Mourning in America: Apocalyptic Melancholia

The nation is attacked, its belief in its invulnerability shattered. Buildings emblematic of its power, might, and security are leveled, left in ruins. Its people are forced to re-evaluate their place in the world; some find national affirmation even in the wake of the destruction, others look for a reason for the tragedy—or someone to blame, even destroy, so that it never happens again.

This scenario is meant to evoke the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 for the United States, but it could just as well describe the Babylonian conquest of Judea and the burning of the Temple in Jerusalem in 587 BCE. In earlier work, I have explored the relationship between the destruction of the Temple and certain prophetic and apocalyptic responses to it—namely, the Biblical Ezekiel and the Apocryphal 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and 3 Baruch. I argued that these texts were a form of mourning for the great losses, material and symbolic, that were inflicted on the Jewish people, first by the Babylonians, then again six centuries later by the Romans. These texts, and others from the same apocalyptic tradition, exhibited nothing short of the symptoms that Sigmund Freud describes for the state of interrupted or repressed mourning known as melancholia in his classic essay, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). The features shared by melancholia and these scriptures include a compulsion to return to the original trauma and repeat the loss over and over again; the misrecognition and censorship of what was actually lost; a displacement of rage, vilification, and annihilating fantasies onto innocent and inappropriate targets; and the reproduction in fantasy of that which was lost but in an idealized, impervious form.

This reading of apocalyptic reactions to national tragedy suggests that the negotiation of a people’s identity in the wake of a similar collective

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trauma, where a people’s symbols have been destroyed, their identity shattered, and their comfortable expectations for the future eradicated, could exhibit the same features of “apocalyptic melancholia.”

On a symbolic level, the losses were grievous. What did the attacks reveal about ourselves as Americans we did not know? What cherished self conceptions would we be forced to give up, faced with this startling new reality? Certainly, the first to go was the notion that our two vast oceans protected us from outside attacks. We were also forced to accept that the U.S. must not be universally loved around the world. The loss of love and the resulting loss of protection: Americans suddenly were terrorized by the two great oedipal fears, only on a scale never-before imagined. But unlike the classical oedipal situation, Americans did not repress the aggressive response to the loss of love. In a very literal and demonstrable sense, public sentiment revolted against any honest probing of either the terrorists’ motives or our own responsibility in them. To do so was “siding with our enemies” and “blaming America first.” Identification with our enemies was completely proscribed, to the point that we literally could not correctly identify them. Over the course of the next two years, the fifteen Saudi hijackers unconsciously became Iraqis; all Muslims joined al-Qaeda by association; and a majority of Americans found it unnecessary to differentiate between Sunnis and Shi’ites or between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. The president himself said, in September of 2002, “[Y]ou can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror” (“The Rest of the Story: Iraq’s Links to Al Qaeda,” White House Press Release, September 16, 2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/2006094.html). It is clear that, even beyond the question of the connection of the Iraq War to 9/11, both events have long since been disconnected from their historical realities. Like the destruction of Jerusalem, they are touchstones for projection, crucibles of wish, need, and desire in the space between one national identity and another.

Just as important as reading the recent past in this manner, however, is using it to discern the impact this prolonged fantasy could have on the 2008 presidential election by looking at which presidential candidates may reinforce this melancholia and which may offer the country a chance at true healing of the wounds that have so occupied our national consciousness.

Without a doubt, the candidate who is most clearly trying to adopt the mantle of 9/11 is Rudy Giuliani. As the mayor of New York during the attacks, his visible, authoritative response turned him into a nationally-trusted figure. A New York Magazine feature on Giuliani’s presidential run called 9/11 his “alpha and omega” and suggested that to “many Americans, Rudy fills the leadership vacuum created by Bush’s bungling of the war and Katrina” that came to a head with the midterm elections in 2006 (Stephen Rodrick, “Rudy Tuesday,” New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/news/features/28517). Giuliani has also been the candidate who most consistently represents himself as the one to continue Bush’s approach in the War on Terror. Like the president, for Giuliani 9/11 justifies all actions taken in Iraq and lays the groundwork for pre-emptive military action against Iran.

If any one candidate would be in the position to be a melancholy apocalyptician straight out of the ancient texts, it’s Giuliani—except that rather than being displaced and brought low, psychologically, by the attacks, they turned him into “America’s mayor,” one of the most popular politicians in America, in no small part because of his ability to have people project their deepest desires for safety onto him. Cognitive psychologist George Lakoff argues that the image of the “strict father” lies at the heart of the conservative worldview, as it anchors these politics emotionally to the desire for a strong authority figure who protects his family from harm, invasion, and weakness. When Giuliani plays the 9/11 fear card, as he does repeatedly at his campaign events and in debates, he absolutely embodies this meme. He is an apocalyptician, no doubt, but an almost cheerful one. The attacks energized him and transformed him into a world figure; they made him whom he must have felt he was meant to be. He is not the desolate prophet, lamenting his ruined city. He is, rather, the happy warrior in the apocalyptic battle, whose mission will be complete only when he has run out of enemies to slay. Warning that a “new 9/11” will happen if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, Giuliani proclaimed, “This war ends when they stop coming here to kill us!” (Roger Simon, “Giuliani Warns of ‘New 9/11 if Dems Win,” Politico, http:// www.politico.com/news/stories/0407/3 684.html).

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For Rudy Giuliani, who is now defined to his core by 9/11, there must be a constant 9/11 for him to respond to. He must not defend against the losses of 9/11, but only the loss of 9/11 in the mind of the American public. Literally, to him, “every day is an anniversary of Sept. 11,” an unmistakable expression of melancholic love for one’s own unending loss (Adam Smith, “Giuliani Stresses National Security, Electability,” St. Petersburg Times, http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/08/State/Giulianistressesnatshtml). Significantly, opinion polling from September 2007 appears to confirm that his expression of this sentiment appears to be connecting precisely with the forty percent of Republicans who still hold to the fantasy that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks (Janet Elder, “Packaging 9/11, Terror and the War in Iraq,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/us/politics/I7webelder.html).

Does any candidate have the potential change this dynamic, especially as the vast majority of the American public has, after the 2006 midterm elections, demonstrated that it is not as compelled to perpetuate the 9/11-Iraq-terror circular narrative as it once was? The public has shifted to a more realistic view of the Iraq War; it is skeptical of the ability of this administration to protect Americans, which failed so terribly in the face of Hurricane Katrina. Who speaks honestly to a public who has seen the Emperor’s new clothes? John McCain and Hillary Clinton, in their own ways, have tried to position themselves as hard-nosed realists on terrorism and Iraq while still criticizing the president’s handling of these efforts, but their stances on these issues work at cross-purposes for them, psychologically speaking. “The War on Terror,” as the name literally suggests, is a defense against an emotional response at an instinctual level. To accept that there could be a successful “war” against such a thing is to embrace a fantasy of protection, whereby “terror” itself is eliminated by destroying all potential “terrorizing” threats. By adopting the connection of the Bush administration that the war in Iraq is a “central front” of the War on Terror, McCain and Clinton have already skewed their view of the reality of Iraq—it remains a symbol of another conflict, not the conflict to be addressed itself. Perhaps as a result, McCain’s venture has suffered, especially in comparison to his candid “Straight Talk Express” campaign of 2000, which made a virtue of the candidate’s refusal to paint flattering illusions for voters. On the other hand, Clinton is the clear front-runner for the Democrats. Maybe Republican voters read McCain’s division within himself as ambivalence—not a trait rewarded by Republican voters who have long supported the “steadfast” and “unwavering” President Bush—while Democrats potentially see reflected in Hillary Clinton her husband’s exceptional skill at political compartmentalization. Unfortunately, John Edwards’s emergence as war critic after not only voting to authorize the Iraq venture but also campaigning on it in the 2004 Democratic primaries does not seem to suggest a psychological tension more complex than finding that the message that resonated one year is discordant in another.

A few candidates from both parties, such as Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Dennis Kucinich, actually have taken consistent stands against the war, its association with 9/11, and the perpetuation of the notion that U.S. security needs require our on-going presence in the Middle East. Both men have their strong and vocal supporters, but their standing in the polls hardly makes the case that they have captured America’s imagination as honest men speaking truth to power. On the other hand, Barack Obama is a very viable candidate who opposed the Iraq War from its start. He has perhaps been the most conscientious candidate in trying to sort the realities of 9/11 and Iraq out from the many political fantasies that have accompanied them. What’s more, his focus on a transformative politics for the future should echo the transformation of U.S. politics evident in the midterm elections of 2006. If anyone is positioned to be the national healer for a nation tired of licking its wounds, it is he. However, he has gained little traction against Clinton as Democratic front-runner. Quite possibly Clinton’s evocation of her time as First Lady carries with it the symbol of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a time of peace and unprecedented growth. It may just be that her appeal is in part due to the chance to recover another loss, the one suffered in the 2000 election, symbolized ever since in the person of President Bush—the loss, they might say, of good, responsive, competent, and legitimate governance; worse, the loss of our democracy itself.

Other presidential candidates, though they may be significant in their own right, do not seem to play an obvious part in this particular psychopolitical dynamic. But based on the analysis pre-

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sented above, despite the readiness of much of the American public to approach the traumas of the last six years in a more clear-eyed fashion, that sentiment has not translated into a demand for a commensurate-”withdrawal of projection” from its candidates on either side. Chances are, in the fantasy world that is American presidential politics, We the People will find the compulsion to repeat too powerful once again. Whether we elect a Republican or Democrat, we seem likely to split off our desire to preserve the 9/11-Iraq-terror fantasy from our need to live honestly in the present and rebuild our nation for the future—and we will constantly be mystified that we have done so, even though we knew better. Such is melancholia, and it remains at the heart of our post-9/1 1 apocalyptic political state.

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