Posted on 09/03/2002 8:02:23 AM PDT by mitchbert
NEW YORK -
IT HAS started. Reporters going to great lengths to assess the mood of America, one year after. Taking the pulse, taking the measure, of a nation.
We shall leave no victim unturned, no survivor unexamined, no hero unheralded, no fatherless baby unphotographed. It's what we do in this business, often without substance or insight, rarely with any grace. If journalism is history on the run, then the post-9/11 reportage has been a 12-month marathon that has taken us from lower Manhattan to Afghanistan and now, a week away from the anniversary of that fateful date, the Ides of September, back again whence we began.
It is a story without a deadline. It is a story that will never be put to bed.
And how do you feel, America?
Are you still grieving? Still frightened, cramped with dread in the pit of your stomach? Wracked with worry about what might yet come: further random acts of mass killing, killing that slides through the mail slot, hijacked aircraft, suicide bombers, foreign embassies under siege, international repudiation, celebrations on Arab streets over infidel bloodshed, another war in another godforsaken country; all but alone now in your combative truculence, so many staunch allies — Canada included — having no appetite for the grunt work of a bold war against terrorism, hiding behind the skirts of the United Nations.
It was so easy to pledge solidarity with the United States while the towers of the World Trade Centre were still smouldering, quite another thing a year on when the enemy du jour is not quite the stooge stick figure of a one-eyed religious zealot in a black turban, nor a Messianic madman-millionaire living in a cave, but a cunning political survivor whose Arab pals control the barrel price of oil. Fair-weather friends, the Frances and Saudi Arabias of this world, their bowels liquefying at the prospect of militarily ousting a tyrant whose forensically proven crime is — what? — gassing a few thousand Kurds. Oh, and lobbing some Scud-duds at Israel, and manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. We can live with that, it seems. Just have the U.N. ask nicely for Saddam Hussein to allow weapons inspectors back into Iraq and all will be fine.
How is America feeling? How do you think?
In a country of 275 million people, of all faiths and all ideologies, surely the most pluralistic place on earth, it is ill-advised to generalize. I do not know the mood of America. I doubt Americans know this themselves. But I will not make an odyssey of the United States in search of clues. I refuse. Were I not here for other, more prosaic reasons, I would not have made the anniversary pilgrimage to New York City at all. It is unseemly to poke about in the entrails of their sorrow merely because 365 days have passed. Surely this is a time to leave them alone so they can work it out for themselves.
In the self-conscious atmosphere of this dreaded anniversary, nothing is spontaneous and thus little is genuine. How can it be? Even the minute of silence that all Americans have been asked to observe on Sept. 11 is intrinsically contrived. How to properly remember men and women and children whom most Americans never knew? That valley in the shadow of death is the intimate purview of relatives, loved ones, friends. Not our terrain, we the oglers. The media, however sympathetic or well-intentioned, cannot truly get inside the heart and soul of America. Certainly no foreigner can do it. Best to acknowledge up front that we are looking at America through a glass, darkly. And to understand that most Americans, who genuinely do feel grief on behalf of those strangers who were murdered, will more accurately be mourning the country this used to be, before 9/11.
On the day, the U.S. will be awash in remembrance, but I fear the unavoidable bathos of it, the exhibitionism. Cheap sentimentality will not make Americans feel any more loved. And it will not make them any more secure in a world where anti-Americanism is the new currency.
For many, the contempt towards America is bred in the bone, nurtured from the cradle, even though the instructors of hate know nothing at all about the United States, have never been there, never even been exposed to that reviled American culture because their lives are backwards and their living circumstances primitive. Religious totalitarianism, the most dire threat to political stability and world peace, has cast the U. S. as the Great Satan, so that its citizens have no human value and a Jewish American newspaperman can have his throat slit on video for no reason, not a one.
Others, and here I include a wide segment of Canadians, are alternately envious and resentful, feeling smug toward the U.S. but at the same time evincing all the qualities of an inferiority complex. They include an instinctively anti-American intelligentsia (or pseudo-intelligentsia) that almost immediately, before the sun had even risen on Sept. 12, began to mitigate and exculpate and otherwise justify the terrorist attacks in a chorus of moral equivalency. Some espoused the "twin sentiments" of the occasion — yes, it's terrible what's happened, but ... hardly surprising, had it coming, brought it upon themselves, now Americans know how it feels. And quite a few, without a blush of embarrassment, revelled in America's misery. Harold Pinter, the acclaimed British playwright, described the U.S. as the "authentic rogue state" (a sentiment and a term used also in the pages of this newspaper yesterday by one of my colleagues), arrogant and indifferent to international law. Writing in Granta magazine, after Sept. 11, after the start of the military campaign in Afghanistan: "The rogue state ... has effectively declared war on the world. It knows only one language — bombs and death."
Bombs and death — the lingua franca of terrorism. But victims in the United States — Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan — don't count.
No, I don't know how America feels. But I know how I would feel, were I American. Indeed, how I do feel, on behalf of Americans, and as a North American-raised citizen of the world: Enraged.
As consumed with fury now as I was on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, when I stood at the edge of the killing field that had been the twin towers. In the pale luminescence of moon glow, the sight was monstrous.
It is important, I think, to stay angry, because only rage can stoke the purposefulness needed to confront what lies ahead. The truth is, there's nothing more to be done for the victims of 9/11, little to be done on behalf of those who loved them and will miss them forever, but much to be done in expunging terrorist cells and terrorist regimes from the face of the Earth.
That's the only truth I found at Ground Zero.
Maybe you just had to be there.
Yep. Also the jerk who gave away my first copy of Dr. Bruce Clayton's "Life After Doomsday" after I loaned it to him to when he was at CFRB.
Sorry about the emotional outburst. The United Methodists' "can't we all just get along" ad really grated my nerves after a while.
Darth Sidious commanding the Leader of the trade Federation to wipe out the Gungins.
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