The Speedy Citizen

The collection, “Who Defended the Country,” with title essay by Elaine Scarry and reply remarks by a host of well-known scholars like Richard Falk, Ellen Willis, Antonia Chayes, and others, invites us to re-examine our roles as citizens within a particularly postmodern frame. Scarry argues against the centralized war power now exercised by the U.S. government and encourages the populace to endorse a more egalitarian, distributed form of national defense. Together with her commentators, Scarry analyzes the events of 9/11 in an effort to articulate the duties of individual and collective national citizenship. While thinking about the agency or passivity inherent in American citizenship is nothing new, neither in contemporary nor historical discourse ranging from Tocqueville to Unger, this collection employs some vital, particularly postmodern concepts which not only help us to consider the ways we enact our citizenry, but also invite us to reshape our conceptions of democracy and empire. The collection assists us in asking what it means to be a citizen of a democracy, what constitutes contemporary boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and what “national ground,” “territory,” and “affiliation” entail in the increasingly blurred spaces of ideological and geographical placement. Ultimately, the text alerts us to the ways our discursive terms highlight the problematic contradictions of democratic forms.

Scarry begins her essay with the observation that the United States had difficulty defending itself on 9/11. Noting that defending our country is “an obligation we all share” (3), Scarry seeks to explore how our national defense systems can be improved through citizen involvement. While Scarry’s impulse to provoke us, as citizens, into participatory governance is laudatory, she serves us even more importantly by inviting us to explore what “we as a country” means. By thinking about the link between individual or group identification and responsibility for the maintenance of the structures comprising the “country” we purportedly need to “defend,” Scarry and the text’s other authors unravel the notion of agency’s relationship to “country” while pondering several postmodern themes already in discursive play: speed, space, and motion.

A main tenet of Scarry’s argument is that the speed with which nuclear war can be initiated without citizen consent stands in stark contrast to the extensive time the government had, and failed, to respond to the hijackers before they flew into the Pentagon. According to Scarry, this disparity demonstrates the government’s inadequate defense of the nation and its inappropriate usurping of control over the potentially more effective populace. Scarry’s concerns about the government’s ability to act hastily, without citizen consent, in the event of a nuclear attack echoes contemporary fears about the irreversible and dangerous levels of speed American culture is already witnessing in multiple arenas. From popular cinematic hits, including one actually titled “Speed,” to research being conducted on faster connections through fiber optics, culture is no doubt reacting to a world that, in temporality and architecture, arguably leaves the human behind and bereft. Scarry’s points about speed are troubling. She claims, for instance, that the Constitution has been bypassed by the country’s doctrine of Presidential First Use of nuclear weapons, because officials argue that the “pace of modern life” does not allow time for consulting Congress or citizens before a nuclear strike. Scarry movingly juxtaposes deadly force with the beneficial potential for communication between the government and the populace in her ironic statement that “with planes and weapons traveling faster than the speed of sound, what sense does it make to have a lot of sentences we have no time to hear?” (5). Noting that the need for speed has been invoked by the government in recent history to explain the centralization of war power as opposed to the distribution of consent across the citizenry (14), Scarry argues that time should not pose as an excuse for refusing to involve the American public in key policy decisions.

Several of the respondents to Scarry embrace the discourse...