“Disharmoniously” NOT leaving 9/11 behind

Five years ago, on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I wrote a long post looking back, and I opined that there was a a sort of internal war in the nation’s consciousness:

…there’s this huge capacity for denial which not only won’t go away, it seems to take on a life of its own.

It’s as if there’s a sort of internal war going on in the nation’s consciousness between the forces of remembrance and the forces of forgetfulness. Paradoxically, I’m enough of a contrarian that those who want to forget make me remember, and there’s no way for me not to write a post in remembrance of the attacks, despite the fact that I have nothing new by way of philosophical observations that I haven’t made before. I do wish that people would remember that there’s plenty of time in the future to forget and to deny, to make everything go away. It’s a thing called eternity, also known as death. Because I think denial of reality is a form of death, I’d rather put it off, but I know I’ll never persuade the people who need it.

More than anything else, though, I think there is something important that needs to be restated.

We are at war.

It would seem difficult if not impossible to forget something like that.

Well, here it is five years later, and the forces of forgetfulness are still trying.

“Time to leave 9/11 behind,” argues E.J. Dionne. The evil Bush “politicized” the attack by disagreeing with Kerry’s call for a police operation and arguing (gasp!) that we were at war:

…I find it hard to forget former president George W. Bush’s 2004 response to Sen. John Kerry’s comment that “the war on terror is less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation.”

Bush retorted: “I disagree — strongly disagree…. After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got.”

By stating the obvious, Bush echoed Democratic hero FDR, who also acknowledged the nation was at war when it had been attacked.

But in Dionne’s view, Bush aggravated our “disharmony” (which I suspect he defines as disagreeing with E.J. Dionne) and ruined the economy.

Thus was an event that initially united the nation used, over and over, to aggravate our political disharmony. This is also why we must put it behind us.

In the flood of anniversary commentary, notice how often the term “the lost decade” has been invoked. We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home — on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.

This is not “isolationism.” It is a common sense that was pushed aside by the talk of “glory” and “honor,” by utopian schemes to transform the world by abruptly reordering the Middle East — and by our fears.

Striking the enemy by transforming his turf is a “utopian scheme”? By that standard, I suppose shutting down Hitler’s death camps and rebuilding Japan along modern lines is also “utopian.” Actually I don’t see either place as a utopia, but I’ll take them over the older versions any day.

And that goes for the new Russia too. How “utopian” it was of Reagan to imagine that the cold war was winnable! How much better off we would all be to have forgotten about these utopian schemes, and let our enemies win!

How harmonious everything would have been!

Wow. I started this post as a reflection back on 9/11 and I can’t believe how annoyed I am getting at this man who preaches against political disharmony. So maybe I am being disharmonious here.

Who the hell ever said that war was harmonious?

Obviously though, Dionne is speaking for a lot of people. The voices of forgetfulness are louder and shriller than ever in their desire to have us forget. But we can no more forget 9/11 and put it behind us than we can Pearl Harbor, or the Civil War.

In the Wall Street Journal, both James Taranto and Peggy Noonan take Dionne’s argument apart. Noonan argues “We’ll Never Get Over It, Nor Should We” and shares an eloquent reminder of what happened:

…the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren’t there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn’t be gone, they couldn’t have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings.

And it changed everything. It marked a psychic shift in our town between “safe” and “not safe.” It marked the end of impregnable America and began an age of vulnerability. It marked the end of “we are protected” and the beginning of something else.

How utterly true.

Once again let me repeat what I’ve been repeating over the years:

The Twin Towers stood as gigantically strong, seemingly indestructible, twin pillars of freedom. I will never be able to shake that awful memory of how, in the instant these giants came crashing down, they were suddenly not strong at all, and certainly not to be taken for granted. Instead, they appeared very frail and delicate.

And now, I know that American freedom is frail and delicate. It cannot and must not ever be taken for granted.

I’ll never take it for granted again. I cannot forget what happened. We are still living with the war and the consequences. There is no leaving it behind.

If remembering is “disharmonious,” too bad.

I don’t believe in the principle of death before disharmony.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds (who at the time had noted pre-9/11  conservative opposition to the “Drug War) links the best retrospective headline.

Some things cannot be left behind.