Thursday, September 11, 2003
(9:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Second Anniversary
I have a couple of links for you. First there's Fred Kaplan's article in Slate (featuring one of the best/worst Bush photos ever). This is a much-linked piece here in the blogosphere, so I felt I might as well join in. Also very illuminating is Josh Marshall's post this morning. Here are a few high points:
Watching [a documentary on 9-11] brought me back to the newness and rawness of those first hours and days. I recalled the images of the president getting the first word from Andy Card about the attacks, the later ones of his touring ground-zero and talking to the assembled search and rescue crews. I found him an inspiring leader in those moments. And not simply because it was such a traumatic event. I never thought much of the criticism that President Bush didn't get back to Washington till late that evening. I thought he served admirably in those first days.
As the documentary moved toward the aftermath, I wondered whether those thoughts of mine would seep into the present to color what's happening today.
They didn't.
What I felt wasn't continuity but the jarring contrast, the cheap, obvious lies, the hubris, the tough-talk for low ends, not so much the mistakes as the tawdriness of so much of what's happened, especially over the last eighteen months. Fred Kaplan has an excellent piece in Slate this week about the missed opportunity of September 12th. "By the summer of 2003," writes Kaplan, "it could fairly be said that most of the world hated the United States, or at least feared the current U.S. government." That sounds like such an extreme, over-the-top statement. "Hate" is a pretty subjective word. But it's hard to read the papers regularly and not realize that what Kaplan says is true. It's sickening.
Now, normally Josh Marshall is very mild-mannered, so I think that last paragraph means a lot more coming from him than from other commentators. I think that the task for the next year will be to really remember those attacks and then become sickened at all the wasted opportunities: perhaps with the strong international support that was spontaneously offered after those attacks, we could be making actual progress toward dismantling terrorist organizations; perhaps the jarring image of the fragility of life could have seeped into other areas of politics, making us reluctant to burden future generations with massive debt, so that we wouldn't completely throw away the chance to get the national debt under control; but more importantly, perhaps the image of our own fellow-citizens dying senseless deaths would have transferred over to actual other people so that we wouldn't be so disgustingly eager to "bomb Iraq."
And why is it always "bomb"? Why is it that our model of a just, well-done war is dropping bombs from the sky? Perhaps when we saw our own massive civilian casualties, we could have decided to declare a moratorium on massive bombing runs, which might further increase our reluctance to go to war. Maybe that seems unrealistic, and maybe that seems like it could absolutely never happen -- but I don't think that anyone in the year 2000 would have ever believed that we could have such a warmongering, deceitful president with such a callous disregard for the poor and oppressed. That seemed pretty unrealistic, too. But in this post-Bush world, we have to realize that things can get a lot worse than we previously thought, even here, even today.
Oh, by the way, I notice that absolutely no one is posting comments. Do they not work? Is absolutely no one reading? Is what I'm saying so absolutely brilliant or so hopelessly wrongheaded that responding to it seems like wasted effort? All these questions circulate in my mind as I scroll through post after post ending with "[Add a comment]".
ALMOST IMMEDIATE UPDATE: Check out Neal Pollack's non-satirical post today.
