Collateral Language

A User's Guide to America's New War

John Collins, Ross Glover, John Collins, Ross Glover

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780814716281
• eBook ISBN: 9780814772652
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Thirteen essays contextualizing the new meanings around certain words and phrases in the post-9/11 discourse

Terrorism, jihad, fundamentalism, blowback. These and other highly charged terms have saturated news broadcasts and everyday conversation since September 11th. But to keen ears their meanings change depending upon who's doing the talking. So what do these words really mean? And what are people trying to say when they use them?

Each of the thirteen essays in Collateral Language offers an informed perspective on a particular word or phrase that serves as a building block in the edifice of post-World Trade Center rhetoric. In some cases this involves a systematic examination of the term in question (e.g. "anthrax" or "unity")its historical roots, the development of its meaning and usage in the U.S. over time, and its employment in the current context. In other cases authors provide a set of more philosophical or autobiographical reflections on a particular idea (e.g. "vital interests" or "evil"), suggesting a need to consider the ethical and moral implications of using the concept uncritically. In every instance, however, the overriding goal is to give the reader a set of practical tools to analyze the political language that surrounds all of us at this critical point in our nation's history.
Witty, informative and highly readable, Collateral Language is a lexicon of political terminology and an indispensable tool for understanding the current conflict.

1. Anthrax

R. DANIELLE EGAN

This story, my story of Anthrax and what Anthrax symbolically represents in our broader culture, starts with me in my pajamas. Fuzzy brained and in the process of waking up, clutching my coffee as I move from the kitchen and into the living room, I grab the remote control and turn on CNN. A nice white woman with a southern accent is being interviewed: “So, tell us about your cause,” the male reporter from CNN says. During the delay, while his words travel to her in Lafayette, Tennessee, from Atlanta, the camera pans to the name of the street on which she is standing—Anthrax Street. The blonde woman with the soothing accent goes on to talk about her disgust with the name of the street on which she lives and how “people stand back when they read the name of [her] street on [her] checks.” During her narrative the reporter on the split screen nods empathetically because who in America would want to live on Anthrax Street? The reporter asks, “So what are you planning?” The woman explains that she is passing around a petition to her neighbors to change the name of her street. “Have any of your neighbors given you suggestions on what they would like to see the name of the street changed to?” “Yes,” she replies, and goes on to list names like “America,” “Freedom,” and “U.S.A.” The reporter wishes the woman good luck with her cause, to which she says “Thank you,” and the next story starts.

When next year’s map of Lafayette, Tennessee, is published, will there will be an Anthrax Street, or will Anthrax become America, Freedom, or U.S.A. Street? Even if the name is changed you can be sure that Anthrax Street will be a ghostly presence that haunts the map, a reminder of the cultural panic when names of streets caused people to stand back when they read it on checks and when parents discussed whether there should be Halloween due to the possibility of Anthrax-tainted candy given to children in their trick or treat bags. Meanwhile, what will happen to the maps with Anthrax Street on them? Will they become collector’s items selling on Ebay with “Operation Enduring Freedom” trading cards?

This story of a blonde woman in a panic over the name of her street represents a fear of infestation. Is she possibly guilty of infection by association due to the street on which she lives? Just to be safe, she distances herself as far as possible from it, changing her street name from a dis-ease, to something strong and seemingly pure like America or Freedom. To live on Anthrax Street is to be associated with terrorism, with “weapons of mass destruction,” and finally with terrorists.¹ After my cup of coffee, my mind cleared, and I sat in awe as I thought about how Anthrax has come to symbolically represent the Middle Eastern “terrorist” body, and how this bacterium serves as proof of the fragility of our own national, capitalist, and cultural border. Moreover, Anthrax and our “internal war” against it seek to shore up these boundaries to protect the social body from invasion by an almost invisible plague in our midst.

As in other wartime conflicts, America at this point in time metaphorically takes on the quality of a body that is under attack from invasion and needs to be protected from the “other” who can infect the “life blood” or “livelihood” of a nation.² Since 9/11, the metaphor of the social body that represents America comes to operate even more powerfully when the body is seemingly under attack from a biological weapon such as Anthrax. Anthrax, like other dis-eases that have caused cultural panics, such as HIV/AIDS, serves as a discourse which merges a biological disease with a population which also causes social dis-ease, the Middle Eastern body for Anthrax and the body of the homosexual male for HIV/AIDS.

In the early 1980s the discourse of HIV/AIDS created a social panic that functioned to identify HIV exclusively with male homosexuals. In so doing, this discourse stigmatized all gay men as potential dis-ease carriers. A homophobic synecdochic doubling occurred wherein one gay man came to represent all gay men as diseased, and HIV in one man came to represent the fantasy that all gay men were diseased.³ Seropositivity was seen as emblematic of gay sexuality. In this homophobic discourse, a panic ensued over the potential that the pure heterobody was in danger from gay men who were getting what they deserved due to their “deviant lifestyle.” This discourse perpetuated homophobic responses that ranged from lack of research money to right-wing fundamental Christian ministers offering solutions such as shipping those with HIV to sparsely populated areas to insure the purity of the heterobody.⁴

However, unlike the homophobia which circulated around HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s where gay men were prefigured as the carriers of the plague that could infest the “pure” heterosexual body, Anthrax functions somewhat differently because the afflicted are viewed as pure, and the mysterious senders who are unafflicted are viewed as demonic and evil, not only infecting the individual body, but infecting the immune system of the social body as well. With the closing of post offices, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, the social body faces a bacterium that could cripple institutional sites which had not been closed since their inception. Through the discourse of Anthrax, the United States represents a social body whose immune system is under attack—by those infected not with a biological disease but with a political and religious one instead. Anthrax gets merged with the bodies of those from the Middle East so that they represent one and the same thing. It is this synthesis which underlies the cultural panic sweeping the United States.⁵

A function of the discourse of Anthrax and its production of panic is the construction of Anthrax as a weapon of mass destruction. This creates both the illusion and the panic necessary for its cultural acceptability. Anthrax as weapon of mass destruction extends this discourse to its ultimate limit, meaning that if Anthrax is a weapon of mass destruction, then any and all governmental intervention is not only valid but also absolutely necessary for national safety. This, in effect, makes the continual bombing of Afghanistan seem necessary and the next potential target, Iraq, prudent. We are being bombarded, we are under attack, the body America is in danger by a weapon of mass destruction; therefore, we must strengthen our immune system—we must fight back. We must protect ourselves by any means necessary. The use of the term “weapon of mass destruction” in the discourse of Anthrax is the ultimate illusion, the ultimate way of producing a cultural panic and blindness to the massive contradiction between Anthrax, which has at this time killed four people, and the repeated dropping of ten-ton bombs on Afghanistan. The contradiction in logic is so obvious, but so obscured. How can a bacterium that a simple sixty-day course of the antibiotic Cipro can cure be viewed as more threatening than the continual air raids in Afghanistan? Or the “daisy cutter” bombs that incinerate a one-square-mile area?

The United States has repeatedly used weapons of mass destruction, whether one thinks of the napalm used in Vietnam, the atomic weapons dropped on Japan, or the not-so-“smart” bombs in Iraq which killed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians—or the embargo which has been estimated to have cost close to a million children their lives in Iraq. Or, if we go back further in history, the smallpox-infested blankets sent to Native Americans by the U.S. government, an action that cost thousands of lives. Weapons of mass destruction are defined as those that can kill large numbers of people through nuclear, biological, or chemical means. I would argue that there is a need to recognize that conventional weapons such as daisy cutters, smart bombs, and cluster bombs with their ability to take large numbers of lives, particularly in repeated air raids, are weapons of mass destruction. To do so would force the United States to explore its own mass destruction in other countries, destruction that has been ideologically ignored under the guise of “protection of U.S. interests.” Our discursively produced panic has effectively wiped out our cultural understanding of past and present U.S. atrocities.

An article on Anthrax from my local newspaper declared, “in the longer run, both possibilities [Anthrax contamination through the mail attacking political institutions as well as spreading beyond its intended targets] raise the question of whether the U.S. mail stream as a whole may at some point have to be deemed potentially deadly.”⁶ CNN and other mainstream news organizations report that those in the public eye, from members of Congress to soap opera stars, are now fearful of their mail. People are encouraged to send their favorite stars e-mails as opposed to letters through the mail. However, no official statement has yet been released from Hollywood. Oprah Winfrey has a panic-ridden audience being counseled by Dr. Phil, who tells them that their fear is unnecessary and that they are the only ones holding themselves hostage. All precautions must be taken and are being taken, we are told by Ari Flescher, and we must stay calm while Anthrax spores are found in post offices in New Jersey, New York, Florida, and Washington, D.C. The Postmaster General states that there are no guarantees of complete mail safety. Moreover, Vice President Dick Cheney reports that he is suspicious that the attack of September 11 and the attacks of Anthrax are linked.

When viewing the media coverage, it seems as if our Congress, president, Supreme Court Justices, and news anchors are under attack, yet suspiciously the “targets” of these attacks are continuously unscathed, whether we are talking about Senator Daschle or Tom Brokaw. Anthrax seems only to touch those who serve such powerful figures; like the food tasters who protected the monarch from potential poisoning, it is interns, secretaries, post office workers, or assistants—the least protected—who should be considered at risk. It is no wonder that residents of Ewing, New Jersey, met to allay their fears of Anthrax and are subsequently washing their mailboxes with a bleach and water solution, which should kill any dangerous bacteria. These stories underscore the need for panic and support the belief that our social body is presently under attack. However, like many wars it is usually those who reside in nonpowerful positions who are most affected (see “War on ______”).

The individually infected body has been enlarged to become the social body so that the infected postal worker or the exposed NBC employee becomes the infected or exposed body of America. Whether it is cutaneous or inhaled Anthrax, the discourse underscores that we are in danger, that terrorism has transgressed the internal lines of the social body. The Anthrax-laden letters are available for all to see at CNN.com, providing a type of visible evidence and justification for the panic presently sweeping the United States. Specular proof is a currency in our culture. We need to see it to believe it, so to speak. Next to the letters that circulate on television and in cyberspace, we can see microscopic images of the Anthrax bacterium and associate those images as the cause of our panic and potential infection. The visual image perpetuates both the discourse of Anthrax and the panic that accompanies it, because the visual acts as a form of truth and proof that our social body is under attack and that the body America is in a seemingly precarious and vulnerable state. Moreover, it provides truth and justification for our need to fight back. The microscopic pictures of Anthrax, like “ground zero,” provide scopic justification for our war and governmental policies, both domestic and international, in this war.

Culturally, we have come to deal with this transgression of the social body by equating the Anthrax spore with the Middle Eastern body. Moreover, this discourse serves to make the Middle Eastern body synonymous with the Islamic, Arab, and other “brown bodies” which all come to equal “terrorist.” Anthrax is the Middle Eastern Other and, like the environmental sweeps that go on in various buildings across the country, so too under our antiterrorism legislation are the largest sweeps of bodies of color—namely, Middle Eastern bodies, being detained in numbers we have not seen since the Japanese internment camps of World War II. The Islamic body is a potential infection that must be contained before it spreads, before it is ingested and kills the body America. The discourse of Anthrax couples racist and xenophobic fears of the “other” and their seeming ability to gestate among us.

These fears increase an insidious form of U.S. state power which many have accepted for their own good and protection, seeking to rid the social body of its infection. Like the side effects associated with an antibiotic, we must be willing to deal with the side effects of “homeland security”—it will, after all, “make us feel better.” Like the cancer patient who undergoes radiation treatments that make him or her sicker in the hope of getting better, we accept the abolishment of our civil rights in the hope of making the body America better in the long run. This is evidenced in polls on CNN that state that American citizens are willing to forgo certain rights and suffer inconveniences in order to rid our country of terrorism.

Terrorist cells become Anthrax colonies, and in this coupling a form of synthesis occurs due to the visual interchanging of terrorist = Middle Eastern. Like the discourse of HIV/AIDS, the discourse of Anthrax also produces a form of synecdochic doubling. All Middle Eastern bodies come to be associated in the United States with terrorism (as evidenced in the suspect sweeps of Middle Eastern people) and through the discourse of Anthrax, all terrorists, and thus Middle Eastern bodies, become associated with Anthrax. The three become one, producing a sensibility and justification for the panic and fear perpetuated by the discourse of Anthrax and the tactics necessary to combat the problem. As such, people who fit a particular corporeal image are guilty prior to ever doing anything wrong.

The racialization of visual difference between white and nonwhite produces a system wherein anyone of Arab descent is automatically registered as guilty. The visual field of the police officer, the INS officer, military guard, or worried citizen is saturated by a discourse which constructs the Middle Eastern body as infectious; the effect of the process serves to replace the category of “suspect” with “infectious.” The Middle Eastern body, in other words, is suspected and thus infecting long before an action ever takes place. Like the spore exposure that leads to Anthrax, the Middle Eastern or Islamic body is a form of exposure that could lead to cultural infection.

Through this racist coupling of Anthrax with the Islamic or Middle Eastern body, the discourse of Anthrax serves another purpose, as a justification for civil rights violations in our homeland security tactics and the continued bombing of Afghanistan or potentially other countries that are “against us” and therefore, “terrorists.” Although the official governmental discourse suggests that we stay calm and that we have nothing to worry about, the cultural panic is to the government’s advantage as it justifies our “war” on two fronts, in the United States and in Afghanistan.

This panic blinds the population by warping their perceptions through fear. Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that terrorist cells still exist and we need to root them out; he further stated that terrorists “are poisoning our communities with Anthrax.” The use of “terrorist cells” by the government invokes another disease—cancer. Like the metastatic rogue cell in the body, the terrorist cell is pathological and needs cutting out before its pathology spreads to the larger social body. This discourse perpetuates the perception that the spore/terrorists are everywhere, thereby justifying the rounding up of nine hundred and ninety “suspects” since 9/11. These roundups or sweeps are viewed as “necessary” in our fight against “evil.” Yet out of the nine hundred and ninety detainees only ten have any known connection with 9/11, and a fifty-five-year old man detained by the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) has died “mysteriously” in prison. This alone is sufficient for a cultural panic surrounding the erosion of our civil rights; however, our Anthrax panic creates a discourse that hides abuse of power and lack of due process, and, in effect, creates an ideology making these sweeps a necessary result of our internal war to protect the immune system of body America. America will never be the same, they say; however, if we examine the history of U.S. foreign policy and FBI tactics domestically we see the ghost of violations past rearing its ugly head, similitude in its worst form.

The formation of the discourse on bioterrorism is new in that it is being filtered through the media and government as a “new type of warfare,” one that is not people strapping on bombs, but rather insidiously infecting us while the perpetrators go unscathed. It is, however, in the effects of this discourse that we see the past repeating itself. We only need to scratch the surface to see the ways in which the United States has violated human rights in the name of protecting its hegemonic interests. Whether it is the training of dictators of Central and South America at the School of the Americas in Georgia who under the discourse of capitalism and democracy systematically kill leftists and the poor who challenge the hegemony of U.S. domination; or the FBI killing Black Panthers in their beds to protect the white populations from the potential violence of black nationalism; or the rounding up of socialists during the “red scare”; or the U.S. military using biological weapons in previous conflicts—the United States abuses power and constrains dissent at every turn.

This illuminates how the United States creates discursive smoke screens to conduct horrific violence against those who grate against the dominant ideologies of the state and its interests. The most effective way to do this is to create a discourse that perpetuates panic and makes the population feel there is no other choice. This is the discourse of Anthrax. Racism and xenophobia make the discourse all the more powerful. Precisely because the Middle Eastern body is nonwhite, civil rights violations become easier and culturally palatable. After the Oklahoma City bombing it would have been impossible to categorize the white terrorists as anything other than “a few bad extremists,” otherwise whiteness itself would have come under suspicion.

Currently, training courses are being advertised on-line which offer to train officers, guards, military, and other law enforcers to combat bioterrorism. Ironically, these training sessions are in Georgia—the site of the School of the Americas discussed above—showing the ghostly presence of this “new” form of counterterrorism. Although its syllabi are not available to the public, I wonder what strategies it employs, how much more in the name of homeland security will we give up, how many more of our rights and the rights of others we will hand over. Due to the racialized status of the terrorists, sweeps of Middle Eastern “others” are justified and the d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Anthrax
• 2 Blowback
• 3 Civilization versus Barbarism
• 4 Cowardice
• 5 Evil
• 6 Freedom
• 7 Fundamentalism
• 8 Jihad
• 9 Justice
• 10 Targets
• 11 Terrorism
• 12 Unity
• 13 Vital Interests
• 14 The War on _____
• Appendix: Alternatives to the Mainstream U.S. Media
• Contributors