A Day of Remembrance, Politics, and Kardashians

The Tribute in Light in NYC (Gary Hershorn/Reuters)

You could almost be forgiven for forgetting that today is the anniversary of 9/11 — or perhaps just for wanting to forget. In a sharp contrast to last year’s largely backward-looking and high-minded coverage of the 10th anniversary, the 11th passed in an underwhelming show of media blase and political bickering. Far from rising above partisan sentiments, this year’s September 11 was less a solemn commemoration than just another day two months from an election. The unhinged far-right doubled down on its crusade against Islam, accusing President Obama of handing jihadists the keys to the country and lambasting universities for daring to sponsor “tolerance” programs like “The Future of Islam: Beyond Fear and Fundamentalism” instead of, who knows, deporting all their Muslim students to Guantanamo. The left buzzed about a New York Times op-ed by 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars author Kurt Eichenwald that laid out the pre-attack intelligence ignored by the Bush administration, and the Times itself resorted to what the Public Editor called “anniversary journalism.” “Every year, the anniversary of D-Day, the commemoration of Veterans Day and other important dates cause journalists to try to find the right balance between what readers think is appropriate and necessary and the lack of any actual news to drive the coverage,” wrote Margaret Sullivan. “Often, other than the local events surrounding an anniversary, there isn’t always much to say that is original.”

The Times certainly succeeded on this note, delivering an unoriginal story about financial infighting at Ground Zero and slapping up a link to the list of victims’ names on its splash page. Politico devoted its lead story to “the Kerry-ization of Mitt Romney,” describing Democratic attempts to paint the Republican candidate, who failed to mention Afghanistan in his convention acceptance speech, as weak on national security. NBC’s “Today Show” caught flack for declining live coverage of the 9/11 Moment of Silence (ABC and CBS cut away to the live feed), opting instead to continue its discussion of Kardashian mother Kris Jenner and her breast implants.

In the political realm, things were even worse. The president marked the anniversary with a ceremony on the White House lawn, a visit to the Pentagon, and a check-in with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, while the vice-president traveled to Shanksville, PA, to speak at the Flight 93 memorial. In Obama’s defense, Ground Zero was declared off-limits to politicians this year “to avoid politicizing the moment,” and both campaigns pulled their negative advertising for the day. Still, the Times reports that the candidates “made no effort to duplicate the show of unity that Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain, then his Republican opponent, staged in 2008 when they appeared together.” Romney addressed a National Guard convention in Nevada in an attempt to regain the traditional Republican advantage on national security, an edge which recent polling shows has disappeared. He offered standard praise for the troops and personal accounts of meetings with members of the military but revealed nothing further about his plans for Afghanistan; it was not a speech that will likely erode Obama’s 51-40 lead on “handling terrorism.” It was also a typical Romney speech, purporting to “eschew politics” yet criticizing the current administration for finding an “excuse to hollow out our military through devastating defense budget cuts” and warning that “we cannot cancel program after program, we cannot jeopardize critical missions.” (Like . . . those programs that even the Pentagon — but not pork-hungry House Republicans — want to cancel?)

Outside the presidential campaign, partisanship reigned supreme. Dick Cheney, whose post-9/11 push to invade Iraq probably did more to divert attention from the hunt for Al Qaeda than than any other Bush-era malpractice, told the Daily Caller that, “if President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis, then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.” Stay classy, Dick. (And perhaps remember that Bush, who took intelligence briefings six days a week, dismissed one on Aug. 6, 2011 titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) House Majority Leader Eric Cantor released a dog-whistle statement — “Our national security must be a priority and we must protect against efforts that would undermine our ability to prevent or respond to another devastating attack” — suggesting that the president is undercutting the safety of America. (How ’bout those sequestration defense cuts your party voted for, Eric?) Mostly, business on the Hill continued without pause, with Rep. John Mica holding a hearing on Amtrak subsidies (too generous, natch) and Congressional negotiators attempting to pin down a deal to keep the government open past Oct. 1. The Ways and Means Committee will gavel open the millionth hearing on repealing the Affordable Care Act. Dana Milbank’s Washington Post column hit the nail on the head: “On 9/11, Washington as usual.” Among the sundry activities Milbank finds on the capitol’s calendar:

The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts is having its fundraising gala at the Mayflower Hotel. A launch event is scheduled for a provocative new book, “The End of Men.” Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies is having a forum on “The Business of Sanitation.”

In short, “there is something for every taste in the Washington area on Tuesday” — unless your taste happens to run toward remembering the 3,000 people killed 11 years ago today.

Amid all this depressing lack of interest, the best “coverage” of 9/11 comes not from a major newspaper (no interactive, heavy-on-the-visuals commemorative package from the Times this year) but from the Stamford Advocate, a smallish Hearst paper in the Connecticut town of 122,000. In a moving story about a note recovered from the World Trade Center debris, reporter John Breunig focuses on the attacks’ impact on one family who originally thought its father died instantly when the plane hit the second tower. His office was close to the impact site, and his wife says, “I spent 10 years hoping that Randy wasn’t trapped in that building.” This changed after a note with a spot of her husband’s blood, identified through DNA tests, was found in the wreckage. Of the scrap of paper, Breunig writes:

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, these five words and two numbers have changed the picture completely for Scott’s family . . . .

In a steady tone, their mother explained the power of the note. “You don’t want them to suffer. They’re trapped in a burning building. It’s just an unspeakable horror. And then you get this 10 years later. It just changes everything.”

“84th floor

West Office

12 people trapped”

It took a decade for the note to make its way to the Scott family. It moved from a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, which is still working to identify fragments — more often biological fragments — from the debris. Advances in DNA technology allowed a match to be made shortly before the 10th anniversary. Breunig describes Denise Scott’s reaction to the news:

“I said, `What kind of fragment?’ ” Denise recalled. “She said, `No, it’s not a fragment. It’s something written.’ And that’s when I just fell apart.”

Denise also brought a sample of Randy’s handwriting [to the museum], thinking she would need it for identification.

“The minute I saw it I didn’t need to see the DNA test,” she said. “I saw the handwriting. It’s Randy’s handwriting.”

She agreed to let the museum exhibit the note, but only after talking to the families of Scott’s coworkers.

They knew it had changed not just their father’s narrative, but that of the 11 other people referenced in the note.

“Everyone hoped that it was right on impact. That he didn’t suffer,” Alexandra said. “Because not only to know that he was trapped but what he was going through? And we knew the guys in his office too. And they had kids and they had families, and to think that they were terrified.”

“It tells people the story of the day,” Denise said.

In just five words and two numbers.

It’s a powerful story, worth reading in full at the Advocate’s website. The best piece of journalism to come out of 9/11 is still, bar none, Tom Junod’s 2003 Esquire article on attempting to identify the figure in the “Falling Man” photograph, but Breunig’s piece is a worthy entry, especially in a year otherwise devoid of significant coverage.

“This is never an easy day,” Obama said in his Pentagon address, but he is in some ways incorrect. For many of us, maybe most of us, today came and went far too easily.

A Sad Story, Badly Told

What is it about momentous occasions that brings out the Edward Bulwer-Lytton, of “It was a dark and storm night” fame, in reporters? Maybe it’s tacky to grumble that the articles about the 9/11 anniversary are poorly written, but I’m lodging a complaint anyway. The Associated Press offers multiple takes on the anniversary, as if to give its network of newspapers several options: maudlin, saccharine or lugubrious. I find it insulting that the AP thinks this sort of high school essay writing appeals to the average American. It smacks of what conservatives call media elitism, because it presumes that the only way readers will grasp the significance of a situation is to bang them over the head with it. It offends my intelligence in the same way that laugh-track sitcoms that crack stale, misogynist jokes offend my intelligence. Just as Hollywood assumes no one will pay to see a thoughtful movie about real people, but will fork over eight dollars to watch a cariciatured romp-fest, the AP assumes that its readers will choose melodrama over straight news.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the writing style on display in the AP’s 9/11 stories. Far too many of the news service’s articles are almost willfully bad, in that there is no real excuse for the overly colloquial, casual language. It does not come off as rushed or written on deadline, as one might expect from a wire service. I could understand if the sentences were hastily composed or the metaphors slightly mixed, but that isn’t the problem. The reporters choose their words carefully; it’s just that they choose the wrong ones. Still, the AP’s 9/11 reporting is especially bad. The melodramatic tone suggests that the only way to commemorate a tragedy is through weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is a mistake to assume that a slew of colorful adjectives is the only way to telegraph sincerity or grief. Other publications — the Times, to cite my personal favorite — have produced authentic, compelling 9/11 stories that are vastly more moving than the AP’s stylistic glop. There is a place and time for dramatic devices like repetition; that time, as Tom Junod’s “Falling Man” article proves, is after the author has spent six pages proving he can write. In other cases, Junod is a notorious abuser of repetition — see his 2011 profile of Pixar chief John Lasseter — but by the end of the wrenching 7,000-word “Falling Man,” he has earned his sign-off: ” . . . We have known who the Falling Man is all along.” The AP, by contrast, has done nothing to justify these opening lines:

At churches, we prayed. At fire stations, we laid wreaths. At football stadiums, hands and baseball caps over hearts, we lifted our voices in song and familiar chants of “USA!” – our patriotism renewed once more as we allowed ourselves to go back in time, to the planes and the towers and the panic and the despair, to the memories that scar us still.

Not only does the writer begin the first three sentences with “at,” but she subjects us to “the planes and the towers and the panic and the dispair” as well. Pick one, please. I don’t doubt that the reporter was sincere in her desire to convey the indelible nature of the memories, but the result is overdone and exhausting to read. Just two paragraphs later, the rhythmic list-making returns, as we are told of gatherings “on small-town main streets and in courthouse squares, in big-city parks and on statehouse steps.”

Another article begins with a smattering of descriptions that sound just slightly off:

Determined never to forget but perhaps ready to move on, the nation gently handed Sept. 11 over to history Sunday and etched its memory on a new generation. A stark memorial took its place where twin towers once stood, and the names of the lost resounded from children too young to remember terror from a decade ago.

The nation “gently” handed the day over to history? Its memory was “etched . . . on a new generation”? You can etch a memory into someone’s mind, perhaps, but on an entire generation? There’s nothing explicitly wrong with this sentence, but it sits awkwardly on the page, like a chair with one leg an inch too short. Likewise, the image of names “resound[ing]” from children” doesn’t quite work. The whole paragraph is an exercise in overwriting.

The AP article that my local newspaper chose for today’s front page includes the following:

Close your eyes and picture Sept. 11. The memories are cauterized, familiar forever. The second plane banks and slides in, the fireball blooms, the towers peel away as if unzipped from the top . . . . No one knew exactly what was happening, or how vast, or at whose hand. No one knew, for a time, that the instruments of destruction were not prop planes but jumbo jets. At the very first, almost no one knew there were planes at all.

September 11 isn’t an event that requires embellishment or fancy language. What the AP reporters don’t seem to realize is that the story is horrific enough to stand on its own. Joe Biden once accused Rudy Giuliani of composing sentences from “a noun, a verb and 9/11.” In some cases, that simple noun-verb formula may not be such a bad idea.

To be fair, the AP isn’t the only media outlet guilty of melodrama. Even the vaunted Gray Lady ran a column on September 6 by Roger Cohen that contains some pretty purple prose. Describing the post-9/11 era, Cohen writes:

Irresponsibility was allied to conviction, a heinous marriage. Self-delusion is the mother of perdition. Wars killed. Wall Street made killings. “Whatever” became the watchword of maxed-out Americans; and in time things fell apart.

Scan the rest of the column and you’ll encounter “scurrilous imaginings,” “kleptocratic tyrannies” and ” inexorable currents of history.” That’s quite a mouthful. If you’re looking for SAT-prep words, Cohen is your man.

Not all of the 9/11 coverage was poorly written. It’s just a shame that the AP, which provides content to newspapers across the country, didn’t hold itself to higher standards.

 

An Incomplete Guide to 9/11 Coverage

It’s hard to name a media outlet that isn’t in some way commemorating the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. “Some specials are so niche-sensitive that they almost sound like humor-magazine parodies,” writes Alessandra Stanley in the Times. “CNBC, which has a series called ‘American Greed,’ came up with ‘American Greed: 9/11 Fraud,’ about the scams and profiteering that followed the disaster. Showtime offers ‘The Love We Make,’ about Paul McCartney’s journey through New York after Sept. 11.” Such a delicate topic means that “viewers become hypersensitive to the misplaced word or self-serving gesture.” Though most of the editors and writers undoubtedly mean well, good intentions do not always translate into quality journalism. Here, a roundup of some of the highs and lows of the print media’s 9/11 coverage.

image via esquire.com

Even after eight years, Tom Junod’s Esquire article about the iconic “Falling Man” photo stands head and shoulders above anything else written about the attacks. Junod recently published an update on the families he interviewed for the 2003 story, but it doesn’t add much to the outstanding original.

If you only read one newspaper’s coverage of the anniversary, make it the Times’ special “9/11: The Reckoning” section, which includes previously unreleased audio recordings of the flight controllers and FAA officials monitoring the hijacked planes on September 11. Two slideshows, one of possessions saved by New Yorkers and the other of 9/11-inspired artwork from across the world, are well worth clicking through. In the Sunday Magazine, a roundtable of former contributors epitomizes the paper’s elite liberal reputation. It’s the only conversation, for example, in which you’ll find a participant exclaiming “Good God, man!” with complete seriousness. Bill Keller, who just stepped down as the paper’s executive editor, offers a belated mea culpa for his part in giving the liberal seal of approval to the war in Iraq.

Businessweek offers its typical cynical take on the anniversary, running an article in the Sept. 2 issue about the reinsurance industry. Between terrorist acts and unprecedented flooding, the companies that foot the bill for reconstruction must attempt to balance risk and reward. A few weeks ago, the magazine devoted a feature-length story to Larry Silverstein, the developer building an office tower at 7 World Trade Center. If the apocalypse arrived tomorrow, Businessweek would undoubtedly be advising its readers on how to sell muni bonds to the anti-Christ.

image via newsweek.com

The most charitable thing one can say about Newsweek’s coverage is that Tina Brown has not Photoshopped an age-advanced Dick Cheney into the ceremonies at Ground Zero. Andrew Sullivan, who seemed like such a catch when Brown lured him away from The Atlantic earlier this year, takes a dismal look at the American response to the attacks, writing that “Bin Laden hoped to provoke a civilizational war between Islam and the West. And we took the bait.” Unfortunately, Sullivan continues to take the bait, trotting out the hoary cliche of Al Qaeda as “a few religious fanatics living in caves.” It’s an accurate description, to an extent, but it elides the seriousness of the threat posed by radical Islamists. A handful of fundamentalists can be dealt with — bombed back to the stone age, as the theory went before the war — but Bin Laden’s violent ideology and the deep-seated rage at the U.S. that permeates much of the world are less tractable issues. Sullivan also overstates the degree to which ordinary Americans have suffered over the past decade. Of the victims at the World Trade Center, he writes, “Their terror ended quickly. Ours had just begun.” Pat-downs at airports, two wars as foreign to most people as the moon — these are not comparable to having one’s life snuffed out on 9/11.

image via thenation.com

The Nation and Mother Jones both engage in standard liberal hand-wringing over America’s lost civil liberties. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but . . . how predictable can you get?) At The Nation, David K. Shipler writes that “Obama has perpetuated so many of the Bush administration’s policies that even Republicans might take heart.” That Mother Jones chooses to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 with an issue dedicated to the FBI’s extraordinary rendition program gives even the casual reader an idea of its priorities. This is hardly the first time the tragedy has been misused — the Bush administration’s elevation of terror threat levels to correspond with election dates comes to mind — but it is particularly classless to run a scathing critique of post-9/11 intelligence without also acknowledging the victims of the attack. Adam Liptak of the Times actually offers a more nuanced — albeit less popular — interpretation of the Patriot Act, noting that “By historic standards, the domestic legal response to 9/11 gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes.”

One of the more compelling stories is not from a national magazine or a New York publication but from the Boston Globe, which gives its coverage a parochial angle by recounting the stories of the ticket agents and security personnel at Logan Airport, where two of the hijacked flights originated. “They are the rarely noticed casualties of the terrorist attacks,” writes the Globe’s Eric Moskowitz. Ordinary details are twisted into life-changing, haunting memories: “Two men in their 20s approach, Middle Eastern, hair carefully trimmed, clothes so new they are still creased from the store.”

At The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen offers a fairly standard timeline of 9/11’s effects on the checks and balances of divided government. His argument, that the executive branch gained power at the expense of a fairly submissive Congress and judiciary, is familiar, as is his contention that such a concentration of power can only lead to abuse (see: Iraq, wiretapping, extraordinary rendition). The most interesting thing about this piece is Cohen’s recognition that the scales have not remained weighted in favor of the president. During George W. Bush’s second term, when a handful of Supreme Court decisions invalidated lower courts’ pro-administration rulings on indefinite detention and military tribunals, Congress mainly worked around the restrictions and allowed executive authority to grow unchecked. Since the election of Barack Obama, however, the legislative branch has rediscovered its voice, moving to place restrictions on an administration with which it disagrees. Cohen writes:

[L]awmakers blocked with great relish and fanfare the Obama Administration’s efforts to prosecute 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal civilian court. Such meddling in the discretion of the Justice Department’s charging decisions would have been unthinkable during the Age of Fear.

Apparently, the unitary executive theory was just fine as long as Dick Cheney was the one advocating it. Only when a Democrat moved into the White House did the war hawks in Congress begin to reevaluate their deference. A king is only popular among those who benefit from the palace’s largesse.

image via fastcompany.com

From across the pond, the Financial Times checks in with some of the families who had posted “missing” signs across New York after the towers collapsed. The stories are not all hopeful, but they are honest in revealing the different ways people deal with the death of a loved one.

Finally, if the TV networks’ incessant stream of 9/11 programming seems just a little crass, take a look at this Fast Company slideshow of taste-challenged advertisements. The worst offenders are from Europe, where the advertising industry as a whole is much more accepting of graphic, risque content.

Ten Years of Vampires and TMZ

— More coverage of the 9/11 coverage —

Reporters aren’t known for spiking stories before they’re written. Given the assignment to write about the cultural and artistic changes exacted by 9/11, a reporter could hardly come back with the conclusion that there’s no story to be told — that, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. Ten years after the attacks, however, the idea that 9/11 changed everything is increasingly been seen as the dog that didn’t bark. It’s not that American culture didn’t respond to the tragedy; it did, in a million different ways, from the obvious (John Updike’s Terrorist) to the slightly more subtle (Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight). But declaring that 9/11 changed everything is not the same as examining everything that changed on 9/11. The former is predicated on a world in which all variety of cultural developments, including the rise in tabloid sensationalism and the proliferation of sexy vampire stories, are rooted in 9/11. The latter acknowledges that, as Michiko Kakutani of the Times puts it, “We now know that the New Normal was very much like the Old Normal, at least in terms of the country’s arts and entertainment.”

Yet even as Kakutani and other arts critics caution against attributing all things great and small to 9/11, they indulge in the very fantasies they dismiss. Articles, of course, still have to be written, and that hole in the Culture section is not going to fill itself. Kakutani observes that “fantasy epics — pitting good versus evil in stark Manichean terms — dominated the box office in the last decade,” then reminds us in the next breath that “Voldemort sprang from J.K. Rowling’s imagination well before 9/11.” True, but once Kakutani admits that the theme of light vs. dark predates the age of terror by decades (Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”) as well as millennia (the Bible), you begin to wonder why she even brings up these non-examples at all. The temptation to fill the page with connections between 9/11 and every cultural phenomenon of the last decade overwhelms even those people who claim to know better.

More convincing, perhaps, is the suggestion by John Powers that “it has always been the genius of pop culture that, by wrapping things up as ‘entertainment,’ it can get across feelings and ideas that more officially serious culture cannot.” He cites the Batman film The Dark Knight as a case of pop culture reflecting a deeper anxiety about the prosecution of the war on terror and “the dangers of fighting evil.” Far from implying that 9/11 tipped a domino line of cultural factors that produced a clearly defined chain of responses, Powers makes the case that artists and writers reacted to the disaster in the way that the creative class has always done: by processing the monumental into the mundane, and allowing the uneasy zeitgeist to filter into their work. This is more believable than the sudden attribution of long-established trends — say, the craving for the trivial fluff of Us Weekly — to the fallout from 9/11. It gives artists agency, acknowledging that understated meditation on current events is no less a conscious response to the world than the direct address represented by Don DeLillo’s The Falling Man or straightforward documentaries like Taxi to the Dark Side. Powers sees in The Dark Knight a transformation of America from a lovable superhero to “a monster who winds up slinking into the shadows, reviled by those who once loved him.”

There is a line, however, between identifying cultural parallels in a sophisticated screenplay and chalking up every passing fad to the effects of 9/11. It is a bridge too far to suggest, as Powers later does, that zombies (“mindless, brain-eating killers who attack in hordes”) are “a simple metaphor for those shadowy aliens who threaten us — in this case Islamic terrorists,” or that the popularity of the dangerous-yet-seductive vampires in Twilight and Buffy is attributable to the war on terror’s blurring of good and evil. No amount of persuasion is going to convince me that Stephenie Meyer’s writing explores anything deeper than teenage lust and the dispiritingly persistent value our society puts on female purity. As for Buffy — well, I remember watching a lot of Buffy episodes. In ninth grade. In 2000.

One of the more tenacious cultural tropes holds that Americans respond to hard times by retreating into mindless fluff and artistic comfort food. As proof, we are offered the example of 1940s families flocking to movie theaters to escape from the anxieties of World War II. The idea that hemlines rise and fall with the stock market, suggesting that an uncertain economy spurs a conservative retrenchment, has been floating around for years. “[P]op culture has slid so far into the slough of celebrity worship and escapist fluff that the antics of the Kardashian sisters now pass as entertainment,” Kakutani writes. She can’t quite bring herself to blame 9/11 for the elevation of Sharon Osbourne and Paris Hilton to national celebrities — “a lot of post-9/11 culture seems like a cut-and-paste version of pre-9/11 culture” — but she also can’t resist mentioning the surge of mindless entertainment, rationalizing that today’s obsession with TMZ is “a more extreme version” of what existed before the attacks.

Powers vacillates even more dramatically between exaggeration and reality. He’s found his fence and is determined to sit on it, proclaiming that the popularity of SpongeBob Squarepants and YouTube videos of barking cats demonstrates our need for escapism, then brushing off such simplistic connections: “While it would be foolish to suggest that September 11 caused all this . . . .” Who exactly is the fool here? Ultimately, Powers adopts Kakutani’s halfway argument. “The search for mental comfort food was everywhere,” he writes, citing “the cupcake boom, the cars shaped like Tonka Toys,” and “Hollywood comedies about 30-year-olds who behave like teens.” As if realizing his logic is shaky, he too insists that it’s all about intensity of the shift: “I know American have been loving cute things forever . . . but over the past decade, things have reached a new level.” Even without 9/11, the past decade would likely have brought older cultural phenomena to a new level. Every decade is an overdone version of the last; adults have been bemoaning the callousness and stupidity of the next generation since the Roman empire. America did not need a terrorist attack to choose Good Morning America and its comparison testing of anti-wrinkle creams over the urbane sobriety of Walter Cronkite’s successors. And Hollywood has never served up terrific role models; screenwriters invented immaturity long before 9/11.

Despite diligently turning out their dispatches on the post-9/11 cultural scene, both Kakutani and Powers seem skeptical of the notion that one day changed everything. Powers is convinced that 9/11 at least exacerbated what he apparently considers a cultural decline. “[I]t’s hard not to think the fear and confusion following the terror attacks made the retreat to such sideshows more frantic,” he writes. But he ends on an optimistic note, citing resilience as one of America’s greatest assets. “One can even imagine someone comparing the United States to The Hangover franchise, whose heroes, having once been knocked out only to wake up in trouble, let the same thing happen again in the sequel.”

The Black Hole of “The Day That Changed Everything”

Is Frank Rich (late of the Times) earning his keep at New York Magazine?

Frank Rich introduces his cover story for this week’s New York magazine by pretending to dispel a cliché: “It was ‘the day that changed everything,’ until it didn’t.” He’s referring to 9/11, of course, but no matter how strongly he insists in the opening paragraphs that “ten years later, it’s remarkable how much our city, like the country, has moved on,” by the end of the article the reader is left with the nagging suspicion that Rich hasn’t moved on at all.

Like the majority of writers on the left, Rich favors a narrative in which 9/11 is at the heart of every significant development of the last decade. It’s a familiar argument, but also a facile one: that politicians took advantage of the fear caused by the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil to cripple civil liberties at home and advance a neoconservative agenda abroad. More convincing, however, is the perspective laid out by David Rothkopf in the August issue of Foreign Policy. He writes that “It is important to our process of consigning 9/11 to history to understand both what it was and what it was not, why it was important and why it was just one of many even greater stories of the past decade.” To demonstrate his point, Rothkopf compiles a list of ten developments that “exceed 9/11 in lasting importance,” including the proliferation of mobile technology and the rise of the “BRIC” countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Both Rich and Rothkopf address the web of non-9/11 issues that have emerged in the last decade, but while Rich unsuccessfully attempts to tie all these events to 9/11, Rothkopf points out that these disparate events are not necessarily related. They exist independently of 9/11 and would likely have unfolded in much the same way had Bin Laden’s 19 hijackers been intercepted before they reached the airport. By presenting 9/11 as a distraction from any number of equally significant crises, Rich diminishes the true tragedy and effects of the attack. He gives the same weight to Iraq as to Enron, attributing the financial scandal to a Bush-administration “propaganda campaign [that] was no more reality-based than the one that would promote Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.” As bad as Enron was — and the employees who watched their jobs and pensions vaporize will tell you it was very bad indeed — it was not a trillion-dollar war. It was not 4,400 dead American soldiers. If we value everything, we value nothing: ranking 9/11 a “10” on the disaster scale means little if every other unfortunate event, from the Bush tax cuts to the 2008 financial crisis, also merits a 10. Rich devalues the gruesome human cost of 9/11 by labelling what followed “another hijacking.” He writes, “The most lethal of these hijackings was the Bush administration’s repurposing of 9/11 for a war against a country that had not attacked us.” This is the liberal equivalent of insinuating that President Obama is a Muslim and therefore a terrorist. The war in Iraq was wrong, but equating President Bush with a suicide bomber who held a box cutter to the pilot’s throat and flew a plane into the World Trade Center is pure vitriole: rhetoric designed to inflame, not convince.

Rich makes the classic American mistake of seeing the U.S. at the center of the world, as the driver of history. He looks inward, not outward. Afghanistan and Iraq are corrupt ventures not because they caused thousands of civilian casualties or produced a surreal debate over the merits of torture, but because they were presented “as utterly cost-free to a credulous public” which learned to ask, “If we don’t need new taxes to fight two wars, why do we need them for anything?” Is the Tea Party’s distaste for taxes really the worst consequence of 9/11 Rich can find?

Rich seems to believe that all the crises of the last decade can be connected to 9/11 and the mindset it produced. Writing in Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf uses his list of 10 developments “that exceed 9/11 in lasting importance” to demonstrate the danger of Rich’s position. He criticizes the “American legend machine” that will “seek to frame 9/11 as a great event, the definer of an era, when in fact, its greatest defining characteristic was that of a distraction — the Great Distraction — that drew America’s focus and that of many in the world from the greater issues of our time.” Yet, despite his characterization of 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror as a distraction, Rothkopf does not really believe that the 10 events on his list happened because America was distracted. The argument that the heavy-handed response to 9/11 prevented the U.S. from focusing on the truly important stories of the decade — China’s rise, the frailty of the American economy — is not a new one. In part, it is one Rich makes himself when he claims that “we were so caught up in Al Qaeda’s external threat to America that we didn’t pay proper attention” to what he deems “the most consequential event” of the last decade: “the looting of the American economy by those in power in Washington and on Wall Street.” Nor is Rich alone in making his case. Anne Applebaum, writing for Slate, argues that “our worst mistake was one of omission. In making Islamic terrorism our central priority . . . we ignored the economic, environmental, and political concerns of the rest of the globe.”

Where Rothkopf diverges from the rest of the media echo chamber is in his definition of distraction. He believes that the events on his list were caused by greater external forces that had little to do with America. Our distraction didn’t cause these events; it just caused us to ignore them. Because of this distinction, Rothkopf is not nearly as pessimistic as other writers. America’s greatest error lies in its evaluation of the last decade, not necessarily in the actions it took during those ten years. He looks forward, not backward; his purpose is not to assess the damage but to warn against similar blindness in the future. Unlike Applebaum or Rich, Rothkopf considers China’s rise something that happened while the U.S. was distracted, not because the U.S. was distracted. Larger economic and cultural forces are at play here; while America might have responded more intelligently to an emboldened China without the attention-devouring specter of 9/11, no amount of focus could have prevented it. Our tunnel vision is unfortunate but not — yet — deadly.

Likewise, the other events on Rothkopf’s list also happened in spite of 9/11, not because of it. He names the invention of social media and the revolutions of the Arab Spring as two developments whose importance will eventually overshadow that of the war on terror. It is telling that Rothkopf reserves only one slot — the tenth, least important slot — on his list for what he terms “the American response to 9/11.” He writes:

 While some might consider America’s overwrought response to 9/11 to be proof of its significance, so much of that response was irrational and more directly related to issues in America’s past (the invasion of Iraq, for example) that it needs to be seen as a thing apart.

By pointing out that “we had been directly and indirectly fighting wars in and around Iraq for years,” Rothkopf suggests that the invasion might have happened even in the absence of such a dramatic trigger as 9/11. Rich and writers of a similar stripe err when they fail to realize that, had 9/11 not occurred, other things would have. A timeline without an Al Qaeda attack is not a timeline with nothing in its place. The neoconservative grudge against Saddam Hussein was a tinderbox waiting for a match. Had 9/11 not provided that match, who’s to say that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would not have invented a different one? If it is difficult to presume the inevitability of such a major event as the Iraq war, try a smaller one: say, taxes. Rich paints what he sees as the deliberate Republican deception about the cause of the Iraq war (WMDs, Condoleezza Rice’s “mushroom cloud”) as part of a pattern of disingeunousness that includes a manufactured panic over the national debt and the regulatory rollback that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Jonathan Schell at The Nation writes that “the habit of exaggerating or making up threats somehow persisted and spread. A new readiness to manufacture and credit illusion infected public life . . . .” Schell ventures even further afield than Rich by including on his list of manufactured threats not only the supposed dangers of deficit spending but the “epidemic” of voter fraud used to justify voting restrictions imposed by Republican state legislatures to suppress minority turnout. “The provocateur’s strategy of manufacturing a threat in order to respond to it is a familiar one,” he claims, “but it has never played as large a role in American politics as it has since 9/11.”

Really? As early as 1961, Eisenhower was warning against the “military-industrial complex” whose quest for profits had the potential to drag America into endless wars. Cold warriors used the threat of an all-powerful Soviet Union and a metastisizing Communist movement to build a nuclear arsenal and purge “un-American” enemies from politics. Go back even further, some historians suggest, to witness the 18th-century merchant class whipping up public outrage about trampled freedoms and curtailed liberties to convince poorer citizens that they too had a stake in the American Revolution.

There is nothing new under the sun, Ecclesiastes says, and certainly nothing new since 9/11. Even the bitter partisanship that pundits like Rich consider a hallmark of poisonous post-9/11 politics is not as unusual as it seems. One only has to remember the 2000 Florida recount and the introduction of terms like “hanging chad” into the lexicon to see that the red-blue disconnect was only exacerbated, not caused, by 9/11. The greatest stretch of blame-it-all-on-9/11 reasoning is the claim, by Steve Erickson of The American Prospect, that “it’s unimaginable that without 9/11 Barack Obama would have become president.” By Erickson’s logic, a world without 9/11 would have been one in which Hillary Clinton, unhobbled by her vote for the Iraq war, would have easily won the nomination. Furthermore, Obama never would have made the speeches on Iraq and on race that “directly addressed a post-9/11 America that yearned for that brief few weeks when the country felt, as Obama put it, not like a conglomerate of red and blue states but rather like the United States.” I don’t deny that Obama’s themes of hope and change resonated with a public exhausted with the partisanship of the Bush years, but to position 9/11 as the one singular event required for an Obama presidency is to reduce the world to a series of simplistic yes-or-no questions. So many other factors — John McCain’s uninspiring performance, the natural swing of the electoral pendulum after eight years of a Republican presidency — played a role in Obama’s election that is impossible to tease out the effects of a tragedy nearly seven years in the past.

David Rothkopf, at the end of his article, warns against exaggerating the significance of 9/11. Placing it at the center of everything that transpired over the last decade blinds us to truly world-changing developments, or at least narrows our understanding of their causes. Rich would have us believe that what Rothkopof terms “the stagnation of the U.S. and other developed-world economies” has its roots in the poisonous, deceptive politics spawned by 9/11. By accepting such a simplistic and baldly partisan explanation, we are free to ignore the deeper faults in the western economic model. This same willful blindness allows us to pretend that China’s surge is not a natural (and perhaps irreversible) development but the result of a distracted (yet still dominant) America. It is a conclusion easier to stomach than the reality that the U.S. will not be #1 forever.

“So, does all this mean 9/11 was not important?” Rothkopf asks. “Of course not.” He acknowledges that the attack forced major changes in domestic and foreign policy, but cautions that “we cannot allow single isolated events to warp our view of all around them, like historical black holes twisting the fabric of adjacent time and events.” Unfortunately, 9/11 is a black hole that Rich and his likeminded colleagues are all too eager to throw themselves into.

Beware Pundits Bearing “Meaning”

The majority of the media coverage surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11 is reflective; it follows up with survivors interviewed in 2001 or looks back at a decade of war on terror. The Atlantic is a bit more ambitious, in that it at least makes an attempt at critical thinking. Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Real Meaning of 9/11,” serves as an introduction to the magazine’s 10-years-later section. As one might expect from an essay purporting to reveal the “real meaning” of anything, Goldberg’s piece is ponderous and self-serious. “What we saw on the morning of September 11, 2001 was evil made manifest,” he declares in his opening gambit, as if he plans to address the nature of evil and its connection to Al Qaeda in a mere three pages. Though he acknowledges that “self-criticism is necessary, even indispensable, for democracy to work,” he mostly dismisses such navel-gazing, reminding us that “Westerners are gifted in the art of slashing self-criticism.” Goldberg wants to keep the onus of that bright Tuesday morning on Bin Laden and his suicide attackers; he has little patience for those who would explain 9/11 as a failure of intelligence, a failure of policy, or a failure to understand the Muslim world. No one would argue with the contention that the responsibility for the deaths of 3,000 Americans rests solely on the shoulders of the attackers — but then, no one is really suggesting otherwise. Even the self-flagellation that was supposedly popular in liberal circles, as some wondered aloud whether American actions could have somehow contributed to the attack, was not an attempt to absolve Osama Bin Laden of his crime. Professor Ward Churchill’s reference to the thousands of “little Eichmanns” who died in the Twin Towers was notable for its abhorrence, not its sound reasoning or widespread appeal.

Some of what Goldberg has to say is indeed valuable; he is one of the few authors to question the axiomatic belief that “terror is a weapon of the weak, when it is in fact a weapon deployed against the weak.” Here he means “weak” in the sense of “innocent” — the innocent children, mothers and fathers who were killed on 9/11 — but the fallacy he points out parallels the strange perception that terrorists are cowards. Preying on the weak is despicable, and if one assumes it is cowardly to hunt easy game rather than equally-matched targets — civilians instead of soldiers, say — then terrorists are indeed cowards. But the phrasing has always seemed chosen more to belittle and scoff at the perpetrators, to in some way posthumously humiliate them, than to actually explain their crimes. I do not pretend to understand the mind of a suicide bomber, but it seems that to face one’s own death requires some sort of bravery, or perhaps insanity, however twisted it may be. Maybe I feel this way because I fear death so much myself, because I do not believe in heaven or hell and so regard death as the ultimate, terrifying end. But I know I would never be brave enough to walk willingly into my own death.

While Goldberg rejects the idea that terrorists are weak, he asserts throughout his essay that they are evil. Their souls “are devoid of anything but hate, and murder is what erupted from these voids.” With this claim, Goldberg commits the very error for which he chastises the “terrorists are weak” crowd. To say that a terrorist’s emotions are limited to hate is to suggest, as those who label terrorism a coward’s tactic suggest, that a terrorist is less than human. Such denigration makes it easier to see violence as something foreign and 9/11 as an event fundamentally removed from the otherwise logical and compassionate flow of history. But what makes 9/11 so repulsive is that it was carried out by humans, by people with the same capacity to reason and feel as ourselves. Terrorism would be less frightening if it were perpetrated by an inherently cruel alien attacker; then we would not have to ask “why?” We would not have to wonder at man’s inhumanity to man. I can accept that Bin Laden’s suicide bombers were evil, because evil implies a present characteristic, a deliberate cruelty. What I have a hard time accepting is that these men were necessarily “soulless,” people, “devoid of love,” whose actions expressed “their hatred for humanity.” To believe someone is soulless is to believe in absence — the absence of a soul, the very thing that makes humans human. I suspect that even an evil person has experienced moments of love or friendship, if only perhaps as a child. This in no way lessens the magnitude of the evil that person commits; it only confirms our worst fear: that he, too, is human. Love and hate are not zero-sum quantities — a modicum of love does not soften or take away from a surplus of hate.

In the title of his essay, Goldberg assures us that, if we just stick with him for a few pages, we will learn the meaning of 9/11. Unfortunately, the answer to his implicit question is unsatisfying and vague. “[M]urder is the meaning of 9/11,” he writes. The statement feels cheap, because where does that leave us? Yes, murder is what happened on 9/11, but the idea of meaning suggests something broader and more resonant. Murder is perhaps what 9/11 meant for the terrorists, who never had to wake up on 9/12 and wrangle with the event’s far-reaching, tangled consequences for the future. For Bin Laden, the attack on America was very much about hatred; but for millions of Americans, “hatred” and “murder” do not begin to encompass the effects of that day. Murder happens once, but grief and vulnerability and politics happen each day, every day, for the rest of our lives. The meaning of 9/11 cannot possibly be restricted to three acts — three planes — of murderous impulse.

If Goldberg’s reduction of 9/11 to a series of facts impedes his quest to define the date’s greater significance, it may in part be due to his phrasing of the question. Writing in The American Prospect, John Powers makes this observation:

Before you knew it, the date September 11, 2001, gave way to the mystified shorthand of “9/11,” a name all too soon employed as a talisman, a bludgeon, a Get Out of Jail Free Card.

Powers is referring to the way in which 9/11 became the answer (or perhaps the excuse) for everything: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the PATRIOT Act, the subtle erosion of civil liberties and the ability of politicians on the right to shut down any line of inquiry by questioning their opponents’ patriotism. President Bush declared that “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” In a 2007 debate, then-Senator Joe Biden chastised Rudy Giuliani for constructing every sentence from “a noun, and a verb and 9/11.”

Such discourse cheapens the memory and impact of September 11, and makes it more difficult to tease out the meaning that Jeffrey Goldberg is so certain he has identified. Can an event experienced — for the most part vicariously, but haven’t we all laid a claim to a piece of the tragedy; hasn’t it changed everyone’s lives just a bit? — by millions of people have one unified meaning? In a more general sense, do events even have meaning deeper than the simple facts of their occurrence? Events have consequences and implications, but meaning is not a quality that exists independent of the human mind. It is something we ascribe to a tragedy in its aftermath, a narrative not of what happened that day but a story of how it affected us in the days followed.

I don’t know what the so-called meaning of 9/11 is, but I know that, whatever it is, it will have to account for the years, mostly still to come, in which the victims will not be there for their wives, husbands and children. It will have to account for two wars, for a society trying to walk the line between security and civil liberties, for a body politic upended and left angrily vulnerable by the attacks, for a shift in America’s sense of the world. “Murder” is far too simple to rise to the level of meaning. It is what 9/11 meant on 9/11/o1, not on 9/11/11. Too much has happened. Goldberg writes that “There are many people who still seem befogged by fallacies and delusions about the cause and meaning of 9/11.” I share his disappointment in the persistence of fallacies and delusions — that the attacks were an inside job, for example, or that the suicide attackers were on the CIA payroll. But there is no shame in, ten years later, still being “befogged” about 9/11’s meaning. Meaning is a shifting, slippery thing, and as the ripples caused by that day in September 2001 propagate throughout the years, it will have to take into account thousands of changing inputs. It cannot be summed up in a blue-bound commission report or a PBS documentary — and certainly not in a three-page article in a magazine.