TV Guide

I remember it clearly. It wasn’t quite an epiphany, but it qualified as a significant insight. Back in late September, 2001 I was heartened by the notion that the silver lining to 9/11 was a tangible sense that our inane reality TV culture had been knocked to the canvas, replaced by a real bipartisan sense of unity and higher purpose.

Things were moving fast, and of course the ugly finger prints of Dick Cheney were starting to proliferate, but America seemed to be snapped out of its stupor. The idea that anybody could get their 15 minutes had lost its luster, now family and friends and community seemed paramount… who gave a crap about roommates stabbing each other in the back? Or kids self-destructing within their own nastiness? Yes, for a while it was kind of glorious….and then it was over. And almost 20 years later we’re more vapid than ever. Oh, and we elected the genre’s most grotesque caricature POTUS.   Like a yo-yo dieter, following discipline and self improvement with a binge that doesn’t stop, our culture has more worthless flab than ever. What the hell happened? And what will it take to get us back on the wagon?

If 9/11 represented one of the worst days in US history, it also posed an opportunity and a challenge. It seemed obvious at the time, if not to many in the Bush Administration, that a proper response to the attack would in large part analyze and better understand the whole reason the cabal succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: that we were not prepared for men, not just ready to die for their cause, but employing their death as the lynchpin to execute their plan. It occurred to nobody on those planes until it was too late that their hijackers planned to die. No negotiations, no heading to Cuba, no airport shootouts. Their  deaths were both the means and the end of their horrible scheme.

It struck me at the time, and still does today, that unless we better learn why men would enthusiastically sacrifice themselves to cause us harm, we will never be able to deploy any sort of viable response to confront them. From a policy and societal standpoint 9/11 gave us differing ways to go.  We could allow its devastating carnage to petrify us and retreat as a nation behind a military that would surely unleash the wrath of God on somebody.  This approach would paint swaths of the world with a broad brush, and allow the trauma we suffered to dilute what foreigners could offer in fear of the threat they conjured up.

An offshoot of this thinking would be to turn inward, retrenching from our world leadership role. This, of course, would by any account allow the terrorists a victory, not to mention create a plethora of other problems. Moreover, as a democratic system, and destination for many a world refugee, retreating from our missions abroad could only discourage our interest in other peoples and render us less hospitable to those wishing to come here.

A different  way would be to view 9/11 as a tragic aberration, a freak, a horrible crime carried out by maniacs, whose fanaticism provided the blind spot needed to carry out their insanity. Until 9/11 we could not process planned suicide on our shores. Now was the time to better understand its genesis. Certainly there was no reason not to unite the world against the wretched Taliban in Afghanistan, who had been committing outrage after outrage since taking over in Kabul. But our guiding priority had to be to understand why educated men would methodically plan their own destruction to harm us. It seemed obvious that to better grasp this issue meant engagement not just confrontation, and diplomacy not just the military. Dealing with the threat of fanatical elements within Islam with more nuance than a zero-sum crusade would require courage and tolerance, but good policy usually flows from exactly those attributes.

We all knew watching the Towers come down that things would change. So extreme a horror, shared in real time by the entire nation, was going to have a lasting foot print….everybody understood that. Less clear was how the path we chose going forward in response to terror would effect our culture and the society it defined. Xenophobia is by definition boring because it excludes. The military is boring because it relies on routine to instill discipline and training.  Fear is boring because it views most things new as threats and seeks to avoid them.  To the degree the 9/11 attacks were allowed to dim our enthusiasm for new frontiers and understanding, and to the extent our interaction with other countries and people’s was going to be a military exercise, our cultural vibrancy would suffer.  Why wouldn’t our cultural life be defined by the limitations of our national security policy? To the extent it was bold and engaging, we could be a creative, dynamic society, staging new entertainment based on discovery.  To the degree we met the world with wariness, equating it’s unknowns with danger, we would rest on our laurels and watch reruns. Downtown Abbey or Jersey Shore? Our choice.

Sadly, we know the route we took, and we are living with the consequences. Can we ever get to and give the third option a shot? What trauma will we have to endure to achieve the clarity necessary to consider it? I have no idea, but perhaps we can ponder the question over a 3 Part Reunion Special of The Real Houswives of Atlanta.  What do you say? BC