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You Can’t Wake Up People Who Ain’t Asleep: J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

UnderCurrents of the East Bay and Beyond
Friday September 10, 2004

Once back South, some years ago, I passed a half-hour or so that could have been used for good fishing time trying to convince an old segregationist about an instance of racial injustice. Afterwards, T.C. Brown, who used to keep me in line, led me out of the meeting by the arm with a quiet lecture on the theory of time-waste. “Boy,” she said, “don’t you know you can’t wake up somebody what ain’t ‘sleep?” 

Comes the waning days of the presidential election of 2004, and my good Democratic Party friends find themselves in similar circumstances. 

They stream out from the Michael Moore movie, convinced that in the president’s seven minutes following the second Twin Tower attack, they have found the secret of their electoral salvation. They wave those seven silent minutes as a banner to the as-yet-unswayed masses in Joplin and Massilon and Alaquippa, shouting, “Don’t you see? Don't you see? It shows that Bush is not a leader! It shows that he is not in charge!” 

I suspect that in answer, a good portion of the American electorate is saying, quietly, under their breaths, “And thank God for that. What’s your point?” The great demonstration of What George Did, after all, does not seem to have made much of a dent in the electoral math. 

And I suspect that is because you can’t wake up people who ain’t asleep. 

The war goes badly, for the American side. Seven U.S. soldiers die in a single act of ambush, the worst casualties since the dark days of bloody April. The cities of Najaf and Falujah are all aflame, and we are told by American commanders-somewhat sheepishly-that there are some portions of the country where U.S. forces will not even go. 

Democrats seem befuddled. Why has this not made a difference? 

Have not the various rationales for the Iraqi war long since vanished, like cold ice set upon desert sand? There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link between al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Far from arresting terrorism, our little tank-trot along the Tigris seems to be creating more terrorists in its terrible wake than we manage to kill. You would think that all would be disaster for the President’s prospects. And yet, as summer wanes, the polls begin to drift toward the red end of the spectrum, slightly but deliberately, like the temperature gauge of a car which cannot stop to replenish its water, but must barrel onward, towards its doom. 

Can't the people see?, my Democratic friends wail. 

In Iowa, Mr. Cheney twists the knife. “If we make the wrong choice [this November] then the danger is that we’ll get hit again,” he tells a Des Moines audience. “We’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint that the United States will fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we’re not really at war.” For those who do not quite get the point given the Vice President’s convoluted syntax, the Des Moines Register straightens it out by headline: “Cheney: Terrorists will attack if Bush loses.” 

But why do not these Iowans not realize, the Democrats wonder, that the “pre-9/11 mindset” actually belonged to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves, that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks occurred on their watch, while their eyes were averted elsewhere? How can Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney dance around the edge of this precipice, like Smeagol madly waving the Ring of Power above Oridúin, and not themselves tumble over into the abyss? 

We turn, for answers, to another familiar English fable. 

Near the end of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In The Willows, the Rat tells the homecoming Toad of the fall of his beloved Toad Hall to the stoats and weasels in what would be described these days as a terrorist attack. 

“A band of weasels, armed to the teeth, crept silently up the carriage-drive to the front entrance,” the Rat says. “The Mole and the Badger were sitting by the fire in the smoking-room, telling stories and suspecting nothing, … when those bloodthirsty villains broke down the doors and rushed in upon them from every side. They made the best fight they could, but what was the good? They were unarmed, and taken by surprise, and what can two animals do against hundreds? They took and beat them severely with sticks, those two poor faithful creatures, and turned them out into the cold and the wet, with many insulting and uncalled-for remarks! … And the Wild Wooders have been living in Toad Hall ever since… Eating your grub, and drinking your drink, and making bad jokes about you, and singing vulgar songs… And they’re telling the tradespeople and everybody that they’ve come to stay for good.” 

Toad is despondent and ready to give up his ancestral home, until the Badger outlines a plan to sneak into the Hall by a secret, underground passageway and retake the dwelling by force. Thence the celebration-of-anticipation begins. 

“‘We shall creep out quietly into the butler’s pantry-’ cried the Mole. 

‘-with our pistols and swords and sticks-’ shouted the Rat. 

‘-and rush in upon them,’ said the Badger. 

‘-and whack ‘em, and whack ‘em, and whack ‘em!’ cried the Toad in ecstasy, running round and round the room, and jumping over the chairs.” 

We were badly bloodied on September 11th, we Americans. We took a great hit, not so much to our national security as to our national psyche. Some three thousand gone, and we cannot shake that day’s images from our minds. Struck, we want to strike back, with all the weapons of mass destruction in our great and terrible arsenal. What is the use of such an arsenal, after all, if not for times like these? But there are no stoats and weasels around us to kill, because all the September 11th terrorists died in the September 11th attacks themselves, casting themselves into the fires even at the very moment they drove the dagger into our collective heart. 

And so, we seek their kin. Or any who associated with them, or even resembled them. Afghanistan did not last long enough. It did not satisfy enough. We wanted to whack ‘em, and whack ‘em, and whack ‘em, until their blood washes away the images imprinted on our brains. And so, on to Iraq, at whatever cost, and damn the justification. 

Why are so many Americans unmoved by the argument that Iraq is a war without logic, that the Iraqis possess neither threat nor culpability? Because for so many Americans, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with logic. It has everything to do with vengeance. And so you cannot wake so many of them from their slumber, because they are not ‘sleep. I wish this were not true, my friends, but I have lived among Americans for many years, and long and bitter experience tells me that it is. 

 

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