When the history of our era is written a few hundred years from now, I hope that one of the signature ideologemes of the American twentieth and twenty-first centuries will turn out to have been the movement from national energy organized around "wars against" to a political and nation-state system structurally dependent on a series of "wars on." (I hope so at least partly because someone checking the Printculture archives in 2305 will then realize that I was uniquely, awesomely right about all this at the time.)

I mean that if the United States was defined in the first 89 years of the twentieth century by a series of "wars against"--namely the first and second World Wars and the Cold War (which included the Vietnam and Korean wars, of course)--by century's end the balance had shifted (and continues to shift in this century) dramatically to a series of "wars on": the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on pedophelia. (More details on this admittedly sketchy temporality in a note at the end.)

Whereas the "war against" is a structure that mobilizes national energy with the aim of defeating a particular enemy, usually localized in a concrete nation-state and political framework, the "war on" by contrast involves an enemy that is shifting, malleable, geographically diffuse, and in some important sense apolitical in the traditional sense. A war against involves two opposed and fairly clearly defined sides going at it over a conflict that is itself localizable and resolvable through violence; a war against seems to involve a nation-state taking on a series or network of actors, all of which are defined by their inability to be located exclusively outside the nation-state: a war on is always against an enemy within.

The war on drugs, for instance, has as its obvious enemies semi-feudal, semi-corporate cartels that function transnationally and certain nation-states or rebel groups within nation-states (FARC in Columbia, warlords in Afghanistan). But its enemies also include, if the television is to be believed, liberals who favor legalizing drugs, casual users whose drug use supports the cartels or rebel groups, and, perhaps most surprisingly, irresponsible parents. If parents are, as the government tells us, the anti-drug, then bad parents are by logical inference the pro-drug. Look how easy it is, the government says, to keep your kids off drugs; look how little time it would take you to handle this sort of thing. And the children can join in too; a couple of years ago a teenager turned in his father for growing marijuana. The enemies in the war on drugs are scalable and fractal: the failure to adequately police one's children (or one's neighbors) can be located at one end of a continuum whose other end includes running a Columbian cartel.

As with the war on drugs, in the war on terror (or on pedophilia--and in this more controversial case the work of James R. Kincaid convincingly shows that the hysteria directed against stranger abductions covers over the far more dangerous [to children] situation of simply living in a family), we are all soldiers, and doing nothing (being blind to the possibility of terrorists next door or the ones next to you on the plane) is as good as joining the other side.

The difference between the war against and the war on, at its most fundamental level, then, has to do with the transformation of an entire nation-state into a battlefield. We don't know where the war on terror ends or begins; it could be in our homes or libraries, on our internets, or shopping in the 7-11 down the street. The guy next door could be making a bomb in his basement, or he could be growing pot, or he could have a suspicious relationship with his niece or his nephew or one of the neighborhood kids. Or he could be none of those things; maybe the problem is you.

Because wars "on" are neverending and cannot be pinpointed in cultural or geographic space--they are in fact defined by the topographical subtlety of their battelgrounds--they justify far more than wars against (for which the enemy is in a relatively clearly defined "outside") the erosion of civil liberties and the transformation of the nation-state into a police state. In this the necessities of a war on resemble in every way the attempts to control things like the red menace of communism in the McCarthy era, the capitalist menace of individualism during the Cultural Revolution, the homosexual menace of gay marriage or SpongeBob or Will & Grace, and of course that slipperiest of twentieth-century menaces, the Jew.

The logic of metonymic contamination taken up by each of these historical disasters--to be interested in money is to become Jewish; to belong to a union is to become a communist; to be tolerant of any of these things is to be, in some sense, already a homosexual--should feel familiar to those of us living under its latest iteration. In each case the metoynm, the mere fact of nearness, produces then a demand for the definitive reading and parsing of signs, the working out of codes that will allow anyone to differentiate between friend and foe, terrorist and neighbor. Here a phenotypical guide--like the ones published in Life after Pearl Harbor showing Americans how to tell friendly Chinese" from "enemy alien Japs"--is both a "necessary" and inevitably futile accessory for modern living.

But of course the fantasy of the "war on" is always that we will know our enemy, because we will be able to be sure what the signs mean--we will know that our child's decreased attention span means marijuana or ecstasy, that the photos our neighbors take of their newborn in the bath are or are not pornography, or that the difference between "friendly Saudis" and "enemy alien Wahabbists" is readable in the clothing or the accent or the foreign policy of the government to which they belong. Then, when we know--when we know our neighbors as we know ourselves, and with the same strange certainty--only then will we be sure of the end of irony, will we put up the right fences in the right places, will we finally aim the weapons away from ourselves. Only then will we truly be able to breathe.

note promised from earlier:
As should be clear from my invocation of the Japanese internment camps, the Nazi Holocaust, and the red scare, I do not think that the "war on" structure emerges historically independently from the "war against" structure in order to replace it. Rather, it's my sense that we are living through a historical shift in which the "war on" structure has come to more realistically correspond with the organization and distribution of power (not only economic power, but also the power to kill) across the globe. That is, shifts in the organization of culture, capital and media have, I think--and this is admittedly speculative--produced a situation in which the "war on" more readily than "war against" allows for the generation of publically convincing narratives designed to produce the cooperation of a population in its own domination.

and a final coda:
Then again, I'm not saying anything that Siegfried Kracauer or Ernst Juenger didn't say about photography in the 1930s. My sense that something has shifted is also no different from theirs. But at least I say all this with the knowledge that I am doomed to feel, as they did, that the present in which I perceive there to be difference is in some sense a uniquely different present. While, if I can, resisting it.