Living Through the Age of Denial in America

I found the following article and edited it down to a somewhat reasonable size. It is from Tom Englehart and the full text can be seen here:http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/52924.html

"I was born, after all, just a year and a few weeks before the United States atomically incinerated Hiroshima and then followed up by atomically obliterating the city of Nagasaki, and World War II ended. Victory arrived, but amid scenes of planetary carnage, genocide, and devastation on a scale and over an expanse previously unimaginable...

The logic of war's developing machinery seemedto be leading inexorably in just that direction. Otherwise, how do you explain the way the United States and the Soviet Union, long after both superpowers had the ability to destroy all human life on Planet Earth, simply could not stop upgrading and adding to their nuclear arsenals...

It was as if the two powers were preparing for the destruction of many planets. Such a war would have given the fullest meaning to "world" and no ocean, no line of defenses, would have left any continent, any place, out of the mix. This is what World War III, whose name would have had to be given prospectively, might have meant (and, ofcourse, could still mean)...It was, of course, this world of war from which, in 1945, the United States emerged triumphant...On a planet many of whose great cities were now largely rubble, a world of refugee camps and privation, a world destroyed.. the U.S. was untouched...

The world war had, in fact, leveled all its rivals and made the U.S. a powerhouse of economic expansion. That war and the atomic bomb had somehow ushered in a golden age of abundanceand consumerism. All the deferred dreams and desires of depression and wartime America -- the washing machine, the TV set, the toaster, the automobile, the suburban house, you name it -- were suddenly available to significant numbers ofAmericans. The U.S. military began to demobilize and the former troops returned not to rubble, but to new tract homes and G.I. Bill educations...The taste of ashes may have been in global mouths, but the taste of nectar (or, at least, Coca Cola) was in American ones. And yet all of this was shadowed by our own "victory weapon," by the dark train of thought that led quickly to scenarios of our own destruction in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, in movies, and on TV (think, "The TwilightZone")...The young, with their own pocket money to spend just as they pleased for the first time in history -- teens on the verge of becoming "trendsetters" -- found themselves plunged into a mordant, yet strangely thrilling world... "Triumphialist despair"...

At the economic and governmental level, the 24/7 world of sunny consumerism increasingly merged with the 24/7world of dark atomic alerts, of ever vigilant armadas of nuclear-armed planes ready to take off on a moment's notice to obliterate the Soviets. ["99 Red Balloons"] After all, the peaceable giants of consumer production now doubled as the militarized giants of weapons production. A military Keynesianism drove theU.S. economy toward a form of consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and atomic submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The companies -- General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others -- producing the icons of the American home were also major contractors developing the weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance...

Think of all this as the beginning not so much of the American (half) Century, but of an American Age of Denial that lasted until… well, I think we can actually date it… until September 11, 2001, the day that "changed everything." ...by now, it's far clearer just what the attacks of that day, the collapse of those towers, the murder of thousands, did change -- and of just how terrible, how craven but, given our previous history, how unsurprising the response to it actually was...

Those dates -- 1945-2001 -- 56 years in which life was organized, to a significant degree, to safeguard Americans from an "atomic Pearl Harbor," from the thought that two great oceans were no longer protection enough for this continent, that the United States was now part of a world capable of being laid low. In those years, the sun of good fortune shone steadily on the U.S. of A., even as American newspapers, just weeks after Hiroshima, began drawing concentric circles of destruction around American cities and imagining their future in ruins. Think of this as the shadow story of that era, the gnawing anxiety at the edge of abundance..

At the very moment when, without the Soviet Union, the U.S. might have accepted its own long-term vulnerability and begun working toward a world in which destruction was less obviously on the agenda, the U.S. government instead embarked, like the Greatest of Great Powers..on a series of neocolonial wars on the peripheries. It began building up a constellation of new military bases in and around the oil heartlands of theplanet, while reinforcing a military and technological might meant to brook no future opponents. Orwell's famous phrase from his novel 1984, "war is peace," was operative well before the second Bush administration entered office...

Call this a Mr. Spock moment, one where you just wanted to say "illogical." With only one superpower left, the American Age of Denial didn't dissipate. It only deepened and any serious assessment of the real planet we were all living on was carefully avoided...

And Americans? Don't think that George W. Bush was the first to urge us to "sacrifice" by spending our money and visiting Disney World. That was the story of the 1990s and it represented the deepestof all denials, a complete shading of the eyes from any reasonably possible future. If the world was flat, then why shouldn't we drive blissfully right offits edge? The SUV, the subprime mortgage, the McMansion in the distant suburb, the 100-mile commute to work… you name it, we did it...And while we were burning oil and spending money we often didn't have, and at prodigious rates, "globalization" was slowly making its way to the impoverished backlands of Afghanistan...

This, of course, brings us almost to our own moment. To the neocons, putting on their pith helmets and planning their Project for a New American Century (meant to be just like the old nineteenth century, only larger, better, and all-American), the only force that really mattered in the world was the American military, which would rule the day, and the Bush administration, initially made up of so many of them, unsurprisingly agreed. This would prove to be one of the great misreadings of the nature of power in our world...

On September 11, 2001, the Age of Denial endedin the "mushroom cloud" of the World Trade Center. It was no mistake that, within 24 hours, the site where the towers had gone down was declared to be "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion. Of course, nosuch explosion had happened, nor had an apocalypse of destruction actually occurred. No city, continent, or planet had been vaporized, but for Americans, secretly waiting all those decades for their "victory weapon" to come home, itbriefly looked that way...

The shock of discovering for the first time and in a gut way that the continental United States, too, could be at some planetary epicenter of destruction was indeed immense. In the media, apocalypticmoments -- anthrax, plagues, dirty bombs -- only multiplied and most Americans, still safe in theirhomes, hunkered down in fear to await various doom-laden scenarios that would never happen. In the meantime, other encroaching but unpalatable globalizing realities, ranging from America's "oil addiction" to climate change, would continue to be assiduously ignored. In the U.S., this was, you might say, the real "inconvenient truth" of these years...

The response to 9/11 was, to say the least, striking -- and craven in the extreme. Although the Bushadministration's Global War on Terror (aka World War IV) has been pictured many ways, it has never, I suspect, been seen for what it most truly may have been: a desperate and fierce rearguard action to extend the American Age of Denial. We would, as the President urged right after 9/11, show our confidence in the American system by acting as though nothing had happened and, of course, paying that visit to Disney World. In the meantime, as "commander-in-chief" he wouldwall us in and fight a "global war" to stave off the forces threatening us. Better yet, that war would once again be on their soil, not ours, forever andever, amen...

The message of 9/11 was, in truth, clear enough -- quite outside the issue of who was delivering it for what purpose. It was: Here is the future of the United States; try as you might, like it or not, you are about to become part of the painful, modern history of this planet...And the irony that went with it was this: The fiercer the response, the more we tried to force the cost of denial of this central reality on others, the faster history -- that grim shadow story of the Cold War era -- seemed to approach...

if I were to boil all this down to postcard size, I might write:

Here's our hope: History surprised us and we got through. Somehow. In that worst of all centuries, the last one, the worst didn't happen, not by a longshot.

Here's the problem: It still could happen -- and, 64 years later, in more ways than anyone once imagined.

Here's a provisional conclusion:And it will happen, somehow or other, unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we surprise ourselves and the United States ends its age of denial.

And a little p.s.: It's not too late. We -- we Americans -- could still do something that mattered when it comes to the fate of the Earth.