No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror

Abstract

At the same time that the Bush Administration's declaration of the so-called war on terror and intervention in Iraq exacerbated tensions between its long-standing allies as well as enemies on the international front, it miraculously delivered the people back to itself. Suddenly whole host of high-profi le domestic confl icts on whose outcome the very viability of the nation was said heretofore to depend were neutralized as the administration, with the help of the mass media, launched what many on the left might call its shock and awe campaign on the cultural home front. Most notably, perhaps, immediately after the attacks Republicans and Democrats gathered together for robust round of God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol. As Tim Russert reported on that evening's NBC special news hour, extraordinary scene here in Washington. Twenty-four hours ago rancor, partisanship, not tonight. National unity, indeed new tone in Washington (Attack 2001). Shortly thereafter, conservatives openly censured Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson—two leading spokesmen of the right-wing's cultural revolution of the 1990s—for attributing the tragedy to Americans' own hedonistic lifestyles, and for months to come prime time public service announcements (the I am an American campaign, for example) as well as morning and evening prime-time news programs preached ethnic and racial tolerance and inclusion. Even Tom Brokaw, who in the late 1990s had made cottage industry out of pitting the humble and selfl ess col- lective sacrifi ces of the World War II generation against the parochialism and self-serving identity politics of the next, publicly performed complete about- face. 1 For the fi rst time since The Good War, E Pluribus Unum had begun to feel less like (impossible) ideal and more like a description of