The Global Homeland State: Bush's Biopolitical Settlement

The following remarks constitute an effort to interpret the Bush administration's alteration of the regulatory fictions through which government policymakers exercise normative control over the population. They are grounded in the assumption that the state's master fictions are freighted with metaphorical significance and possessed of performative force that characteristically separates "what happened" from the capacity to supply the representations through which what happened becomes meaningful. The mythological themes—"Virgin Land," "Redeemer Nation," "American Adam," "Nature's Nation," "Errand into the Wilderness"—sedimented within these master narratives supply the transformational grammar through which the state attempts to shape the public's understanding of contemporary political and historical events. The state's powers of governance depend in part on its recourse to this regulatory intertext that transmits a normative system of values and beliefs from generation to generation. After they subordinate historical events to these mythological themes, the government's policymakers are empowered to fashion imaginary resolutions of actual historical dilemmas. ¹

But the catastrophic events that took place at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, precipitated a "reality" that the national metanarratives could neither comprehend nor master. In his September 20, 2001, address to the nation, President George W. Bush provided a symbolic reply that inaugurated a symbolic drama that was partly autonomous of the events that called it forth. The address to the nation was designed to lessen the events' traumatizing power through the provision of an imaginary response to a disaster that could not otherwise be assimilated to the preexisting order of things:

On September 11, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country. Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941. Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning. . . . Americans have known surprise attacks, but never before on thousands of civilians. . . . All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world. . . . I will not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it. . . . Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.

As the harbinger for the invariant core beliefs prerequisite to the reordering of reality, the national mythology supplied the master fictions to which Bush appealed to authorize the state's actions. The executive phrases in Bush's address alluded to mythological themes embedded within the governing fictions. These phrases also inaugurated a symbolic drama that would subsequently transform the primary integers in the narrative the nation had formerly told itself into terms—Ground Zero, Homeland, Operation Enduring Justice, Operation Iraqi Freedom—that authorized the Bush administration's state of emergency. Specifically, the state's symbolic response to 9/11 replaced Virgin Land ("Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil") with Ground Zero ("Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning") and the Homeland ("Americans have known surprise attacks, but never before on thousands of civilians") as the governing metaphors through which to come to terms with the attack. The spectacular military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed Bush's September 20 address accomplished the conversion of these metaphors into historical facts. ²

When George Bush cited the historically accurate fact that "with the exception of a Sunday in 1941," the United States had not been subject to foreign invasion, he linked the public's belief in the myth of Virgin Land with the historical record. But when he did so, Bush did not supply U.S. publics with historical grounds for the collective belief in Virgin Land. The myth that America was a virgin land...