Tag Archives: national security state

Black Hawk Helicopter training in downtown Minneapolis

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Last night the chickens we sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan to protect us here at home were flying around downtown Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The Black Hawk helicopters are here on U.S. Army “urban training exercises” rattling the windows of startled residents’ condos, homes, and apartments right in Minnesota. The exercises of the Fort Campbell, KY special forces Night Hawks will continue through Thursday.

Why are they here? When and how did an American city of civilians become the training grounds for the United States Army? Why has there not been a louder outcry against the intrusion of the military into what we have now come to call “the Homeland”? It could be argued that their presence will make us safer, but citizen preoccupation with security is the ingredient essential to the recipe of a national security state.

Tonight the Night Hawks in the cockpits of their Black Hawk helicopters will fly among the high-rise homes of the Twin Cities again. It is no assurance that, according to the unit’s Fort Campbell commander, the same “urban training exercises” have taken place in San Diego, Phoenix, and other major cities and still littler comfort to those who value keeping a hard line against the intrusion of its military into civilian life.

How many eggs does a chicken have to lay before the American public understands that military adventures abroad – the “pre-emptive” wars that laid huge eggs abroad – have disastrous domestic consequences? What we sent off to Iraq and Afghanistan are now training in our own back yards. The message the Commander wants us to hear is that they are here to protect us, our best friends, as it were. “There are terrorists in every city,” he said.

Ferguson, Missouri and the Twin Cities of Minnesota are not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but they feel more and more like them every day.

The questions are moral and spiritual, just as they were when the Kerner Commission identified the drift toward two societies, one white, one black. Just as they were in Abu Graib. Just as they are now when the U.S. Army special forces unit is using our own cities as military training grounds…for what purpose?

How do we stop this before we’re all dead opossums? I wish I knew. So, I’m sure, does the President.
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Why is pop culture fascinated with the end of the world?

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Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Journalism asked the question after release of the film Seeking a Friend for the End of the Earth. Here’s how I responded.

Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death makes the case that our culture is death-denying.

One could argue that our fascination with end of the world films and stories is an entertaining and objectified way of dealing with one’s own personal destiny. Every death is “The end of the world.” The end of the world writ large on the planetary screen moves the issue into the world of fiction, fantasy and myth from which, like all cultures before ours, we create meaning in the midst of time.

There are other reasons for our fascination, of course. Supreme among them, in my view, is the dualism and the violence that saturate Western culture: God/Satan, Good/Evil, Moral/Immoral, Saved/Damned, Blessed/Cursed.

It is this misreading of ancient Jewish and Christian texts that makes the will to power the central theme of our time. The late Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama said that all “sin” has the same root. It is the claim of “exceptionalism.” Under the banner of nationalist exceptionalism’s shameless stealing of the metaphor of “the city set on a hill” away from its proper setting in Jesus’ nonviolent Sermon on the Mount, we assume Western Culture and the U.S.A. to be the Golden City and the agent of divine will. The exercise of that fallacious conviction results in wars of foreign intervention, occupation, and “pre-emptive strikes” in the name of national security.

We have become a national security state. The “end of the world” fascination in our time is heightened by the knowledge that global destruction – nuclear night – is entirely possible. We fear it. We know it. Yet we are also a culture addicted to entertainment where our worst nightmares get projected onto a movie or television screen where we know that what we’re watching is fiction. The fiction is almost always a high-tech version of the old racist and xenophobic dualism my generation grew up on: cowboys and Indians.

Beneath the question of why our culture is fascinated with end of the world is human nature itself. We human beings, like all other animals, are mortal. We may be exceptional in that we are (more) conscious and self-conscious, but first and last, we are animals. We are born. We live. We die.

As conscious animals, we are capable of great feats. We are also, so far as we know, the only animal capable of self-deception, denial, illusion, and species suicide. The denial of death is the great denial, and immortality is the human species’ great illusion.

The fact of death looms over life for each of us existentially and for the species itself from the beginning and in the middle, not just at the end.  Death is our shared destiny. Death is extinction. Our fascination with the end of the world is a strange Molotov cocktail comprised of all of the ingredients of the human condition, most especially the spiritual terror of annihilation, and the illusion of winning. It is the ongoing legacy of the biblical myth of Cain, humanity’s “first-born” who kills his brother Abel, the myth that describes our time and place in history.

If, like in the movie, you had only three weeks left before the end of the world… What would you do?

I’d do what I’m doing now only more consciously. I’d continue to write each morning. I’d do my best to live gratefully, attending to beauty in nature and in art (classical music and paintings) and to family and friends. I’d pray more thoughtfully. I’d walk my dogs more joyfully, stop yelling at them for barking, and find a place on the North Shore to look out to the horizon of Lake Superior. I’d eat lobster and Dungeness crab with lots of hot butter and salt, rib-eye steaks, garlic mashed potatoes. I would avoid Brussels sprouts! I’d end each meal with a Maine blueberry pie, flan, or Graeter’s ice cream, and a Makers Mark Manhattan.  Then I’d settle down on the couch next to the love of my life, Kay, by the fireplace, turn off the news, see if we can make a little fire of our own, get anchored again in the Sermon on the Mount, and return to sources of joy and laughter in the poems of Hafiz. I’d give up being intentional/purposive. I’d live in the moment.