"The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or coordination. It was a failure of imagination," asserts Thomas Friedman. No one "imagined evil on the scale Osama bin Laden did." Friedman's New York Times editorial of May 19, 2002, lists a half dozen deadly incidents since the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, foreshadowings that should have provoked greater vigilance but didn't. Clues that should have been noticed were missed. According to Friedman, we were too naive and optimistic for our own good. "Trust is so hard-wired into the American character and citizenry, we can't get rid of it -- even when we so obviously should."
I disagree with Friedman's first premise; there were glaring organizational obstacles that hindered intelligence agencies from fully sharing and comprehending their own data. The media has trained its lens on internal memos and previously ignored FBI agents like Colleen Rowley, proving that bureaucratic impediments curtailed urgent information from reaching the right people. I am more concerned about Friedman's second premise: the unfortunate construct "failure of imagination," which in this context means "failure to imagine the worst possible scenario."
I've always believed that imagination puts us in touch with our higher selves. "We say God and the imagination are one," wrote the poet Wallace Stevens. To imagine is to use one's mental capacities to form an image or concept of something not present, an incipient phase of creativity. Our culture mythologizes the imagination; since Plato's time, superlatively imaginative works have been invariably attributed to divine inspiration. Even Henry Miller, renowned for his writings of earthy sensuality, once declared that "Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything Godlike about God, it is that. He dared to imagine everything." For Miller, bold imagination is Godliness.
Of course, imagination can be used destructively, just as physical strength can produce either harm or good. The stealth, efficiency, and precise timing of the September attacks were ingeniously calculated to inflict monumental death, damage and sorrow. We are psychically bruised. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to identify which dark emotion -- grief, disbelief, anger or fear -- rules our mood at any given moment. How should our nation respond to such a heavy blow? Should we imagine and prepare for the worst? Just three days after the attacks, during the National Day of Prayer ceremony that he proclaimed, President Bush reflected upon Americans responding to the crisis with acts of courage and generosity:
"adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a nation as well. In this trial, we have been reminded, and the world has seen, that our fellow Americans are generous and kind, resourceful and brave. We see our national character in rescuers working past exhaustion, in long lines of blood donors, in thousands of citizens who have asked to work and serve in any way possible."Around the world, people who have never visited our shores expressed heartfelt sympathy and solidarity with us. Adversity inspired the imaginations of strangers to notice their connections with each other.
"Not if but when," declares John Ashcroft. Eight months after 9-11, letters laced with anthrax, rural mailboxes stuffed with pipebombs, and color-coded homeland security alerts have left our nation feeling on edge. But do we really need an "Office of Evil?" Friedman proposes the moniker for a new security agency, "whose job would be to constantly sift all intelligence data and imagine what the most twisted mind might be up to." The name is tongue in cheek, but the reason for its being is dead serious. "Given the increasingly lethal nature of terrorism, we are going to have to adapt," Friedman says, echoing the administration's pessimism about inevitable future attacks. Like the administration, he does not examine the reasons why. Attempts to understand the dangers apparently seem futile. "We're facing a different enemy than we have ever faced,"declared President Bush on September 12. "This enemy hides in shadows, and has no regard for human life." In recent days, government officials have detected vague but ominous clues that new attacks are imminent. A grocery list of possible tragedies waiting to befall us grows longer and more terrifying every day: timebombs in apartment high-rises, explosions in subways, private planes dive-bombing nuclear plants, dirty bombs in metropolitan areas, and ambulatory suicide bombers. "There will be another terrorist attack," FBI Director Robert Mueller states. "We will not be able to stop it." Perhaps "Office of Paranoia" would be more apt.
Paranoia means knowledge (noia) that is alongside (para) -- to be beside oneself. It is the madness of sensing danger but never knowing what is truly going on. Philosopher and psychologist Thomas Moore writes: "Paranoid knowing satisfies the masochist who takes delight in being hurt. . . . . (it) keeps the possibility of deeper knowledge within reach but also dissociates itself from will and intentionality" It is a powerful symptom, reinforced by the sufferer's very refusal to acknowledge his willful ignorance. In his book, Care of the Soul, Moore discusses paranoia in terms of a young man's jealous feelings towards his girlfriend. A love relationship gone wrong might seem a universe apart from the complexity and danger associated with a war on terrorism, yet there are strikingly similar pathologies. Obsessive fear needs to be educated in order to dispel unrealistic and overpowering worry. To cure himself, the young man must force himself to face his fears and get to know his girlfriend as she really is. Our government's panicky fatalism is just as irrational as the young man's jealousy. We will not have much luck shadowboxing with bogeymen, but we may have a fighting chance by facing our fears and exploring the reasons fellow human beings seek such desperate acts against us.
This spring, on the other side of the world, Ayat al-Akhras, a top high school student with a promising future, took her life and that of a stranger's. For the first time, President Bush addressed the tragic loss not only of the bombing victim, but of the bomber herself. "When an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up, and in the process kills a 17-year-old Israeli girl, the future itself is dying." He said. Ayat had planned to pursue a career in journalism. Rachel Levy, the random victim killed in a Jerusalem supermarket, had been studying photography. The newspaper accounts commented on how both girls looked remarkably similar, with flowing black hair, brown eyes, dark complexions and jeans. For a few primetime moments, Americans had a glimpse of reality we may not have been willing to face before: the victim and the perpetrator seemed more alike than different.
At the end of the Gulf War, British labor politician Tony Benn stated that "all war represents a failure of diplomacy." There is enlightenment in that phrase, absent from Friedman's formulation that 9-11 was "a failure of imagination." Benn essentially seems to say "never give up, always negotiate," while Friedman seems to immediately begin digging a trench. To be fair, in the same editorial, Friedman also chides President Bush for his "failure to imagine good." But the missed possibility Friedman speaks of is grounded in fear and isolationism: energy saving projects that would reduce our dependence on oil, and "have made us safer by making us independent of countries who share none of our values." Friedman would have the most powerful nation on earth retreating behind a fence. That to me would represent a true failure of imagination: a refusal to pursue the best in ourselves and in our neighbors. Friedman states that, pre-9-11, the American character was too optimistic for its own good. I worry that, post-9-11, we will lose the most important part of ourselves if we fail to imagine hope.
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Letter to the Author: Rafael Wang at rafael_sf@mac.com