3/18/2002
Even more forgotten are the anthrax mailings, which ended abruptly in December, when perhaps the mailer's supply ran out, or perhaps further attacks no longer seemed to serve his objective. Gradually we stopped fearing escalation, and by the time it would have been clear that the attacks were over, they were gone from our minds, yesterday's plague. That fear was supplanted by glorious doings of war in Afghanistan, and then by the expansion of that war to all points on the globe, at the end of January.
The FBI seems just as forgetful as the general populace; in fact, it seems more so. The Bureau forgot all about the anthrax mailer as soon as it became crystal clear that only an American scientist working on treaty-violating biological weapons of mass destruction could possibly have access to such a highly developed grade of anthrax (notwithstanding our hopeful finger-pointing at Iraq, which we are still doggedly preparing to attack with or without that once-promising excuse), and it's still forgetting even now. Bush has forgotten also; no mention of that particular threat has passed his lips for a few months, even though we've made not a whit of progress in apprehending the culprit.
A Trenton journalist has been saying for months that she's pretty sure she knows who the mailer was, and that the FBI was acting like it knew too--but even though the FBI isn't too busy to round up innocent brown people all over the country without charges or evidence, it doesn't seem to "have the belly to do what must be done" when it comes to white American terrorists with government jobs.
Remember the significance that anthrax has had for us in practice, though--leaving aside any questions of where it came from. In this article there's a timeline of sorts (the better one I'd found got taken down); anthrax attacks began in mid-October, and petered out by December. During that time there was pandemonium. We forget it now, with so many more pressing things to worry about, but the threat of anthrax was terrifying. Congress was shut down. Any place might be vulnerable. I know I spent weeks agonizing over the idea of somebody cropdusting Manhattan.
There was panic from October to December. Panic gives us a sense of urgency; urgency makes us cry out for somebody to do something. Enter George Bush, who spent precisely those days hammering the crap out of a basically defenseless little country. Not long after the anthrax thing settled down, he announced his agenda of more and more wars, and since then we've had all that to occupy us. We forget the mailings.
We forget, but the impression is still with us, like the memory of a flavor: the mailings were like an extension of 9/11, and it felt like we would be subject to deadly assault for the rest of our lives. Do something!
It might matter that the mailings began just after the war in Afghanistan, and ended just after the Taliban was ousted--a visceral, atmospheric justification during the very questionable campaign, and a nearly subliminal reward for having allowed the war to take place--a sudden quiet at home, just as the faraway Afghanis were overcome, a subconscious sense that the fighting itself had accomplished something. As though it had in some causal way ended the terror. Thus, as it happened, Bush got his mandate to go on "doing something" whenever he saw fit--and in fact, from the beginning right to the present day, he's been doing no more or less than the things he'd wanted to do anyway.