The Bush regime is probably unprecedented in human history for the rate at which it makes actual policy proposals that are impossible to satirize. There are such things out there as informal “celebrity death” betting pools, where cubicle denizens gather around the water cooler to make morbid wagers on who will croak next. (The dogged crew of wishful thinkers who have been pulling for Strom Thurmond finally collected their money this year.) But who would have thought that a government department would propose that this exercise should be given the imprimatur of the state, with millions to be made from assassinations, embassy takeovers, bombings, and the like?
The “Terrorism Futures” scheme was ludicrous enough that the regime had to repudiate it just days before its implementation. The fact remains that a grown-up human being somewhere in the bowels of the Department of “Defense” actually thought this up and proposed it in something other than an April Fools’ Day memo, and enough other people in that same department thought that it was a legitimate subject for policy discussion at the national level.
It is difficult to discern whether the masterminds of the scheme were trying to come up with the most arcane way to make even more money on human misfortune, or whether they truly believed the rationale that their betting pool would help them predict terrorist attacks because the “market” would reveal “hidden information.” There is reason to believe it was the latter — and that is an unsettling fact.
To understand the depth of this pathology, we need to go back over fifty years, to the beginnings of the nuclear age. From the day the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there has been a consistent attempt to rationalize and explain the Bomb’s necessity. The rationalizers had their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, when people like Herman Kahn and the RAND think-tank devised models for a “winnable” nuclear war in which “only” 20 million, or 50 million, or 100 million people died. Theirs was the age of technical-managerial liberalism, when it was thought that the “best and brightest” need only rationally apply their minds to the task in order to solve all human problems, or at least to make a “limited” nuclear holocaust conceivable as a legitimate option in confronting an implacable foe. C. Wright Mills called this outlook “crackpot realism.”
The New Right knocked the technical-managerial liberals from their “big government” pedestal, and installed in their place the ideology of “the market.” All along, their aim was a practical one: to allow rich people to fleece the public as much as possible while knocking back any conceivable political challenge to their prerogatives. Their ideology, however, was based on the idea that “the market” was the best conveyor of “hidden information” ever devised, the cure for the diseases of all “central planning” and “collectivist” utopias.
It appears that enough people in the Pentagon were convinced that the privatization of as many government functions as possible would bring desirable results. It is unsurprising, in fact, that the program was supported by John Poindexter — Bush’s designee for “Total Information Awareness” — who himself helped Oliver North set up an illegal private gun-running network when Congress proved insufficiently enthusiastic about helping the contras blow up health clinics and cooperatives in Nicaragua. This is the crackpot realism of our day.
I have always been bothered by the style of George Bush jokes favored by liberals — ones about his mangled syntax, his barroom posturing, his overall stupidity. I have argued that the issue is not Bush’s stupidity, if only because the people around him have a well-planned, thought-out, and single-minded agenda, and they are equipped with a fanatical will and discipline to carry it out. And yet it is at moments like this that we all realize that even that is not the whole story — because above all, in many cases, we are dealing here with people who are not entirely rational.
Think about your reaction when you first heard this news. After you realized it wasn’t a hoax, I mean. You found yourself asking the obvious questions that for some reason did *not* get asked anywhere along the line, before the whole issue ended up before Congress (e.g., “If someone stands to gain $50 million from a coup in Thailand, what’s to stop them from spending $30 million to *foment* a coup in Thailand?”). But you then went on to other, weirder questions. If they did this, how would they regulate it? How would they stop “insider trading”? Some version of the SEC?
At this point, you had to stop because of the inescapable fact that merely considering the “terrorism futures” market is completely and unambiguously insane. When it reached Congress, they should not only have demanded the immediate firing of anyone who proposed it, but should have recommended that whoever did it be brought in for an immediate psychiatric evaluation. And yet here was the Bush regime, a bit embarrassed by the whole thing, but quickly disowning it as if it were only a slight excess rather than an exercise in unadulterated lunacy. That you could contemplate its implementation even for a moment is evidence of the particularly corrosive effect that this regime has on the political culture, so that everything it touches becomes infected with a dose of its madness.
Proponents of anti-colonial movements of liberation, confronted with the problems that national independence often created, still like to point out that even a wretched domestic regime is preferable to the indignity of foreign domination. The Bush years have added a corollary to that doctrine for the United States: we should prefer an enemy in the White House whose motivations we can at least explain, to an enemy in the White House not all of whose followers can confidently be said to hail from the same planet as the rest of the human race.
“Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” — Amilcar Cabral
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