AlterNet: Politics of Risk

On risk society...the difference here is that it points to the way the society itself feels at risk, aka the Culture of Fear that Glassner talks about, where we are basically afraid all the time, but often we are afraid of the wrong things. This of course could never be said in a public forum. Unfortunately, programs for school lunches aren't nearly as newsworthy as military contracts.

The author says that Kerry wants to "democratize risk." Here he misspeaks: Kerry wants to democratize risk management--but only for the risks that most obviously effect every class of people. The real issue if the risk has already been democratized. A few months ago when I was working on the Hummer paper and thinking about the fortress society, I looked at an article in Newsweek in which a mother lamented that her son would have to live in fear. I don't know that I ever really got to the point here, but my first reaction was that her problem wasn't that people had to fear suicide bombers or live with global terrorism--but that she and her children had to live with it. It was something that only "they" had to worry about "over there" and then it was just an unfortunate fact of life, "too bad for them."

But now risk is seen as having been democratized. It isn't of course: people in the third world still have much more to fear than we do. But the appearance of such a democratization is still powerful. But rather than realize just how terrible it is to have this kind of fear in one's daily life, most people, like this mother, just want things to return to the way they were, when people in the global first world had nothing to fear. And the best way to do this, they seem to think, is to create a completely militarized state.

Zell Miller and the Republicans last night--and for most of the week--talk about the need for a strong military force to face "the new threat of terrorism." He gives Kerry trouble for the senator's not voting on certain weapons systems and makes this the example of how Kerry is undermining the fight against terrorism. Nevermind that no one on either side of this nasty rhetorical squabble has bothered to define terrorism or that, in practice, Kerry is really as hawkish as Bush, the problem is that Zell Miller, the codger that he is, seems to believe that huge weapons systems are the way to combat "the new threat of terrorism."

If he wasn't a person in power, just an old man carrying on while sitting in his rocking chair, playing with his teeth, this sentiment would be almost mildly amusing in its nostalgia. As he lists off these weapons systems "the trident missle, the patriot missle, the f-14 tomcat, the f-16 fighting falcon..." one could dismiss his rantings as just that: the things that senile people dwell on so much that they think you too must agree and feel their anguish. Unfortunately, Zell Miller does have some power, or at least enough to give him a national platform on which to recite his litany of products generously produced for us by the military industrial complex.

His laundry list is supposed to make us see big holes in the fortress, to give us the feeling that we have these problems because we don't have enough big guns pointed outwards. This is, of course, the fortress society thinking. And the desire is for us to return to the way things were before, when we could count on mutually ensured destruction to keep anyone from disagreeing with us in any meaningful way.

But these enormous defense systems are largely unnecessary when your primary foe is a person willing to die for their cause and using a box cutter. These old school solutions to external threats posed by rival states are the lumbering artifacts of wars gone by. Unfortunately, the momentum of the corporations that make these systems will make it impossible to fight the war we need to fight--if it can be considered a war at all. The only solutions this administration has are the big industry answers to the threat of thermonuclear war. Obviously this threat is still real--and the more we piss off our allies the more we risk facing a state with nuclear weapons in the near future--but that is not the "new threat" posed by the terrorists.

In the cold war there was always the accompanied war "for hearts and minds." This, it was understood, was essential to combatting the war of ideologies abroad. But this war of hearts and minds wasn't only fought in propaganda, there was also an awareness that actions mattered as well. In one of Nixon's campaign commercials for his 1960 bid, he had this to say about the struggle for civil rights:

I want to talk to you for a moment about civil rights, equal rights for all our citizens: why must we vigorously defend them