In the world constituted by a system of stories that support a master narrative of life in America, "it's the economy, stupid," and "are you better off than you were four years ago?" offer "strange attractors" capable of trumping whatever narrative residue remains from George W. Bush's ill-fated, ill-named "crusade." While these strange narrative attractors are uniting Americans against the war there will be other strange narrative attractors motivating those in power to ignore the will of the people in favor of continuing a war against fear that is really a war for oil and further corporate profits.
3. The global war on terror will continue to be waged until the money runs out, but with a new twist: Counter-narratives will be deployed with greater and greater effectiveness than drone attacks or political corruption, although that won't stop drone attacks or political corruption . There's too much money to be made, and at $190 million a day to wage war, there are 190 million reasons for large corporations and other defense contractors not to end it until forced to end it by Congress. The really bad news is that just as these new narratives are taking hold in targeted populations, the U.S. will pull out in much the same way as we did in Vietnam, leaving behind thousands of people who helped us as well as the counter-narratives that are beginning to work.
But the good news is that those counter-narratives will have a long echo. It will be the counter-narratives that cause a gradual evolution toward the local empowerment of women and the local valuing of education, both of which will exert long-term influence over the political future of the Middle East.
The cultural change will be slow, so it is unlikely that these changes to the narrative landscape will be either understood or embraced by the American public, who see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as mistakes that cost us dearly. However, as our military and diplomatic leaders have stressed for some time now, until the oppressed local populations hear and believe in a different narrative than the violent extremists offer them, and until they can send their daughters and sons to schools and live in safe neighborhoods with economic opportunities, there is little reason for hope of any kind.
Short of the nuclear annihilation of entire populations, wars against the ideology and practice of terror in the 21st century can only be successfully engaged by a confluence of two strange attractors: Credible leaders of local populations leveraging existing master narratives against violent extremists coupled with narratives of hope enabled and paid for by the international community that focus on real improvements in the standard of living. While those strange attractors are busy colliding and creating new forms of relative stability, other strange attractors will be as busy disrupting them.
By the end of 2011 we will have lived through a mediated year saturated with narrative extremes that have largely abandoned any common ground. But these extremes--because neither one of them can ultimately control the trajectory of our shared national narrative--will set the narrative stage for the dawning of new story based on a necessary correction to our master narrative. That correction will recall the core idea of the founders--that government exists to do two things, provide for our common defense and to promote the public good--and that a fine collision of those two strange attractors are once again on course to reenter America's narrative orbit. When that happens, sometime early in 2012, no doubt brought on by some spectacle that as of right now we cannot yet imagine, how we respond to it, how we story it, will make all the difference in the world, and to the world as we narratively know and constitute it.
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