WMD

Terrorists will try to use Weapons of Mass Destruction in America in the next two years, predicts the Bush administration. Say, doesn’t that include election year? I guess we’d better reelect these folks who are taking such good care of the country. What with Syria harboring terrorists and now Iran touted as a nuclear threat, we sure are glad we’ve conquered Iraq and are hard at work turning it into an American military base and oil well, surrounded by civil chaos.

So what if none of these WMDs are found in Iraq. The most important WMDs are in your minds and hearts anyway. The focus of your fears.

We’re too busy to read biographies of Karl Rove, or Joan Didion’s reporting going back to Bush the Elder that lay out the dangers in scandalously transparent detail. Despite their supposed piety, nothing is sacred to these people but power. They will manipulate every issue and emotion for one purpose: to keep and extend their power. Right now the Bush administration is as dangerous to America as Hitler and the Nazis were to Germany in the 1930s. (Of course, Americans would never commit such violence on a race or class as the Nazis did with the Jews. Never mind that our concentration camps are full of mostly one race, comprising a high proportion of said race, and we execute mostly one class, with some eugenic benefits when they also happen to be retarded.)

We’re so fixated on the latest flavor of fear, so attuned to novelty in our favorite WMDs, that a recently signed pact between the U.S. and Russia promising to reduce their arsenals of nuclear weapons by two-thirds came and went unnoticed. Apart from the mutual cynicism masking a tiny bit of actual progress (at least as measured against standing arsenals, if not previous agreements), this is a disquieting suggestion of how used to the idea of nuclear weapons we’ve become.

It’s been forty years since the nuclear test ban treaty, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis made the awful prospect of nuclear holocaust a clear and present danger. It’s been 58 years since Hiroshima; only fading codgers were around for that, and only retirees remember the days of desert booms and fallout in the backyard. Nuclear war is no longer the sum of all fears (especially if an a-bomb dropped in Baltimore doesn’t disrupt the Beltway too much.) So impoverished is our imagination that it seems quite thinkable that we’ll see a nuclear bomb—not a so-called “dirty” bomb, which is just some explosives that spread a little radiation and a lot of panic, but a bona fide big bang nuke---used by some country against an enemy—before the decade is out, perhaps well before any more chi-chi WMDs. We came close to the first actual nuclear exchange just a year or so ago, and India and Pakistan have not exactly resolved their differences since.

This is not to downgrade the dangers of your favorite WMD; biological and chemical and soon genetic weapons can be deployed cheaply and by small groups, and pretty soon by individuals who find automatic weapons too limiting. It would be nice if our leaders were actually doing something about these dangers other than trying to scare us into voting for them and increasing their power, but of course that's your usual liberal wishful thinking. No, the likelihood of a big bang is just a predictable consequence of our apathy. The nuclear threat has been around so long without anything much ever happening, and people no longer fear it, that it just becomes more likely that it will finally be fulfilled, and we'll see what it really looks like (that is, if we don't happen to be real close to where it happens.) Bet the cable channels can't wait.