Monday, February 20, 2017

The Next Attack Will Happen. (What If We Decide Now Not to Overreact?)

The Trump thing keeps giving me Bush flashbacks. Dubya didn't get to enjoy much of a honeymoon period after his inauguration either, because he also didn't win the popular vote. He looked like a one-term wonder in early 2000. Between his stupidity, conflicts of interest, and tendency to lash out at everyone and everything regardless of reality, Trump might not be in the White House long enough to host a Labor Day cookout.

Unless...

Bush didn't do 9/11, but does anyone doubt it served him politically? Suddenly you had to support him or the turrurrists win. If you didn't, you weren't a real 'murkin. He was given so much leeway that he questioned the heroism of an actual war hero and we rewarded his chicken hawk ass with re-election.

It took Katrina to remind us that sometimes the government we pay for can come in handy, but only when qualified professionals are in charge. This is part of why I don't believe Bush planned 9/11. He wasn't competent enough to plan anything that actually achieved its objectives.

Which brings us to Trump, whose single achievement to date is making Bush look like a dignified, nuanced thinker by comparison. He has proven himself to be a never-ending brain fart, a walking constitutional crisis. How can a man with so many thoughts be so thoughtless? Given his tendency to provoke, his inability to differentiate between violent strains of Islam and the rest, and the fact that he is a living recruitment poster for groups like Al Qaeda and I.S.I.S, another attack on U.S. soil during a Trump or Pence presidency is likely.

Though 9/11 was undoubtedly one of the worst moments in U.S. history, I've always felt our reaction to it was worth consideration as a separate historic disaster. It's like we were sucker punched in the eye and responded by throwing blind punches at everyone and anyone in arm's length. We also responded with acts of self-mutilation: torture, indefinite detention of terror suspects, and lunatic military spending. Our response was predicted by bin Laden. It's time to face the painful truth that before we gave him the bullets he deserved, we gave bin Laden everything he ever wanted.

If Bush's judgment was questionable in a crisis, imagine Trump's. Everything 62 million Americans liked about him, his "simplicity", his "telling it like it is", will be the opposite of what we need. It may be time to face the facts that the "virtues" of an American political candidate might not match the virtues needed by a person in a governing position. Some people mistake patience, nuance, and intellect for weakness, and this belief has become a national weakness in and of itself.

What if we decide in advance not to overreact next time an attack happens? We ought to commit to a sober reaction now, while we have the benefit of calm. Justice doesn't need to be swift, it needs to be slow and accurate. The danger of overreaction is greater now than it was in 2001. Whatever Bush's faults, he wasn't a human mood swing. He reacted months later by invading the wrong nation, because he didn't know or care enough to know. In response to even a minor terrorist attack, Trump would likely nuke South America, Africa, and Antarctica: anywhere full of brown people and endangered species he could easily scapegoat with his minority of supporters (and where he doesn't privately own a golf course or hotel, this is where those conflicts of interest come into play, bigly).

There are two things that frighten me more than Trump: One is a future politician with his amorality, but also with actual intelligence and discipline, who uses Trump's fear-baiting and chaos-as-camouflage templates to hypnotize us toward fascism. The other is Trump and his white Nazi brigade using the next terrorist attack to crush all resistance and change America in their deadly, kleptocratic, Putin-esque corporate-military image. Stupid becomes cool and questioning his government becomes treason. "The Media" can't be trusted except for the outlets President Deathwig approves of (and of course, they are the ones who approve of him). Dissenters disappear in the night. We go to war when and where he says, because he says. The damage we do to ourselves is, again, worse than what any home-grown or authentic Islamic terrorist could achieve.

We can and should decide ahead of time, now, while we have the luxury of security keeping us rational, that we will never again allow any tragedy to make us choose cowardice over true bravery, fear over compassion, and authority over resistance.