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Op-Eds

9/12: The Appeal to National Narcissism is Alive and Well

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September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: V...
September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City: View of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty. (Image: US National Park Service ) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“The narcissist,” someone once wrote on an Internet discussion forum devoted to the topic, “learns nothing, forgets nothing, and forgives nothing.”

In conscious appeal to this tendency, the American political class flocks to shrines in New York, DC and Pennsylvania each year to once again cynically wring as much narcissistic flag-waving hoopla as possible from the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

I generally avoid watching these observances. This year my sole exposure to them was video of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton collapsing as she left the New York event during a medical emergency.

9/11 will remain American political propaganda’s killer app (pun intended) for many years, I’m sure, but I consider 9/12 and the following few days far more important in the scheme of things. Call ME a national narcissist, but I find the response more compelling than the initiating event.

Fifteen years on, it is clear that America’s political class still relies on Americans having learned nothing, forgotten nothing, and forgiven nothing. That reliance seems justified.

Consider this excerpt from an op-ed I wrote on September 12, 2001:

“Our politicians have acted for years with impunity, citing only our ‘national interest,’ as if any legitimate interest could be served by the intentional killing of civilians simply because those civilians have been designated ‘the enemy’ …

“We watched as those politicians were hustled away to ‘safe houses,’ the better to immunize themselves from the consequences of their own actions of years and decades past. …

“Now, they emerge from their hiding places, and they wail and gnash their teeth, vowing revenge and demanding that we surrender even more of our freedoms in order to avoid more of what they themselves brought upon us in the first place. They regard the blood of September 11 not as a horrible payment for their past errors, but as ink with which to write new checks to the order of their power and drawn on the account of our lives and freedoms.”

Has anything changed since I wrote that column? Not that I can tell.

After 15 years of unremitting exploitation of 9/11 to justify war on our civil liberties at home, and war abroad of the very type that culminated in 9/11, American politicians still believe that all they need to gull the populace into supporting more of the same is, as Joe Biden put it of Rudy Giuliani, “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”

They’re right. And until that changes, nothing else will.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

Election 2016: It’s a Presidential Campaign, Not a Geography Quiz

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Former Gov. Gary Johnson
Gary Johnson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On September 8, Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where panelist Mike Barnicle hit him with the question:

“What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

Johnson: “About?”

Barnicle: “Aleppo.”

Johnson: “And what is a leppo?”

Barnicle: “You’re kidding.”

Johnson: “No.”

Maybe you’ve heard about this exchange. Maybe you know (or maybe you Googled and found out) that Aleppo is the largest city in Syria and a focal point of the war between Syria’s government and Islamic State rebels.

Be warned: If you listened to MSNBC’s “expert” on Syria, or read the New York Times account of Johnson’s “faux pas,” you got bad scoop. They didn’t know much about Aleppo either, inaccurately describing the city as the Islamic State’s “capital” (that’s Raqqa, not Aleppo).

My gut feeling is that the average American will come down on Johnson’s side of this teapot tempest, for two reasons.

First, most Americans likely know little if anything about Aleppo and don’t care to, so they can probably sympathize. Johnson’s foreign policy focus as a presidential candidate is “big picture.” He wants the US to stop militarily intervening everywhere around the world at the drop of a hat. He doesn’t have to know the name of every city in the world to know that he doesn’t want to bomb them.

Secondly, the question was transparently framed as an ambush. Barnicle’s obvious intent was to try and get a Dan Quayle or George W. Bush type howler or malapropism out of Johnson.

Any TV talking head who queried Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump on the subject would do so roughly as follows:

“Moving on to Syria: If elected, what is your plan to address the civil war there, destroy ISIS and bring peace to the region? And what do you think of reports of new chemical attacks in the country’s largest city, Aleppo, where fighting between regime forces and ISIS has flared up again?”

Not: “What would you do if you were elected about Aleppo?”

To Johnson’s credit, he quickly owned up to and apologized for his knowledge gap in the area of Syrian geography. But he shouldn’t have had to, because he shouldn’t have been asked that question in that exceedingly unprofessional manner.

Running for president is not a geography quiz.

And Morning Joe isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — an arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, charged with helping her regain traction among voters who have abandoned her for third party candidates because of her demonstrated personal corruption and incompetence, not to mention her dangerous foreign policy belligerence.

Yes, Clinton knows where Aleppo is — and she’d turn the city of more than two million into a lifeless crater given the opportunity.

Is Johnson all that and a bag of chips? Maybe not. But at least his ideas on foreign policy and military adventurism don’t constitute an existential threat to the US and to humanity. The same can’t be said for the ideas of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

DEA Declares (Kr)atomic War on Americans

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Typical powdered commercial Kratom, Mitragyna ...
Typical powdered commercial Kratom, Mitragyna speciosa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In early August, the US Drug Enforcement Administration announced that, contrary to expectations, it wouldn’t remove marijuana from “Schedule 1” (“no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”).

At the end of the month, DEA made another announcement: It intends to add another herbal substance, kratom, to Schedule 1.

Why is the DEA picking on kratom? The agency offers numerous excuses — insufficient testing for the plant to have an approved medical use, its historical use as an opium substitute,  its increasing use “to self-treat chronic pain and opioid withdrawal symptoms, with users reporting its effects to be comparable to prescription opioids.”

DEA says that last bit like it’s a bad thing. It isn’t. Pain relief is a GOOD thing. I’ve tried kratom myself for chronic back pain. I used it once, and got several days of (admittedly subjective) pain relief. The next time, not as much. I assume there was a difference of purity/strength involved. My pain turned out to be neuropathic and treatable with non-opioid medication. Otherwise I’d probably have continued to experiment with kratom.

Every day we’re warned of an “epidemic” of “prescription drug abuse” — mostly of opioids. Along comes a fairly benign herbal substance that helps with withdrawal from such drugs and with the chronic pain that the patient was probably taking them for in the first place, and DEA wants to ban it.

Yes, I said “fairly benign.” DEA claims to have identified 15 “kratom-related” deaths in the US over the last two years, but doesn’t claim kratom as the actual CAUSE of those deaths. While my research has admittedly been minimal, I’ve yet to find so much as a single documented report of a “kratom-related” death in which other drugs were not also present.

When you have to ask why, the answer is usually “money.” The case of DEA versus kratom is no exception to the rule.

The Drug Enforcement Administration employs more than 10,000 people (nearly 5,000 of them “special agents”) and sports a budget of more than $2 billion per year. The organization’s mission statement is fairly long and convoluted and manages to leave out the real main mission: Keeping those jobs and increasing that budget.

How long has that been the mission? For a century or so. The Drug Enforcement Administration was once known as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which in turn was a remnant of the Bureau of (alcohol) Prohibition, created for the express purpose of allowing former booze-busters to continue collecting government paychecks.

The only thing the DEA “protects” America from is the threat of having to compete with laid-off tax parasites for jobs in the productive sector.

With the war on marijuana winding down, DEA is on the lookout for new scary stories it can tell to taxpayers so we won’t object when politicians continue to throw money at DEA. Cue the kratom “threat.”

The real threat is DEA and other government agencies whose employees are willing to condemn Americans to pain, sickness, imprisonment, even death, rather than find real jobs.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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