The War Story - Cultural Amnesia and the Avenging Angel Fantasy
By Lori E. Amy
I want to begin this encounter with the narratives inscribing America's post-September 11th, 2001 war on terror by recounting a recent event:
On August 12, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that, on September 11, 2002, "the first phase of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) would be implemented by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) at selected ports of entry throughout the United States" (US Embassy online). Under NSEERS, "aliens who stay in the United States for more than 30 days" must register with the INS, and targeted populations must notify "the INS within ten days of any changes regarding place of residence, employment or educational institution" (US Embassy online). On December 19, 2002, "up to 700 Middle Eastern and Muslim men and boys were arrested in Southern California by federal immigration authorities after they voluntarily complied with" the registration requirement, which "mandates the fingerprinting and registration of all male visitors 16 years and older from certain Middle Eastern countries. It remains unclear how many others have been detained across the country, but reportedly a full one-quarter of all those who complied with the program were arrested in Los Angeles" (ACLU online). According to a December 19 press release from the ACLU,
In most cases, it is apparent that the INS arrested men who were simply waiting for approval of their green card applications, or those with minor visa problems caused by incompetence in the agency itself, which has been plagued by an inept bureaucracy for years. In but one example, the San Diego Union Tribune reported on July 27, 2002 that the agency recently failed to process more than 200,000 change of address forms and then unceremoniously dumped them in the largest underground records facility in the world - an abandoned mine near Kansas City - putting hundreds of thousands at risk of wrongful arrest and deportation for failing to report a change of address. (ACLU online).
Lucas Guttentag, Director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project said that, given the evidence, "there is no alarmism in saying this is a round-up" (ACLU online). "Attorney General Ashcroft is using the immigrant registration program to lock up people who already have provided extensive information as part of their green card applications. . . . Therefore the purpose is clearly not to get information but rather to selectively arrest, detain and deport Middle Eastern and Muslim men in the United States" (ACLU online).
This event - an event reminiscent of the American internment of the Japanese during WWII and of the Nuremberg laws in Germany (laws upon which the entire machinery of the concentration camps depended) - is evidence of the dangerous consolidation of Americans' long-standing delusion of this country as the force of "Good" locked in mortal combat against the forces of "Evil," variously embodied throughout history by other races, countries, and political/economic ideologies. This is a delusion that we share with the terrorists who spent over a year planning and preparing for the attacks on the structures most symbolic of America's financial and military presence in other countries: they could undertake these actions because they passionately believed that they were attacking the evil that has been unjustly attacking their own good-ness.
I want to think about the story of war unraveling in the wake of the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the United States Pentagon and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as a story of mass delusions. Mass delusion, as Susan Griffin defines it in her analysis of Nazi Germany, is characterized by a "a shared set of beliefs which are untrue and which distort reality" (156). And cultural delusions - like the belief that America (or Islam) is the exemplary force of good in the world and that there exists something like an "Axis of Evil" - can, as Griffin argues, "shape [themselves] into such devastating social events as the Holocaust" (158). Or, I would add, the horrific obliteration of the Twin Towers, the equally horrific, unremitting bombing of Afghanistan, the unconscionable manipulations of words like "war" and "terrorism" used to justify wholly unjustifiable actions.
But this delusionary good/evil script and its concomitant war story is a cultural fabrication, a script that we write and re-write, over and over again, and that we have - that, at any rate, I want to believe that we have - the possibility of re-vising. In the interests of thinking through our possibilities for waking up from the delusion of America as a force of good combating "Evil" (incarnated in the American imaginary as the September 11th attacks and encompassing everything associated with "Muslim" in particular and "Arab" in general), I want to consider the relationship between:
1. The ways in which narratives of good/evil become culturally entrenched;
2. The degree to which these narrative constructions rely on a cultural work of forgetting;
3. The causal relation between delusionary narratives and the utter failure of individuals and societies to bear witness to (and hence intervene in) "devastating social events."
From these considerations, I want to pose three preliminary criteria for embarking on a project of historical re-membering; a project of re-membering through which I hope we can begin to wake up from this somnambulistic fugue-state in which we are presently action out the nightmare of the fight-until-the-death of a good/evil world.
Entrenching the Good/Evil Narrative: The Media and the Work of Forgetting
We all know that the American fiction of the Arab terrorist, the construction of the new evil-other so necessary to replace the loss of the fiction of the "commie-pinko-fag," is not a product of the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center or the United States Pentagon -- it has been a long time in the making. But the events of September 11th have turned existing cultural stereotypes linking "Arab" and "terrorist" into a powerful national myth, a cultural delusion organizing fear, hate, and paranoia into a devastating machinery of international terror. When I refer to the fiction of the Arab terrorist, I am not in any way trivializing what are clearly heinous acts. Nor am I lapsing into what Seyla Benhabib describes as the failure of Western intellectuals, "recycl[ing] well-worn out 1960's clichés about western imperialist struggle by the `wretched of the earth,' to "grasp the unprecedented nature of the events unfolding since September 11 2001" (Benhabib online).
Benhabib rightly points us to the "internal dynamics and struggles within the Islamic world" that have "given rise to" these events, and warns that we must reach for a grasp of the world that is "beyond our usual categories" (Benhabib online). The desire for a simplistic causality that can explain these attacks as a matter of "because America did this, the `terrorists' did that" is useless: "blaming the policies and actions of western governments will NOT "purge" the "enmity and hatred which is directed toward one as a member of such western societies" (Benhabib online). I am, however, insisting that the attacks ARE in relation to and an escalation of the political and economic dynamics that preceded them, and, more crucially, that these attacks relied on, as Jean Baudrillard argues in an essay circulated just after September 11th, the symbolic logic of good and evil - a logic motivating both "sides" in endless cycles of "attack" and "retaliation" (Baudrillard online).
This logic of "good" and "evil" locks us into a stale-mate of terror (Baudrillard online), which produces and is (re)produced by a repetitive "flooding of military forces, fantastic news, useless propaganda, deceitful and pathetic discourses and technological deployments" (Baudrillard online). In this equation, the media are not just "part of the event, they are part of the terror." In the aftermath of the Twin Towers, Americans were bombarded, first, with images of the WTC attacks, aired over and over and over again, and then with images of America's terrifying retaliations. This "instantaneous global diffusion" in real time of the collapsing Twin Towers "infinitely multiplie[d]" the image and fe[d] the frenzy of retaliation. The spectacularized and terror-inducing (Baudrillard online) representations of this attack-retaliation have come to constitute American cultural knowledge of this event and an American identity that carries out a series of actions in the world based on this knowledge and the emotions and beliefs this way of knowing evolves.
As Baudrillard argues, the media is "part of the problem" in that it re-terrorizes us with the inundation of images that become a virtual reality, thereby supplanting any possibility for an actual encounter of the event and its meaning. These "large and complex repertoires of images . . . of the world created by these media" are "image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality" that blur "the lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes" (Appadurai 330 - 331). These "mediascapes" (Appadurai 330) not only fund cultural delusions - convictions of what is "real" that derive from splintered, fragmented, decontextualized and hence inherently fictive media representations-they also function as censoring mechanisms of the state apparatus. The fictive quality inherent to mediascapes is amplified by government control of information , including, as in the 1991 Persian Gulf and throughout the United States bombing of Afghanistan, strictly limiting reporters' access to battle fields, chaperoning reporters, forbidding off-the-record interviews with soldiers, and censoring dispatches for "sensitive" information (Cotts online). In these ways, media attention, while seemingly disseminating "facts" and "information," in fact actively facilitates a cultural amnesia, both in the ways it distorts what it does represent and by virtue of what it fails to represent (Ross 650). Those things that the media do not represent - information kept secret by the government, programming unpopular with corporate sponsors - are kept outside of and largely unavailable to cultural memory. This combination of distortion and censorship helps to create the delusional environment in which contradictions in the official discourse are by and large ignored and even blatant lies remain generally unchallenged.
Hannah Arendt has analyzed this cultural fugue as a crucial component of Nazi Germany, where
the announcements of the Third Reich consistently contradicted themselves. Even within the same statement, contradictory assertions were to be found. Moreover, continually, with almost no attempt to conceal the divergence between fact and statement, the pronouncements of the Third Reich contradicted what the German people could see with their own eyes. (Arendt qtd Griffin 186)
Lest we lapse into one of the most insidious delusions of this cultural moment - that something like the Holocaust "could never happen in America" -- Griffin reminds us that Hitler insisted that he was a pacifist; that, indeed, he argued that, "in order to save pacifism, those who believe in this idea must wage a war to preserve the German race" (185). In a very similar vein, George Bush argues - and the American public seems to believe - the delusional notion that, in order to secure "peace" in the "world," we must wage war on Iraq, and, from there, any other country or peoples that the United States unilaterally decides makes up the "Axis of Evil" against whom our war machinery is mobilizing.
Should any of us see through the contradictions, lies, and distortions of this delusional landscape, the full force of the law is poised to silence us and erase us from cultural memory. Barely a month after the September 11th attacks, America enacted laws that began eroding domestic civil liberties. On October 24th, 2002, HR 3162 RDS, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, popularly known as the Patriot Act, passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 357-66, and, on October 25th, passed the Senate by a vote of 98-1. Virtually no public debate preceded this Act. Just over one year later, on November 19, 2002, and despite substantial grass-roots opposition , The Homeland Security Act passed the Senate by a vote of 90 to 9. These acts increase government secrecy, reduce accountability (Richter and Tracy, online), and evolve a national security state - the enabling condition of bloody and oppressive regimes.
Supported by the reality-shaping force of the media and repressive laws, prominent professional and civic organizations actively censor (and censure) any critical discussion of United States policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. A particularly frightening example of this for academics is the November 2001 report of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), "Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It." This report casts any criticism of U.S. foreign policy as "America-bashing" and condemns the move to understand the September 11th attacks in a larger global context. Calling the important first wave of teach-ins organized on campuses around the country to help students grapple with the geopolitical dimensions of the attacks "moral equivocation[s]" and "condemnations of America" (Martin and Neal 2), the report claims:
Rarely did professors publicly mention heroism, rarely did they discuss the difference between good and evil, the nature of Western political order or the virtue of a free society. Indeed, the message of much of academe was clear: BLAME AMERICA FIRST. . (Martin and Neal 3)
The report goes so far as to condemn attempts to understand international political history. In a truly chilling gesture of cultural denial and an early indication of the mass delusion that has a vice-grip on this country, the report states:
Ironically, instead of ensuring that students understand the unique contributions of America and Western civilization - the civilization under attack-universities are rushing to add courses on Islamic and Asian culture. UCLA created 50 new courses in response to the terrorist attacks while other institutions expanded existing offerings. (6)
Besides uniformly condemning any intellectual public debate about they ways in which a "war on terrorism" aids American economic and military interests overseas, the ACTA, in an early act of New-McCarthyism, quotes students, professors, and public intellectuals at teach-ins and war protests across the country and provides a blackball list of the professors that it accuses of America-bashing.
How can we understand this repressive climate, in which even our modest questioning of attacks on our civil liberties or America's role in fostering international unrest is called un-patriotic, as other than delusional? How else can I explain the surreal incomprehensibility of the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, or the round-up of hundreds of Muslim men, other than as a mass cultural delusion following from both the "Good/Evil" bifurcations locking us into mortal combat and the cultural amnesia scripted by mediascapes operating as forces of the state apparatus enforcing our cultural forgetting? And how can I explain, other than as a mass cultural delusion, the American public being overwhelmingly in favor of American military actions even as the Human Rights Watch warns that "the anti-terror campaign led by the United States is inspiring opportunistic attacks on civil liberties around the world" (online).
Besides legitimating other governments' repressive actions against civilian populations, this language of "evil" legitimates American troops' war-time excesses. The 27 Afghans who were held for 16 days in Kandahar, beaten and abused by American troops, offer a counter-narrative to the "just war" story. Abdul Rauf, for example, describes the United States Special Forces storming a compound in Oruzgan:
I was shouting 'Dost! Dost!' - we are friends! - but they were not listening. . . . And I was telling my men that they are friends, and American soldiers came and started to beat me. I was down on my knees, bent over, and they kicked me in the chest. I heard my ribs crack. Then I was lying on my side and they kicked me in the back, in the kidneys, and I fainted. (Gall online)
When he regained consciousness, his hands were tied and one of his men was dead on the ground. The Pentagon has "acknowledged that the raids were conducted in error, apparently because of flawed intelligence, and that the prisoners were neither members of Al Qaeda nor the Taliban. Local officials put the death toll at 21, the Pentagon" admits to "at least" 15 innocent men killed. These deaths that the Pentagon calls an "error" from "flawed intelligence" are the logical conclusion of a language that dehumanizes entire peoples and reduces them to an "evil" that must be brutally destroyed. Despite the devastating consequences of this language and the actions it legitimates, America's current administration blithely ignores pleas from humanitarian organizations, threatened peoples and governments, and even America's allies, to bear witness to the consequences of our words and actions.
This is but one incident - a small one, a minor one, one that even The New York Times reported - and that the by-standing American public looked away from, overlooked, failed to bear witness to. Psychoanalytic analyses of cultural trauma offer us one way to understand this failure to either comprehend the enormity of what is taking place or to speak out against state violence. Shoshana Felman discusses this cultural failure to bear witness to the genocide of the Jews in Poland as a function of the different topographical and cognitive positions that victims, perpetrator, and bystanders occupied. The various positions are differentiated by "what and how they do not see, by what and how they fail to witness" (208). Felman argues that the Jews saw but did not "understand the purpose and destination of what they [saw]"; the Poles saw but, as bystanders, "they [did] not quite look, they avoid[ed] looking directly and thus they overlook[ed] at once their responsibility and their complicity as witness" (208); the Nazis "[saw] to it that both the Jews and the extermination [would] remain unseen, invisible" (208).
Theoretically, as Dori Laub argues,
the truth of the event could have been (italics mine) recorded in perception and in memory, either from within our without, by Jews, by any one of a number of ``outsiders." Outsider-witnesses could have been, for instance, the next-door neighbor, a friend, a business partner, community institutions including the police and the courts of law, as well as bystanders and potential rescuers and allies from other countries. (81)
Of course, attempts at bearing witness did take place. In fact, we have, retrospectively, constructed entire institutions and disciplines around the examination of holocaust testimonials -- diaries, photos, failed attempts to broadcast first-hand testimony of the genocide to the outside world. But the "degree to which beearing witness was required, entailed such an outstanding measure of awareness and of comprehension of the event - of its dimensions, consequences, and above all, of its radical otherness to all knows frames of reference - that it was beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to imagine (84). Those lucid enough to warn the community were "dismissed as `prophets of doom' and labeled traitors or madmen" (83). In this way, the "capability of a witness alone to stand out from the crowd and not be flooded and engulfed by the event itself was precluded" (83). Hence, as the "event of the Jewish genocide unfolded," most "actual or potential witnesses failed one by one to occupy their position as a witness, and at a certain point it seemed as if there was no one left to witness what was taking place" (81). Few people were able to extricate themselves from the "roles, and consequent identities" by which their perspective of events was defined.
Felman argues that there is an unbreachable gap between these different topographical and cognitive positions; this "splitting of eyewitnessing" in effect let the Holocaust occur as an event unwitnessed. This is true because in part because the eyewitnesses each overlook, fail to look, misunderstand, or hide what they see, but as crucially because the incommensurability between the fragmented empirical witnessing precluded the possibility of a community of seeing. The splitting of eye-witnessing "radically annihilate[d] the recourse (the appeal) to visual corroboration (to the commensurability between two different seeings) and thus dissolve[d] the possibility of any community of witnessing" (211). Lacking a community of seeing - a dialogic, relational space in which to unfold, analyze, process, and make meaning of the horrific and unprecedented events of the holocaust-neither victim nor bystander (nor, I would argue, the vast majority of the perpetrators) was able to fully comprehend the meaning of the disappearing neighbors, the special trains, the comings and going in the death-camp towns. The "splitting of eyewitnessing which the historical event seems to consist of" results, then, in an "incapacity of seeing to translate itself spontaneously into" meaning and "memory" (212).
At this historical moment, Americans are, much like the Poles in Felman's example, not quite looking; we are avoiding looking directly at what America's war machinery means to people across the globe. We are failing to bear witness to the meaning and significance of the violence we are perpetrating. Our individual failures to bear witness, structured as they are by our different topographical and cognitive positions - different than, say, the moderate Pakistani citizen whose days are now lived in the cross-fire between local forces violently polarizing in rhythm with the bifurcating violences we enact - are equally structured by the calculating coercive forces of the state apparatus scripting what we can see, orchestrating what and how we can "know."
As a segue way into my closing, I want to offer two concrete examples of the failure to bear witness that bear out the theoretical stakes Laub and Felman outline.
The first:
I was witness to one of the most mundane acts of constructing the fiction of the "evil other" and the concomitant fiction of the "good/morally superior self" upon which laws like NSEER's are founded and on which they rely to prevent the outrage against injustice that such actions should invoke. In 1991, just after Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf, I was teaching at a rural high school just outside of Gainsesville, Florida. In need of money between my M.A. and my Ph.D. program, teaching high school seemed like a good way to pay some bills while earning practical experience. But I could never have predicated the experience I would gain or the impact it would make on my life. One of my students, James Ripley, had a step-father who was an army reservist and who spent a short time in the Persian Gulf. When he returned, James' stepfather brought back with him pictures of dead Iraqis . . . men, mostly soldiers (though, as we all know, pictures of the "other" deaths . . . the women, the children, the civilians in Baghdad, have never entered American cultural consciousness. We overlook the fact that 90% of the casualties of modern war are civilians [Nordstrom]). These were human beings with limbs missing, their clothes blown off by the blast of bombs.
I would not have known exactly what these images represented, except that the high school principal invited James' step-father to bring these pictures to school, where they were displayed in the school auditorium. My students returned from this obscene display euphoric, spouting empty football-field slogans like "we kicked ass" and "that'll teach `em." I threw up. And then I protested the display and forbade my students to partake of it (not that I had any authority to "forbid" them, and not that they listened to me . . . ) This ghastly display of carnage constituted me and every member of that school as witnesses to the mechanisms of cultural amnesia. The institution of the school was teaching these adolescents how to forget that they were looking at photographs of human beings, how to not know that these death shots signified pain, terror, carnage. We were all witness to the institution of the school teaching students how to hate, how to split themselves off from themselves and deny the humanity they share with the dead bodies that they "saw" but refused to witness. Many of these students are in the United States military now.
The second, and I think uncomfortably familiar to many of us today:
In January 2002, not a single one of the 72 students in three undergraduate classes I was teaching knew what the Patriot Act is. (In contrast, almost all of them knew who the last contestants on the popular television show "Survivor" were.) If 72 students can know about a popular television show but not about an act that allows the government to collect private information on its citizens, expand Internet eavesdropping technology, and obtain wire taps for activity on the Internet (Olsen online), then, clearly, the knowledge of life-altering historic events such as this may not make it into mainstream cultural consciousness.
Popular culture's refusal to admit the Patriot Act into its awareness does not, unfortunately, rule out the possibility of its devastating effects on us in the long term. A slight scratch at the surface of our repressed historical memory reveals dozens of examples of things we did not want to know or believe that came back to haunt us - the Nazi concentration camps, the Tuskegee experiments, Enron's accounting irregularities, just to name a few. We should be afraid of this. We should re-member that, in February of 2002, "fewer than half of Serbia's people believe[d]" that the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian (Christian) Serb troops killed 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, actually took place (Ford 1). This refusal to know the truth of genocide is especially striking as the war crimes trial of former Serbian President Slobadan Milosovic, begun on February 12th, 2002, publicly detailed the very atrocities the Serbs still deny (Ford online). And we should be afraid when we re-member that, during the reign of Argentina's bloody military junta, (a regime supported by the United States and extensively trained at the School the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia), the majority of Argentine's were "convinced that the reports of gross human rights violations that flourished in the international press" were "made up by the supposed victims . enjoying refugee status in Mexico and Europe" in order to "'discredit' the Fatherland" (244).
Felman and Laub argue that it is only after-the-fact, belatedly, that the survivors of the Holocaust (the literal survivors of the death camps and all the "others" - bystanders, perpetrators, the next generation of children) have been able to begin to bear witness to the horrors that, so far outside of their frames of reference, exceeded them. There was thus a "missed contemporaneity" between "the Holocaust experience and the witness of the Holocaust experience" (Felman 268). In order to bear witness, the "spectator as witness has to wake up . . . into the unthinkable realization that what he is witnessing is not simply a dream" (Felman 270). This is exceedingly difficult -- perhaps impossible? - when what we must awaken to is "a reality whose scrutiny requires a degree of vigilance, of wakefulness and of alertness such that it exceeds perhaps human capacity" (Felman 271). The question we each have to pose - for ourselves as individuals and for our culture, is: Can we become "contemporaneous" with the meaning and significance of the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, the registration and detention of Muslim men, the (check number of) tons of depleted uranium dropped in Iraq. . .? Can we become contemporaneous with these events and bear witness to them?
If it is possible to shake the fugue that has settled on us, we must, as Hannah Arendt argues in her analysis of the Eichman trial, exercise our critical judgment. It is especially difficult to exercise our critical judgment when "the evil acts committed are the law of the country" (Arendt 294 - 295) - the Nuremberg laws, the laws demanding the Registration of Jews in Germany or Muslim men in America, the yellow star, expulsion, deportation, the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act. It is difficult to exercise our critical judgment when our own judgment may be completely at odds with what we regard as the unanimous opinion of all those around us (Arendt 294 -295). But it is especially urgent under these circumstances that we develop our critical judgment to counter the campaign of anti-memory working against our ability to bear witness.
But what are our possibilities for bearing witness to this cultural moment, for
becoming conscious of the meaning and significance of "war" on "terror" that we are supporting our government in waging? "In what way, buy what creative means, (and at what price) would it become possible for us to witness the event without a witness?" (Felman 227). Hannah Arendt, reporting on Israel's trial of Adolph Eichmann, tells the story of a "hush" that "settled over the courtroom" after Abba Kovner told the story of Anton Schmidt, a sergeant in the German Army who had "helped the Jewish partisans by supplying them with forged papers and military trucks" (230). Arendt wonders "how utterly different everything would be today . . . in Israel, in Germany, in all of Europe, and perhaps in all countries of the world, if only more such stories could have been told" (231).
Schmidt's story unsettles the simple "good/evil" logic legitimating each side's murder of the other. And, at this moment in our global history, we desperately need to recover such stories. If we are going to write our way out of this war story, one of the things we need is a sustained project of historical re-membering that counters the anti-memory campaign of militaristic calls to "Remember 9-11" as rage-inducing fuel for the war narrative. We need a project of re-membering that dives into the historical and cultural record and brings into immediate cultural consciousness the stories, perspectives, and knowledges we need for the hard work of peace in front of us. To begin a project of historical re-membering, we need to work on cultural memory on at least three levels simultaneously:
1. In order to deconstruct the Avenging Angel fantasy underwriting United States violences, Americans have to re-member the many ways that America has been complicit in and reaps economic profit from other people's troubles. To re-member America's role in the larger world is not to "blame" America or to reinscribe the destructive narratives of "evil" America that fueled the September 11th terrorist attacks. Rather, we must re-member the historical complexity of our relation to the larger world in order to imagine how "others" might see us, and, through that imagining, be able to imagine others differently;
2. In order to awaken to the grave danger of this moment, Americans have to re-member the ways in which our repressive actions over here are like those that we condemn "over there." We need to develop a critical cultural consciousness through which we can identify the mechanisms of political oppression no matter where they operate, including mechanisms such as a language of the "evil" other that mobilizes genocides and the consolidation of a national security apparatus capable of disappearings;
3. In order to conceive stories of peace, we have to re-member the alternatives to the violent retaliatory justice of a good/evil dichotomy that other people have already evolved. We do not have only a history of violent regimes haunting our collective memory: we have also a history of people transforming cultures of violence and oppression into open democratic societies. We need to mine the work of the truth commissions, non-violent resistance movements, peace groups, and civic action organizations that have been agents of this cultural transformation.
Especially because popular culture is now inscribed by/inscribing the language of good and evil scripting war, we have to find ways to bring to our students and the American people stories that will help us to re-member ourselves - literally, re-collect to ourselves knowledges forgotten or repressed- and write our way out of this war story.
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