"Wanted, Dead or Alive"

What kind of State is that which is able to nip terrorism in the bud and eliminate it...? Does it not have to equip itself with its own terrorism and in doing so simply generalize terror at all levels? What is the real price for such security and are we all seriously dreaming about this?

Jean Baudrillard[1]

Introduction: “I don’t like this movie” (a remark by a U.S. Marine during the Vietnam War, reported in Michael Herr’s Dispatches)

A body falling through the air from over 90 stories up; a doomed worker, hopelessly waiving a white flag from a window near the top; the two towers imploding with thousands still trapped inside! It was like a disaster movie without a touch of redemption. I wanted to see it as the worst film I has ever seen. But it happened, and, to borrow one of Don DeLillo’s expressions, it was like “an aberration in the heartland of the real.” And now perhaps the worst is yet to come.

When George Dubya initially reacted to the events of September 11, he appeared to be hankering for a “Wild West” solution. He wanted to — here I use the venerable yet paradoxical phrase — “bring to justice” Osama Bin Laden. Of course, as Richard Slotkin has pointed out, in one of our dominant collective imaginaries, we are a “gunfighter nation.” Pointing to Western films as the genre within which the territorial extension of Euro American national culture (the westward moving frontier of violence) has been mythologized and legitimated throughout the twentieth century, Slotkin dismisses the more pacific, contractual models of the evolution of American nationhood.[2]

Certainly the imagery has found its way into popular as well as official culture. When I heard Bush’s remark, I thought of an episode of the HBO production, The Sopranos. Tony Soprano’s Uncle Junior says to his head hit man, who is thirsting for violent revenge against some of Tony’s overly exuberant minions, “Take it easy, we’re not making a Western here.” And, while pondering the western scenario that the President (and Junior) evoked, I recalled the revenge-happy antics that emerged throughout the U.S. in America’s Centennial Year, right after General Custer and his cavalry regiment were wiped out by Crazy Horse and his Sioux warriors. Evan Connell’s remarks, in his account of the events following the Battle of Little Big Horn, fit our current situation:

Reaction throughout the country was no different in 1876 than it is today upon receipt of similar news: shock, followed by disbelief, fury, and a slavering appetite for revenge.[3]

In the1876 episode, “volunteers popped up like daisies in April” (in “of all places,” Sioux City and in Salt Lake City, Springfield Illinois, and throughout several states, including Arkansas, Nevada, Tennessee, and Texas), egged on by a revenge-lusting media. Among the more incendiary statements in the press was an editorial in the Chicago Tribune: “In every case where an inoffensive citizen is slain, let 100 of these red brutes feel the power of a rope properly adjusted under their chins.” And in an articulation reminiscent of President Bush’s, “a group of schoolboys [in Custer’s birthplace of New Rumsley, Ohio] took an oath — ‘each with his right hand upraised over a McGuffey First Reader’ — to kill Sitting Bull on sight.”[4]

Connell notes that “a few reflective people could be heard among those of letter writers, volunteers, and schoolboys in knickers, but not many.”[5] At least in this respect, the current situation is not as grim. More than a few “self-reflective people” can be heard. But at the level of official decision-making, and in mainstream media, revenge, strategy and logistics monopolize the agenda. Although, unlike the situation in 1876, the prime adversaries are not easy to locate, and although, as the Secretary of Defense put it, Afghanistan lacks “high value targets,” the U. S., U. K. and some others are proceeding (as I write) with a military assault on Afghanistan, having decided that they must punish the country within which the alleged mastermind resides.

So perhaps, as...