience that while Chris Kyle may be protecting his fellow soldiers he is also an active participant in a sequence of war crimes against the Iraqi people for which he will pay a price but not those who sent him there? Would it occur to an American audience, accordingly, that they are on the wrong side and “rooting” for the villains, that Mustafa is the real anti-hero of American Sniper? What do the numbers say?

Sea of Blue

Steven Johnston
is author of American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Rafael Ramos’s December 27 funeral in Queens drew an estimated twenty to thirty thousand police officers—not only from the United States but also from abroad. Commissioner William J. Bratton referred to it as a sea of blue, and print and broadcast media across America followed suit. The image was no doubt meant to be awe-inspiring to the public at large, calming and reassuring to Ramos’s family. The image also signaled something else: a police show of force, an excessive, narcissistic show of force. Mourning rituals have a politics all their own. The police gathered in huge numbers to display solidarity—for Ramos and his family, for each other, for the very idea of police. They gathered to let the world know that the police own New York City and that they are different, that blue lives matter most because what they do is different from what anybody else does. That’s why Ramos was not just murdered but assassinated. He was assassinated because he was blue. This, according to Bratton, makes him a hero. 

Bratton’s eulogy not only paid tribute to Ramos, then, it was also an exercise in institutional self-assertion. Bratton does not conceive of the police as a subordinate element of society, as an instrument of democracy that executes necessary assignments related to the coordination and cooperation of society, while the mainsprings of democratic life unfold elsewhere. He thinks of the police as the “foundation” of society. The police are “the blue thread” that holds things together in the face of anarchical forces that might otherwise tear them apart. The police are the condition of possibility of everything. That’s why there were twenty to thirty thousand cops in Queens. They wanted the rest of us, mere civilians, to know their place in the order of things.

Bratton, not surprisingly, holds politics in contempt. Early on in his eulogy, he told a short story about his first police funeral. It took place in Boston in 1970. Patrolman Walter Schroeder had been killed responding to a bank robbery. Bratton reminded his audience that America suffered from a great deal of tumult in 1970. He cited civil rights protests, anti-war activism, and anti-government and anti-police demonstrations. He cited “divisive politics” and a “polarized …city…and country.” “Maybe that sounds familiar,” Bratton remarked, as if to suggest that the conduct of democratic politics, especially an oppositional politics, leads invariably to violence. Bratton didn’t come right out and say it, of course, but he didn’t need to say it. He let his list of happenings cited do the work for him. Schroeder was “ambushed by a violent group of anti-war extremists.” Besides, he’d been more explicit a few days earlier—and received criticism for it. At the funeral he needed to be more circumspect. But make no mistake: politics killed Rafael Ramos and those who were—and remain—on the streets protesting the police are responsible. While Bratton ostensibly laments that people in America can’t see each other, he’s one of the reasons. His fear and loathing of democratic politics (and the citizens who enact it) as something illicit, something dangerous, something to be monitored, contained, cordoned off, administered, and sanitized contributes to the blindness.

Politics by the police themselves fall into a different category. At Ramos’s funeral, a sizeable number of attendees turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio when he spoke. It was a blatant display of contempt for the democratic figure who is also their boss. Civilian control of those who wear government uniforms and carry guns is a fundamental principle of democracy. It applies not just to the military but also to the police, who apparently like to think that they don’t have to answer to anyone. Ironically, in the aftermath of this protest, when its propriety was questioned, the grievance surfaced that police suffer from a lack of respect. This may or may not be true, but it misses a larger and more important point. What the police don’t seem to appreciate is that while they are a significant aspect of a democratic society, they are not an inherently valuable part of that society. They are a necessary evil, to borrow a well-known American expression about government. In other words, if we could do without the police we would gladly dispense with them. This is not true of other major institutions in American life, however, including one that police traditionally disparage: colleges and universities. Colleges and universities embody and enact (many of) the fundamental values of a democratic society. They are an end in and of themselves. The contributions they make are priceless and irreplaceable and we cannot—and would not want to—do without them.

What’s more, the police often present themselves as antagonistic to and destructive of the basic norms of democracy. This includes New York’s finest, who in recent years have racked up credit for herding, surveilling, and assaulting democratic citizens exercising their rights at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and attacking, dispersing, and destroying Occupy Wall Street encampments in 2011 (the latter formed part of a national campaign). In addition, they routinely erupt at even the slightest criticism, to say nothing of serious critique. Think of the venom top police officials unleashed at Bruce Springsteen in the wake of “American Skin (41 Shots).” If the police feel disrespected, perhaps that’s what they have earned, given how they represent and do the dirty work of society’s powerful interests or how they (mis)treat American citizens of color.

Last summer, Eric Garner was murdered by New York City police on Staten Island. He was black. These facts are connected. No charges were filed against those responsible, including the principal assailant, Daniel Pantaleo. In America, we have learned it’s nearly impossible to indict police for murdering American citizens, even when they do it repeatedly. In the last few years New York police have had several opportunities to prove to a skeptical public that they are not an institution with an intrinsically problematic relationship to democracy, that they take seriously the claim that their job is to serve and protect, that they understand that the foundation of America’s democracy is freedom—and thus politics. They could have refused to move against their fellow citizens in Zuccotti Park. Instead, they might have engaged in democratic civil disobedience to defend the rights of the people themselves, supposedly the ultimate objects of their concern. They might also have attended Eric Garner’s funeral. Where was the sea of blue for Mr. Garner? His execution represents a criminal failure of policing—not just in New York City but America (which holds true for Michael Brown and so many others). Why were the police not there en masse to take responsibility for their failure and to mourn his loss, because he, too, was one of their own?

Making War on Citizens at the National September 11 Museum

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

The National September 11 Museum, which opened to controversy in May, functions as an affective and political continuation, even intensification of the National September 11 Memorial. It is not a freestanding institution. Philip Kennicott, architecture critic of The Washington Post, considers the Museum a “supplement” to Michael Arad’s Memorial pools, but destructively so: it “overwhelms—or more literally undermines—the dignified power of [the] memorial by inviting visitors to re-experience the events in a strangely, obsessively, narcissistically repetitious way.” This is what makes the Museum, in my judgment, a continuation of the Memorial. That is, the Museum, which is located directly beneath Ground Zero, does belowground what the Memorial does aboveground: it makes war on citizens. The Memorial creates this effect more subtly as the reflecting pools’ waterfalls mimic the collapsing towers. Here there is no debris left over; the water crashes down and disappears into a void where it is recirculated to provide the material for subsequent collapses. The Museum, on the other hand, recreates the horrors of September 11 in intimate, assaultive detail and does so primarily by targeting individuals—their memories, their experiences, their traumas. This approach to commemoration crystallizes America’s understanding of itself as an unrivaled source of right and good in the world and nothing more than an innocent victim on September 11, 2001. It thus obscures, among other things, the violence and tragedy constitutive of its imperial democracy. Nevertheless, it was precisely the institutional structures of this violence and tragedy that were attacked on September 11. To explicitly acknowledge this, of course, would be to acknowledge al-Qaeda’s success on September 11, thereby showing respect for an enemy, an act of which America, not alone among democracies, is incapable.



What, more specifically, does it mean for the National September 11 Museum to make war on citizens? The idea here is not to kill them, of course. Wars are much broader in scope and their violence assumes myriad forms. The idea is to overpower them with an awesome display of architectural and archaeological engineering, a display that perversely matches, even surpasses, al-Qaeda’s 2001 assault. It’s as if the world’s leading democracy, feeling insecure not just about its porous borders but also its very identity, needed to prove itself equal, even superior to its deadliest enemy regardless of the cost. What Terry Smith has written of the World Trade Center’s and al Qaeda’s masterminds could be said of the Museum’s: ”To attempt creation or destruction on such an immense scale requires both bombers and master-builders to view living processes in general, and social life in particular, with a high degree of abstraction. Both must undertake a radical distancing of themselves from the flesh and blood of mundane experience ‘on the ground.’” This claim might seem counter-intuitive with the Museum, given its emphasis on the individual, but it simultaneously addresses everyone and no one, hence its air of abstraction. Emanating from its own cavernous vacuum, the Museum seems determined to induce a certain emotional-political sensibility, to break the morale of visitors and any possible resistance they might offer to its impressive and appalling death-laden design itself in service of a nationalist politics. I’m tempted to say it may not even matter if anyone visits the Museum.  For the United States, it’s enough that it was built.



Visitors enter the Museum on the same level as the Memorial. To access the Museum proper, one first takes a long descending escalator ride past one of the massive steel tridents that formed part of the World Trade Center façade. It is the first official ruin one sees, a sign both of mass murder and indestructibility. It also serves, along with the other ruins, to make a point of political pride. The towers collapsed, but total destruction was not and could not be achieved. These are exceptional artifacts. The enemy did not succeed as it might first appear. The Museum begins officially, if you will, at the bottom of the escalator. The contentious gift shop is located on this level; it contains souvenir items—coffee mugs, T-shirts, key chains, hors d’oeuvres plates—which can serve as daily reminders of horror and death.



The Museum’s inexorable descent to bedrock seven storeys below ground level, which somehow renders a sense of return to the surface and life problematic, if not quite doubtful, is reminiscent of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall on the National Mall, except this descent takes place on a much grander scale and entirely indoors. Instead of virtually walking into a tomb from outside, as in Washington, D.C., one is always already in a tomb at the National September 11 Museum. This tomb is filled with thousands and thousands of the still-unidentified remains of the day’s victims. After all, the site is both a cemetery and the official repository of the dead. The tomb is also littered with ruins and debris from the day’s attacks: an antenna from the roof of one of the towers; the motor from one of the elevators; the last steel beam to be removed from the clean-up site; a fire truck badly damaged during rescue efforts; twisted steel remnants from the floors that were struck. These substantial items look tiny in the immense surroundings of the underground tomb, which include the original slurry wall that held back the Hudson River to the west. The visitor is made to feel puny.



Puniness apparently reaches its climax next to the north Memorial pool, the bottom of which can be circumnavigated underground. Here one encounters a small information sign. It reveals that some 1,200 feet above this very spot, “hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center” and “tore a gash in the building more than 150 feet wide.” What is the visitor to do now? How is the visitor to react after reading this matter-of-fact fact? Look up and imagine the day’s terrible events, the towers suddenly collapsing above and down upon him, and winding up beneath 110 floors of compressed rubble? The inclusion on site of a composite of several floors of one of the towers flattened and fused gives one answer. It’s not enough to imagine the death of others; one must also imagine one’s own. Vulnerability, susceptibility, contingency define life here.

 

In the Museum’s Memorial Exhibition, which highlights the identities of those killed in the day’s attacks, the memorialization circle is closed. On a “Wall of Faces,” there is a portrait photograph of each and every victim. This complements the names inscribed in the Memorial directly above. On so-called touch screen tables, visitors can call up the name of any victim and learn more about her. Inside this memorial hall there is an inner chamber with benches lining the walls. The name of everyone killed is sequentially projected onto opposing walls, followed by biographical information, and, where possible, audio-visual reminiscences from family or friends. Visitors sit respectfully in the chamber and watch the alphabetical parade of names relentlessly pass by, as if afraid to leave, which would seem rude given the solemnity of the space. The attacks that are recreated by the Memorial waterfalls produce their offspring here.

 

The Memorial Exhibition aspires to pay tribute to the day’s victims. To challenge this aspiration seems almost offensive by the time you reach the Museum’s nadir, especially if you have seen the room in the Historical Exhibition which catalogues and documents those who jumped from the Towers on September 11. Still photographs capture these horrific scenes, estimated at some 50 to 200, accompanied by recollections of people who witnessed the suicides but could not look away, for that would be to abandon people (though strangers) at the worst moment of their lives. It’s a gut-wrenching alcove, one of several with a box of tissues at the ready, and with a bench just outside it so people can sit and compose themselves afterwards.

What is the point of this death-driven redundancy? Edward Rothstein speculates that the Museum “is the site of their murder. And the attention to individuality presumably highlights the scale of the terrorist crime.” It also serves, as Rothstein notes, to distract. The Museum signifies avoidance, even denial of America’s contradictory role in the world and its contributions to the circumstances that make 9/11 all too conceivable rather than unthinkable. The Museum thus contributes to the impoverishment, through privatization, of public space. Leaving the National September 11 Museum, the single, solitary brick from Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad, Afghanistan, liberated by the American assassination team that eradicated him from the face of the earth, and proudly on display at bedrock, may be the Museum’s representative artifact. There are two possibilities, the brick suggests: challenge the American-led global order of things and you will be reduced to this; or, align yourself with the American-led global order of things, which also reduces you to a brick, a mere pillar of America’s global war on terror.

Snowden's Real Crime

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

Despite military crisis in Syria and fiscal terrorism in the United States, Edward Snowden continues to haunt American and global politics. He has exposed and unnerved the American national security establishment, its partner in international crime, Great Britain, and disrupted their planetary surveillance networks, which are far more extensive and menacing than previously realized, or even imagined. The NSA (assisted by GCHQ) not only aims to surveil, literally, the entire world with and without its cooperation; it also regulates and shapes the production and circulation of encryption standards and encryption software to facilitate its limitless eavesdropping. Snowden’s actions took officials by such surprise that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress, with impunity, about the scope of NSA skullduggery in an effort to limit the “damage” of Snowden’s revelations. He, of course, has Barack Obama’s full support.

At right: James Clapper

Snowden’s status is much in dispute. Most Americans approve of his efforts on behalf of democratic transparency,to inform the American public about what is done in its name, and consider hima whistleblower. The government, unsurprisingly, deems him a criminal, disloyal, a traitor who aids and abets the enemy. The latter charge is especially critical to Obama Administration efforts to criminalize investigative journalism and buttress the inter-national security state. This kind of effort is already paying off, as Glenn Greenwald has documented. Mainstream media mimic the official state line, having been effectively cowed and co-opted over many decades by insider access and standing. NBC’s DavidGregory is perhaps exhibit number one. Jeffrey Toobin could be considered exhibit number two.

Edward Snowden should be thought of as a democratic citizen with the courage of his moral and political convictions. He belongs in the distinguished democratic dissident tradition exemplified by Chelsea Manning and Daniel Ellsberg and their heroic efforts to disclose American perfidy in Iraq and Vietnam. He is paying a terrible price for brave political decisions made for the good of democracy, rendering him a political prisoner (as is Manning).

One of the principal objections to Snowden’s whistle blowing is that he allegedly caused irreparable harm to the United States, endangering national security and placing lives at risk. In the wake of charges against (then) Bradley Manning that included aiding and abetting the enemy, this comes as no surprise. The common phrase heard early on regarding Manning was that he has much blood on his hands. Officials later retreated from such claims, but the work they do in slandering whistle blowers and whistle blowing remains.

Invoking the specter of death has long been the default response of the state to exposés of its secrets. During the Cold War instances of Soviet espionage involving American agents (Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, etc.) were followed by extravagant claims of unprecedented damage inflicted against the country’s national security interests, which, it was always said, would take a great deal of time to unravel and catalogue. Ironically, they were so enormous that they defied any specificity. People were simply supposed to believe government assessments without any evidentiary showing. There never were any such showings, of course, and the claims could not be taken seriously, though they would be made over and over again. Somehow, the republic never fell despite all the repeated damage cited. Only the Soviet Union collapsed—before the disbelieving eyes of American intelligence professionals.

What’s more, if American national security, aiding and abetting the enemy, or responsibility for lives gratuitously lost were really of concern in Snowden’s case, (now former) President George Bush would have been tried and convicted long ago for invading Iraq, which contributed to hatred of the United States across the globe, and gave al Qaeda its greatest recruiting tool and boost. President Barack Obama likewise would find himself in the dock for his global drone campaign that has murdered hundreds of innocent women and children and created untold mortal enemies in the process. These presidents have killed and murdered with impunity and have real blood on their hands, making the United States less safe in the process.

What really matters to the Obama Administration and other governments is Snowden’s audacity—that he would take it upon himself, as a citizen, to force a conversation on not just transparency but also on democracy itself, a conversation that people like Obama say they favor but do nearly everything possible to avoid, postpone, subvert, or derail. Democracies do not value citizens such as Snowden; they fear, police, intimidate, and do whatever it takes to control, contain, domesticate, and discourage them. (Julian Assange remains the target of secret grand jury proceedings in Virginia.) Rather, citizens in democracies must know their place in the political order of things and stick to it. This is why Vladimir Putin initially insisted that Snowden curtail activities “against” the United States before considering asylum. Putin did not want Russians to view Snowden as a model. Think of this as the infantilization of citizenship. It could be seen in the streets of New York City during the 2004 Republican National Convention; it could be seen in the brutal police reaction nationwide to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and 2012.

Yet few things are as democratic as the people themselves not just defending but taking and exercising their rights as citizens. This may, on occasion, entail problematic consequences. In the United States, at the founding, Americans vandalized the homes of royal tax collectors to defeat enforcement of revenue policies. In the 19^th century, a group of Boston citizens refused to let Anthony Burns be forcibly returned to slavery by a United States Marshal, who was killed in the process. Frederick Douglass defended the killing of the marshal, a kidnapper, in the name of self-defense and the right to life. These actions are not automatically condemned because they involve violence and blood. They are considered part and parcel of America’s patriotic tradition. They involve citizens, aware of the potential consequences, taking actions on behalf of a new democratic order yet to come. You can hear the infantilization at work when it is asked, rhetorically of course: Who is Edward Snowden to take such action on his own? The answer is: who does he have to be? He’s a democratic citizen.