Has it really been half a decade?
On the morning of September 11 2001, my wife and I were up early packing the car for a weekend stay we’d planned in Taos, NM. We were watching “Good Morning America” while having our coffee when the report broke of a “small plane” hitting one of the Twin Towers—a report that was soon thrown into doubt by eyewitnesses who claimed the plane was much larger than the initial accounts were claiming.
We decided to stick around for a bit until we knew what exactly was happening, and because of that, we watched live as the second plane hit the Towers. It was at that point, I think, that we cancelled our trip. Not long after, we watched the Towers collapse.
In the days and weeks following what we eventually learned were terrorist attacks, I became—along with millions of Americans, I suspect—a news junkie. And it was during the second stage of the coverage—after the immediate 48 hours, when networks began “contextualizing” the attacks—that I found myself growing disillusioned with media outlets I’d previously watched fairly uncritically. Pre-911, I wasn’t at all a political animal; but CNN and Peter Jennings turned me into one.
They also allowed me to find FOX News, which I had never before watched—and blogs, which I had never before read. The rapidity of the updates on blogs, which were pulling stories from multiple sources and offering commentary, fed both my hunger for information and my desire to consider a broad range of commentary. And in December 2001, I started my own site, which eventually became protein wisdom.
I also subscribed to a number of magazines within a month or two of the 911 attacks in order to read across the ideological and political spectrum. Among these were The Nation, Harpers, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, and Reason. And it was through these periodicals that I was able to find my political bearings—which I’d always believed was more toward, say, Harpers -- but which in fact turned out to be some combination of the The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and National Review on foreign policy, and Reason on social policy.
Which, I have to be honest, this came as quite a shock to a guy who’d spent the last 10 years of his life in the Humanities—though in retrospect, I don’t think it should have been, given the way I now believe one’s understanding of how language works (even if that understanding is entirely unconscious) either determines (or possibly is determined by) one’s ideological orientation, which then translates into a nodal point on the political continuum.
My own orientation—which I’ve come to identify as classically liberal—also exposed an ideological rift between me and many of my friends, one that had previously been a far more localized and discipline-specific dispute over hermeneutics, often argued vigorously over beer and bad 70s music. Unsurprisingly (to me, at least), my friends who were of the postcolonial / new historical / post-structural (including reader-response) schools of interpretation theory turned out to hold “progressive” political views and were the most likely to embrace ideas about “blowback” and US imperialism / hegemony, which they often trotted out as a way to distance themselves from the crass nativists who had taken to wearing American flag lapel pins or decorating their cars with ribbon magnets, and had committed the unpardonable sin of having never read Pynchon or Delillo or Said or Walter Benjamin.
So for me, not only was 911 an horrific day of tragedy, but it was likewise the day that began my political awakening, and compelled me to think through and clarify my political beliefs, as well as endeavor to understand the philosophical underpinnings of my ideological inclinations in much the same way I’d previously gone about understanding, say, The Time Machine or The Prince.
Now, five years later, I’m completely comfortable with my politics; and I am firmly behind the current administration’s basic strategy for fighting the scourge of Islamic radicalism—even if I often disagree with particular manifestations of that strategy.
And at this remove, I find it rather pointless, now, to argue with those who have become entrenched in their views. Nevertheless, I continue to write—sometimes to persuade, sometimes to crystalize my own thoughts—so that those who are perhaps new to an examination of politics, foreign policy, etc., can, if they’d like, add my observations and arguments to the mix that will eventually define their place on the political spectrum.
911 was a clarion call. It told us we are indeed at war—that an enemy has sought us out, and that no amount of projection or denial or blame shifting or strained attempts to “understand” that enemy (ironically, often in completely western terms, this despite the constant suggestions that we need to understand them through the lens of their peculiar cultural beliefs) was going to change that fact.
Some of us have embraced that message and have decided to support a particular strategy for fighting the war; others (on both the left and the right) think our current leadership has chosen the wrong strategy; and still others deny that we are even AT war.
And so for me, today is a time to reflect not only upon the horrors of that sunny September morning—but it is likewise a time to take stock of where we are, what we’ve done since, and what we need to do going forward in order to protect our country and our way of life from those who would annihilate them.
I figure watching United 93 ought to be a nice way to jumpstart those reflections. So if you’ll excuse me --
What’s struck me over the past five years is how the veil has been ripped off the various prejudices of Americans. The absolute venom with which the Left refers to the “NASCAR crowd,” or suburbanites, or people who shop at Wal-Mart, is something I’ve heard as background music for years, but I never really listened to the tune until post-9/11. I grew up in a heavily bigoted area (South Side Chicago Irish), and the pure vitriol aimed at the parties mentioned above is akin to what I heard directed at blacks when I was growing up.
Similar too is the increased tension among ethnic groups, mainly “people of color” against whites, but also between sub-groups of the melanin-enhanced. I can’t help but think this is due to the decline in civics education in school, replaced by the claptrap of multiculturalism, “diversity” and victimology. Stress everyone’s differences, and their grievances, and it’s not surprising that we focus more on our tribes than on our citizenry as a whole. (More likely, these thoughts have been here all along, and now we’re just more open to saying them aloud.)
I really don’t see where things are going to get better any time soon. I can see a situation where a massive calamity hits a major city, and the suburban/rural response would be a collective shoulder shrug - not my people, not my problem.
On the flip side, just think about what the response would be in certain circles of the Boston-NY-DC corrider if Oklahoma City got hit by a WMD. I can see the Kossacks crowing right now about how “those damn Christian Nazis deserved it.”
Mr. Merry F'in’ Sunshine, that’s me.
"It was the 9/11 attacks which started me looking seriously into Islam. Before that I had just looked at them as being just another religion. As I checked out the Koran to see what it actually said, I started to realise that here we have a death cult totally dedicated to wiping out western civilization, no holds barred. It is so obvious that I find it mind-bending just how many PC people in our govts and our indoctrinated populations are unable and unwilling to see the truth. "
