The Monsters

By Fe Bongolan

 The whole aim of politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — and menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken

I’m sure many of you remember Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episode from 1960 called “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” In the story, when a pleasant suburban American neighborhood experiences a series of small intermittent power outages, the disruption causes the residents to degenerate into suspicion and accusation. Fear takes over, and the residents descend into full-blown panic and ultimately riot. As the ending revealed, in order to destroy human beings all it took was to disrupt basic services, let rumor and imagination run unchecked and the self-destruction of the community would do the rest.

Over forty years later — the moment that September 11 morning began, all it took was a country reeling from a violent blow, followed by the hint, the allegation, the jimmied-up evidence — to begin our decade long descent into further divisiveness and fear. Our necessary assailant was conveniently found, blame was spread over a wide swath, and fingers of suspicion pointed without corroborating evidence. All you had to be was Muslim or have a funny, foreign-sounding name. Or be a liberal.

What followed to this day has been ten years of a shrinking and distortion of our national character. Knowledge and science have become suspect. Mosques are vandalized, burned or bombed, Muslim-American children bullied in school by students and teachers. The threat of Sharia Law is bandied about in the same way Senator Joe McCarthy used the word “communist” in the 1950s. This decade, I finally understood how low we’ve descended when books appeared on the shelves lionizing Joseph McCarthy, a man whose claim to fame was the blacklisting and persecution of American socialists (liberals). And we let it happen. The monsters were no longer due. They were here all along.

Over a week has passed since May 1st and the death of Usama bin Laden, and I am still in a quandry over his death. Should we have killed him or brought him to trial? Set aside the fact that after much hoo-ha over the placement of a mosque three blocks from Ground Zero, the City of New York refused to try alleged 9-11 co-conspirator Khalid Sheikh Muhamed in a New York civilian court. Set aside the enormous burden for security costs to imprison Usama, and confronting a possible uprising his imprisonment would create in an already unstable Muslim world. Whether the death of bin Laden happened years ago and Obama put the myth to rest, or he actually killed him May 1st, 2011, my conscience is troubled as to why we did not capture and try him. This country does not seem to want the normal wheels of justice turned for the ‘devil’ himself.

What have we become?  Now that the boogeyman is dead, would asking questions that demand just a moment of reflection be a bad thing to do? What, in questioning the guilt or innocence of the assailant in question, are we afraid of finding out about ourselves?

On cue, 48 hours after last Sunday night’s announcement by President Obama of the death of Usama bin Laden at the hands of the Navy SEALs, the diesel-fueled mighty Wurlitzer organ of the former regime dragged itself into our living rooms to bask in the killing of bin Laden as their victory. Taking it one step further, Bush Administration torture enabler John Yoo said the President made a mistake in killing bin Laden. Bin Laden should have been brought in and tortured into providing valuable information on Al-Qaeda. Taking the route most natural to their modus operendi, they doubled-down. It’s not enough just to kill him. They should have tortured him, put him through a mock trial, found him guilty and THEN killed him. I guess anything less, like just simply killing him, is being a “pussy”. The Victim-Persecutor-Redeemer syndrome synonymous with the Bush Administration is in full force.

I know you understand that everything you’re about to see in the next year and a half takes place in the shadow of the general elections of 2012, and fear will certainly be an element used for control of your mind and your vote. It is a familiar rut, having been dug like a trench in your head the last ten years with terrorists, border-crossing illegal immigrants, minorities and old people who ‘will be stealing your tax dollars’. Someone will be taking away your freedom and your money. Whoever it is that planted that suspicion in your head wants to dig that trench deeper. And of course, there will be fringe elements of this society who will continue to use that rut to swim in.

The ‘fill-in-the-blank-name-of-perceived-threat’ has been a successful model since centuries before the Twilight Zone, and efforts will continue to paint dark corners in the room of our national psyche even as we attempt to turn on the lights, to get on with the business of fixing what really needs to be fixed. Even as you try to paint over old dark stains, darkness bleeds through. I’m not sure what it will take to scrape away at the layers of what we’ve attempted to cover over the decades from years of war, profit, greed and degradation of the world, which is why I’ve peppered my articles of late with more questions and less certainty.

Maybe that lack of certainty is good. It’s a time to refresh choices of paths to take, and thoughts to think. It’s a little seed of doubt to quell the ‘certainty’ that we — out of fear — thought we needed, which led us into years of bad decisions that took us places we never should have gone. This moment in time, with a boogeyman dead and the world in flux, brings with it an opportunity to evolve.

Fear is always with us. It is part of our hard wiring and helpful for survival. But with history coming at us so fast, and technology and weaponry so deadly that it could kill the world, we are perched at the brink of being swallowed by monsters of fear or the salvation of self-discovery. Recognizing patterns is a form of self-scrutiny and sanity. Naming our patterns re-invigorates our individual power. Remembering what we need to do — learning the lessons of history — may give us tools we need to climb out of the rut. We need to remember where we are, what neighborhood we’re in. We need to light candles when and if the power goes out.