Monday, December 22, 2003
The Christmas Orange
Let no one think, just because Osama bin Laden lives in caves and looks and talks like Moses, that he's not a brilliant psychological warrior. Whether Al Qaeda launches a terrorist attack in the next week or not, the fact that they've succeeded in getting us to raise our terror alert level to orange just in time for the biggest holiday of the year is a hard shot to the body and mind.
Christmas American style is already an event that sits squarely at the conjunction of two sometimes-contradictory impulses that define us as a people--our religiosity (no matter whether it's the kind that's lived every day or the kind that's put on like a Santa hat on December 24) and our consumerism. The terror threat takes aim at both. The mere idea that the infidels (let's call them what we think they are in this context) might unleash some kind of indeterminate horror on us at this time confirms their evil. So if they were to strike us on the most sacred day of our year, the heinousness of the crime would be multiplied no matter what kind of a body count it produced. And if the threat of an attack dampens our desire to shop in the next few days (and experts differ on whether it will), the terrorists will have damaged something that, in the long run, means more to us than our religion--our economy, symbol of what makes us strong and free.
Some people wonder if the terror alert, first tipped on Friday before being raised on Sunday, is another Bush administration smokescreen manufactured to divert attention away from their defeats on the Jose Padilla and Guantanamo detention cases. I don't think so. If anything, it knocks the legs out from under the idea that the capture of Saddam Hussein made us safer from terror attack.
If you think about it, the vaunted five-level alert system has only two levels that are operational in a practical sense. Green, the lowest level, is one that will never be applicable until the lion really does lie down with the lamb and a little child shall lead them. Blue, general risk of attacks, seems to be the bare minimum achievable in a world with largely open borders and a sophisticated system of air travel, but it still presumes a level of general peaceablity among the human species that's not practical to achieve. Let's leave aside yellow and orange for a second to consider red--severe risk of attack. The nature of terror attacks makes it unlikely that we'd ever receive information fast enough for the bureaucracy to determine the need to go to this level. If this level is ever used, it would be in a local area--for example, if there were corroborated evidence that a suicide bomber was headed for New York City or something (rather like the story that sparked a flurry of concern last week).
So what we have are two levels--yellow and orange. Yellow is the modern condition, the natural outcome of 6,000 years of human history, which has resulted in the existence of people who want to terrorize and kill other people and have the technology and the wherewithal to attempt it. The relative openness of our borders makes it possible for them to get here and do just that. It was true before the alert system was invented and will always be true (absent a victory in the "war on terror," and regular readers of this feature know how likely I think that's going to be). Orange recognizes that sometimes we will have more than just the normal level of information ("chatter") about what terrorists are up to, which is what we've got this week. We don't know what they're planning, but they're up to more than the usual something.
The Department of Homeland Security has been reluctant to raise the level, particularly after the widely ridiculed orange-alert duct-tape freakout of last spring. So I'm guessing that this time, they didn't do it lightly and there's reason to worry. But how much good the alert does is questionable. A security analyst told NPR yesterday that the added vigilance and publicity of an orange alert might be enough to stop an attack operation from going forward. But it's unclear to me why terrorists couldn't just bide their time and use the return to yellow as a signal to go on with the operation. And Ridge's appearance on TV yesterday (his truly is the Face and Voice of Doom), in which he spun spectres of attacks worse than 9/11 and at the same time urged Americans to go about their business normally, contributes to the boy-crying-wolf problem inherent in the alerts. He's got to say what he said--first of all, he dares not downplay the threat in case it really does turn out to be big, and second, he dares not panic the populace by suggesting that they alter their regular routines. I have characterized this as "Go about your business normally but prepare to die"--which is not bad advice for mortal creatures such as we, whether threatened by terrorists or not, but doesn't really give us much we can use to help ourselves feel safer during the alert period.
Up here in Wisconsin, there's a grim tradition--each year on Christmas, it seems, we hear of a house fire somewhere, often in the Milwaukee area, that kills several children and gives a tragic tang to our celebrations. This year, we will be listening for something far more horrible. Merry Christmas, America.
One more thing: I don't think people who live outside of Wisconsin truly understand how we feel about Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. As much as they love Peyton Manning in Indiana or Steve McNair in Tennessee, our relationship with Favre is different, more personal. "He's like our cousin," my wife said this morning, and that's exactly right. Every family has a cousin who, if not exactly a black sheep, dabbles in shades of gray, and the free-spirited Favre is very much like that. So the news this morning that Favre's father died over the weekend hits every household in the state like the loss of an uncle. Although nobody would begrudge him taking the night off and breaking his record streak of consecutive games played, he won't. Favre will play tonight in Oakland before returning to Mississippi for funeral services over Christmas.
Let no one think, just because Osama bin Laden lives in caves and looks and talks like Moses, that he's not a brilliant psychological warrior. Whether Al Qaeda launches a terrorist attack in the next week or not, the fact that they've succeeded in getting us to raise our terror alert level to orange just in time for the biggest holiday of the year is a hard shot to the body and mind.
Christmas American style is already an event that sits squarely at the conjunction of two sometimes-contradictory impulses that define us as a people--our religiosity (no matter whether it's the kind that's lived every day or the kind that's put on like a Santa hat on December 24) and our consumerism. The terror threat takes aim at both. The mere idea that the infidels (let's call them what we think they are in this context) might unleash some kind of indeterminate horror on us at this time confirms their evil. So if they were to strike us on the most sacred day of our year, the heinousness of the crime would be multiplied no matter what kind of a body count it produced. And if the threat of an attack dampens our desire to shop in the next few days (and experts differ on whether it will), the terrorists will have damaged something that, in the long run, means more to us than our religion--our economy, symbol of what makes us strong and free.
Some people wonder if the terror alert, first tipped on Friday before being raised on Sunday, is another Bush administration smokescreen manufactured to divert attention away from their defeats on the Jose Padilla and Guantanamo detention cases. I don't think so. If anything, it knocks the legs out from under the idea that the capture of Saddam Hussein made us safer from terror attack.
If you think about it, the vaunted five-level alert system has only two levels that are operational in a practical sense. Green, the lowest level, is one that will never be applicable until the lion really does lie down with the lamb and a little child shall lead them. Blue, general risk of attacks, seems to be the bare minimum achievable in a world with largely open borders and a sophisticated system of air travel, but it still presumes a level of general peaceablity among the human species that's not practical to achieve. Let's leave aside yellow and orange for a second to consider red--severe risk of attack. The nature of terror attacks makes it unlikely that we'd ever receive information fast enough for the bureaucracy to determine the need to go to this level. If this level is ever used, it would be in a local area--for example, if there were corroborated evidence that a suicide bomber was headed for New York City or something (rather like the story that sparked a flurry of concern last week).
So what we have are two levels--yellow and orange. Yellow is the modern condition, the natural outcome of 6,000 years of human history, which has resulted in the existence of people who want to terrorize and kill other people and have the technology and the wherewithal to attempt it. The relative openness of our borders makes it possible for them to get here and do just that. It was true before the alert system was invented and will always be true (absent a victory in the "war on terror," and regular readers of this feature know how likely I think that's going to be). Orange recognizes that sometimes we will have more than just the normal level of information ("chatter") about what terrorists are up to, which is what we've got this week. We don't know what they're planning, but they're up to more than the usual something.
The Department of Homeland Security has been reluctant to raise the level, particularly after the widely ridiculed orange-alert duct-tape freakout of last spring. So I'm guessing that this time, they didn't do it lightly and there's reason to worry. But how much good the alert does is questionable. A security analyst told NPR yesterday that the added vigilance and publicity of an orange alert might be enough to stop an attack operation from going forward. But it's unclear to me why terrorists couldn't just bide their time and use the return to yellow as a signal to go on with the operation. And Ridge's appearance on TV yesterday (his truly is the Face and Voice of Doom), in which he spun spectres of attacks worse than 9/11 and at the same time urged Americans to go about their business normally, contributes to the boy-crying-wolf problem inherent in the alerts. He's got to say what he said--first of all, he dares not downplay the threat in case it really does turn out to be big, and second, he dares not panic the populace by suggesting that they alter their regular routines. I have characterized this as "Go about your business normally but prepare to die"--which is not bad advice for mortal creatures such as we, whether threatened by terrorists or not, but doesn't really give us much we can use to help ourselves feel safer during the alert period.
Up here in Wisconsin, there's a grim tradition--each year on Christmas, it seems, we hear of a house fire somewhere, often in the Milwaukee area, that kills several children and gives a tragic tang to our celebrations. This year, we will be listening for something far more horrible. Merry Christmas, America.
One more thing: I don't think people who live outside of Wisconsin truly understand how we feel about Brett Favre, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. As much as they love Peyton Manning in Indiana or Steve McNair in Tennessee, our relationship with Favre is different, more personal. "He's like our cousin," my wife said this morning, and that's exactly right. Every family has a cousin who, if not exactly a black sheep, dabbles in shades of gray, and the free-spirited Favre is very much like that. So the news this morning that Favre's father died over the weekend hits every household in the state like the loss of an uncle. Although nobody would begrudge him taking the night off and breaking his record streak of consecutive games played, he won't. Favre will play tonight in Oakland before returning to Mississippi for funeral services over Christmas.
