Living Blue in the Red States

18. Theater of Operations

18. Theater of Operations Donald Morrill Tampa, Florida, January 1, 2006 1. The teenaged Roman emperor Elagabalus (ad 218–222) sent minions forth into the empire to gather people with the biggest hernias. These unfortunates were then made to compete in athletic events at the palace baths. For his pleasure. See, the leadership isn’t so bad in America at present. Now close your eyes and get back to work. 2. All those checks on governmental power in the U.S. Constitution and yet little or no concern there about overbearing private power, no intimation that such a thing could tyrannize while perhaps retaining the outward forms of the Republic as an inspiring camouflage. Though the framers were skeptics and realists—and more than one was deeply schooled in the burgeoning technologies and economies of the time—none could envision, apparently, something like oil cartels or media combines (not to mention their nineteenth- and eighteenth -century predecessors) dominating the People, with hands on the levers of the public till. Or was there no way to admit such a thing and keep everybody in business who mattered to ratification? 256 Theater of Operations | 257 Also, not the slightest alertness in the Constitution to the powers of the image (though Ben Franklin—media man that he was—surely understood it well, urging administrative unity, for instance, as early as 1754, in the Pennsylvania Gazette, through a woodcut depicting the colonies as a chopped-up snake, with the caption,“Join, or Die”). Alas. Perhaps it is true that during the Enlightenment people still wanted to believe words mattered more than pictures, and that words would control pictures and would be controlled, in the end, by reason . 3. Last October, I presented the following hypothetical “deal”1 to a class of first-year writing students at the university where I teach (in response to one agitated student’s demand to know why the world was “so fucked up”—why it seemed few, if any, in Washington cared much about, say, the suffering inflicted by Hurricane Katrina, or about child poverty in the United States—or the vast poverty beyond our shores—while billions in tax cuts and rebates were pouring into the coffers of the richest 1 percent of the U.S. population and billions more, on credit, were disappearing into the national security pork barrel and the Iraq fiasco): A million dollars, tax-free, will be deposited in an off-shore bank account in your name; all you need do is write “yes” on the blank piece of paper before you. But if you write “yes,” a thirdworld peasant will be liquidated—with no legal consequences for you, of course. Simply write “yes” on the sheet . . . or “no” if you reject the bargain. Nothing else. Seven of nineteen wrote “yes.” I’m tempted to leave off my report of this incident with that last sentence . But I’m already far too sentimental about the obvious—about how certain phenomena are so overwhelmingly the case most everyone can acknowledge them; I forget how often wishes deface the facts. So: only two students remarked on the ethical implications of the class response, though the others—given their peculiar silence (the silence of disturbing recognition?)—seemed to sense how it illustrated one way ordinary people might become monstrous. 258 | Donald Morrill At last, one student did pluck up her courage and declare only a fool would not take the money and run. When asked, no student could offer a cogent definition of “public interest” or “social contract.” None could distinguish government from enterprise, not having heard of such a distinction, apparently. 4. “Oh, come on, they let 9/11 happen!”—how often we hear it, or a premise more or less similarly paranoid and/or aggressively knowing (and yet not always so far-fetched). Those who demand such conspiracy theories—the world run by an international camorra or an invisible regime-within-all-regimes—must find consolation (and perhaps aesthetic satisfaction) in the assertion of a malignant order. Better an awful purpose, they seem to be saying, than what appears to be chaos. What but design of darkness to appall If Design govern in a thing so small . . . —Robert Frost,“Design” 5. Me? Raised in a blue-collar family. But I’m neither blue state nor red, and I resent this misleading binary imposed for its high-contrast televalue . (It...