I meant to post this yesterday, but today will do. It’s a reprise of Rick Perlstein’s 10 year anniversary piece about the squandering of international good will after 9/11. It’s still sad. And infuriating.
The day began in a dull civic deadness. It was an election day, the second Tuesday in September, in one of the world’s most political cities. The weather was perfect: a cloudless Indian-summer day. The polls opened at six in the morning. But no one was showing up. Did it even matter who governed? Seven and a half months earlier, a Republican had become president and the sky had not fallen. The federal budget was in surplus. New York was about to enjoy a fiscal windfall from a new 99-year lease on the World Trade Center. The hot issue in the mayoral primary, supposedly, was how the city would spend all the money. But nobody cared. When September 11, 2001, dawned, collective rituals of civic engagement felt like anachronism.
Until the hot issue was mooted when the center was transformed into twin, acrid clouds of debris and incinerated human flesh, and everything, as we used to say, changed.
How did September 11 change America? We became, of course, so much more frightened that our oceans would no longer protect us from the rest of the world’s awful chaos. But at least at first, a more interesting answer presented itself, as the civic indifference—exemplified by the apathy of that mayoral election day in New York—gave way instantaneously to an almost radical burst of public-spiritedness.
In Brooklyn, we poured out into the streets, desperate to confirm that others were feeling what we were feeling. Cosmopolitans transformed themselves into villagers. TVs and radios blared from every storefront; the first tower collapsed into itself, and those same storefronts vacuumed people inside to watch. We needed to see it together.
Many of us were on our way to the hospital, where lines ran all the way around the block (until we were told to go home; there’d be too few survivors to require blood donations). In Manhattan, the campaign signs everyone had been ignoring were replaced by new signs we read obsessively: “Worked for Morgan Stanley. Any Information … Please Contact: Collette” “Have You Seen Me/ My Name is Ira Zazlow.”
We made collective pilgrimages to Union Square, the southernmost point people were allowed to travel—though some ventured farther south, ducking beneath security barriers, risking their health to help. Everyone, everywhere, was desperate to help. Heartland Evangelicals wept for Manhattan Jews. Nous sommes tous Americains. Newly patriotic youth talked about signing up for the military. Teach for America, AmeriCorps, and the Peace Corps fielded floods of recruits—a volunteer nation aborning. Even television ceased to be a commercial enterprise: 500 channels, and each one seemed to be showing a 9/11 feed.
I remember Friday, September 14, even more indelibly. My neighborhood, Park Slope, held a candlelight vigil. Our bodies spanned Seventh Avenue. Our candle wax slicked the sidewalk. When we passed a shrine of local heroes—Engine Company 220, garlanded with memorial wreaths—many, a bit ashamed, realized something (I know I did, and I discussed it with other people afterward): Why didn’t we think to honor firefighters all the time, just for doing what they do every day? I began to wonder what might be happening here. Maybe from this tragedy our flawed nation might become less solipsistic, narcissistic, recriminatory, and cruel. That afternoon, in his speech to the prayer convocation at the National Cathedral, President George W. Bush confirmed the shift. “Today,” he said, “we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘the warm courage of national unity.'”
Then it was gone.
And we feel, now, how America ended up, against all our hopes, more solipsistic, narcissistic, recriminatory, and cruel. This is an article about how that happened and why.
***
TO UNDERSTAND HOW PROFOUND the squandering of solidarity was, we must first establish the heights from which such unity fell. A September 13 bill extending new wiretapping and electronic-surveillance capabilities passed Congress by voice vote without debate. Five days later, the authorization of force passed the Senate unanimously. The USA Patriot Act also passed the Senate, 98 to 1. Why? In part, yes, from a sense of panicked emergency. But also in part because it seemed unimaginable that this extraordinary grant of executive power could possibly be abused. As Al Gore, whose own presidency had been stolen outright, announced at a Democratic dinner in Iowa: “Regardless of party … there are no divisions in this country where our response to the war on terrorism is concerned. … George W. Bush is my commander in chief.”
The trust came from further left, too. For an article I was writing in The New York Observer, radicals like Ellen Willis and Doug Henwood told me they supported Bush’s call for war. So did the presiding officer of the Queens branch of the Green Party. Barbara Streisand scrubbed all comments critical of George Bush from her website. America had changed. For the first time since Vietnam, the national-security state had regained a nearly universal ideological legitimacy. People who might otherwise have chosen skepticism chose trust out of the belief that we had become, or could become, a different sort of nation than the one we were before—not the juvenile, irony-drenched Seinfeld-watching collectivity we had been only the day before yesterday. More high-minded. More self-sacrificing. Less jingoistic. George W. Bush promised it himself. The refrain in his September 20, 2001, address to a joint session of Congress was “I ask you”:
“I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.”
“I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions.”
“The thousands of FBI who are now at work in this investigation may need your cooperation, and I ask you to give it.”
“I ask for your patience with the delays and inconveniences that may accompany tighter security and for your patience in what will be a long struggle.”
These were gentle, reasonable requests.
Most memorably, Bush appealed for solidarity with Americans who came from Arab countries: “I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here. We’re in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”
But the squandering had already begun, and precisely on the terms the president said he refused. The Justice Department had already started secretly detaining nationals from Islamic countries on minor immigration charges or no charges at all. In press conferences, Attorney General John Ashcroft called them “suspected terrorists.” More than 600 were tried in secret immigration proceedings closed even to members of Congress. When critics complained, Ashcroft responded (in his December 2001 testimony to Congress), “To those who pit Americans against immigrants and citizens against noncitizens, those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.”
Not a single one of the detainees would be convicted of a terror-related offense.
Orwellian language was suddenly everywhere—not least in the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. It was all about uniting America, don’t you see? Its tools were merely the appropriate ones. Disagree? Well, you must not be a USA patriot.
The president invited us to plant victory gardens of credit-card receipts. The day after the National Cathedral convocation, the president was asked “how much of a sacrifice ordinary Americans could be expected to make,” and he honored the warm courage of national unity by answering, “Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever.” Dick Cheney advised Americans to “stick their thumbs in the eye of the terrorists” by not allowing the national crusade against terror “in any way to throw off their normal level of economic activity.” Bush infamously told a gathering of aviation employees, “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life the way we want it to be enjoyed.” Finally, this sacrifice, which he suggested on October 4: “We need for there to be more tax cuts.”
The war, too, would look far different from what those of us who had surrendered to trust believed we had signed on for. We had heard Bush when he declared, “we are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.” It turned out, however, that this was not the fight the Bushies were spoiling for. Ever since the Cold War, conservatives have been floundering without a garrison state. They had embraced the wisdom of Samuel Huntington’s Clinton-era volume, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, whose message, as legal scholar Stephen Holmes described it in The London Review of Books, was, “The secular optimism of those who believe that mankind is being drawn into peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial cooperation by the growth of global markets is not only misplaced: it is suicidal. … For self-definition and motivation, people need enemies.” Bloody fortunate we had one now…
.
