On the 9th of January, Presidential Candidate Clark declared that if he were President 9/11 would never have happened and if he wins this election, another 9/11 will not happen. He guaranteed it.
Here’s one of the stories: http://www.detnews.com/2004/politics/0401/11/politics-31662.htm.
It was really something, and when I shared the general’s claims with my good friend Paul Bunyan, he became incensed at the irresponsibility of the quote. I wrote him and asked: What do you think?
Starting directly below is what he wrote back to me, and then me to him, on down to our conclusions about what taking a position such as this might mean. So unlike normal email threads, this one is stacked so you can read it top to bottom.
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From: Paul Bunyan
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2004 2:17 PM
To: Uncle Sam
Subject: Re: FW: pull over buddy
I am so sad, so angry, so disappointed…so really, really alarmed… by the stupidity of these guys who want to pretend to run this country. It’s weird that almost everyone seems to agree that the way to win an election to speak completely irresponsibly.
Not only is guaranteeing security either total bullshit or a promise of a police state (and even then still bullshit), but it’s also just a really bad thing to say, a bad thread to launch, a bad meme to propogate. ANd not only that, it’s more of this kind of shit that all the Dems are doing that may or may help them win a few primary votes, but which completely distorts and trashes the political discourse of the party as a whole, and hurts everbody’s chances in the general elec.
–Paul Bunyan
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Yeah the clark thing is so weird. I have a buddy who is working for him. Clark is COOL in the “cool media” — you have to be this way — sort of way. He’s a Modern TV Guy. A CNN guy. And from my media studies, those are the folks who can win. The question for me is the degree to which he’s a person of conviction, of caring, of his own mind. He’s a little too cute alright, and maybe up against George that would stand out more.However.I love the quote. Insofar as words are what they are, which is a simulacrum of what is truly possible, I like what he said. They can’t hurt us. I’ve been wanting somebody to say this for a long time. In the language of what passes for American politics, it’s fucking awesome. He’s just saying no. Do you kind of see my angle?~ Uncle Sam
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At 07:54 PM 1/9/2004, Paul Bunyan wrote:
Not any. 1) You can’t ever say this can’t happen. 2) To say 9/11 was Bush’s fault is to criticize him for the wrong things. Even if Bush did the thing (which is not true), or even passively allowed it for political reasons (still not true but at least possible), it’s the wrong thing to criticize him for. What clark is essentially saying is I would have been more facist than he. WHich is the wrong way to go.
The democratic thing is as you said, is about, we make happen more money, more sex, more happiness. The victory path is not to say, yeah I could beat those evildoers better. Its to say, we didn’t have these evildoers at all when we were president. let’s get back to living good life and stop focusing on all this negative shit. I think every time we go to orange alert or some fucking embarassing ridiculous shit like that and nothing happens, 500,00 votes shift over to the dem side. Only thing is, one more terrorist attack on U.S. soil under any conditions and 5 million votes shift over the other way.
Clark can say it doesn’t matter, he can say we will conquer it by other means, he can say it’s bushes fault even, but he can’t say I can prevent such things. It’s just not true and it’s a false hope and phony and riding for a fall. A football team can guarantee a victory, but no one can guarantee “security” which does not exist.
–Paul Bunyan
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From: Paul Bunyan
Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004
9:54 PM
To: Uncle Sam
Subject: RE: FW: pull over buddy/incompetence fear and love
Uncle Sam wrote: I may be in the minority, but I can’t discount that Bush & Co. ignored certain information for political reasons. You really don’t believe that? To whatever extent that means he “did” it I will leave for minds more philosophical than mind to determine. Paul Bunyan replied: Nope. I stick to my dogma. Incompetence explains nearly everything. Fear and love fight it out for what’s left. I think the level at which they passively have responsibility exists, but at a few removes.
It’s like, should we take the Hart/Rudman study seriously?–and then the answer is no, and there’s a semi-unconscious check mark in a mental box that says, kick this out cause it’s a win-win, either there is no threat or if there is, it’s good for us. But I don’t think there was any specific ignoring of intelligence specific to the WTC, for example. And then of course there’s the fact that what Hart/Rudman expected (I’m guessing) was 200 dead in a first domestic incident, not 3000.
Even though some people did see the idea of the jet plane attack, still it would have been 3 figures dead, and not 4, even at the WTC if not for the structural collapse, and I don’t think anybody took it that far. So if that’s the kind of collusion you mean, then o.k.“I could have stopped it. If I am president it won’t happen.” Of course it’s not criticizing him for the right things. It’s an absurd thing, for sure, for Clark to say.
But we aren’t arguing about the comments’ trueness, or how well it reflects on the candidate. All that has nothing to do with the fact that I love the quote as one of the greatest American quotes I have ever heard. Let me say this about that. I think in these times we got to get our love where we find it. If you give me Tyson I’ll give you Clark. “I could have stopped it. If I am president it won’t happen.” It’s so crazy, so wonderfully crazy, so fucking smart about distilling what kind of discourse would count for distinguishing itself from the drumbeat we’re getting inundated with. It is also something I love, which is swinging for the fences. It’s the first thing that shows me this guy wants to win. I like that. And it’s obviously what the politicos sitting in the meeting must have been saying to one another.
Here, I’ll give it a whirl: “Well, dammit, the only thing that’s going to beat Bush is if we have him say: ‘If I am president I will protect you. I won’t use fear as a tool. I know what I’m doing. I’ll fix it. I know how to listen to intelligence. I honestly think if I was in charge I would have figured it out better than these idiots did. I would have stopped it. So vote for me, and if I win, I promise we won’t be living in that environment where we’re terrified all the time. We’re better than that.’”And then they just hit upon it. Fuck it, he’s just gotta go out there and say it. It’s either going to sink him or it will elevate him, but it will show that we simply won’t have it. It’s so amazingly American. Just say no.
No, we’re not living in Bush’s world.O.K., you had to really hammer away at me, but I can see now the beauty of Clark’s statement. Especially because the second part of it is actually True. The fact is that things will happen–heck, even Timothy McVeigh happened, and so did ted bundy even and all that. The subtext of all, all, all is the NY Nuke, and it either will or won’t happen. But the team doesn’t need to know the details, they need the Tao (what Clark calls the “right way”), and the Tao relevant to this issue is the mode of living in which we will be o.k. if it doesn’t happen, and, more importantly, will even be o.k. if it does happen. And this is possible, as painful as it is even to think about, which is why the team doesn’t need to know about it.
But Bush is giving us a fragile world in which the blow will finish us, he’s giving us a world of preemptive war and religious hatred, whereas there is another world which Clark expresses just about right: “there is nothing that can hurt us if we stay united and move together and have a vision for moving to the future the right way.”Bush is using the insane fear of terror to increase his hold on power. duh. That is the sick reality of the day. You must see that. I think, dammit, I know, every time we go on agent orange alert 500K votes go to the _republican side_. My point is/was this. I agree, of course, the very idea even of creating terror-alerts and then implementing them certainly creates republicans and has been already described by some weird combination of Orwell and Huxley.
But what I was talking about is that these guys, both in Iraq and domestically are paying somewhat slightly for their dogmatism, in the slight corrective of nature that is the tiny and possibly insignificant edge that truth has, by not getting the facts right, even though they’ve got the propaganda game iced. They are crying wolf, cause they really don;t know anything, cause their intellingece sucks, and are just rolling the dice by calling these alert conditions. The last time they rang the alarm before this one–I think it was the 2002 aniversary of 9/11–nothing at all happened, and a NYTimes piece many months later said that sources inside that process said that they had been totally played by a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. No I am not assuming that people know that, but I am assuming that people noticed that the alarm rang for no fucking reason, and that it was rung again lat month in the same way.
Yes, Bush’s guys are smart, and they learned form the last time and realized that this time they had to create fake events, like the cordoning of a number of flights, and yes, I know this probably worked to some degree, i.e. that most people are not aware that all of the security shit that happened was total bullshit, but I still think that even pure TV-watchers can tally it up: 2 Orange ALerts, no atacks and no arrests related to those alerts. If the sock-monkey declared his romper-room Condition Orange and then, subsequently, anything, terrorist-wise, actually happened, or if there were even any significant news-story (even of jessica lynch like fabricatedness) of some prevention of anything, then yes, I agree, many republicans would be created.
But my point was that they have blown it so far. Which I have to say is puzzling, and very encouraging in what it says about how deep the resources of Evil are. The whole thing about terroism is that it is the ultimate of the practical, and Bush and Sharon are simultaneously its “enemies” and its indispensible allies. Anything that Bush does to stay in power, and any perception of there being a need for a man like him to combat terror, are things that any self-respecting “Al-Qaeda” would want to support with everything it’s got. The fact that Macy’s wasn’t blown up (not even a little bit) on christmas leads me to believe simply that they could not do it, because reenforcing Bush’s claim that the Orange COndition actually meant anything would do everything they want to do.
Again I see it as incompetence on both sides. Bush rolled the dice. Call the alert, and lose a little if nothing happens, gain a whole lot if it does. It’s like going for it on fourth down on the opponent’s 30. But still, he didn’t get the first down, and I insist that this erodes his credibility. And again, my point was that this is an incremental erosion–one single terror attack of large magnitude on our soil before the election and all this is washed away. One negative point for calling an alert and having nothing terroristic happen. 100 positive points for having anything happen at any time before the election, no matter what the alert status, and it wipes away all the incremental shit.
Yes, there’s a backlash, but let’s first assent to raw brute force reality. Most people are just plain folks and this shit sounds scary! Certainly the whole Hitlerian terror alert and homeland defense thing works. I’m only talking about the little chinks in its armor.So on the level of meaning where anybody would know that making a claim like that is asinine, I say to those people that cancels out with the sheer audacity of the statement, and how deeply it represents congealed denial, wish fulfillment and the American dream. So you can’t ding it for being wrong. He gets a get out of jail free card on being factually wrong or stating the impossible because he fucking said it, said the thing everybody, deep in their bones, was longing to hear (that’s why you’re reacting to it so strongly the other way).
Yeah. And he gets it because any moron knows that’s impossible, so then, what’s he really saying? You have to get past your purist upsetness that someone would say such a thing. Because it’s clear that it’s unenforceable. But again, that’s depending on how you look at it. Either way though, that’s done with. What’s left is the sense that there’s a guy willing to say he’s going to change reality. Reagan kind of did it with the hostages, and to such a dramatic extent that that apparent reality vanished the day he took office.
And of course the amazing thing is the historical fact that he negotiated with the Iranians prior to the election–who had been going to release the hostages in the fall–promising them stuff (arms I think) to wait until he was in. You know this stuff already right? But the thing remains that he was a guy who made it work as you say. It was like the malaise was over. Most of America needs a strong, kind, warm looking president that will make it all OK. And you can’t hate people for wanting that. And you can’t hate it when somebody tries to give it to ‘em. Of course that’s not what we ultimately want. We want real consciousness.
But I promise you that the hope (and hope, I claim, is the remainder of that equation) represented, though in a very twisted way, in that home run swing, is inextricably between our present state of collective unconsciousness and denial and true consciousness: actually being aware and strong enough to live in the real world. I know. ANd I know you can’t tell the team “well these guys might kill us all along with your wives and babies, but still we might win…” But my point is, it freaks me out. It still seems like you promise them that the other team won’t even get a first down and you are riding for a fall..cause they are going to get that first down and then what do you say?–Paul Bunyan- Uncle Sam
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At 02:38 PM 1/9/2004, you wrote:
Uncle Sam wrote today to his buddy Paul Bunyan:I think we’re agreeing that the overkill of pushing the alarm has a backlash effect. All I’m saying is that’s in the context of the initial effect of creating the alarm reality to begin with. So 5 million people switched to being very afraid, i.e., Republicans, and sure, OK, sum total of both of the Crying Wolfs, I’ll give you 500,000. Except I think my 5 million is low.OK, on to your last and final question. Everybody knows the best way to make something happen is to visualize it.
Or to stop something is to visualize it not happening. So his quote is crucial to at least the chance that collectively we could have some impact on what it might be possible for terrorists to do. More than that, it’s deeply populistic. It’s even to the point of countenancing a militia, the idea that the government is the people, that we can be a society that works together to protect itself. So the 1st half of the answer is that what’s established if he wins is something of that reality. Then the 2nd half, and what happens if and when a bad thing happens is that the spirit of how we rally is different, because no one will be mad at him for letting us down. All that will be left is the residual goodheartedness. We’re a team is the way it’s gotta be. No matter what.
– Uncle Sam
