It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.<\/p>\n
A prescient notion from R.E.M. back in 1988, the waning days of Cold War apocalypticism. The reference, it seems clear now, might just as well have been to September 11th.<\/p>\n
In his column over the weekend, Frank Rich of the New York Times<\/em> led the way with a piece called, “What Happened to the America of 9\/12<\/a>?” that notes and largely bemoans the idea that one might “feel fine” in the wake of 9\/11. Rich illustrates the point with reference to a 9\/11 photo by Thomas Hoepker.<\/p>\n Mr. Hoepker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s picture can now be found in David Friend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s compelling new 9\/11 book, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Watching the World Change,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or on the book\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Web site, watchingtheworldchange.com<\/a>. It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn, taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.<\/p>\n Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he told Mr. Friend. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At some level, Rich has mixed feelings about indifference to Apocalypse:<\/p>\n What [the photographer] caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9\/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast<\/strong>. The young people in Mr. Hoepker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s photo aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily callous. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just American.<\/strong> In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gone right and what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gone wrong<\/strong> on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The upside (“what’s gone right”) might smack some readers as pretty faint praise and even Rich is ambivalent, at best:<\/p>\n What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gone right: the terrorists failed to break America\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s back. The \u00e2\u20ac\u0153new\u00e2\u20ac\u009d normal lasted about 10 minutes, except at airport check-ins…<\/p>\n The culture, for better and worse, survived intact…<\/strong><\/p>\n The day that changed everything didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make Americans change the channel, unless it was from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fear Factor\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153American Idol\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or from Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is supposed to be the good news. But Rich doesn’t seem to really have his heart in it (“for better or worse”). In fact, this is really the bad news:<\/p>\n But even as we celebrate this resilience, it too comes at a price. The companion American trait to resilience is forgetfulness. What we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve forgotten too quickly is the outpouring of affection and unity<\/strong> that swelled against all odds in the wake of Al Qaeda\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s act of mass murder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem, in this forgetting, doesn’t really turn on the issue of affection, however. It turns on the issue of self-sacrifice<\/strong><\/em> and self-subordination to a larger good. And this is the real loss, according to Rich.<\/p>\n Mr. Bush was asked at a press conference<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u0153how much of a sacrifice\u00e2\u20ac\u009d ordinary Americans would \u00e2\u20ac\u0153be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily routines.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d His answer: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever<\/strong>.”<\/p>\n And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing. So do tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack us on 9\/11. We have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved ahead<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Frank Rich is certainly right about one thing: no one<\/em> can argue with this assessment, at least at the New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n It turns out that Rich’s column is the “official” line at the Times<\/em>–evidenced by the editorial “9\/11\/06<\/a>” that begins by lamenting–with Frank–that we are no longer the America of 9\/12:<\/p>\n The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years…<\/p>\n [W]e cannot really imagine a world in which [9\/11] never happened…<\/p>\n What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose<\/strong>. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as wel<\/strong>l?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n What was the point of this “sense of community and purpose”? Once again, the real issue is sacrifice<\/strong>.<\/p>\n [T]he nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning<\/strong> to the tragedy that it had endured…<\/p>\n But the call never came<\/strong>…<\/p>\n Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9\/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.<\/p>\n That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft<\/strong>. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self-centeredness that became a second national tragedy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Frank Rich may be right that “no one can argue” that moving on means moving ahead, but I am going to give it a try.<\/p>\n Maybe the best way to begin is with the mismatch between all the liberal yearning for a politics of sacrifice and the attempt to fashion a critique of the war in Iraq.<\/p>\n The Times <\/em>editorial proposes that the invasion of Iraq “never would have occurred if every voter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft.”<\/p>\n I think that might actually be true. The Vietnam era anti-war movement was largely built by a self-interested refusal<\/em> to sacrifice<\/em>. As critics of that movement never tire of observing, draft resistance was linked to a new, TV generation–a “me<\/em>” generation, I think–that knew nothing about the meaning<\/em> generated in self-sacrifice<\/em>.<\/p>\n This refusal to sacrifice continues to haunt the reputation of the Vietnam resisters. The real glory goes to those who make the ultimate sacrifice. Hence, the “greatest generation” continues to be the one that gave it all in World War II, not the one that refused to go in Vietnam.<\/p>\n By what twist of logic, then, does the New York Times<\/em> editorial simultaneously suggest that a draft would have generated a more potent<\/em> movement against the invasion of Iraq, even as they bemoan the “relapse into a self-centeredness that became a second national tragedy.”<\/p>\n That self-centeredness would have been the key to draft resistance.<\/p>\n As it is, that self-centeredness has dramatically reduced the threshold of popular tolerance for US casualties<\/a>, even without the draft<\/em>.<\/p>\n But the Times<\/em> keeps pining away for “a call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves” as if wartime self-sacrifice was not the premier emblematic figure for “some effort greater than ourselves.”<\/p>\n And it is not simply the “liberal” New York<\/em> Times <\/em>that yearns for a culture of sacrifice. At Ben at Latent State<\/a> has noted in his superb essay on the cultural politics of post-9\/11 America, the neoconservative architects<\/em> of the invasion of Iraq have been just as upset with Bush for refusing to “issue the call” to sacrifice. The discourses of the New York Times<\/em> and the Weekly Standard<\/em> are indistinguishable on this point.<\/p>\n Although some critics on the Right and Left of Bush tend to blame him for his refusal to issue the call to sacrifice, the Bush administration’s “failure of nerve” is probably best understood as a reflection of the popular culture.<\/p>\n As Frank Rich understands, the issue is not Bush. The real force that undermines the spirit of sacrifice is TV, from “‘Fear Factor’ to ‘American Idol’ or from Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton.”<\/p>\n