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about 'the war on terror.'
Historians do not react to the passion of the era, but of their own melieu. If there are such things as historians a generation hence, it will mean that this neocon new century has ended prematurely.
Given that heart warming idea, let us go on and say that doubtless, this putative historian will not understand what America was like in a meaningful way, anymore than you or I understand the great depression.
So this historian (let's call him Jose Odd) will enumerate the ways the terror war was unlike previous American wars. Jose will talk about no bid contracts, idiologically based strategy for the assault, occupation, and administration. He will doubtless have a lot to say about Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush that we do not have access to yet-- the sequellae of the Bush II dynasty will doubtless be quite ugly.
He will have the tools to demonstrate how the Norquist/Rove/Abramoff cabal not only bilked America of Billions, but destroyed the dollar, and with it, the American economy.
But his most damning conclusions will be a truely vain effort to justify why the electorate tolerated it for so long. But you see, Jose will be living in a different world, where the occupants have universal sufferage, universal public education, and universal healthcare. Sr. Odd will live in a hotter, more violent weather'd world, but it will be a world that less resembles Orwell's image of a boot stepping eternally on a human face.
Jose will not understand, in the end, was the devil take the hindmost, I got mine, SUV on the freeway existential nature of Anno Domini 2K America. He will understand terrorism. Terrorism is not going to go away. But he will not understand what it feels like to live in a culture that celebrates its uniqueness through consumption that not only poisons the rest of the world, but perverts the soul of the consumer.
Big Box Exurbia will not have quite disappeared yet, like towns on the blue highways frozen in WPA America, ChumpUSA stores will be used for storing things, and some will convert to 20th century antiques. And by Jose's time, there may still be some internal combustion vehicles, but not many. Travel economy in Jose's day will be measured in meters per person per joule, not miles per gallon per car.
That fact alone will mean that Jose will fail to get the real emotional addiction driving the war on terror- cheap gas and the myth of the open highway. He will say it, but he will not understand it.
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