America: Its Own Worst Enemy

America is at war.  To be sure, the global and perpetual war on terror has not been declared—by Congress.  The enemy the U.S. is fighting is neither a nation-state nor an empire but a largely spectral hydra-headed nebula without nerve center.  Washington and its allies claim to be defending themselves against this anomalous non-state transnational actor which has neither sovereignty nor a government, nor an army.  In Orwellian speak, the Defense Departments—not War Departments—of the First World, attuned to the Pentagon, are nonplussed in the face of an enemy beyond the reach of the full panoply of their modern and post-modern weapons of individual and mass destruction.

Henceforth the battle against the nebulous and elusive enemy, who is being relentlessly diabolized, is guided and fought by a seamless network of “intelligence” and counter-terrorist CIA-FBI-FSA work and listening stations and operatives in countless countries around the globe.   The latest weapon of choice of the vastly overstretched American empire of military, “intelligence,” security, cyber and corporate bases: the remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle, insidiously dubbed drone, presumably to evoke the stingless male honeybee.

The Brothers Tsaraev, who perpetrated the horrendous Boston Marathon Massacre, succeeded beyond their wildest, not to say quixotic, dreams, which were fired by crosswired social, political, religious, and psychological pulsations.   The detonation of their artisanal bombs packed with low-grade explosives and ball-bearings killed three people and wounded 260.   Sixteen of the injured had limbs blown off by the blast or had to endure amputations.  Although small beer in the annals of recent terrorist attacks, the unconscionably willful and indiscriminate Boston carnage resonated far and wide, in large measure thanks to its instrumentalization and exploitation by America’s political class and the mainline media, especially cable television.   Indeed, they presented Greater Boston’s vast manhunt and mandatory lockdown by thousands of policemen and National Guardsmen reinforced by SWAT teams, SWAT tanks, and helicopters as a reality show, interspersed with advertisements for palliatives for erectile dysfunctions and facial wrinkles, for cut-rate vacations in the sun, and for the  timely investment in gold and silver.   The highlight of the Hollywoodian psychodrama came with the invasive and persecutorial interrogation of the sister, parents, and friends and acquaintances of—in Vice President Joe Biden’s carefully crafted words—“the two twisted, perverted, cowardly, knock-off jihadists.”

Presently President Obama set the tone for America’s deep-felt aggrievement and patriotic outrage.  The opening sentence in his homily at the Interfaith Service in Boston’s Cathedral of the Holy Cross: “Scripture tells us to ‘run with endurance the race that is set before us’.”  He led the congregation in prayer for the victims and for the recovery of the injured.  The President commended Greater Boston, by then out from under martial law, for...