On this weekend 20 years ago, I was tasked by the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine (RIP) to assess whether Americans had profoundly changed in the 12 months since the lightning traumas of 9/11.
You may well remember what that post-9/11 year was like. For starters, there was a semblance of bipartisan unity as George W. Bush stood in the rubble with a bullhorn; there was patriotic fervor arguably not felt since Pearl Harbor; there was deep discomfort with new ill-timed films that dramatized mass violence. All told, there was a widely shared assumption in late ’01 that “everything has changed,” that we Americans, united by grief after planes became missiles on a morning of azure blue, had “lost our innocence,” irrevocably so.
“It certainly seemed that way,” I wrote on this weekend 20 years ago:
“Jay Leno and other wise-guy comics fell silent, social commentators insisted that the age of irony was dead, violent films slated for release were put on the shelf, multimillionaire ballplayers laid down their gloves, people of little faith found solace in prayer – and in Washington, the practitioners of slash-and-burn politics curbed their tongues and cloaked themselves in the Stars and Stripes.
“The latter response was predictable. Politicians are experts at sniffing out the public mood, and they’re only as human as the rest of us. Still, it was a sight to behold. The political community is wired for combat, yet here was this thunderous silence, smothering our disputatious discourse of the moment: the Social Security ‘lockbox,’ the budget surplus (remember that?), stem cells, prescription drugs, HMO reform, immigrant reform, Al Gore’s new beard…all swept away in the aftershock, seemingly forever.”
But then my article took a big turn:
“Now we know better.
“Now we know that, even amid our continued mourning for those who died on Sept. 11, we can’t stem the most fundamental traits of our national character, including our rambunctiousness, our love of argument, our impulse to question authority, our inherent pursuit of happiness – traits essential to the traditional functioning of our democratic disorder. And sure enough, Washington is now behaving much as it did before.”
Then I hauled in some talking heads:
“Charles Cook, a nonpartisan analyst who tracks politics inn Washington, says, ‘There is a big tendency in politics, and in life, to overreact whenever a big event occurs. Even an event as horrible as Sept. 11. We tend to look at everything through a microscope, and that makes everything seem huge. Yet if anyone on that day had been able to put their emotions aside and say that one year in the future not much will have changed, that person would have been right on the mark.’
“Douglas Brinkley, a historian and presidential biographer, tells me, ‘Sept. 11 has brought a degree of increased collective paranoia into the American lifestyle. But we have coexisted with paranoia before. When the Soviets exploded the atomic bomb in 1949, we felt collectively vulnerable for the first time. When they launched Sputnik in 1957, we felt that any minute we could be attacked from space. Then we had the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. So this is a psychological factor we’ve already lived with. It doesn’t necessarily transform the way we live.’
“As polling analyst Karlyn Bowman puts it, ‘We are the same people that we were before Sept. 11 – with all our patriotic and tawdry dimensions. And our democracy is all about political combat, always has been.'”
“Political combat” had indeed resumed, but when I look back today at this ’02 article, I’m ruefully bemused about my references to our inherent “rambunctiousness,” our traditional “democratic disorder.” One year after 9/11, Democrats and Republicans were again fighting about stuff like…hold your breath…HMO reform! Funding for Social Security! Stem cell research!
Oh, what idyllic times those were.
Today we’re so far removed from 9/11 that the terrorists are now inside the house. We’re rambunctious to the point where one party is threatening the future of free and fair elections, threatening to topple the scaffolding of our entire way of life. When I wrote that article, I could never have imagined (nor, I suspect, could you) that our most “tawdry” dimension would devolve to the point where an ousted president, a font of ignorance, would steal nuclear secrets and still be feted by millions.
Paul Simon has sung, “It isn’t strange that after changes upon changes / We are more or less the same.” Dare I suggest that, in the two decades since 9/11, we may actually be worse?