> Well, yeah, but... "We" aren't the ones getting attacked in Iraq. Our
> soldiers invaded the country, and Iraqis are trying to blow them up.
> "We" wouldn't be getting attacked if "we" hadn't gone there in the
> first place.
Well, yeah, but... that's the way you and I and all of our friends think about it, but a lot of plain ol' Amur'cans think, "Hey, we were on the way to making the place a showplace of democracy, and then that firebrand Sadr and the ex-Saddam-lovers started seriously shooting at our boys and girls, so of course we have to hit them hard." (BTW, isn't it interesting how these labels like "firebrand" get stuck on a person who gets prominently mentioned in the media and never come off, as though they were the person's first name? E.g., "May I introduce Mr. Firebrand Sadr, the Iraqi celebrity?")
Same thing happened with Vietnam -- Americans got absolutely outraged about the treatment of American prisoners of war in "Hanoi Hilton," etc. (and it wasn't very good treatment), but couldn't get it into their heads for the life of them that we had no business invading the country in the first place.
> And it was NYC that was attacked on 9/11, and we (no quotation marks)
> were among the least bellicose people in the U.S. People in the
> heartland, who are more likely to get hit by a tornado than a 747 or a
> dirty bomb, were the ones really out for blood. Human nature is a very
> plastic thing.
I hope you read the NY Times article that I pointed to; it's not by any means the final story on the subject (no scientific study ever is), but it has a lot to ponder in it. The basic point is that all of this stuff is emotional -- of course, you and I and all our friends are very rational, sensible people (especially the New Yorkers :-) ), so we don't pay attention to emotions most of the time. But international relations, once you get outside the narrow circle of people who analyze the subject deeply, is 95% emotion. (Even the professional analyzers of international relations have a lot of emotions about the subject, which they usually don't look into very closely.)
Remember the "1,000-year-old man"? (A Mel Brooks routine, I think.) He was a caveman who somehow survived to the present, and kept being interviewed by a reporter. One day the reporter asked him if there were national anthems back then. "Yes, indeed," the TYOM replied. "Every cave had one." "Can you remember yours?" "Sure -- it started out [singing off-key:], 'They can all go to hell except for Cave 72!' "
The psychological study suggested that in order to maintain good self-esteem, people need to feel that they belong to a group, which they rely on for safety. Then, if they feel insecure or angry, they have to boost their self-esteem by finding outsider groups to stereotype and express hostility towards.
I don't know how a sophisticated analysis of the contrast you point out (a very true one, I think), between the blase New Yorkers and the bloody-minded heartland Americans after 9/11, would run, but I might suggest that: (1) The New Yorkers, especially those in the lower part of Manhattan, I assume, were plenty shaken up that morning, but once it became clear that it was just the two planes, they reverted to the normal New Yorker mode of existence, which is coping with minor and major disasters as SOP. Hey -- it's New York, right? Whaddaya expect, for Chrissakes? Whereas out in the heartland, people are used to a somewhat more peaceful environment. And after all, one plane did crash-land in Western PA, which is certainly the heartland; it didn't fall on anyone, if I remember correctly, but it very well could have.
(2) Ordinary Amur'cans, unlike folks like us (or at least me, to speak for myself), have a rather intense emotional identification with the nation. So they have an intense need to constantly prove that they are members in good standing of the group which they rely on to protect them. And remember, this protection is not just a matter of simple physical security, it is all emotional -- your country protects you from whatever symbolic spooky evil entities might be running around in the universe (which of course are really things in people's heads). The strong appeal of the alien abduction myth, and the Area 74 (or whatever the number is) thing, is an example of this. It's a free-floating sort of anxiety about something, whatever, lurking out there and about to get us; we need a strong nation to protect us from these nasty beasties, whatever they are. And the sudden loss of 3,000 people, which lots of Americans watched live on TV (I certainly did) from wherever they were, no doubt energized (I think the Freudians say "cathected") this whole complex of emotions.
None of this makes rational sense, I repeat, and I'm not trying to justify these ideas in the majority's heads -- it's all silly, of course. But leftists who want to understand how the heads of the majority work, and I would submit that we'd better try as hard as we can to understand ordinary folks, silly as they sometimes seem to be, have got to take this kind of thing into consideration. Otherwise we don't have a prayer of connecting with the majority on the level of consciousness they are actually on.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt