During the months following 9.11, sorters in the us Postal Service were confronted with stacks of mail ‘addressed to Osama bin Laden’.footnote1 Most of these missives were sent on to Afghanistan before investigators from the Justice Department could obtain a warrant authorizing their interception. As the letters were never opened (except perhaps by Osama), we can only speculate as to their content. Many would have conveyed threats: Americans, wanting to relieve the trauma of attack by taking some immediate action, pouring out their anger and frustration against the perceived agent of their distress. Perhaps some of the letters were laced with anthrax. It is just as likely, though, that they were infused with perfume. The women who reported to their analysts that they were haunted by the dream of sleeping with bin Laden may equally have taken the opportunity to pen the terrorist some lines of seduction. Would the ghastly, aesthetic face of Osama flash a smile upon opening a love letter from an American? Or would such a message be the kiss of death, a defilement more toxic than anthrax?
Whether curse or invitation, the letters bespeak a naive attachment to the real. At a time when most Americans communicate by e-mail, a page—typed or hand written, folded in an envelope, stamped, addressed and designated for actual physical transport—represents a tangible link to that longed-for condition. To write to Osama is to enact a form of sympathetic magic whereby the phantom terrorist, the haunting visage seen on video feeds from Al Jazeera, becomes a man of flesh, blood and bone. Just as children post their messages to Father Christmas at the North Pole as a means to dispel disbelief—to confirm Santa as real, through the logic that equates an actual letter with an existing recipient—so Osama, inscrutably mythic to the western imagination, and Afghanistan, remote as the Arctic, are pressed into the mould of the real by the fact of the letters.
This, the age of fundamentalisms—both Christian and Islamic—is also an era of obtuse literal mindedness, anchored in a devotion to the real. The nineteenth century gave birth to the forensic sciences, popularized by the ploy of the fingerprint in detective novels; the twenty-first boasts a host of technologies guaranteed to inscribe us in the real: voice prints, retinal scans, dna. Marshall McLuhan could once produce a frisson by proclaiming that ‘the medium is the message’, thus indicating that meaning was no longer rooted in what was said but in how it was communicated; we have now entered a world where code is reality, the human genome is our meaning. Struggling to keep up with advances in science, Washington’s newly created Office of Homeland Security seems antiquated at its inception in its attempts to pave the way to the real by compiling information on Americans’ credit-card purchases, travel plans, e-mail and medical records: constructing its citizens as the imagined sum of their data. With the imaginary thus steeped in the tedium of information, and the real reduced to the barren skeleton of code, Americans risk becoming a nation of sleepwalkers, yearning to recover the remnant of the symbolic order in their dreams.
Reductive readings of Lacan have preached the symbolic, the imaginary and the real as discrete categories, but the letters to Osama clearly manifest a blurring of the boundaries: the symbolic impinges on the imaginary so as to force the real into being—although in a version that only exists as a fiction. Slavoj Žižek has recently recommended that ‘we should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it’.footnote2 Had the investigators from the Justice Department been allowed access to Osama’s mail they would no doubt have scanned it for such ‘kernels’, as a basis for bringing the letter-writers to trial—or, in a turn to the irreal, consigning them to the limbo of illegal aiders and abettors of terror, thus reducing the real to banality. Far more interesting are the kernels that will never be known to us, imbricated in each letter-writer’s private fiction.
What haunts post-9.11 America is the spectre of the real, the horror that it may one day exceed the code yellow and orange alerts and go all the way to red, thus discovering what true catastrophe is: not sporadic and isolated events—a Trade Tower here, an anthrax letter there—but the final big bang, which will not only validate Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld but obliterate them. This is, of course, as much a figment of the imagination as the notion of an ultimate real somehow ‘concealed beneath the layers of imaginary and symbolic veils’. As Žižek argues, the idea of a final, an absolutely distilled ‘Real Thing’ is ‘a fantasmatic spectre whose presence guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice’.footnote3
Nowhere is the fantasmatic quality of the real more apparent than in America’s shadow government, at whose ‘secure, undisclosed location’ Vice President Cheney has (to this day) been hiding out. This us Tora Bora consists of forty underground bunkers built into the mountains within a 100-mile radius of Washington. Some of these sites are no longer ‘undisclosed’. Mount Weather, in Virginia, is the designated hideout for the Speaker of the House, Cabinet heads and Supreme Court justices. No mean Afghan cave, the place has been described as a ‘small city’, with ‘vast quantities of office space, room to store the nation’s art treasures, sleeping accommodation for several thousand people’—nirvana for the Taliban. Two other features, ‘a private reservoir and a crematorium’, make clear that it can double as shelter and tomb. Perhaps the government is planning for their own martyrdom.footnote4
Another shadow location, Raven Rock, has been earmarked as the underground site for whatever remnant of the military manages to survive a nuclear attack on Washington. It includes ‘computers and communication gear . . . a barbershop, dental and medical clinics, and a chapel’. Leaked descriptions characterize the sites as furnished with 1950s efficiency; indeed, many of the bunkers were first built under Eisenhower and replicate, on a grand scale, the fallout shelters that many Americans dug in their back yards.footnote5 In reinventing them, our postmodern state betrays its nostalgia for the simple ‘us vs them’ politics of the Cold War, the comfort of a clearly discernable enemy. What could be more concrete than a bunker carved into the heart of a mountain—proof of an enemy real as rock?