The Stranger Next Door

The Stranger Next Door
March 10, 2003
by John Bloom

NEW YORK, March 10 (UPI) -- The peril of Iraq is not that more terrorists will attack us, or that we'll be bogged down in foreign climes, or that our economy will be wrecked, or that we'll ignite Islamic fundamentalist anger worldwide.

The peril of Iraq is more personal and mundane: for the next generation or two we won't trust one other.

Already the preparation for war has twisted us into a dysfunctional family that's gone beyond bickering to screaming, slamming doors, taking long walks around the block, and sleeping on the couch. Our father is a bully, our mother is perpetually frightened, and all our siblings have locked the doors to their rooms and immersed themselves in the Internet.

The debate, if you can call it that, has turned nasty and regressive. There are plots and conspiracies everywhere. The dark-skinned men at the next booth in Shoney's are foreign agents. Secret corporate cabals are conspiring to seize the oil fields. The patriotism of neighbors is suspect. All foreigners are doubly suspect. The jails seethe with swarthy sorts who at one time would have been considered merely eccentric, but now symbolize the menace born of too much democracy. The nation's high sheriff wants a new law passed to strip citizenship from those who prove unworthy, like assemblymen in the French Revolution who threw into dungeons anyone refusing to take the Tennis Court Oath.

A few examples:

The Pentagon released "ground rules" for the media covering the war, expressly forbidding them from reporting "specific information on friendly force troop movements, tactical deployment, and dispositions that would jeopardize lives."

Reporting on troop movements in advance is something the press has never done, in any war, even a single time. It's not anything they're interested in doing or have ever considered doing. So why is there suddenly an official written policy telling them not to be traitors? It's as though an urban myth has bypassed the trailer parks and infected the highest reaches of the government itself. You have to wonder what kind of country we've become when we not only suspect Al Qaeda sleeper cells of being embedded in every condo complex, but we expect reporters who are vetted and embedded by our own military leaders to turn on us at any moment and become Iraqi agents.

I think the word for that is "paranoid." And paranoid leaders are dangerous leaders. We now know, for example, that John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," was little more than a divinity student trying to serve a sort of internship opposing the Northern Alliance, never firing his weapon and expressly refusing to do anything resembling a terrorist act. He got 20 years in prison and is still forbidden to speak to the outside world, because there's a fear that he would do something to aid international terrorism. He's universally hated, but for primitive superstitious reasons. The fact that he's from Marin County, California, has even been offered as explanation for his treachery. There are actual places, in other words, that are seed beds of betrayal.

The domestic version of John Walker Lindh also comes from California. A heroin addict named Andrade was caught shoplifting videotapes from K-mart twice within two weeks, and the pilfering resulted in his second and third strikes, earning him a 50-years- to-life prison term. He challenged this as "cruel and unusual," but the Supreme Court upheld the California sentence. Nothing is cruel and unusual in a society of fear and denunciation, which is to say a paranoid society.

In the classic paranoid cultures, there are three basic fears. The first is the destructive enemy agent, who is always talked about in such vague terms that men see thousands of them where there are hundreds, and hundreds of them where there is only one. These agents are endowed with the superhuman ability to know what we're doing at all times and to dream up ways of killing us that we haven't thought of.

The second, even greater fear is of the enemy within--the neighbor who works for the foreign agent. Once a traitor is rooted out, the man's friends become suspect as well, and every organization he's ever belonged to is ransacked and scrutinized. The privileged classes imagine covens of plotters in urban warrens and mountain hideaways, tapping into vast conspiratorial networks funded by shadowy Mr. Bigs. The lower classes imagine that the business elite have sold out to the enemy for money. Secret informants are encouraged. The niceties of arrest and detention are ignored. Everyone is stopped and asked to produce their documents. The argument is made that we live in a time more perilous than any that's ever existed.

And yet the opposite is true. We live in the first true liberal modern society, and everything that came before us was more perilous. Yet it feels dangerous, because there is no place to get a foothold. When people are granted true freedom, they tend to go their own secret ways, and there's no corraling them. They act out of private motives and they move about without regard for tradition. Democracy itself tends to erode the family and make the city a place of menace. It seems dangerous because, in a modern liberal society, things can remain ambiguous and unresolved for years.

Which brings us to our third symptom. The classic paranoid rejects ambiguity and demands a resolution. He demands black and white, good and evil, for us or against us. It's the ambivalence that makes him scared in the first place. Everything "loose" in the society becomes a source of his fear. Every solution involves purging whatever made it loose in the first place. It is Manichaean, primitively aggressive, and, if I may say so, medieval. It's the reason that communities in the Middle Ages lived behind high fortress walls on mountaintops under the direction of a warrior monarch.

And yet those walls proved not to be so impregnable. When a people isolated themselves, they instilled fear and mistrust in both their own citizens and the enemy as well--and all outsiders became the enemy. When another fiefdom refuses allegiance to our own, we cut it off. When that fiefdom joins with another fiefdom in opposition to us, we build the walls thicker and add a moat. Our security becomes the mace, the pickaxe and the torch. Our pastures lie fallow. Our trade dries up. Our executioner is busy. We become secure by circumscribing ourselves, raising our drawbridge, purging our populace, and redefining our abode in ever smaller circles.

There is nothing new in this, of course. The plot, the panic, the suspect, the fear of the stranger, the belief that suspected is as good as proven, the denunciation of traitors, the dangerous enemy without, the spy within, the need for cleansing blood to avenge blood, the scapegoating, the blaming, the purging, the demands of one brother for another brother's patriotic credentials--these are the oldest symptoms of the oldest societies. What's sad is that they're also symptoms of societies which, in defending themselves, start to self-destruct.

And, oh yes, there's one more thing that the paranoid culture always does: it starts a foreign war. It's always a war couched in terms of striking the enemy before he has a chance to strike us. It's the reflection of forces building up that must be satisfied in an angry lashing out. But the forces are created from within, not from without. The paranoid's ultimate fear is of himself.

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