After the fall of the Soviet Union, I used to joke, "Now what are they going to put in the action movies now that we’ve lost the KGB? Arab Terrorists?" I haven’t said that since September 11th, 2001. But I think it’s my version of a more general feeling that we were out of the woods in some way. I think it even had something to do with electing George W. Bush – like maybe it just wasn’t as important as it used to be – now that we weren’t living with the threat of Thermonuclear Holocaust like we had for my whole remembered life.
Now, we have lived with the real and present threat of Arab Terrorists for seven years – and the window between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and September 11th is only a vague memory – like the short span between the end of World War II and the onset of the
Cold War.
The first use of the term "Cold War" to describe post-World War II geopolitical tensions between the Soviet Union and the US has been attributed to American financier and US presidential advisor Bernard Baruch. On April 16, 1947, Baruch gave a speech in South Carolina, in which he said, "Let us not be deceived: we are today in the midst of a cold war". Columnist Walter Lippmann also gave the term wide currency, with the publication of his 1947 book titled Cold War.
We’ve never named this post 9/11 period. People just say "since 9/11" or "post-9/11" without calling it an era or an epoch, but it is one, nonetheless. During the "Cold War," we never really knew how it was going to end. Thermonuclear devastation was one outcome – and our movie industry cranked out post-apocalyptic movies like "On the Beach" and the more modern "Mad Max" genre with the world taken over by whacked out survivors riding motorcycles dressed like modern day Marlon Brandos in "The Wild One." But I don’t recall anyone thinking it would end like it did – not with a bang but a whimper.
George W. Bush thought he could end this "since 9/11" era with a quick stroke of war. The way to put a stop to things was to kill the bad guys, like in the days of the wild west. – the oater movies of our childhood. He never noticed that killing the bad hombres only lasted until the next Saturday Matinee when they popped up somewhere else. He seemed to thrive on those cowboy metaphors [until his repeated failures lead his handlers to shut him up]. But he has never tired of the worst rhetoric of the "Cold War" era. One can take anything he says and substitute "Arab Terrorists" for "Commies" and it sounds exactly the same. "Soft on Communism" became "Soft of Terrorism." The term "leftist" has the same connotation it had back then. Because Barak Obama’s middle name is Hussein, he must be a secret Moslem. We still have "Hawks" and "Doves" – only the name for the latter is now "Move-On.org."
9/11 is quiet today – the seventh anniversary. We’re used to it. Our tensions with the Middle East are now something we deal with every day – the Terrorists, Al Qaeda, Oil, OPEC. It’s become part of modern life. George Bush’s impetuous and naive solutions are largely discredited in spite of our ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I doubt that many of us believe that "killing Bin Laden" will bring the end to much of anything. There’s a hole in New York that no one seems to know exactly how to fill. When one is "in history," one never knows how it’s going to play out. All I know right now for sure is that the bravado of Bush’s Wars will not be seen as the definitive solution in the history books of the future. They’ll be seen as a trivial temper tantrum that interfered with the process that moved us from the movie world of good and evil to a place where solutions can exist…
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