It is clear, is it not, that the defining duty of a citizen is serious-minded, dedicated, personal participation, not only with a vote for Big Brother on election day, but blood, toil, tears and sweat, down-and-dirty, in-the-trenches, flak-jacket participation. After parenthood there can be no more demanding, no more crucial task in all of life than that of paying close attention to what's happening. That's what liberty is all about. Every citizen must keep in the very forefront of his mind that this Spaceship Earth on which we travel is more canoe than battleship, more fragile than mighty. We're adults; it's time to put childish behavior behind us. We must behave ourselves. We must value the wisdom of the ages. Above all else, we must not play Russian roulette with everyone's future. Nothing less than the survival of humankind is at stake.

The Greeks, who seem to have left pithy commentary on just about everything, bequeathed to us the observation that “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Barry Goldwater, a prominent conservative, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, had a catchy electioneering slogan, a part of which, if memory serves, ran, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” That's an attractive notion, but it's madness. It's possible that extremism did no damage to Pithecanthropus Erectus, he was too weak to do much damage beyond his immediate cave, but it is terrifyingly dangerous in a world of H-bombs, eyes in the sky and all the rest. And it's madness of a particularly virulent sort as nanotechnology comes on line. He who does not cower in fear before the life-destroying capability of nanotechnology is certifiably insane.

The salient characteristic of all enthusiasms, fanaticisms, and extremisms is that each is high as a kite on certitude. Certitude is by far the most addictive of opiates. Certitude is the ultimate turn-on. To enlist in one or another certitude is to be “born again” into enthusiasm. But all certitudes justify the most barbaric of behaviors. All certitudes are religions in that they are all matters of faith and all religions are intolerant of heresies. All certitudes are baptized in blood. Savonaraola, Calvin, the Ayatollah, observed no limits because they were without doubt. It is true that the moral imperatives they cited differed little from those cited by other established faiths. But while such imperatives may be acceptable as guides they are not acceptable as absolutes. The dogmatist thirsts after your very soul. His is the classic Faustian bargain: “You give me your soul; I'll bring you joy.”

Kant devoted his life to seeking to justify Reason. Instead he found it to be a dead-end street. He was driven to that conclusion against his will. Godel showed scientifically that “certainty is an illegitimate concept.” So scholarship and science have joined forces to doom us to dwell in a world without anchors. Those who cannot abide drift, who cannot live with mystery, those who find themselves immobilized by angst are left with no choice but to leap into faith. However, a leap into faith, properly understood, is an escape from freedom. It is democracy's most implacable enemy.

Arnold Toynbee, Sir Arnold Toynbee—he was knighted by Elizabeth—spent his scholarly years diligently at work in dusty archives in an effort to comprehend the workings of that emergent organism we call “civilization.” He studied more than twenty in total. His overall finding was that each of them committed suicide. And, as we are all aware, that is the commonsense evaluation of their histories, but there are others. Many others. Both Niels Bohr and Oscar Wilde offered the insight that for every Truth there is an equal and opposite Truth. Bohr was so struck by the profundity of that particular intuition that he added the Yin-Yang symbol to his coat of arms. The Truth that commonsense speaks to Truth is passed on from generation to generation in prestigious universities around the globe. Historians write and professors teach that Man is, indeed, master of his fate; that he does, indeed, possess free will; that it is, indeed, he who is the maker and shaper of all history and that, therefore, it was Man himself who, throughout all history made unwise even foolish choices which eventuated in the deaths of civilizations. Thus if commonsense be the lens through which the data are viewed, Toynbee got it right. Additionally, it needs to be kept in mind that some do seek to dress commonsense in one or another piece of intellectual finery as a means of gaining standing. The dialectic interpretation of events is one example. Hegel offers the commonsense of the dialectic as proof of a cosmic planner. Marx uses that very same method to diagnose the history of class warfare. But fancy dress notwithstanding, the dialectic is good old-fashioned commonsense.

The opposite Truth is that history is irrational—in human eyes anyhow. Defenders of the efficacy of this lens, argue that knowing is simply beyond Man's capabilities. The Truth, therefore, they say, is “ineffable.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., my personal nominee for Mount Rushmore, wrote to his friend Harold Laski, “I detest a man who knows that he knows… When you know that you know, persecution comes easy. It is as well that some of us don't know that we know anything.” I took that from The Metaphysical Club, an exciting work by Louis Manand, published in 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The quote can be found on page 62.

There is no escape from interpretation when one makes the intellectual selection from a veritable grab bag of possible selections. I mention this because this essay concerns America's response to 9/11. A reader's reaction to the argument presented will depend on the lens through which he chooses to look. Since all choices are necessarily biased against all alternatives, so are all interpretations. Thus if the opposite Truth is that not you and I but some non-local script writer—non-local being the cabala for outside Time/Space—controls events, then each of the civilizations reported on by Toynbee did not commit suicide as he so confidently reported, using his refined commonsense, of course, but was, rather, somewhat “mystically”—an opposite Truth—ushered unceremoniously off Stage-Left by some stage manager in order to make way for a new cast, a different script and a more responsive audience.

Is the Middle East our denouement? Do those who say they hear the pit orchestra practicing the Dies Irae have sharp ears or are they simply wacky? Will Western Civilization soon be filed under RIP in Huntington's, or—if not there—in some great archival center in Beijing?

*

This essay is an examination of America's and the world's surprising reaction to 9/11. The lens chosen is that of commonsense. That lens is chosen because commonsense is the lingua franca. Truth or fiction, it is that which the majority speaks around the world. Thus one needn't spend time mastering the phraseology or translating conversations. Commonsense comes natural, as they say. “America's—and the world's—surprising response to 9/11 has been sanctified by presidential commentary, prime minister seconding, the 9/11 Commission, world silence and acquiescence, votes of legislatures, media endorsement around the world and patriotism manqué. As a consequence it now wears the near impregnable armor of Holy Writ. It has effectively been placed outside the realm of casual chitchat. Today, challenges to any verse of this scripture are apt to be labeled heresy and autos-da-fe of one sort or another recommended. But democracy without heretics is a horse without a carriage—or vice versa.

The term exegesis is used to identify scholarly criticism of scripture. I trust the criticism, which is the purpose of this essay, satisfies the meaning of the term exegesis. First, there is something passing strange about carrying shock and awe to the historically hapless, poor as poor can be, as powerless as powerless can be, people of the desolate land of Afghanistan most of whom are without a pot, a people who just yesterday had been rescued by white knight America from the clutches of that arch-villain, the Soviet Union.

What was that all about? Why? What was the rush? What were they guilty of? Why were we, the mightiest of the mighty, putting our multi-trillion-dollar high tech power on display on the evening news with commentary by Donald Rumsfeld as we blasted holes in their emptiness?

I had maintained a friendship with an officer with whom I served in World War II during our participation in the campaign in Tunisia against Rommel and his Afrika Korps. The officer's name was Robert Reisman. And that contact was interesting in that while he moved among the mighty—he was a force both in Rhode Island and nationally—I was the quintessential Sad Sack. I appreciated his character and his talents. He was, as we put it, “real,” which is to say, unaffected by his station in life, and unusually talented verbally. He missed his calling. He devoted his life to public service. One can wish he had set aside time for authorship. He died recognized, yes, but not recognized as a writer of major power, which he was.

Anyway, he called me following 9/11 and asked for my “read.” I said that it looked like a typical tech school prank. I wish I hadn't said that simply because it was outré, and I suspect he was a bit taken aback by it.

Most today are too young to recall when “tech school pranks” were a fad reported on in the national media. They were informal, unofficial contests held yearly at graduation time involving schools such as MIT, Cal-Tech and the like. These peccadilloes, these boys-will-be-boys high-jinks were occasions for graduates to demonstrate their grasp of the arcane.

To me, flying gasoline into steel buildings seemed precisely the sort of idea graduates of technical academies would come up with. (Ending a sentence with a preposition is a practice that I, unlike Churchill, can tolerate).

In any case, official Washington's choice of possible responses to Twin Towers could not have been more calamitous. The obvious cardinal rule of all cardinal rules in texts on strategy is to publicly minimize damage. Twin Towers was heartrending. Watching the tragedy on television was traumatic. No one denies that. However, the intelligent response for critical strategic reasons, for valid reasons of national security, would have been to compare the Twin towers' numbers to those tsunamis, floods, earthquakes and the like and thus by contrast place the damage in context. How many lives were lost at Stalingrad? At Gettysburg? The damage, by contrast, was minimal, and the national well-being must not be sacrificed to anguish. Winston Churchill's response to disaster was to say: “The maxim of the British people is: `Business as usual.'” That confounds the enemy, that heartens the citizen and that should have been our response. Instead, we chose national paranoia and “The sky is falling.” And even worse, we then chose to wrap our response in hymn-inspiring high-minded talk of the millennium and Armageddon. That was about as eye-popping a marriage of Church and State as the world has seen since Calvin in Geneva. A secular state should not march to war quoting Revelations.

The sure-to-follow consequences of our disastrous response are terrifying to think about. Our foolish response has without any question placed all our futures, our children's futures in particular, in grave peril. We in mindless haste have sown the dragon's teeth. Our children will reap the consequences—and they will be right to blame us and to be bitter.

Then there's this:

There is consensus, albeit a cynical one, that the rationale offered as justification for wasting billions, or is it trillions, carrying expensive high tech death and destruction to Iraq was a Machiavellian scheme hatched in coven. One can hear the chant:

“Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Let's blast the hell out of Iraq tonight. It will be no trouble.” There is a flood of words “out there” deploring our attack on Iraq.

Strangely, on the other hand, there is also consensus, but this time, by way of contrast, a startlingly naïve one, that 9/11 was the brainchild of bin Laden, conceived by him and carried out under his direction. And it is true that bin Laden tells the world that that consensus is the correct one, but why wouldn't he? The puzzle here is “Where's the words?” Why does the rationale for the cruel assault on the poor, bewildered, shell-shocked souls in Afghanistan go unquestioned? Why is there no challenge to lynch mob justice. Bear in mind that as of yet there is not one shred of hard evidence that anyone in Afghanistan played any role in the attack.

Afghanistan was most likely pivotal, the linchpin, to our follow-up. No Afghanistan, no Iraq. No tens of thousands of deaths, trillions saved, hundreds with their own arms and legs, none permanently blinded. So what can explain this thunderous silence, this oppressive silence that speaks so much louder than words? Can it be true—and it is sad if true—that the American citizenry in clear dereliction of their bounden duty as citizens, their Jeffersonian heritage, their national pride, have found Afghanis guilty absent the presentation of any evidence whatsoever? The American mantra is: “Innocent until proven guilty,” is it not? “Honor thy father, thy mother and this golden citizenship rule” should serve as our First Civic Commandment. He who is unable to abide by that basic rule of American citizenship obviously should not lay claim to being an American, now should he?

Richard Clarke, a top-level White House advisor on matters of national security behaved most abominably in the 9/11 period. In his self-serving account of his behavior in his book, Against All Enemies, he tells of an incident in which the President asks the group to “see if Saddam did this.” Clarke tells us that he was “taken aback, incredulous, and it showed.”

“But, Mr. President,” Clarke responded, “al Qaeda did this.” That response by a top-level intelligence officer was criminal, since he had no proof at all that al Qaeda had done “this.” It is my sense that had he been an army intelligence officer, he would have been brought up on charges. Off-the-top-of-the-head intelligence is not only worthless, it is downright dangerous. That situation in which answers spring full-formed from foreheads, no proof required, is known as naïve realism. The dictionary tells us that to be naïve is to be unsophisticated. Gut certainty is the spawning ground of fascisms; therefore, citizens of an always fragile democracy must resist the siren call of certainties. They must be intellectually sophisticated Jeffersonians.

As any reader of history is aware, there is no end to duplicity when leaders take it upon themselves to substitute the “efficiency” of war for the “inefficiency” of diplomacy in the conduct of international relations. The really obscene, really ugly, clearly unconstitutional defacto conferring of the imperium on a democratically elected official clears the way for Napoleonic ambitions and Machiavellian machinations. H.D.S. Greenway in his May 21, 2006, Op-ed piece in The Boston Globe titled “It's not the first war under false pretenses,” writes:

“In the now-famous British confidential memos that described how President Bush was determined to attack Iraq no matter what, Bush discussed with Prime Minister Tony Blair the possibility of painting a surveillance plane in United Nations colors and flying it over Iraq in the hope that Saddam Hussein's gunners would take the bait and shoot it down.”

Greenway goes on to list the Mukden Incident, in which the Japanese staged a railway sabotage, to justify the takeover of Manchuria, the staging of a raid by the Germans on a German border post, which they blamed on Poland and used to justify the invasion of that poor nation, The Lavon Affair in which the Israelis set off bombs in the American libraries of Alexandria and Cairo in an effort to discredit Nasser and so on. Given that history, no American citizen should ever be so unsophisticated as to be part of the faceless masses who credit high level chicaneries. No citizen should ever run with the crowd. What could possibly be more destructive of that individual responsibility which is the pride of democracy?

In his book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck reminds us that “the ancient Sumerians… had a basic rule for guiding their thinking…. With regard to any important decisions to be made they literally had to think twice.”

We citizens had been reassured that lessons learned from the Tonkin Gulf incident in Southeast Asia ensured that the nation would behave responsibly from now on and adhere to that caution. Instead, as it turned out, we did not learn from history and so chose to repeat it.

And then, too, of course, the United Nations had been conceived and put in place with great ceremony by the shell-shocked nations of the world and charged by them with the duty to making certain that never happened again. Here too it developed that all that worry, all that careful planning, all that idealistic, careful preparation to head off Chicken Littles losing their heads and running about screaming, “The sky is falling; the sky is falling,” and setting off stampedes of death and destruction--didn't amount to a tinker's dam. It had all been a colossal waste of time and effort. Solemn agreements signed in solemn conclaves were dismissed with a wave of a powerful hand as meaningless scraps of paper. Cry the beloved civilization. History will record that the barbarians were not at the gate; they sat in the seats of power.

Michael Byers had this to say about the United Nations in an essay in the London Review of Books for 5/5/05.

“One of the often overlooked benefits of the United Nations is that it enables relatively disinterested parties in a dispute to demand more evidence, delay the recourse to arms, and, if necessary, withhold the legitimacy and legality provided by the Security Council authorization. What is often seen as inaction on the part of the UN is precisely the opposite. In many instances, it is, by doing nothing, doing its job.”

*

About the Evidence

Byers speaks of evidence in the quote just cited. Here's some: Beyond a reasonable doubt, those who flew into Twin Towers were acting on their own. Evidence: The recruitment story is the dead giveaway. Without that there is no convincing connection between the students in Hamburg and bin Laden in Afghanistan. There was a single visit to Afghanistan by Mohamed Atta, but control of the operation would have necessitated much more than that over the years. And had there been electronic communication it would have been taped and long since triumphantly made available for world opinion, we can be certain of that. The very fact that it has not speaks loudly and clearly. Echelon, so we are informed, records most every electronic communication everywhere in this world, from a mother's call from kitchen to nursery on an in-house intercom, to calls to and from taxicabs, to encoded communications between the mighty—especially those involving satellites--which we can then assume are easily decoded, and so on. As I say, if bin Laden had been in communication with the students in Germany it would long since have been presented as conclusive evidence. It's worth noting parenthetically that there is no mention of evidence in the report of the 9/11 Commission. That's another of those phenomena that one finds passing strange. So, any old port in a storm… as they say. When one lacks evidence, the sophomoric simply manufacture some.

But why on earth would al Qaeda need to recruit anyone in any case? Here also, despite repeated assurances, by Dan Rather in particular, that the name of the recruiter would be made public “soon,” it never has been. Stranger and stranger. An investigation into where Mr. Rather got his information and why he put it on the air so often should be interesting. We are told that al Qaeda is a mighty organization, more sinister, more to be feared than the Soviet Union in the time of the Cold War, sufficiently dangerous to justify the allocation of trillions in an eternal crusade against evil. Now surely an organization of that size and complexity would have no need at all to recruit twenty or so high school graduates. After all, all that was needed to carry out the assault was twenty semi-educated thugs. Can we doubt that al Qaeda had many times twenty in its inventory?

The recruiting story is a patchwork quilt. Why would an organization in search of fanatics red-hot-to-trot, to die in holy martyrdom, put them on ice for years once they had been recruited? Does that make sense? And why would they have them earn degrees first? Does that make sense? And just as soon as they have the degrees in hand, why would they then ask them to incinerate themselves and others? Does that make sense? All of that is an ignorant story written by ignorant people. It is absurd on its face. Mortimer Snerd wouldn't swallow that horse manure. Why are the beneficiaries of the most expensive educations available still applauding?

It is science that informs us that the assailants likely acted independently of bin Laden. Let me explain: the kids signed up at the university to get an education. Once there they were ghettoized--i.e. they were forced into contact with one another simply because they were Moslem in a Christian environ. Once ghettoized, they were made radioactive by--and I quote from The New York Times--“a fiery Imam.” The rest is history.

The science is seminal and basic. The example of what happened is a swarm of bees. The swarm is a gestalt creation. It is an organism with a single mind, a single purpose and a single energy. There are all sorts of books available about this phenomenon. It's called “emergence.” This “thing” is no longer a collection of individuals. Individuality has been subsumed in the group. The many have become one. A new organism walks or flies across the earth. Swarms are not created on planning boards. They just happen.

The history of the transmutation of the enslaved black to the person of Soul--the poet of the Harlem Renaissance, say--demonstrates the power of the ghetto. The creation of the modern woman as she moved from the isolation of farm and plantation to the city is another example.

The scholar studying 9/11, the commission investigating 9/11, the essayist offering deep thoughts about 9/11 will all be blowing smoke if they fail to recognize that it was an organism that flew into Twin Towers, an emergent creation, not twenty individual selves “recruited” separately, by bin Laden.

So now what? The evidence in hand--the only evidence available to any of us as he strives to do his bounden duty as a citizen--is sufficient to bring charges against certain government officials, much of the Senate and members of the 9/11 Commission, the leadership of the CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department as well as large contingents of publishers, editors and Op-Ed essayists and such before a grand jury of the World Court. I venture to predict that one day something of that sort will take place. To borrow from Robert Jackson at Nuremberg: The startlingly cruel, egregious bringing of the plagues of death, destruction and chaos to guiltless, destitute Afghanistan, a godforsaken, defenseless and helpless land not yet recovered from a merciless mauling by another mighty power, plus mindless worldwide support for the catastrophe, is behavior so gross that the world will need to take notice in order to try once more to make certain it happens “never again.”

The charge: Aiding and abetting atrocity, being defined as an unprovoked attack on innocents. But there is a troubling codicil to this. If perchance a True Bill were to be handed down, whom would they indict? The scholarship of Ortega y Gasset as set forth in his, The Revolt of the Masses, offers inspired insight. Whom to indict, you ask? Ortega replies that it is you and I. We have met the enemy and it is us.

“This stable, normal relation amongst men which is known as `rule' never rests on force; on the contrary… rule is always based on public opinion.” (p. 128 of paperback.)

In other words, societies get what they ask for. It is we who sinned.

Reizman, Glazer and Denney in their work, The Lonely Crowd, struck a nerve with their identification of “other-direction” as the tyrannous public-opinion-manipulator of our time. It, so they wrote, replaced inner-direction, by which, in general, is meant adherence to scripture. Thus, while there was a modicum of freedom of thought and speech in the inner-directed box, there is none, nor can there be, in a society held hostage by theocratic masses. And all masses are theocratic and single-minded, because masses in common with the “Soul” of the black population and the unisex swagger of Thoroughly Modern Maureens (who wonder in print if men are necessary) are emergent wholes. Both Ortega and Riesman et al were writing about narrowly defined aspects of a new whole without, I think, fully appreciating the import of what they were sensing. They were focusing on parts of the elephant, not the whole animal. Thus they were, in a way, missing the point.

Just as it required long centuries for commonsense to acknowledge that the earth is neither flat nor stationary; that measurement is not an absolute, that parallel lines have no choice but to meet in curved space and so on, so it will take many centuries for commonsense to make its peace with the startling disappearance of the individual from history. Art, always the first to know, has adjusted. Wylie Sypher, in a splendid little book titled Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art, chronicles the disappearance. Today, any visitor to a major art museum, the Guggenheim in particular, perhaps, can view the phenomenon with his/her own eyes.

An organism such as a swarm, for example, is hypersensitive. It surrenders to madness when disturbed. Once rampaging, it organizes lynching parties and thirsts after blood. French and Russian revolutionaries alike prated foolishly on and on about the holy purposes of bloodletting. Richard Pipes in his monumental, The Russian Revolution, writes extensively and learnedly about these rationalizations of mad revolutionary leaders as they chant, “Kill for the love of Kali,” or similar slogans. He concludes his chapter on the murders of Tsar Nicholas II and his family with this observation: “When a government arrogates to itself the power to kill people not because of what they had done or even might do, but because their death is `needed,' we are entering an entirely new moral realm.” Is it thinkable that America began shedding Afghani blood before it had any proof that anyone in that poor nation had the least involvement with the attack on Twin Towers? Did the “need” to slake our thirst for blood sanction atrocity? If, as Ortega argues, I asked for that, how am I different from Pol Pot?

*

The stink grows ever more acrid. There is, for instance, unrelenting blather about “terrorists.” No suggestion is heard that these “terrorists” might best be understood as patriots seeking to wrest control of their nations' resources from imperialists. So there can be no negotiations between the name-caller and the ones insulted. That leaves the field to brute force.

One final thought: Yes, indeed, this essay could be improved by a rewrite, but my effort is not to write well but to offer an opposing view to that which threatens to destroy Western Civilization. But getting opposing views into the conversation stream isn't easy. Norbert Wiener in his classic, The Human Side of Human Beings, a study of cybernetics, makes the point that without feedback every mechanism can be expected to malfunction. But the media are more echo chamber than the geese of Rome. Even Jefferson himself took note of media misbehavior, as did Spengler, Danilevsky and an army of commentators. So it is unlikely that this voice will be heard. It's too “controversial.” What a hoot.

Afghanistan is a full-fledged atrocity. Does a whore who charges $1 get reviled as a whore while one who charges $500 wins applause? Are we Americans less to be censured than Germans of 1939?

Well, gotta run. Think on it kids, think on it.