By Harry T. Cook

8/20/10

America has been stampeded by terror down a well-rutted road,
and it seems almost impossible now to turn back the madding crowd. If those
hurtling down it only knew: that road’s end is a desolation of emotional and
intellectual slavery.

We are told that our nation is waging a war against
terrorism. One may as well wage a war against syllogism.

The common wisdom is that weapons in sufficient number and
with sufficient firepower can and will in time subjugate the agencies of
terror. There is a fool’s errand, if ever one there was.

The Greek word for “terror” is also the Greek word for
“fear:” phobos, and in the works of Homer it frequently means “impetus to flight.”

A bird otherwise going about its business of hunting for food will fly away at
the slightest provocation. It knows not why, except that an instinct we would
call “fear” has animated its wings and actuated flight.

“Fear,” then, or “terror” are not the children of reason,
and therein is the worry.

It was a nearly unanimous passion that drove the invasion of
Afghanistan within months of 9/11 and of Iraq just 18 months later. Both were
to avenge the carnage wrought by the 19 assassins who hijacked four aircraft to
employ as weapons of mass destruction and to teach the world a lesson.

There are surely lessons in all of it, but they are
primarily for recalcitrant America to learn. The first lesson was and is that
the hunt for Osama bin-Laden was doomed to failure from the beginning, and even
if he had been taken — as George W. Bush was wont to say: “dead or alive” —
that would only have made anti-American grievances in the Muslim world more
intense.

As for the invasion of Iraq, we thought we knew then (and we
damned well know now) that it was in the works fully four years before 9/11 as
the neo-conservatives were laying their plans to return to power. (See Statement
of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, June 3, 1997.)

When it became convenient, the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs was cynically promulgated as fact.

Reading now those so-called “principles” with an eye to
analysis, one can see the basal fear underlying them: a xenophobic reaction to
developments abroad over which the United States would have no control and in
which its perceived self-interest would be compromised.

The George W. Bush years were given over in large part to
the pursuit of those principles where foreign policy was concerned. It is not
as if the United States had run a stick into a hornet’s nest. It aided and
abetted the building of that nest and then ran the stick into it. And we wonder
why we keep getting stung, cannot win, cannot withdraw with honor or without.

Such is the desolation that comes of giving in to fear and veiling
it in a pretense of muscular bravery.

I am in the midst of such a situation at this writing. I
have lived in the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan, first as a child from
birth to six years old and as an adult for most of the last quarter century —
a city whose commissioners this week, by a vote of 4-3, repealed a ban on the
open carrying of loaded firearms during a four-day street festival to take
place here over the Labor Day weekend.

The arguments for and against the repeal went this way: Representatives
of an extremist group known as
Michigan Open Carry flaunted their pieces in the city commission chambers over
several meetings in the last few weeks as they pressed the commissioners into
repealing the ban, threatening a suit if they did not. The open-carriers,
relying on a statute right out of the National Rifle Association’s manual of
disruption, warned that such a suit would be filed if, during the festival, a
police officer attempted to detain any one of them for displaying a weapon.
Three commissioners objected to what became the eventual
repeal. One of them, a practicing attorney, said it was the city’s duty to
protect not only its citizens but the thousands of visitors expected to attend
the festival and, moreover, courageously to challenge a statute that seems to
permit the open carrying of side arms in public.

He and two other commissioners were outvoted on the grounds
that “the city must obey the law,” regardless of how its leaders feel about it.
But in the mind of everyone present was the heavy financial toll such a suit could
levy upon an already straitened city. That may explain the pusillanimity of the
vote to repeal for which the city attorney rather blandly provided political
cover by parsing the state’s insane gun laws in a way that would make repeal
the obeying of them.

Fear drove the whole process. The gun guys say they fear
criminals attacking them and their families. The four aye-voting commissioners
fear the cost of a suit. Now the citizenry in general fear the specter of
strolling with their children through the city’s streets in the company of men
with holstered guns, who carry them, they say, out of fear.

The opposite of fear is courage — courage to face up and
into the prevailing winds of change, perceived danger, opposition and “the
thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”[1]

Thus: Milton’s “unconquerable will . . . and courage never
to submit or yield.”[2]

Fear as the enemy is a dead-end road, easier to enter than
to exit. Courage is the high road, the fast lane, the passage to enduring
freedom. Why succumb to fear, which is the animal reaction, when courage is the
human response?

[1] Wm.
Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, LL. 62-63

[2] John Milton,
Paradise Lost, Bk. 1, L.104