I will never forget standing in a line at a Burger King in inner city Philadelphia on the morning of October 26, 1983, and noticing a Philadelphia Inquirer on the counter. The front-page headline was about the invasion of Grenada the day before. This was, as some may recall, two days after the bloody bombing in Beirut. I made some disgruntled crack about the crummy invasion, and a man ahead of me in line turned and, in a determined voice, said: "We had to show 'em!" He was referring to the national humiliation of the Beirut bombing two days earlier. As the media savvy Ronald Reagan certainly understood, while Beirut and Grenada may be thousands of miles apart and totally unrelated politically or militarily, they were both on TV. For me, it was an unforgettable lesson in cynical PR ju-jitsu and war mobilization in a post-Vietnam world. Instead of a lingering humiliation, the Beirut bombing was quickly flipped into an unspoken, emotional justification for the controversial US invasion of a harmless, tiny island undergoing a political crisis the White House did not like. And while Beirut served this function for the invasion of Grenada, that very invasion served to assuage the humiliation from the Beirut bombing. It was an insidiously brilliant circle.
Philosophers from time immemorial tell us life is really an incredibly unfathomable, swirling chaos of occurrences, and the human perceptual challenge is to select out the occurrences that work for one's purposes. From this selected gathering of facts, some true, some false, we develop arguments and narratives to sell our case to ourselves and others. Some are more concerned about honesty and fairness in this process than others. Politicians and journalists make careers out of this process. Joseph Goebbels was brilliant at it. The Reagan gang certainly mastered it in the case of Beirut/Grenada. Currently, the militarist political right is working Omar Mateen and his Orlando murders in this fashion. By flogging the term radical Islam over-and-over-and-over ad-nauseum, they're trying to shut out everything else to imprint the magical term in our brains. They're trying to make complexity and balance impossible.
"Trying To Know The Unknowable"
After Orlando, the New York Times has been doing what the New York Times does best: It has been making the Omar Mateen/Orlando story more complicated. It has begun a series of stories under the title "The Interpreter." The purpose is to "explore the ideas and context behind world events." On June 15, an Interpreter article by Max Fisher was headlined: "Trying to Know The Unknowable: Why Attackers Strike."
Complexity is the nemesis of people on both sides of the ideological mud-wrestling match that is American politics at the moment. Leftists trash the New York Times as a corporate organ of the elite, while those the right trash it as an organ of liberalism. In the spirit of complexity, both views have some validity. The Times is flawed; for instance, no one should forget the Judith Miller reporting that shilled for a dishonest Iraq War. But efforts like "The Interpreter" series encourage slowing down, suspending judgment while gathering more information and weighing the complexities, even, as the headline cited above suggests, sometimes allowing for the ultimate unknowability of what goes down in the world. There may be no absolute, closing-out solution to a problem, in which case understanding the complexities of the matter becomes the most critical factor in coping with the problem. Too often in the face of crisis, we convince ourselves we have to quickly do something -- anything! Remaining calm and working to understand what happened may be best for the long run.
"We want to live in a world where these questions have identifiable answers, and politicians are happy to tell us that they do, so they can present themselves as the solution," Max Fisher writes. "But because no single narrative is ever sufficient, the debate is always unsettled -- and always raging."
Fisher distills the Omar Mateen narrative down to four "explanations." They are: 1) radical Islam, 2) mental illness, 3) homophobia and 4) gun access:
1) Omar Mateen was not very religious, though he did apparently make at least one trip to Mecca. He said he was loyal to both al Qaeda and Hezballah, Sunni and Shia organizations at odds with each other, which suggests he wasn't very clear on the politics of Middle Eastern religion. It suggests he mentioned these affiliations to a 911 operator because he had heard them on TV and knew they would have shock value. What he appears to have liked about "radical Islam" was its official oppression of females, something he personally felt strongly about, given that he regularly beat his wife and kept her virtually locked up in what he considered his apartment.
2) My wife argues hard for the mental illness aspect, and she makes a powerful case. As a society, we tend to wait until someone harms him- or herself or others before we feel compelled to intervene. In the eighties, we emptied out the state hospitals, often known as "snake pits". We now rely on the criminal justice system to address mental-illness problems. We avoid like the plague any solution that violates an American's civil liberties or smacks of "socialism". We wait until its too late and then rely on police and weaponry.
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