Quotes of the day:

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, Without a Doubt, New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004)

“[Before the war] Intelligence officials were convinced that American soldiers would be greeted warmly when they pushed into southern Iraq, so a C.I.A. operative suggested sneaking hundreds of small American flags into the country for grateful Iraqis to wave at their liberators. The agency would capture the spectacle on film and beam it throughout the Arab world. It would be the ultimate information operation… The agency believed that many of the towns were ‘ours,’ said one former staff officer who attended the session. ‘At first, it was going to be U.S. flags,’ he said, ‘and then it was going to be Iraqi flags. The flags are probably still sitting in a bag somewhere.’” (Michael R. Gordon, Poor Intelligence Misled Troops About Risk of Drawn-Out War,” New York Times, October 20, 2004)

What a world! Everyone his own auteur. Everybody from CIA agents and Presidential political consultants to Osama bin Laden directing his own movie or unreality TV show. Of course, why should we be surprised? When it comes to saleable products, illusion Hollywood-style has been up there with weaponry as a major American export success for countless years. And the world has paid attention. I can’t claim that Osama bin Laden ever saw The Towering Inferno or any of the action-adventure dramas where subways barrel down streets, blimps threaten crowded stadiums, or terrorists unleash nuclear weapons on an unsuspecting world. But retro-fundamentalist though he might be, and no matter how often he invokes the Arabian peninsula of centuries ago, he’s a distinctly modern man.

Without the camera — and the knowledge that, whatever you do wherever you are, the camera will somehow be there to catch the moment (viz. Abu Ghraib) and then the TV news will be ready and willing to play it again, and again, and again — the attacks of 9/11 would have been almost inconceivable. They would have made next to no sense. They were, after all, planned and organized as fodder for the TV news, as Osama’s Hollywood-style spectacle, his “export” to be viewed by the world. Similarly, George Bush’s illusion-based bubble-presidency had been planned and organized as an ongoing spectacle of controlled imagery from early on — from those imaginary mushroom clouds rising over our cities to that aircraft-carrier strut. After all, every publicly made argument for our little Iraqi war that won’t end was an illusion, and that’s stopped no one in the administration, then or now.

If there hadn’t been an even grander illusion evoked by the event that began it all, nothing would have developed as it did. As columnist James Carroll writes this week in the Boston Globe (10/19):

“After decades [following the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] of implicitly waiting for the mushroom cloud to appear over the nation, we saw the clouds of ash rising from the World Trade Center as a version of that horror. As I heard the scholar John Dower observe, the use of the term ‘Ground Zero’ in New York is an unconscious appropriation of the authentic Ground Zeros in Japan. That is why 9/11 traumatized us out of all proportion to the scale of destruction, which, while tragic, was hardly world-historic.”

Or put another way: With the help of those camera-ready images, those unbearable shots of the two towers crumbling, and then crumbling again, and yet again, director Osama bin Laden, a man of exceedingly grandiose ambitions and distinctly limited resources, managed on the proverbial shoe-string budget to create his own apocalyptic film in lower Manhattan (though not in Washington, where the low-slung Pentagon, proved far less photogenic). With the help of a little dismally good luck in the category of destruction, he brought home nuclear-holocaust-style images that had until then, for Americans, been confined to a world of on-screen illusion; hence the almost immediate and blanket adoption of “Ground Zero” in the media and in everyday conversation for the site where the Twin Towers fell. And he did so with box-cutters, mace, and airplanes, not with WMD. What resulted was a fearful illusion that far exceeded a fearful reality, and so launched a presidency based on a principle of illusion onto the path of full-scale war in the Middle East, and into the sort of disaster — the sort of reality — that is painfully unphotogenic, that in the end no illusions can completely cover up.

Even in our world, reality still does have a way of biting back. If the Iraqis weren’t quite in the mood to wave little flags, if reality (however buried in illusion) insists every now and then on making itself felt, well, that may be inconvenient indeed; but as Jonathan Schell indicates in a recent essay, we’re less far than we might imagine from a world in which an Orwellian formula like “illusion is reality” could indeed pass muster — as it already seems to in the White House.

Schell’s piece, “Invitation to a Degraded World,” is as well a preview for a new magazine, Final Edition, just being launched and closed down at one and the same moment. In a world where nothing happens just once, the idea of a magazine that appears and disappears in the flicker of a single issue appeals to me. Its editor, Wallace Shawn, writes in a brief introduction:

“In confusing times and bad times, it seems natural to collect around oneself a group of friends and people one trusts, to try to figure things out. So that’s what this is. It’s not going to be an institution, because I don’t think everything has to be an institution, and sometimes the impulse to make things permanent can be a symptom of the grandiosity that is part of our problem. So that’s why this magazine is going out of business after its first issue and has therefore been given the name FINAL EDITION.”

The sole issue of the magazine (being distributed by Seven Stories Press) includes, in addition to the Schell essay, a piece by Shawn, a Noam Chomsky interview (also done by Shawn), a Mark Strand poem, and a story about New York in the wake of 9/11 by Deborah Eisenberg. In this world of illusions, it’s — however briefly — the real thing.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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