Traumnovelle: Waking From the Dream of Osama

I am denser at times; I have read this three times and I will come back tomorrow.

There is something disjointed about your post; but the topic is disjointed.

I recall the MSM showing that tape of Taliban officials hitting veiled women with sticks who had not properly honored the uniform code of conduct. Afghanistan was getting set up for invasion.

Really good propaganda juxtaposing the stick hitting Taliban with the planes hitting the towers.

But then....

Belushi gives that speech in Animal House calling all his brothers to arms; this is what George W reminded me of when he switched gears and started yelling Sadam Sadam instead of Osama Osama!

All I could think of with no net and only cable news was: WHAT THE HELL?

I mean talk about the theatre of absurd!

THEY kill three thousand of ours and we kill hundreds of thousands of them. But that is okay because we throw a trillion or so into rebuilding both war zones.

Were we scared of being invaded? Or did we just wish revenge?

Well acting on both emotions we reelected a guy who years before 9/11/01--8 full months as Prez--had said:

WE'RE GOIN INTO IRAQ, FIND A WAY!

We receive the government we vote for.

We receive what we deserve.

Have Iraqis and Afghanis received what they deserve?

See I told you I was asea on this.

Your post leaves me disjointed!

ha

Good post!

The young lady at my work, a bright, recent college graduate, who expressed Wednesday afternoon her earnest "skepticism" that a plane could ever knock down a building. 

I hope you reminded her that in New York, two planes knocked down three buildings.

If we are a nation of dreamers, then we deserve the world we wake up to. Dreams are nothing more than an exercise in mental play acting at the subconscious level. One must disassociate a dream from reality simply because dreams aren't focused or based on facts. And it's that refusal to separate fact from fiction that's at issue.

IMO, many people accepted the Dream of Osama as offered by the Administration rather than deal with the reality it posed. They accepted the colored coded alerts and they accepted the restraint on civil liberties as a means to justify the ends. And many firmly believed Osama had them personally in his gun sights too.

In short, Osama was the propaganda tool needed to convince a majority of the public their Constitutional rights and guarantees were a threat to the order and stability necessary for America to capture him and bring him to justice.

Bu$h and the GOPer's declared war on the boogie-man and the public accepted the terms. In the end, the sacrifices the public made by relinquishing their mandated rights and privileges for the common good of the nation weren't necessary...they never were in the first place. Unfortunately, once a right or privilege has been surrendered, it would take an act of Congress to reinstate. And this Congress isn't too keen on giving the public the government they deserve...rather they're more inclined to eliminate more.

If anything, Osama was a god sent to the GOper's party platform to strip the public of their social contract. If anyone doubts that, then explain to me what's going on at the state level, please?

So one has to ask...what will the majority of the public do when they awake from the dream and realize they're living in a nightmare of their own neglect because they preferred the fiction offered rather than deal with the facts they could see?

 To end the fake dream of perfect security through permanent war.  To end the magical thinking.  Toward mere relative security without the war.  This is the challenge, and the opportunity, and the necessity, Mr. President, of leading a people out of their Traumnovelle and into a wakeful day.

That says it.  Nice work A-man.

Very nice, and this part made me wonder, because it sounded too good:

Trauma, after all, is a cousin of the word traum, or dream, in German.

So, I looked it up:

That's not to say you're wrong. I mean, you just said it was a "cousin", which could mean so many things. Regardless of etymology, it's thought-provoking word-play.

The rest of your piece is excellent as well.

Interesting. Individuals can nearly all point to a moment when everything changed. Always for the worst. When she said she wouldn't marry you. When the car went off the road. When you had to declare bankruptcy. 

They don't haunt you every minute or even every day. But neither do they go away. Forty years later you think how things might have been . In Rosalie's Good Eats Cafe (never mind ) Rose wonders how things would have been if he'd stayed.

For a while Pearl Harbor was like that . For Jews, the Holocaust.Now for the Nation there's that hour on 9/11 when we were waiting for the helicopters to come to start plucking people off the roof and then our- the world's - shared nightmare began.. 

My daughter worked across the square. After the first plane she went down and stood in the entrance  looking at the smoke . And watched the second plane hit.

Everybody has a story like that. 

It was good when 90% of the country thought Bush was doing a good job. That didn't include me but even I thought he was exactly right in the National Cathedral. And when he threw out the first ball at the world series he seemed brave. It was wrong of him to spoil that moment by the tawdry Iraq adventure. 

But I suppose he couldn't help it.

...........we are inroduced to Goodness every day,

            He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect

           But wears a stammer like a decoration:

           And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;

           It is Evil that is helpless like a lover

          And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,

          And both are openly destroyed before our eyes

Auden: Herman Melville

Probably the finest piece I've read on this strange post-OBL break in time.

Now, to make up for saying something nice to A-man, here are some counterpoints -

I don't know if "magical thinking" is completely fair, nor does it necessarily do the best job of explaining the psychological dynamics at work. 9/11 I think wasn't so much a trauma about lives lost, or violation. It was a total blowing open of possibilities. There are certain things that just ... can't ... happen. Wittgenstein talks in his work On Certainty of so-called "hinge propositions", beliefs that hold our world together. Among them he mentions belief in external physical reality, assumptions that such things like buildings ... can't ... just disappear into thin air. And in a sense that basic background assumption vanished on 9/11.

Watching the WTC go down was unreal - not because we were losing a sense of the distinction between reality and dreamstate. It was unreal because reality wasn't supposed to operate that way. That wasn't in the realm of possibility. As a result it "unhinged" our sense of what to expect, what we could count on. And that creates a loss not just of certainty but of control.

And so you get the kind of lashing out - gung-ho Friedmanite assertions that we needed to go curb-stomping some brown people somewhere. To regain a sense of control. I don't think anyone believed - in any serious sense - the rationale for the Iraq war. But there was some kind of visceral need for something along those lines.

And you get the kind of wild and wacky theories about what had happened and was happening and what they were planning to have happen. Because uncertainty breeds suspicion. And a loss of faith and confidence in those who were supposed to be in control of events.

And that is why the Age of Terror was also the Age of Nonsense - a time of up-is-down, tax-cuts-increase-revenues, fight-them-there-so-we-don't-have-to-fight-them-here, heck-of-a-job-Brownie. Of course it didn't help to have a Think-with-your-gut President, but rationality naturally takes a back seat when one is just trying to reestablish some semblance of control over the world one inhabits, when time is out of joint and you're just hoping that something somewhere slams it back into place.

In short, it's not that we bought into any and all stories the powers that be were hocking, and it's not that everyone just cooked up their own kooky version of reality in a fit of apophenia. The need for a narrative was secondary all along. As for now, has that sense of disoriented insecurity subsided? I don't know. Maybe not enough just to turn the page on terror and go back to the carefree nineties. The president needs to do more than just pivot off the Bin Laden killing by saying end-of-story.

I remember being in London the weeks after the 7/7 attacks. And here I was, a tanned Asian-looking character riding the rush-hour tube with ... a big heavy book bag. I could sense people straining not to look at me. Sure, the unease was palpable. But the main sense you got was that of people straining not to give in to the sensations the terrorists wanted them to have. That to them was letting the terrorists win. Of course they have a history of dealing with that kind of threat, and the requisite knee-jerk resistance to fear is inculcated early and has deep roots.

it's not that the UK overall is doing all that much better on this score, but its the kind of reflex attitude towards terrorism and the security-state that is a prerequisite to walking back the prevailing jingoism and acquiescence in ceding civil liberties. I don't think a nice little story from the President is going to do the job.

Interesting one, A-man. And thanks for jump-starting us away from the drivel/debate about front vs back of head or whatever.

I think you're in the right dancehall on this one (which too few bloggers have entered), though this take still reads a bit as if there are two or three songs playing. You know, maybe it's only one song, but just slightly out of synch... or maybe different songs entirely. Can't tell yet. For instance, you've got terms like dream, magical thinking, narrative, awake-to-regular-reality-on-earth and trauma-reality... and they're all in play... so it's probably worthwhile for people to ponder on some of those distinctions and connections.

[And I say this while agreeing with you 108% on the need for this to be made into a turning point toward something better. The problem is that it's all a bit Inceptiony at present, where we need to know which dream to wake up from, which one is a creation of others, who are just manipulating us, instilling magical thinking that works in their favour.]

*

What strikes me is this (and it comes out of your use of the term "pivot.") A storyline, a narrative, that runs deep, is one which has been retold thousands of times, celebrated a thousand times, lived out in its variants and renamed and recoloured a thousand times. Those kinds of stories feel "nailed down," embedded in our "real world," not just floating through our neurons. I picture them like ribbons, with thousands of nails through them, til they're basically hammered down through the carpet and right into the floor, so that we can't hope to shift them more than an inch or so, and that only at the loose end. Those are the old established stories. Like, say, Christmas. We get great variants, Dickens, Grinch, Charlie Brown - but they all kinda hafta stick to the path. The Grinch cannot take away Christmas.

Whereas other stories come in and feel new, shocking. It's as though they're only tacked down into the Earth in one place, and so have enormous amounts of swing, degrees of freedom. Thus, they can "pivot." But with these ones, you can make up 100 backstories. And also project them forward along 100 different paths. In many ways, that's what 9/11 looked like, felt like, and that was how the story played.

For instance, we - the great unwashed - really didn't have much idea where Osama came from. Or what the hell motivated him. What his story was. If you listen to 9/11 stories, you'll hear again and again about that "blue sky." They came out of a blue sky. There was nothing there, no hint, no forewarning, no reason. Even though we know NOW that there was, what with previous attacks and all, Osama and his attack all felt - in story terms - for 99% of people - like it came out of a blue sky.

And so, Bush and co. were free to tug that ribbon and tack it down however they liked. So... Osama had no reason for the attack, other than he hated our freedoms. So, for starters, he had to pay. And we were told he had sneaky, miserable, evil allies. And he and they would do it again. So we better do what needed to be done to stop him, and them. Over there.

End story. Didn't need much else. That was enough.

And what such a minimal storyline allowed was great freedom in how the story proceeded. Hell, since it was only really tacked down in the one or two places, you could stretch that ribbon til it took in allllllll sorts of evil allies. And since we didn't know anything about where he went when he escaped, so much the better, he could be anywhere.

[Meanwhile, a million people spent their time trying out a million different configurations of that ribbon. Not sure we can say 99% were "magical thinking." There really are a hell of a lot of tacks and facts that just aren't there.]

What Obama has done is drive a very large, heavy-duty nail into the Osama story. And he's now standing there, holding one end of the ribbon. And surprisingly, there's still a lot of it, and it's still got a lot of play. People never mentally imagined we were closing in on Osama, gonna get him, wrap the story up, just needing that last little tap tap tap of the final tack in place.

So now Obama has to - gets to - tell the story. Retell it. And if you watch close, I'd say the WH and Military are using all the rules of national mythmaking and storytelling, by making sure NOT to nail down too many details. Keep it cloudy. That way, you've got maximum leeway in deciding where you want to go next.

I think a lot of us have our wishes about where he should go, and the term "pivot" fairly accurately describes what we'd actually like to see - a near-reversal of course from this idiotic storyline we've just been down. Not many of us feel this pivot should just be a 5 degree course adjustment - nope, we're looking for something more like a 180. Because to us, a War on Terror sounds almost medieval, insane.  

*

Where I think we can err - and it needn't be a terminal or tragic difference, just one we need to watch - is if we too narrowly define what is "awake," the "really really real reality." We probably need to avoid too hard and fast a claim that our narrative is so solid that IT is taking us out of a dream, out of magical thinking, and taking us back to earth, back to reality. Sure, we ALL feel that, at some level. Which is fine.

But I think once we recognize the fundamental ignorance of the human beings in this life... the way many many "events" just don't have enough facts to nail them down tightly... once we remember the centrality of story-telling and story-making to how we all think, that it just IS how we think... then we realize that the ground is a bit shifty for all of us. 

Sure, some things are more solid than others. No Jews died in 9/11? It's not all that hard to find the names of Jews who died in the buildings. But did we keep Osama on ice? That's a bit mistier. Apparently, we knew something was likely up since, what, last August? And now the Wikileaks docs say we had the courier's name and the town he was in since 2005 or somesuch? I'm not clear on these details, but just to say, there's a bit of play in that particular strand. And the way Osama's killing was done, and followed up, as I say, it doesn't look entirely like our major aim is to shock us all back "awake" or bring us back to Earth. i.e. If so, we could have hauled his body around on tour, had people poke their fingers into the wounds in his head, etc.  

Which is to say, where we're going is not from a completely made up storyline back to reality. It's more like we're going from story to story. But... with a bit of effort we can drive some more solid nails into the earth, tie this ribbon into more of what we know, make more connections, thicken it a bit. Not leave it waving in the wind, completely free of facts, able to take on whatever shape we want, when we want it.

My personal hope is that with such a strong hold on one end of the Osama storyline, Obama will choose to give it a sharp tug, and tear out a few of the flimsier tacks that have been put into it (like Hussein being part of it), giving himself even more leeway as he retells the story of what just happened. Maybe he can retell it, from start to finish, only this time talk about how Osama didn't actually come out of a blue sky, but we had warnings, and maybe even that there were... motivations and connections and causes that enabled 9/11, beyond "hating freedom."

And then, I hope he gives it a sharp pull forward, in a new direction.

Of course, Obama doesn't have to do it all, there are other storytellers. 

But a story, a dream there has to be. Let's just make this one one a little less hateful, a bit more full of goodness and humanity. 

Very intriquing blog.  There's a lot there to ponder and mix around.  I wish I had more time right now to respond to it.  But I agree with pretty much with what Quinn wrote.  Especially - we aren't so much going from story to reality, but from story to story.  Which is what we (humans) have always done since we started pontificating around the fires.   And it isn't a bad thing.  It is part of who we are.  A big question is what kind of story are we telling ourselves, but also the degree we are skeptical that we know what it is that we are trying to tell.  A lot of actors standing around asking "what's my motivation?" when they should be in therapy dealing with the traumas that are a part of life.

I would also say the dreams in the 50s for many Americans were simplier, but less in tune with the world.  There was the general boom of prosperity and people had a luxury of not looking beyond the nicely cut grass of their neighborhoods.  And they didn't have to ignore what was happening in places like Africa or South America.  It took something like Edward R. Murrow's Harvest of Shame to begin to shake the folks from their deep silent dream in the 50s that not all was well.

As we attempt to alter the narrative, bend the dream toward something that resonates as more fully humane and sane, we might just need to keep the words of Murrow in our head.  "Good night, and good luck."

Conspiracy thinking in the aftermath of nine-eleven may be a way to encapsulate an enormity that couldn't be experienced by all for what it was but what gave these ideas legs was the way the Bush administration immediately used the attack to do things they had been thinking about doing for years before they had the power to do them.

Sometimes we have dreams that are not true and we know they aren't prophecy but are very disturbing because they might as well be true.

Starting around the Sputnik era, American sociologists began writing that individuals in our society inhabit a joint dreamlike state in which direct experience is subsumed by a druglike immersion in a "society of spectacle." Books like The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, and The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America.

In any case, to look for the president to lead us into a state of awakening is asking a lot.