The original blog recommended an essay by Suzanne Garment in American Purpose. Her essay introduced comments from others and, for technical reasons, it quickly disappeared from the American Purpose website; thereafter, the link in the blog did not operate successfully. For readers who missed the essay it is reproduced below.
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We’re Still Here
They’re right, of course.
They—meaning the great majority of commentators, including the formidable authors we published this week in American Purpose—are right in saying that we, meaning what we still call the United States of America, have failed royally when it comes to 9/11’s cluster of cataclysms.
Before the attack, we failed to understand the circumstances that launched the suicide planes. We failed to organize our security in ways that made it oblivious to the threat.
When we responded to the destruction, we failed even more consequentially. Domestically, we made ourselves a security state, a bureaucracy that added fuel to our public problems. In foreign policy … well, you know. Iraq. Afghanistan. The end of anyone’s ability to say “nation-building” with a straight face.
Authoritarians are on the march again. Europe, with embarrassment and a survival instinct educated by centuries of horrors, is calculating the extent of its ability to cut itself loose from us and our increasingly loony politics.
Meanwhile, today’s American cancer was already eating at us: a growing inequality that technology made it impossible to ignore and a consequent rage of a sort that can be satisfied only by blood.
And yet.
People who were sentient on 9/11 will never forget it. Even for those of us who resist remembering or weren’t there, the retrospectives now streaming in our collective face won’t let us do so. They shouldn’t. The only mercy in the day’s horror was that it incinerated most of its victims quickly, but not all of them. Read, if you can, the stories of the burn victims.
America—the real one, not some sentimentalized version—reacted like America. You may remember some of the stories: the endless lines of people waiting—hopelessly, it turned out—to give blood because that was the only thing they knew how to give. The ironworkers across the country who put their tools in their trucks and drove down to the pile at the World Trade Center because they knew that there was metal to cut and that they could do it. A friend of mine who volunteered at the site said her first thought when she arrived was, “I smell evil.” Which everyone did, and reacted accordingly.
This American reaction was no less real than the mistakes that almost inevitably followed. We failed, but not before showing that we were capable of Herculean efforts. If things get massively bad, there is not much doubt that we can and will expend that effort again, probably with the same shortcomings. Things aren’t that bad yet. We can hope they won’t be.
When Gladstone told spoke about the Irish question in Parliament in 1881 and said that the “resources of civilization are not yet exhausted,” he was a bad prognosticator. World War I and the worst of the Irish troubles were yet to come. But in the end he was right: Britain’s resources were not yet exhausted. Nor are ours.
—Suzanne Garment for the editors
Suzanne Garment, senior editor of American Purpose, is a political scientist, writer, and attorney. She taught politics at Harvard and Yale universities, then became special assistant to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Daniel P. Moynihan. She was an associate editor and columnist at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where she wrote Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in American Politics(1991).
Garment has practiced tax law at firms in Washington, D.C. and New York City and has written for, among other publications, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She was a presidential appointee to the board of the National Endowment for Democracy and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
All the thoughtful reflections on September 11 and it’s aftermath are greatly appreciated, and will be worthy of continued analysis for years to come, not only the event itself and all that has transpired in subsequent years, but also the lengthy history of policy and events that led up to the tragic events. The current edition of FOREIGN AFFAIRS features a series of articles on “Who Won the War on Terror?”, leading to an overall view that any answer must be left indeterminate, and very unsettled. While our nation’s national defense mechanisms are more developed and undoubtedly stronger than ever, and we have been safe from external physical terror attacks, other than though cyberspace, for years, the overall strength of our nation seems reduced. Our population is more divided politically than it has been for generations, the Western Alliance is weaker and more divided than it has been since it’s inception, and any influence we have in the Middle East has been greatly eroded. Hard to view our involvement there with any sense of satisfaction.
Doug,
Suzanne Garment writes beautifully, as do you; indeed, I wd go further: while you both write eloquently, Ms. Garment writes musically.
I don’t possess a tiny fraction of her/your talent, but neither of you understands a tiny fraction of the pure evil perpetrated on us that day nor our enduring trauma and fierce anger. But I lack the words to express it. So I won’t try.
Best,
Monica (& on behalf of my daughter, who was 21 years old when she was caught in the maelstrom of the WTC debris, and spent 15 minutes of her young life thinking she was going to die…and she was one of the many thousands of lucky ones! Suffice it to say, 20 years later still can’t talk about it.)
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