Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy . . .

Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy . . .

By John Lacny

The Bush regime is probably unprecedented in human
history for the rate at which it makes actual policy
proposals that are impossible to satirize. There are
such things out there as informal "celebrity death"
betting pools, where cubicle denizens gather around the
water cooler to make morbid wagers on who will croak
next. (The dogged crew of wishful thinkers who have been
pulling for Strom Thurmond finally collected their money
this year.) But who would have thought that a government
department would propose that this exercise should be
given the imprimatur of the state, with millions to be
made from assassinations, embassy takeovers, bombings,
and the like?

The "Terrorism Futures" scheme was ludicrous enough that
the regime had to repudiate it just days before its
implementation. The fact remains that a grown-up human
being somewhere in the bowels of the Department of
"Defense" actually thought this up and proposed it in
something other than an April Fools’ Day memo, and
enough other people in that same department thought that
it was a legitimate subject for policy discussion at the
national level.

It is difficult to discern whether the masterminds of
the scheme were trying to come up with the most arcane
way to make even more money on human misfortune, or
whether they truly believed the rationale that their
betting pool would help them predict terrorist attacks
because the "market" would reveal "hidden information."
There is reason to believe it was the latter — and that
is an unsettling fact.

To understand the depth of this pathology, we need to go
back over fifty years, to the beginnings of the nuclear
age. From the day the first bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, there has been a consistent attempt to
rationalize and explain the Bomb’s necessity. The
rationalizers had their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s,
when people like Herman Kahn and the RAND think-tank
devised models for a "winnable" nuclear war in which
"only" 20 million, or 50 million, or 100 million people
died. Theirs was the age of technical-managerial
liberalism, when it was thought that the "best and
brightest" need only rationally apply their minds to the
task in order to solve all human problems, or at least
to make a "limited" nuclear holocaust conceivable as a
legitimate option in confronting an implacable foe. C.
Wright Mills called this outlook "crackpot realism."

The New Right knocked the technical-managerial liberals
from their "big government" pedestal, and installed in
their place the ideology of "the market." All along,
their aim was a practical one: to allow rich people to
fleece the public as much as possible while knocking
back any conceivable political challenge to their
prerogatives. Their ideology, however, was based on the
idea that "the market" was the best conveyor of "hidden
information" ever devised, the cure for the diseases of
all "central planning" and "collectivist" utopias.

It appears that enough people in the Pentagon were
convinced that the privatization of as many government
functions as possible would bring desirable results. It
is unsurprising, in fact, that the program was supported
by John Poindexter — Bush’s designee for "Total
Information Awareness" — who himself helped Oliver
North set up an illegal private gun-running network when
Congress proved insufficiently enthusiastic about
helping the contras blow up health clinics and
cooperatives in Nicaragua. This is the crackpot realism
of our day.

I have always been bothered by the style of George Bush
jokes favored by liberals — ones about his mangled
syntax, his barroom posturing, his overall stupidity. I
have argued that the issue is not Bush’s stupidity, if
only because the people around him have a well-planned,
thought-out, and single-minded agenda, and they are
equipped with a fanatical will and discipline to carry
it out. And yet it is at moments like this that we all
realize that even that is not the whole story — because
above all, in many cases, we are dealing here with
people who are not entirely rational.

Think about your reaction when you first heard this
news. After you realized it wasn’t a hoax, I mean. You
found yourself asking the obvious questions that for
some reason did *not* get asked anywhere along the line,
before the whole issue ended up before Congress (e.g.,
"If someone stands to gain $50 million from a coup in
Thailand, what’s to stop them from spending $30 million
to *foment* a coup in Thailand?"). But you then went on
to other, weirder questions. If they did this, how would
they regulate it? How would they stop "insider trading"?
Some version of the SEC?

At this point, you had to stop because of the
inescapable fact that merely considering the "terrorism
futures" market is completely and unambiguously insane.
When it reached Congress, they should not only have
demanded the immediate firing of anyone who proposed it,
but should have recommended that whoever did it be
brought in for an immediate psychiatric evaluation. And
yet here was the Bush regime, a bit embarrassed by the
whole thing, but quickly disowning it as if it were only
a slight excess rather than an exercise in unadulterated
lunacy. That you could contemplate its implementation
even for a moment is evidence of the particularly
corrosive effect that this regime has on the political
culture, so that everything it touches becomes infected
with a dose of its madness.

Proponents of anti-colonial movements of liberation,
confronted with the problems that national independence
often created, still like to point out that even a
wretched domestic regime is preferable to the indignity
of foreign domination. The Bush years have added a
corollary to that doctrine for the United States: we
should prefer an enemy in the White House whose
motivations we can at least explain, to an enemy in the
White House not all of whose followers can confidently
be said to hail from the same planet as the rest of the
human race.