Bearing Witness to the Unspeakable: 9/11 and America's New Global Imperialism

Two years ago, I told the Congress and the country that the war on terror would be a lengthy war, a different kind of war, fought on many fronts in many places. Iraq is now the central front. Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there, and there they must be defeated. This will take time, and require sacrifice. Yet we will do -what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom, and to make our own nation more secure. -President George W. Bush, September 7, 2003 (USA Today). The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. - Walter Benjamin (Illuminations 257). Introduction This article takes a critical and interpretive approach toward understanding the resurgence of patriotism in the United States following September 11, 2001. It considers this new wave of patriotism as a collective psychic and social phenomenon fostered within the context of the commercial mass media's perpetual creation and renewal of consciousness as a psychic precondition to the maintenance and expansion of US imperialism abroad. The piece seeks to move toward a theoretical understanding of the mediated experience of 9/11 and the media's role therein vis-avis an underlying subtext of governmental preparation to further America's global hegemony. September 11 may constitute the most forthright example of political leaders "hijacking catastrophe"1 in modern history, and a situation wherein the continued potential for American and international democracy, the self-determination of all peoples, and the general welfare of the world hang in the balance. Never before in US history has the government, with the aid of intelligence and military technology, wielded such a threat to the civil liberties of its citizenry at home or the welfare and sovereignty of the nations of the world. Because the United States is a democratic republic, the management of the collective public psyche toward the imperial objectives of its ruling elite is a fundamental requirement in US governmental and corporate institutions' control of the world's energy supply. And, as we shall see, to counter the otherwise logical disposition of the American people - most of whom favor decreased military spending and engagement abroad requires the invention and cultivation of certain thought patterns actively perpetuated within the institutional and symbolic system comprised by the conglomerated for-profit news and entertainment media in conformity with the real and practical strategic ambitions of US governmental and corporate policy makers. As Australian journalist John Pilger puts it, the "western-dominated media, now capable as never before of penetrating societies everywhere, is a new member of a club as old as Columbus" (4). Indeed, nowhere is the media system's effectiveness in this regard more apparent than at home in the world's sole military superpower. Witnessing the Spectacle of 9/11 In one sense, the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were an all-consuming mediated event that brought about something unprecedented in the American collective psyche, piercing the for-profit media's routine cultivation of a prevalent consumer consciousness. In a brief few hours, the US public was brought into direct alignment with its government's cumulative record of geopolitical strategies and courses of action. Historian Gabriel Kolko notes how the clandestine "war the United States has been fighting abroad since 1947 had finally reached its shores" (13). That which was unspeakable-death and destruction on a colossal scale in a familiar locale and with no readily apparent rationalewas observed, felt, lived, and relived in an all-toofamihar mediated terrain. The televisual whisked us to the scene to "be there." Douglas Kellner explains how the international "live television broadcasting brought a 'you are there' drama to the September 11" affair (From 9/11 54). …