Frank Rich has an excellent, elegiac essay in New York Magazine’s “Encyclopedia of 9/11” issue:
It was “the day that changed everything,” until it didn’t. Even in the immediate aftermath, you could see that 9/11 was less momentous for some Americans who were at a safe remove from the carnage and grief. By late September, the ratings at CNN, then 24/7 terror central, had fallen by more than 70 percent. As I traveled across the country that grim fall to fulfill a spectacularly ill-timed book tour, I discovered that the farther west I got, the more my audiences questioned me as though I were a refugee from some flickering evening-news hot spot as distant and exotic as Beirut. When I described the scent of burning flesh wafting through Manhattan, or my sister-in-law’s evacuation by the National Guard from her ash-filled apartment on John Street, I was greeted with polite yet unmistakable expressions of disbelief.
__
Now, ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on. Decades are not supposed to come in tidy packages mandated by the calendar’s arbitrary divisions, but this decade did. For most Americans, the cloud of 9/11 has lifted. Which is not to say that a happier national landscape has been unveiled in its wake.
__
Three red-letter days in 2011 have certified the passing of the 9/11 decade as we had known it. The first, of course, was the killing of Osama bin Laden. We demand that our stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. While bin Laden’s demise wasn’t the final curtain for radical-Islamic terrorism, it was a satisfying resolution of the classic “dead or alive” Western that George W. Bush had dangled so tantalizingly before the nation in 2001, only to let the bad guy get away at Tora Bora. Once bin Laden was gone, he was gone from our politics, too. Terrorism has disappeared as a campaign issue; the old Bush-Cheney fear card can’t be found in the playbook of the GOP presidential contenders. Ron Paul’s isolationism increasingly seems like his party’s mainstream while the neocon orthodoxy of McCain-Palin looks like the cranky fringe.
__
The other red-letter days were August 5 and 6, with their twin calamities: the downgrading of America by Standard & Poor’s and the downing of a Chinook helicopter by the Taliban, making for the single most fatal day for Americans in Afghanistan. Among the fallen in that bloodbath were 17 Navy Seals, some of them members of the same revered team that had vanquished bin Laden.* Yet their tragic deaths were runners-up in national attention next to our fiscal woes. America may still ostensibly be a country at war with terrorists, but that war is at most a low-grade fever for the vast American majority with no direct connection to the men and women fighting it. The battle consuming our attention and our energies these days is the losing struggle to stay financially afloat. In time, the connection between the ten-year-old war in Afghanistan and our new civil war over America’s three-year-old economic crisis may well prove the most consequential historical fact of the hideous decade they bracket…
Calouste
“The terrorists lost.”
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. America has lost whatever little sanity it had, and it might not be able to find it back.
cleek
@Calouste:
so the wingnuts were right; it really was an existential struggle? and we lost?
nah.
Redshift
As nicely as it works rhetorically, I’ve seen no evidence that the Chinook incident in Afghanistan made any lasting impression at all on most people.
Derf
So Frank Ivory Tower Rich is an expert on terrorism now? Gotcha.
Mart
OBL lost his life but was victorious in one of his key goals – they helped bankrupt the USA.
Derf
@Mart: I believe the exact quote was “we shall lead them like lambs to a slaughter and slowly bleed them to death”.
In fact OBL could not have asked for better leadership than Bush/Cheney. They completely fell for it at every turn! They may as well have called themselves Al Qaedas greatest allies.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
“the more my audiences questioned me as though I were a refugee from some flickering evening-news hot spot as distant and exotic as Beirut”
Welcome to the club Frank.
Brachiator
The Rich piece is some of the most insipid crap that I have read in a long time. Lots of indulgent hand wringing and pearl clutching, along with the most idiotic, irrational attempts to connect domestic and international events and the supposed public mood.
A complete waste of time.
Duckest Fuckingway: Ask not for whom the Duck Fucks. . .
It’s the closing of the circle, as America follows New York City into its own belly-button.
JGabriel
@Mart:
Nah, the GOP has been working on that goal (bankrupting the country) since Reagan. Shrub intended to invade Iraq from day 1, so you can’t blame those costs on OBL, and if not terror, the GOP would have found other reasons to spend money or give it to the rich.
The one area where OBL was successful was torture. OBL got America to betray its principles and engage in torture.
.
Derf
@Brachiator: Which pretty much describes just about any of the talking bobble heads in their ivory towers. Most of whom couldn’t survive a weekend camping trip in their own backyards much less understand what is going on in the world around them.
nellcote
@Redshift:
I would rate the goopers refusing to fund healthcare for the 9/11 workers higher on the end-of-an-era list.
PeakVT
@Redshift: Unfortunately, you’re right. The Bush administration worked hard to keep the war from intruding on Americans’ everyday lives. They succeeded, so most people just don’t care about it, and those that do care realize they are helpless to do anything.
Tomjones
@Brachiator: This.
Cat Lady
9/11 just brought into focus things we already knew but didn’t want to admit -it’s blowback for an overextended American empire and citizenry who are dumb lazy consumers of cheap energy which we need to get with a bloated military’s wet work. One would think one would learn about empire from history, and one would be wrong.
Brachiator
@Derf:
Pundits are largely worthless, and this includes Limbaugh and Beck and all the right wing fools as well as many on the left.
nellcote
“our new civil war over America’s three-year-old economic crisis”
good grief! so wrong in so many ways.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Derf: More proof that reading comprehension is not your strong suit. The article was about America, not terrorism.
priscianusjr
I think Frank Rich is one of the best writers in American journalism today. But from this piece, I never would have guessed it. This sounds more like Friedman or Bobo, a collection of lazy clichés. Oh well, I suppose we all have our off days.
singfoom
Wait,
How did the terrorists lose exactly? They killed 3000 people, then they got us to kill our civil liberties and any moral high ground we had left. Imagine if there had been no 9/11. Would the giant police state mentality we have had since that day be here?
I don’t think so. I disagree with the very premise that they lost. We doubled down on Middle East military engagements, providing more of the justification the terrorists used to launch the 9/11 attacks.
bkny
terrorists lost, my ass.
the constitution shredded; international laws obliterated; corporate fascists predominant; hundreds of thousands of muslims dead or mutilated courtesy of those freedom bombs — and ensuring a steady supply of young men eager for revenge.
although, if osama really wanted to bring this country to its knees, he should have become a goldman sachs executive.
Corner Stone
@bkny:
$4T later, he didn’t do too damned bad.
Corner Stone
Frank Rich should be sent to Hell to eternally suck the rod of Al Gore.
Fuck Frank Rich.
Zifnab
You’d never know it, by our spending priorities.
Mart
…on second thought, OBL was probably on the Cheney Disaster Capitalist Planning Committee, had a falling out over salary demands with Obama, and was eliminated.
Derf
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): That is so cute. One of my little furry groupies is also a Frank Rich defender….lol.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator:
Have you ever been watching HGTV, and it’s one of the shows where there are real estate agents, and they’ll see something amiss in an un-made-over house and say something like “Buyers won’t like that?” What they mean is, “I don’t like that.” But they invariably say, “Buyers won’t like that.” Similarly, pundits mean “My mood is sour,” or “I want someone to reassure me,” but they invariably say, “The public’s mood is sour” and “The American people want someone to reassure them.” Maureen Dowd is an egregious offender in this regard.
Jenny
Frank Rich is a bore.
bemused
Americans don’t seem to feel empathy unless they have some personal experience to ignite it. Even sympathy isn’t very deep and shortlived.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Don’t get me started on HGTV. I think when the horde eventually invades and defeats us, HGTV will be the prime motivator.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: But without HGTV, how would 22-year-olds with no savings for a down payment know to act hurt and dismissive whenever they see a kitchen without granite countertops?
mk3872
The Taliban had a lucky shot and downed a helicopter.
Now that’s a “bloodbath”? Good grief. Enough of the hyperbole.
The U.S. lost an AVERAGE of 17.5 soldiers DAILY during Vietnam.
Phildo
Keep in mind that when the first plane hit, it was not even 6 a.m. on the West Coast. The first tower fell at 7 a.m. Pacific Time, the second at 7:30. Could it be that there were many fewer people watching t.v. as it actually happened? Those people didn’t see the disaster in real time, so it might have had less of an impact. Just a thought.
Jenny
If you guys want a really great read, then check out David Remnick’s barn burner in The New Yorker: “Leading from Behind the Scenes”
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig: Or space for “entertaining”, or an “office”?
I personally love HGTV. I think it’s high fucking comedy. The recent Million Dollar Rooms episode was just mind boggling in it’s gloriousity.
But I’m afraid about 5 billion people round the globe may not see the humor in two people spending $5M on an indoor pool room. Or one guy installing a glass floor and a Master Mister button for his entry foyer.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
Yep. I remember back during the 2008 primaries, a local radio pundit kept insisting that “America is not ready for a black president.” I just had to send him an email saying, “What you really mean is that you are not ready for a black president.”
I used to read collections of the works of columnists like Art Buchwald. At his best, he pulled from his background, experience and connections to provide a witty and informed view of the national scene. And he was good at puncturing the pretensions of the Washington political scene. But he never pretended that he had a deep understanding of the “public mood” or that he could tell people how they should think or react to events.
And, for the record, I should make clear that I admire much of Rich’s work. But this column represents the worst of punditry. Worse, there is something about it that appears to be deliberately pitched to a certain type of New York Times reader who thrives on pearl clutching in the absence of clear ideas or recommendations.
techno
Rich is right about of how the impact 9-11 diminished with distance. I live in the midwest and was dealing with the aftermath of my mother’s funeral at the time. I was actually offended that I was being informed on all channels that I was supposed to direct all my emotions into worrying about how New Yorkers felt. I never much cared for New Yorkers anyway and they certainly weren’t more important for me at the time than dealing with the grief of my mother’s dozens of friends.
What made it even worse was that because New Yorkers think they are the center of the universe, they demanded we believe that this was the biggest disaster in human history. I am certain the folks from Dresden or Hiroshima or, or, would probably disagree but they would be “wrong” because Dave Letterman’s show assures us that New York is the GREATEST city in the world 5 nights a week.
This historical illiteracy was made even worse when NO ONE even bothered to answer the question “why was the WTC even targeted” in any depth or seriousness. And we can be CERTAIN this question won’t be asked, let alone answered, in all the ten-year remembrances.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@techno:
“NO ONE even bothered to answer the question “why was the WTC even targeted” in any depth or seriousness.”
Are you serious?
nellcote
@Corner Stone:
I think HGTV is responsible for the growing support for gay marriage. They always make teh gays look so normal.
Corner Stone
@techno: I like your vim and vigor but I’m afraid you’ve completely glossed the actual point.
Corner Stone
@nellcote:
Oh 100% agreed. But notice that maybe 90% of those gay couples are in Canada.
And even the more “out and proud” couples are still treated with the same respect everyone else gets, as they should be.
Like it’s just the way it is, and that’s that.
I may go on an HGTV diatribe here shortly.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
The Voice of the Prophet, Rick Rescorla,
agrippa
Too early to answer either question.
Wait 100 years for how it works out.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@agrippa: Ding! Thank you Mr. Chou En-Lai.
celticragonchick
@Cat Lady:
Youbetcha. All those angry Saudi men on the airplanes were upset about our over extended empire or some such.
Nihilism and Bin Laden’s bullshit about restoring the Caliphate had nothing to do with it. The abortive attempt to assassinate the Canadian PM was doubtless about the bloated Canadian Empire.
Victim blaming isn’t any prettier here then when it is used against a woman raped while wearing heels and a tight skirt.
America did nothing to deserve 9/11. The men who carried it out made choices on their own. They did not have to do what they did.
pragmatism
haliburton’s belly full but dem still hungry.
Cris (without an H)
Ha ha, that’s awesome. I spent most of last year working with contractors on a remodel, and whenever I asked them to do something they didn’t want to do, they would tell me “that’s going to be expensive.” (or sometimes: “You’re not going to like that.”)
singfoom
@celticragonchick: You can point out US foreign policy decisions that led to the conditions that caused those Saudi men to attack us without blaming the victim.
We taught the mujhadeen how to make bombs. We trained them to fight the Soviets. We have supported the government of Saudi Arabia.
I won’t argue that the men who took those actions on 9/11 were justified, but please, don’t mistake searching for possible reasons as victim blaming.
bkny
@mk3872: remember the weekly body counts…
Chris
The terrorists lost the minute they’d flown planes into the World Trade Center, in the sense that there was a massive backlash, not just across the globe but in the Muslim world as well, against them and their ideology.
Bush and Cheney recruited them from their own stupidity by invading Iraq. The AQI in turn rescued Bush and Cheney from their stupidity by behaving so brutally towards the Iraqi population that their local allies eventually fell away from them.
They say war’s a succession of mistakes where the winner’s the one who makes the fewest. I didn’t realize you were expected to try so hard to fuck up, though.
MikeBoyScout
@15 Right on, Cat Lady:
BLOWBACK
Let’s remember that the attacks on us in September 2001 were the classic definition of Blowback.
US policy and prodding created that Hitler de jour, OBL. We were for him before we were against him.
Let’s remember that the father of the idiot who failed to take seriously his President’s Daily Brief entitled Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US first made his mark on the national scene as a Director of the CIA.
Let’s remember that after that horrific day in 2001 US involvement in killing and destruction half a world away for reasons of Empire grew exponentially.
If, 10 years later, you think this will lead to something better and different from what preceded it 10 years earlier then this tragedy has yet to be understood.
MikeBoyScout
@45 celticragonchick:
I wonder if you intended to appear as ill informed as your comment made you look.
Brachiator
@singfoom:
None of this really explains much of anything. Rich wants to peddle some lame shit about Empire. But bin Laden held that any support of the Saudis was anathema if it interfered with his twisted vision of Islamic destiny. So, anything other than strict isolationism on the part of the US would leave us open to attack.
And do you really want to argue that the US should not have opposed the Soviets in Afghanistan, or tried to intervene in any way and let the Soviets attempt to crush that nation? And don’t misconstrue my question here as blanket endorsement of US policy in the reason.
celticragonchick
@singfoom:
Such as? Bin Laden specifically mentioned the stationing of non Muslim US troops on Saudi soil, particularly “pretty American female soldiers” led to his declaration of war against America. So…religious bigotry and misogyny on his own part are Bin Ladens stated reasons on the foreign policy front.
We gave money to the ISI to do it, in truth. The Mujhadeen were not the attackers, however. The Taliban and AQ are not the Mujhadeen, and AQ operated for some time before locating to Afghanistan. We could have stopped Afdghanistans slide into Hobbesian anarchy at the end of the Cold War…possibly. We will never know. Our sin was in not trying, and I readily grant that.
.
So does every other nation on earth with the exception of Israel. However odious, the government of Saudi Arabia is what it is and we have to do business with them. Bin Laden thinks they aren’t extreme enough…, so making our support as a basis for some principled freedom fighter to oppose us will not fly here.
Samara Morgan
lol
everything is connected.
OBL got in a lucky junk punch to americas economic nads and brought the whole house of cards tumbling down.
That is why wall street was a peer target for the Pentagon– 2 fuel bombs each.
But he cant have known that Bush would bankrupt America with a 10 year unfunded 11 trillion dollar war….he was just out for revenge and to show American vulnerabilty.
What he did show was Americas vulnerability to paranoia induction.
And Julian Assange learned that lesson.
Wikileaks junk punched America in the security nads.
Assange is capitalizing off of America’s weakness to paranoia reflex.
And that story is still being told.
:)
celticragonchick
@MikeBoyScout:
Of course I am. Anybody who disagrees with you is an idiot, therefore, I must be as ill informed as whatever you suppose me to be. QED
Samara Morgan
@celticragonchick: such bulshytt.
OBL cited Operation Ajax among his many grievances.
Do you know what that is?
Samara Morgan
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Raven and i know why.
Because American power is economic power.
The Twin Towers were the avatar of Wall Street.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Samara Morgan: Have you ever watched that video I posted? Rescorla was an amazing dude. In the film he sits on his desk and says, “next time they are going to fly planes into these buildings”. Who could have known?
Donut
@Phildo:
I was living in Santa Barbara at the time. I didn’t turn on the TV, didn’t turn on the radio all morning. I had no idea what had happened until I got to work at 8:30 Pacific time and a co-worker told me.
I disagree with Rich about another thing. Californians, as much as pretty much anyone else outside of the NE corridor, were scared shitless by the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. And the American flags were being affixed to cars all over a “liberal” enclave such as Santa Barbara within a day, just like everywhere else. Rich is full of shit, in other words. Yes, it is correct that Californians didn’t experience that day like New Yorkers…of-fucking-course they didn’t. But Rich’s characterization of what it was like out West is, beyond that, totally off base, from my direct experience. Fuck him. Whatever.
Jenny
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
X-Files predicted 9/11 on March 4, 2001.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIZ205ccX8M
Bruce S
Frank Rich is an East Coast elitist who for years contributed to the leftist New York Times that refused to acknowledge the hand of Saddam Hussein in the imminent Jihadist Sharia-Law dangers to America. What does someone so far removed from Real America know about the horrors of 9/11?
Big City Mary
My apartment in the Newport section of Jersey City, NJ looks out over the Hudson River to Battery Park City, the new Goldman Sacks building and the building of the replacement tower for the World Trade Center buildings. I watched on Friday and Saturday as the construction cranes were secured before Irene. A part of one crane was lowered and strapped to the side of the building-two people-little dots of two people made that happen-an amazing sight.
And yet, I have been repulsed by the whole construction as if it was a total sacriledge to 9/11-no building should ever try to replace what were those two iconic beautiful towers-when you were in the top floors it was like flying without the hassle of secuity checks-and yet totally negated by watching people jump from those heights.
Officials-the collective people with the ability to make things happen-have so missed the boat on “ground zero”. Allowing commerce to replace the scars was such a mistake. You cannot imagine the power of the holes in the ground-it made people who take their trip to NYC include “ground zero” as part of their NYC experience. We should have left the site just as it was. And maybe the horror of that disaster would help everyone to understand how awful the effects of hating those different from “some of us” can, well, have very bad results.
Because watching those two people who secured those cranes a few days ago makes me know that we can really do amazing things-even if I wished they had let the cranes, potentially, blow into the Goldman building with very, very bad results. Whatever..
Samara Morgan
?
i’d say they won. America is getting the bum’s rush out of the ME.
Iraq is planting a boot in America’s fat white judeoxian ass in december, and if we dont GTFO A-stan before the Arab Spring rolls into Islamabad, we will be leaving Kabul rooftops in helos while the talibs saw off Karzai’s head and put it on a pike.
Pax Americana is dust and ashes.
agrippa
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
Yes.
It is very long term.
If it is anything at all.
It is far from impossible that no one “won”.
agrippa
@Samara Morgan:
I have no difficulty with the USA getting the “bum’s rush” out of the ME.
We have a revolutionary situation in much of the Arab World; and, it is unclear how that will work out.
People of the OBL/Al queda persuasion may end up one of the losers.
Far too early to say.
honus
@Derf: Note to Derf: fuck yourself. You’re not a pimple on Frank Rich’s ass.
honus
@Brachiator: Yes. The Afghanis seem to have pretty well ousted us without Soviet help. I think they could have got rid of the Russians just as effectively if Charlie Wilson hadn’t given Bin Laden Stinger missles.
Brachiator
@honus:
Of course, there is no way to test this proposition.
And I know that people always like to fall back on the old “never conquered since Alexander the Great” BS, but part of the background to Afghanistan is that the Soviets got sucked in because the local Afghan communist officials were inept at imposing their will on the local population, and the opposition was propped up by the Saudis and the Pakistan government. So, even if you never had a Charlie Wilson, the you still have to find a way to tune your neo-isolationist time machine to eliminate all US support for the Saudi and Pakistan regimes.
The Tea Party People seem to yearn for an America rolled back to either 1850 or 1750. Some lefties seem to yearn for a New Deal America without those pesky World Wars in between (or at least no US involvement) and the Fortress America loved by conservatives, but new and improved without imperialism.
Samara Morgan
@agrippa:
they already won.
In 20 years one out of four humans will be muslim.
that is reproductive fitness.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: Tamerlane conquered them. So did Genghis Khan. They didn’t stay conquered for very long after those guys died, but they conquered them.