9/11: Never Forget

It's hard to believe it has been eight years now since that morning when, as I was settling in at my office (a few blocks from the Hudson River about 140 miles north of NYC) I noticed the sound of a jet aircraft that was much louder than the normal, inbound to ALB, traffic I would often hear. This was followed by an early conference call that usually had extensive Q&A but ended after just one question besides my own, and then hearing about what sounded like just another bad day for general aviation ("an inexperienced pilot ran into a building, no doubt"). Fast forward a few hours to me stopping at a church I had been getting out of the habit of visiting and then not only praying out loud (so not like me!) but then hearing later from some co-workers about how it ending up on local TV! And then a couple of days later, completely losing my temper, something that has only happened once or so a decade (at work anyway) over what in hindsight was a mere slight inflicted by the buffoon then masquerading as our Director of Research. (It was as if the rage stirred up in me by the 9/11 attack had pushed things up to within about a half a degree of the the boiling point, and one dumb-ass little memo was all it took to unleash Berserker.) 

Time heals wounds, but not completely, it would seem. We can forgive, if grace is a part of who we are, and sometimes forget, but sometimes not. There is a concern out there that We the People are starting to forget what was made plain on that dreadful day. This was certainly helped along by the semantic mischief of recent months whereby the "War of Terror" was banished from official discussion, as if a millennial struggle had in a couple of years gone from white hot to stone cold. There is indeed a current within our vast and variegated culture that would like to Move On, to revel in fatuous utopian notions and transform this day into some kind of flower planting, mural painting inter-generational Amerikorps, but its not very wide and not very deep. For most of us, the visual horror, those amazing pictures of impact,collapse and humans astride the threshold of doom, reach through the windows of our souls and strike places that were rendered permanently tender. If, in the years just ahead, we are somehow visited with another terroristic attack, the pain of brushing up against this wound on our collective soul will swiftly transmute into outrage. 

9/11/01 is memorable not only because of the horrific attack and the heroism of that day but also because of it briefly transported us out of the stultifying bubble we had assumed was reality. We learned much to our delight, that ennui, that postmodern "whatever", had not gotten the better of us after all. It had been tempting to suppose that following the trajectory of every civilization that had preceded us, we as a people had reached a point of irreversible diminishment, too comfortable and self-satisfied to stand up and fight, if necessary. For a moment (actually, a few months, and then the numbness of affluenza reasserted itself) it was palpably evident that rumors of our demise had been greatly exaggerated. There is something much more resilient in our national character than we are normally able to recognize. We saw it eight years ago. We see it in the way the economy is stirring back to life after the global financial panic of a lifetime, and have seen it in the way a lot of citizens responded to the overreaching of Powers-that-be of the moment on the matter of dramatically tampering with the delivery of health care. This sacred day still brings a pain to my heart and a glisten to my eye when I let some of the photographs transport me back, but it also reminds me that virtue lurks beneath the surface of our national persona, well cloaked by the banalities of what passes for popular culture, but alive and capable of vigor nonetheless.  

Presidents Day

Conservative critics of the president's televised address to young scholars across the land need to take a deep breath and calm down. When one's adversaries seem to be making it a habit of doing things that make one wonder whether they are crazy or stupid, that's a good thing. The adversary I have in mind is not the president himself but the team assembled around him. Some kind of inspirational address to mark the first back-to-school of his administration might have been done in a benign enough way to make whoever criticized it seem shrill. That was my first thought, a little rhetorical jujitsu that turns an overly aggressive assailant's energy against him. Dispensing a dose of platitudes of the Just Say No variety would hardly be unprecedented, nor out of line with the way electronic interconnectedness has evolved of late. But instead of keeping it as simple as an old-fashioned spoonful of cod liver oil, somebody got the bright idea to trick the whole exercise out with lesson plans, etc. This had the effect of sending out yet another blast of confirmation that we are being governed by a gang that can't seem to shoot straight. It is hard, watching how things have played out since about the time that CrapNTrade cleared the House, not to wonder if somebody somewhere is trying to lull the opposition party into a sense of overconfidence. 

One can certainly sympathize with concerns about parental notification and "going around" school districts, but viewed in the light of prospective outcomes, this little episode is all to the good. Am I the only person who has found himself wondering if any of these bright young things who think this stuff up have ever been around any actual children? It is likely that some child somewhere will be nudged in the direction of progressive ideology, but based on the kids I have known I would expect an opposite effect. For every future ACORN "volunteer", expect the faux sincerity of this exercise to inoculate at least a dozen young citizens against the blandishments of the Nanny State. To the extent any of them are actually paying close enough attention for the message to actually sink in, I would expect it to plants seeds of dissonance. Most kids are smart enough to recognize the phoniness of telling someone you never met how much you care about them; if not now, it will sink in eventually for all but the most thickheaded of them.

The nerve that is being struck here ties in with something I have observed over the time I have been aware that there was a President. Back when JFK made his "Ask not.." appeal, we used to celebrate and learn about the lives of two remarkable individuals who happened to have been Presidents. We learned about the character, trials and triumphs of Washington and of Lincoln. That they both served as the chief executive was secondary to what they were as men. Then somewhere along the way, to neaten up the calendar one supposes, we woke up to Presidents Day. The effect, to the degree anyone thinks about this day as anything but a pretext for sales and a day off from work, was to shift the focus from a couple of individuals of exemplary character to the office itself. Washington and Lincoln were inherently worthy of respect. The fact that a person got himself elected, maybe not so much. 

Viewed in the light of how the whole experiment was cobbled together in the first place, this devolution is at least faintly distasteful. Now fifty or so years after JFK made his appeal (at a time when there was scarcely a rural county or urban neighborhood that had not recently shared in the ultimate form of sacrifice for one's country), the Keystone Cops in charge think its a good idea to ask kids to write down how they can "help Him". This is creepy, so much so that once again, they do themselves more harm than good.