Of course the calls for Napolitano's firing are manifestations of two nearly universal human limitations or maladaptations: first, our obsessive fixation on the unrecoverable past and the ever-shrinking future, which impairs our ability to experience and understand the present; second, our inability to engage with complex systems in their full complexity, which leads us to either dehumanizing abstraction or destructive parochialism. This latter weakness, a misapprehension of scale, is known as 'selfishness' or 'egocentrism' - 'I am the center of the/my universe, its most important feature' - and the former fixation is its narrative cognate.
To put it less abstractly: no one really thinks firing Janet Napolitano will improve the performance of the Department of Homeland Security, and no one really thinks the next bomber will carry out the same half-baked plan as Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab. We're a limited species but not that limited. But we want our fears assuaged, and we have a very limited repertoire of solutions, because we're so fixated on (1) our own fears (bombs, war, embarrassment, strangers with power, etc.) and (2) the recent past. The Republicans want Napolitano fired because they want to win political points, because they want to be reelected and regain executive power. The TSA is restricting the use of in-flight blankets and carryon luggage because a systemic overhaul of airplane security requires adherence to a nonpolitical timeline, and they have none. Our TV talking heads carry on about the Grave Danger We're In because perspective and rumination make for bad television (don't tell David Simon or David Milch). We watch the news to satisfy our desire for connection to current events, i.e. to what happened during the last news cycle, and so we never have time for the question 'What action will most improve our lives together?'
Each group acts out of narrow self-preservation, in the misguided belief that we must be (safe, happy, friends, good) before we can act (freely, globally, in concert, justly).
We just watched a guy try to blow of a plane with explosive powder hidden in his underpants. We must act on what we just saw - because what else could the world possibly consist of? We associate the name 'Janet Napolitano' with these occurrences, because she embodies Power of That Sort; we associate our discomfort - which we can't explain due to our scrupulously-maintained ignorance - with her being-in-power, and to remedy our discomfort, we go looking for buildings to burn. Remember when we were safe? If we clear away the recent past perhaps we'll find our way to the distant past, when we were happy and didn't have to think about anyone else's feelings toward us.
Firing the Boss is a method of wishing away the recent past - because we measure time by circumstance, and for authority-worshippers the most important circumstance is who's yanking our chain today - but it doesn't work; the past keeps growing, and the future keeps arriving. (Why do people read 'spoilers' for favourite TV shows that haven't yet aired? To keep the future from surprising them. 'Mastery' without work; 'learning' without doing. This is only cowardice, which shouldn't surprise anybody. The same psychodynamics are at work whether we're looking forward or backward in time; we teach them in school, for Christ's sake.)
In regard to the present instance, experts have said for years and years that (1) terrorist attacks on the U.S. are inevitable, (2) airport security measures are generally useless against them, (3) in any case our airports are the least of our many worries given Americans' complete disinterest in anything but purely personal security, and (4) if people were even dimly aware of the form and amount of danger they're in they'd go mad, or at least vote the bums out. This last behaviour is of course completely unacceptable. Both Al Qaeda and the U.S. government have worked hard to alter Americans' behaviour by systematic fearmongering and propaganda; in this regard our government has done Al Qaeda's job for it, by publicly responding not to our complex circumstances but to the fear itself.
The 'war on terror' was, in fact, accurately named. The criminals and imbeciles in the Bush administration really did think they were at war with fear - not with the people and circumstances that induce terror but with the result of their actions. It was always a rear-guard action against the overreactions of the American populace, which is why during the last decade most of the government's propaganda efforts were turned inward, toward the voters. What is the nature of the deadly Israel/Palestine relationship? Who knows. What does Al Qaeda want? Doesn't matter. Our 'peaceful' state of mind is, to borrow a phrase from Deadwood, a lie agreed upon. The attacks of 9/11/01 only made that lie more difficult to sustain, though President Bush tried valiantly to cling to the status quo even as he plotted war. (Remember his 'go shopping, go to Disneyworld' schtick? He was serious, of course. Don't be surprised when a recovering alcoholic tells you to 'fake it 'til you make it.')
If the government were to put policies into place to deal with terrorists, rather than terror, we wouldn't bother with the brainless security theatre that now makes airline travel a mundane inconvenience instead of a wonder. If we can't see security, at least once in a while, we forget it's there - and when the inevitable disaster or near-disaster comes around, we get a bit upset and go after the Bosses (but politely, according to procedure, never threatening any real power). This isn't to say DHS and TSA aren't doing good invisible work; I'm sure they're doing a heckuva job in general. But from a public opinion standpoint, that work simply does not matter. We act on what we see. We predict more of what we know. We try to live in a straight line - hence the conservative tendency of the popular press, which isn't 'right' or 'left' but merely myopically up-to-date in its political disposition - and convulse with shock whenever we're reminded that the world is a chaotic system of chaotic systems and history is a consensus narrative, a fiction. Then our government reacts to our reaction even as it attempts (with the usual mixed success) to deal with the situation itself. 'Optics,' alas.
How many Americans gave even a moment's thought to the nonsensical Terror Threat Level indicator this autumn? If we're not reminded about institutions and macrostructures we absorb them into our personal contexts and think no more. (Another hat-tip to David Simon here, whose great work is the narrative depiction of the inextricability of individuals from institutional context, i.e. The Wire.) When was the last time you thought about the Exxon Valdez and the inevitability of another such disaster - or the ongoing slow-motion recreation of that disruption by any number of heedless corporate predators in vulnerable ecosystems all over the world?
America is exceptional. The past is exceptional. In the future we will want and have what we want and have today, only moreso. Extraterrestrials will no doubt look like us, but in a different colour. Everything is either totally different or absolutely the same. How could we possibly be related to anything that doesn't look like us? How could what I see possibly be part of something bigger? How could the world be unknowable if we've already offloaded the very concept of unknowability onto this 'God' character we've invented? Wasn't that the point in the first place?
All things exist independently and interdependently. We believe the opposite, thinking ourselves special and separate. Confronting the not-so-hidden continuity of things, their systemicity, contingency, their mereness, means accepting that our fear of the moment isn't the moment itself. It means neither comforting ourselves with the illusion of security nor gratifying ourselves with the shared narrative of existential peril, neither immanentizing mere power nor wallowing in small-minded despair. In the present instance it means making a good-faith attempt to learn about both long-term and local causes of This Nightmarish Thing, to see the smallness of the thing itself (a bomb is a bomb; war is war; death is death; nothing will stop the world nor absolve our responsibility but our own deaths, which weren't likely today and probably won't come tomorrow either) and accept the largeness of the systems to which we're connected. This is to say that the proper response to such a situation isn't 'righteous indignation,' which is just a dance to keep other people from pointing out how useless we are. The proper response is humility, which is a good deal more complex than it sounds and which plays poorly on the nightly news.
No one wants to hear this - least of all the people on Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab's plane, who might have died had he been more competent - but the explosion of another airplane is not the end of the world. It means death, yes, and death is scary. But it's only death. It's only an airplane. It's only a hundred civilians, a dozen, four hundred. Right? If a hundred civilians died tomorrow in an American airstrike - in Pakistan, say, in the shadow of a flying robot bomber - we'd be up in arms for a day or so and then go back to not giving a shit about unseen civilians dead in American airstrikes. What animates us today is the usual parochialism: But what about me? I was at the airport this week! If we cared about the world we would act for the world. If we cared about justice we would behave justly. But few people evince these desires except after the fact.
It's easier and more immediately profitable to regret injustice than to fight it.
A decent humility suggests we should call on Janet Napolitano and her organization to work harder, now, in the name of a future we can't yet see, rather than 'punishing' them and everyone else out of shame over a past we couldn't prevent or understand. The failed bombing wasn't about us; our proposed remedy is; decent humility might lead us to think about that too.
