Wake-Up Call: Neo-Cons, the Reptilian Cortex, and Iran

This week, the 100th monkey seems to have woken up. From Jane Smiley to Naomi Klein to Drew Westin at Emory University, to Gary Kamiya at Salon, to researchers at NYU and UCLA, everyone seems to be getting the big picture. There’s something that links such developments as privatization, Katrina, Iraq, outsourcing, the unitary presidency, and even the GOP campaign style in a brutish, evil whole. Unless we all wake up, it may end up eating the world as we know it.

Underneath it all, neo-conservatism’s entire ideological smorgasbord--economics, domestic policy, and global domination--is pure Hobbes. All its themes are present there: constant war [war on “terror”], selfish individualism [privatization, dismantled social safety net, market deregulation], fear of violent death [our daily mantra], and a monarch above the law [King George].

The specific issue doesn’t matter. Hysteria R Us: over Al Qaeda, immigration, gay marriage, universal health care, Katrina, God in the public square. Take any of them, boil it down, and the neo-conservative response is obvious: take or be taken, kill or be killed.

This is clear even in the prevailing commentary. Everything is presented as if there are only two options: premature withdrawal or stay the course; invasion or a border wall; sanctity of marriage or demise of civilization; fight them there or fight them here.

Where did this collective panic come from?

The rise of conservatism in the US is not about nostalgia for an airbrushed 1950s. It’s not even about 9/11. It goes so much deeper. Like islanders in a dying culture, we are living within a crumbling global order and we know it. Look around. Everything we thought we knew for sure is gone or in doubt. Heaven, the weather, polar bears, public trust, US invincibility, borders, the American Dream, gender roles, even, mein Gott im himmel!, gender itself.

The things we once thought were immutable are not. Confusion is everywhere. Terra is not firma.

Now more than ever, we need anchors. And this is neo-conservativism’s taproot. Lacking anchors, every threat—perceived or real—looms dire, lethal, and immediate, like Iran’s nuclear capability. Like Saddam’s alleged WMDs. There is no time to think. Ready? Shoot! Aim!

America’s got HOS (Hobbes on Steroids), and we are behaving frighteningly like Germany pre-WWII. When terror, humiliation, and confusion predominate, then as now, the default human response is unquestionably atavistic and instinctual. Individually, we try to tamp down the rising panic with food, booze, drugs, sex, spas, shopping, and speaking in tongues. Nationally, we use bigger guns.

It is as if 9/11 finished off our capacity to foresee the consequences of our own behavior. It appears to have reduced our country to a left brain—-rational, uncharismatic, and effete [Al Gore]--and a reptilian cortex--charismatic, savage, and lacking reason altogether [George Bush].

If you want to take it this far, the fall of the phallic Towers hit America where we live.

Weare panicked, but as Naomi Klein forces us to see, the neo-cons are not. They are poised and ready to impose a new order. Alongside the quest for oil-—itself a throw-back--this is the reason for the war on Iraq, for the appalling drama BushCo served up in New Orleans, for the constant reiteration of 9/11, for the rising drumbeat about Iran’s nuclear power, and for their doing nothing at all to stem global warming and everything to make it worse.

The constant harping on of, and invitation to, cataclysmic terror isn’t just about the war or even domestic intelligence. Sustaining our panic is about acclimating us to a shockingly regressive government that will be brutal and rapacious whenever it chooses to be. As long as we are terrorized, we will submit.

That is why, in six years, the flood of books, editorials, op-eds, blogs, protests, revelations, and lawsuits against them have not even dented Bushco. The rational left brain, represented by moderates and progressives, is being trounced by the reptilian cortex, represented by neo-cons and fundamentalists because we are panicked.

Until the zeitgeist changes and the terror passes, or until we awake to the catastrophes we are causing in our adrenalin-testosterone toxicity, we are unlikely to alter course. We will accept a fascist dictatorship, we will enable a neo-Hitlerian global imperialism, and we will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons on Iran. This is the Rove/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush wet dream. It needn't be ours.

Wake up, everybody. Now. Please.