Dust in the wind

Hannah Selinger - Raw Story Columnist
Published: Wednesday August 23, 2006

I must have been in the second grade—or maybe even younger—when I first heard of Aesop and his fables. These kinds of stories remain in the consciousness well after childhood has ended. But how comical that the state of the world would inspire in my silly, mixed-up brain a memory of stories read all those years ago!

I was thinking, as I heard the vice-president liken a vote for Ned Lamont to a vote for al-Qaeda, that the situation sounded all-too-much like a story I already knew. And then, out of nowhere, there it was: "The Boy Who Cried Wolf."

It’s a trite story. Boy cries, “Wolf.” Villagers come at his call, only to find there is no wolf. Boy cries it again. Again, the villagers, duped and concerned, respond to his call. And again, the boy is joking. When, on the third occasion, the boy does actually see a wolf, no villagers respond. Credibility has been lost and the boy’s sheep disappear from the meadow.

For five years, since a certain president ignored a certain Presidential Daily Briefing and allowed a certain tragedy to befall a certain U.S. city, it has been Dick Chaney’s function to instill fear in the average American. Concerned about terrorism in the United States? Just know that a vote for a Democrat practically insures the demise of all metropolitan areas. Want retribution for the heinous acts of September 11, 2001? Know, too, that Democrats opposed a war that the right side of the aisle promised would put an end to terror threats nationwide. Wolf, wolf, wolf.

Osama bin Laden remains at large. Terrorism has not been curbed (remember last week’s bomb scare out of London?), we have not gotten retribution, and our involvement in the so-called war for freedom has resulted in 2600 American deaths, roughly the same number of people who died when the Twin Towers fell all those years ago. Scare tactics secured four more years for the president, when ratings would have otherwise been low. Vote Bush and your children will live in a safer world, the message seemed to be. The fact that the dream would never come to fruition was, perhaps, besides the point.

Maybe those scare tactics are forgivable and maybe they aren’t. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Dick Cheney did actually believe that his party would usher in a safer, more peaceful era. Okay. Suppose, too, that he believed that invading Iraq would send a message to al-Qaeda that the United States was, very, very serious about protecting itself. Fine. Some claim Cheney misrepresented himself. Others claim he lied. At the very least, he was short-sighted in some of his decisions and verbal attacks. That would also be okay—just a mark of being human, really. But what isn’t okay is the blatantly political slam of Connecticut senatorial candidate Ned Lamont. Mudslinging—and this is the dirtiest, slimiest, most transparent form of mudslinging—is not okay.

Ned Lamont is notoriously antiwar, and for the current administration, the antiwar movement is synonymous with terrorism. Don’t believe in invading countries for political ends? You must be a terrorist. Have a problem with razing and pillaging countries that have been self-sufficient for thousands of years? Terrorist. Believe the protection of innocent lives outweighs everything? Well, when it comes to abortion, you’re a Christian martyr. But if it comes to war, you, friend, are a terrorist.

A vote for Ned Lamont, said the vice-president last week, would embolden “al-Qaeda types.” A few days later, after the terrorist plot story broke in Europe, the national security warning levels were elevated. Word of this plot comes from the same reliable source who assured us that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction (remember those?) and who called Democrats “opportunists” for spreading “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” regarding the war in Iraq. (What falsehoods?)

It wasn’t hard to pull the wool over our eyes five years ago. Back then, we were an easily herded crowd, made vulnerable by of the pervasive fear of having our biggest, most well-oiled machine of a city attacked. For those of us who were here in New York—and you can exclude the vice-president from that group of people—the city changed that day. What we had always taken for granted, that we could be safe and happy in our own neighborhoods, was no longer the case. One only needed to walk down Broadway in the searing daylight of September 12th, when ashes blew northward from the bodies of over 2,000 people, to understand that the city was irrevocably different. So it wasn’t hard to convince us then that war was the answer, or that voting a certain way might take us back to the world we had lived in before those planes flew into those towers.

The problem is that the world is different. It will always be different, and the current administration has only stalled us in time and space, rather than attempting to correct the problems that caused the tragedy in the first place. They cried wolf once, and we reacted. They cried again and we, so irrationally afraid of fear itself, jumped at the bait and did as we were told. The act has grown stale now, and the vice-president should know that, in the distant aftermath of tragedy, his words have the gravity of dust in the wind.