from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 06:18 PM PDT

It's been two months since 9/11 and Michael is on a crosstown
bus reading Kurt Andersen's Turn of the Century when a man wearing a
turban gets on and sits down in the seat next to him.

Michael twitches. He suddenly feels worried and afraid. He
hates that feeling and he hates feeling that way. There are a number of
people on that bus who feel the same way he does but it's different for
them. Most are working class New Yorkers who treat their worry over a man
in a turban holding a large suspicious looking bag as just common sense. A
number of them are minorities themselves and feel no guilt
whatsoever.

Michael though is a liberal. Michael always believed
that he identified with the plight of oppressed people all over the world
even though he grew up in an upper middle class suburb incorporated into a
town specifically to keep the adjoining lower class population out. He
feels tremendous guilt over being afraid of that man in the
turban.

"He's just a regular guy," Michael tells himself, "just
probably going to work at his job and earning a living for his family.
He's not a terrorist and you have no right to be afraid of him and treat
him as if he is one. You're acting the way Grandpa does when a black man
sits near him."

Still as the man in the turban sits calmly watching
the shops and delis pass by, Michael cannot rid himself of the gnawing
fear. Worse than the fear itself is that it is a fear that undermines his
self-perception as enlightened, tolerant and liberal. The Michael who is
afraid of a man in a turban on a bus is a stranger to Michael's own
values, yet it is undeniably him.

Even after the man in the turban
has gotten off at the next stop, the conflict continues to churn inside
him. His fear of a Muslim makes him a despicable racist in his own eyes.
Either the fear or the liberalism must go. This is the conflict between
liberal values and the changing post 9/11 world that millions of Americans
were processing in the weeks and months after September 11th. Even as
Michael rode that bus, many others who had thought themselves liberals
were undergoing their own journeys into the tangled hearts of their own
value systems and the moral shadings of their political
philosophies.

As the bus drives on, there are two routes that
Michael can take still sitting in his seat. He can wake up to the reality
that America is at war and that his fears are not unreasonable. That his
basic moral compass was good but that it has its limitations, and that
while being born a Muslim does not inherently make you evil, no more than
being born a Russian under Communism or a German under Hitler did,
continuing to identify with Islam, Marxism or National Socialism is a
choice that aligns you with a constellation of brutal philosophies bent on
the conquest of all they consider their enemies and as such makes you
reasonably open to suspicion. Islam is not a race but a creed and in the
aftermath of 9/11, a creed whose followers had proven themselves to be
ruthless and dangerous.

There are liberals who indeed take that
route. Who support the War on Terror, do not weep for the terrorists
imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay and do not believe that Abu Ghraib was on a
par with the Holocaust. They support the troops and while they may have
doubts about the War in Iraq, they do not align themselves with the shrill
hysteria of the Cindy Sheehans or Ward Churchills. When they hear the news
of another terrorist being killed, they smile a little and turn the
page.

That is not however the route most take. It is not the route
Michael takes. As Michael struggles with his fear, his fear turns to anger
directed at the man in the turban, at the bus driver, at the government
and at himself. He is angry at all these because he is afraid and because
they are all responsible for his fear. That anger focuses and narrows.
Over and over again Michael cannot ignore the fact that he should be angry
at the source of his fear, at the source of the betrayal of his own
values, at himself.

Yet Michael is far too egotistical and too
subsumed in a sense of entitlement stretching back to his privileged
childhood to stay angry at himself for very long. He calls on that anger,
the anger of the privileged to quash his fear and self-hatred by first
denying the fear and then finding someone to blame for making him afraid.
Not the terrorists. Not even himself. But the government.

"The government is out to terrorize us," he thinks, "this
is just like Nuremberg or Heidelberg or something like that where Hitler
set up a bombing and used it to take power. The people in power always
want us to be afraid of the minorities so they can keep us afraid and
voting for them. They're the ones we should really be worried
about."

He leaves the bus headed off to work at the silicon alley
dot com. During his lunch break at the Starbucks downstairs, he talks it
over with his co-workers, most of whom pretend they came to that same
conclusion right away.

They quote slogans from left-wing
progressive sites to each other all with the same comforting message.

"Millions of people die of cancer every year, but do we go around
being afraid of every smoker."

"When Tim McVeigh bombed Oklahoma
City, did we bomb Idaho?"

"The real threat isn't the terrorists,
it's that the government will use this to suspend civil liberties, declare
martial law, initiate the draft and turn this into a fascist
dictatorship."

"It can happen here."

The entire exercise of
warped logic, twisted reasoning and paranoid delusions may seem crazed,
but actually represents a safety blanket for Michael and his co-workers. A
comfort zone allowing them to maintain their liberal values and direct
their ire right back at the same target they had been directing their ire
up until September 10th.

"He stole the election with the aid of
the Supreme Court and his daddy who bought it for him. There's nothing
those people won't do."

By those people "they" no longer refers to
the terrorists who killed 3000 people as "they" did in the days after the
attacks. By "those people" they now mean once again Republicans,
Conservatives and whatever nebulous forms drift into the zone to the right
of theirs. Those who were their political enemies before 9/11 and now can
be again.

By hating them and directing all the blame and venom at
them, Michael believes he has finally managed to heal himself of the
psychological trauma of September 11. But as is often the case when a
patient is left alone to deal with a trauma, rather than healing himself,
he merely redirects it creating a new obsession. He has displaced his fear
of the very real threat of terrorism into an imaginary one over a
Republican dictatorship and resolved his conflict over his own values and
sense of self by projecting them onto those very same Republicans whom he
will ceaselessly accuse of being racists and of hating Muslims.

It is a topic he will become very passionate about and will become a regular
accusation he will wield aimed at conservatives. Like most accusations it
is actually a Rorschach inkblot revealing more about Michael than it does
about his targets.

In a later blog post Michael will write about his bus
encounter. In his fictionalized version of events he will talk about how
he overcame his fear and talked to the man in the turban, whose name he
learned was Mohammed and who had a wife and children back in Pakistan whom
he was working to support through menial jobs in Queens. At the end
Michael will write that this human contact gave him the revelation that it
wasn't Mohammed who is his enemy, but the government that wants him to
believe that.

Of course the government has said no such thing.
Indeed the government at all levels has gone to great lengths to emphasize
that Islam is a religion of peace, that Arab-Americans and
Muslim-Americans are our neighbors whom we should embrace with open
arms.

When Michael writes and says that it is the government that wanted him to hate
Muslims, he really means that it was a part of him that he denies and
represses which feared and accordingly hated Muslims. Whenever he writes
venomously about the crimes of the US government and the racism of
conservatives, Michael is really chronicling an inner conflict. A struggle
within himself to put down those parts of him which are still angry and
afraid. He has given labels to those parts like 'government' and
'republicans' and 'warmongers' and 'chickenhawks' to externalize them and
set them apart from himself and outside himself. His passionate political
activism is just an engine that drives that delusion.

He reads Dailykos daily, participates in the Democratic Underground and has even
flirted with denying 9/11 even happened in the form of the so-called 911
Truth Movement. Yet all this only leaves him more frustrated than before,
because it itself is a form of denial. Rather than addressing the real
source of his worries and neurotic behavior, he has displaced them and
they continue to gnaw at him. His growing obsession with the War in Iraq
(and if he is Jewish the conflict in Israel too) is an attempt to rebuild
a shattered self-image with crazy glue. And sometimes during the long
nights he can see the cracks.

His parents put down his increasingly
angry attitude and constant monopolizing of any conversation with his
views as youthful enthusiasm. His friends who feel much the way he does
describe it as passionate advocacy. The therapist he briefly visited
couldn't see it for what it is either, because his therapist is trapped in
the same box.

On that bus Michael had a choice between childhood
and adulthood. Between growing up and realizing that the real world had
impinged on his ideals and that as a consequence they had to be modified
to acknowledge reality and between childishly clinging to his values at
any cost by creating and living in a fantasy world in which the real enemy
is his own government and his own people.

No Michael has not come
to love Big Brother. But then few have. Michael has instead come to love
Little Osama. To subsume his fear of terrorism by shouting loudly that the
real terrorists are the government. By engaging in a daily two minutes of
hate that usually stretches into two hours ranting about the War on
Terror. By believing fervently that his enemies are not those who changed
the world on September 11, but those who chose to grow up and shoulder the
burden of the real world in response to it.

If Big Brother represents totalitarian rule, order and
enforcement; then Little Osama like Little Che and all the other leftist
icons represent to their Western devotees an anarchic and egotistical
freedom. An eternal childhood free from responsibilities and regulations.
A pure freedom that murders the father and frees the child to live forever
in a utopian vision untroubled by other people and by the practical
realities, fears and difficulties.

It does not matter, nor has it
ever mattered to them what Che or Osama or the Black Panthers really stand
for. To the troubled infants of the West believing themselves eternally
secure in their cradles, they represent the freedom of the irrational, the
liberation of the purest anarchic childhood. They eternal student. The
eternal angry activist. The eternal bicyclist. The eternal child of the
West, the progressive Peter Pan, fiercely determined to never grow
up.