Protests and The Emotions of 9-11

By Justin Rogers-Cooper

The martial law prism that defines the life of American protest points to outstanding issues of trust and mistrust related to 9-1l. After the attacks, the seemingly necessary rise of Homeland Security made Americans vulnerable to a militarized police culture. Intense expressions of patriotism took the place of meaningful critique, particularly among the right-wing but also among the political center. Many ordinary people were rightly traumatized by the events. It spread an unbearable amount of negative emotions across the country and across the world. As Naomi Klein has argued in The Shock Doctrine, the immediate horror of the event transformed the populace into hysteria. In the wake of that sadness, nothing seemed too dear to reassess, including the constitution.

Among those that still defend the actions of the government at all costs, especially in terms of the war on terror, there is a profound sense that they are making emotional arguments. Patriotism and nationalism are feelings. One identifies with imagined communities and symbols: flags, guns, jets, but also skyscrapers. Even more urgently, one invests people with feeling. The adolescent investment of desire into the Jonas Brothers or Miley Cyrus is not that far removed from the liberal one in Barack Obama. One invests pride into objects that represent unimpeachable values. One projects one’s boundaries into these objects. To break from those objects and the values they represent requires one to examine one’s beliefs. And yet these beliefs hold feelings too vital to dump.

The partisan myopia of the current Republican Party doesn’t just reflect the rump of its base, but also a significant proportion of Americans that fanatically declare strength to mask their fears. Their enduring commitment is ferocious. Everyone clings religiously to myths. Myths package our emotions into narratives. These narratives help channel our fears away from states of confusion into states of resolution. But the story of the war on terror is a story that will continue forever. Therefore we must always feel scared at the cliff-hanger that ends each installment, each attack, each alert. And to cover that fear, we must produce an everlasting strength. This strength takes the form of pride.

Even liberal Democrats are afraid, and need pride. They consume the same media as their conservative neighbors. In the realm of corporate media, the myths of 9-11 produce new life forever. There, too, the bodies of enemy combatants are necessarily enhanced through interrogation. There is a soft speculation in popular culture that torture is necessary, and our new era demands it. This appeared first in shows like 24 and Lost, but it has found expression in any number of genres that tolerate and promote violence as entertainment. It’s not that any one program or video game turns someone into a problem. The culture is violent because of a violence distilled into every facet of its entertainment, and because it blossoms through any stream of channels. It’s visible on the news, in the movies, in sports, and in hardcore pornography. It leaks into fields of the national consciousness. It’s a viral fascism.

It doesn’t necessarily desensitize people to real violence, however. The problem is that people identify with the aggressor. They identify with the agent of power. They learn to feel superior, powerful, and immune to reason. This gives them a sense of pride. The quickest route to self-esteem isn't accomplishment, but by projecting oneself into screens where other bodies perform that power. In television, film, and video games, characters solve problems with violence, but more importantly they solve conflicts by achieving superiority. There isn't any sense that these narratives and institutions play or reverse these tensions. They enforce them.

Video game technology during the past two decades could have gone anywhere, as an example. The recent success of the Nintendo Wi depended in part on the fact that it tapped a demographic that wasn’t interested in hallucinatory identifications with heroic masculine brutality. In many senses, porn works the same way. Several tens of millions of men pay for just that privilege. They do so because their own feelings of insecurity are mass-produced and sold to them through other products, through other ads, through other channels.

If these violent narratives and institutions were part of a field of options that included peaceful resolutions, people might place less privilege on violent stories of pride. Censorship isn’t viable or desirable, of course: but there must be a way to make non-violence more thrilling and more affecting. Violence is popular in part, after all, because it’s so thrilling to watch. For hardcore heteronormative communities of men in particular, it seems impossible to disassociate normative institutions of masculine power from post 9-11 obsessions with pride and patriotism. Military engagement, athletic heroism, and private porn consumption each develops tropes of dominance and hostility to "others," particularly women, non-whites, and non-heterosexuals. It's not a coincidence that these men become the police at protests.

People don't support protest because they suspect the protesters are weak. They don't support protest because they identify, perhaps automatically, with the police. They do this because they identify with power. They identify with power because they're insecure and afraid. They don't want to get dirty: they don't want to be on the bottom. As James Baldwin would say, they don't want the stink of protest near their pride.

The insecurity that produces aggressive pride is profitable. People will pay to feel pride, or simply to feel powerful. It’s not a stretch to connect that insecurity with a political and economic system that produces insecurity through judicial elections and devastating recessions. And it’s not much more of a stretch to connect that profitable insecurity to the department of Homeland Security itself, which is profitable if it is anything. It’s not unreasonable to link a culture of violence to this toleration for Homeland Security. It's otherwise unclear why one isolated attack, though devastating, should result in a war without end. And why should one attack redefine the constitution? Why should one attack criminalize protest forever?

People believe that they’re being protected from enemies. The creation of an entire federal division to multiply the powers of the local police, state Defense Forces, National Guard, FBI, CIA, and National Security Agency, among others, somehow doesn’t appear extraordinary. The fact that this protection has been directed at dissenting Americans in New York and Pittsburgh and elsewhere suggests some rather odd American attitudes are at work.

Americans must want this protection because they’re scared. They don’t seem to mind that this protection has been used to survey them – and possibly to train them for future catastrophes. Since any war on terror is both endless and bound to fail, to even use the logic of Homeland Security’s justifications requires us to expect another attack. Wouldn’t one be inevitable? And what department will be necessary then? What emergency powers will they request?

Bush has left office, but his decisions have left behind an infrastructure. He has left behind a state of mind. This is the state of mind that fears to protest and fears protest itself. It fears dissent. It is this fear of dissent that speaks heaviest about the truths of the war on terror. To criticize Homeland Security and its agents is to necessarily question its existence. It’s existence originates mostly in 9-11. Thus to find fault with one is to come near the sacred political narrative of the era.

To touch that story is to finger the dead, and for many it is to automatically betray their memory. To go close to the towers – to give the bodies an autopsy, as it were – is to place one’s hand on a corpse. There is naturally much fear there, and also dread. To believe that 9-11 has been abused or worse is simply too far beyond the mental fences that people have raised to make them feel safe.

There is simply no popular vocabulary that will do justice to the actual terror one feels climbing that fence, and peering over it, and even entertaining the notion that they have been living in a prison yard. It is perhaps worse to feel it is one that they have helped to build, and even feel safer inside. And yet the more one resists seeing over the fence, the less chance one has to find real safety. This real safety is the heart of real liberty. Real liberty comes from the security of cooperation, not the security of protection.

Who built this fence and who keeps it there? Them or us?

And why? Because of fear or because of pride?