The Detachment

Kanezaki:
    Intel and chatter permeating the community are all about Islamist sleeper cells and more attacks on the way. I don’t know how it’s getting introduced because it’s all bullshit, but it seems to be coming from multiple sources and a consensus is taking hold that it’s accurate. Plus, nobody wants to be the one to err on the side of underestimating what’s on the way in case the shit really does hit the fan. They’re all talking about that August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief about how al Qaeda was determined to strike the United States. How it made Bush look bad.
    I have a friend with the National Security Council. He says the president’s key advisors are steering him to announce what will be called a state of emergency, whatever the hell that really means. They’re recommending a choice from among three possible courses of action: 1) Ride it out and let the FBI and local law enforcement handle it; 2) Declare martial law and a suspension of the Constitution; and 3) Declare a “state of emergency” and deploy the National Guard to protect key governmental and civilian targets. Obviously, compared to the political softness of the first and the demonstrable insanity of the second, the third looks like the sensible choice. Plus it gives the president flexibility to ramp things up or dial them down, depending on the course of events.
    There’s also chatter about attacks on schools. I think administration insiders will leak this. Reporters will then ask the president if it’s true, he’ll say no comment, and the establishment media will all support the Guard deployment and state of emergency, because if schools get attacked, parents will keep their kids home, they won’t be able to go to work, the economy will crater.
    By the time they’re done, suspending the Constitution is going to seem like the only sane, centrist, responsible thing to do. This is fucked. We have to stop it.
    Horton is the key. But I don’t know where he is or how to get to him. Call me as soon as you can.
    I overheard some of the locals talking. One guy was typical, saying, “If we find out for sure the people behind these attacks are Muslims, I say we turn their goddamned countries into glass parking lots. That’s it, no more mister nice guy, no more talk, no more trying to understand each other. This is how you want it, this is what you get. But first, I say we ship every goddamned traitorous fifth columnist American Muslim back to their country of origin so they can be there, right at the center of the mushroom cloud, yes sir. And I’ll press the goddamned button myself, too. I guarantee you I won’t even be the first in line, either, there’ll be a whole lot of other Americans lined up to do the same.”
    No one disagreed with him. I realized the hysteria was something we could hide in, at least among the populace, because we didn’t fit the profile of what had been ginned up in the public imagination.
    We kept on, up and across the Oklahoma Panhandle, steering well clear of Oklahoma City and even of Amarillo, the grief and rage in Lubbock feeling uncomfortably close. Then the dusty, flat roads of New Mexico, through the Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests of Arizona, bypassing Phoenix by way of Prescott, and finally across the Colorado River and into California. We stayed on Interstate 10 the rest of the way in, skirting Joshua Tree National Park rather than using the quieter roads farther north, which would have taken us uncomfortably close to the Marine base at Twentynine Palms. Finally, with the sun coming up behind us, we reached the Pacific in Santa Monica. The whole thing had taken us three nights, on back roads and going not one mile above the applicable speed limit, most of it in a forced march blur, some of it in the cabin of the truck, other times in the stifling heat and dark of the cargo area, all of it while government forces hunted for us wherever they could. But we’d made it. We were here.
    Now we just had to get to Mimi Kei. And through her, to Horton.

You can’t tell anymore the difference between what’s propaganda and what’s news.
—FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein
But what if elites believe reform is impossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, the public too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has been insufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalism works…and often fails to work?
—Jay Rosen, NYU School of