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American Forgetting
Instead of expanding, we contracted. Instead of a new juncture, we retreated to old ways. It's all there at the construction site.
ANNA QUINDLEN |
Quindlen: American Forgetting Instead of expanding, we contracted. Instead of a new juncture, we retreated to old ways. It's all there at the construction site. |
Sept. 17, 2007 issue - At the construction project that has replaced the site of one of America's greatest national traumas, there is a sign with the telephone number of the Port Authority police "in case of an emergency." This would be ironic were it not so sad. Everything about the enormous urban square where the World Trade Center once stood, once burned, once fell, is terribly sad because it has been so sanitized. THIS IS A SPECIAL PLACE, says one small sign on the construction fence, but there's no sign that that's true. Everything has been done to make it seem ordinary. Girders, cranes, gravel, hard hats—it looks no different from the places nearby where luxury condos rise. THINK BACK. MOVE FORWARD. IT'S TIME reads a billboard that has the unmistakable odor of ad agency. Americans like history as long as it's over fast enough.
Six years ago there was a moment. How long did it last? Long enough to seem indelible and authentic. After the greatest terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and a field in Pennsylvania, there was a moment when it seemed that the sheer scale of the event would evoke a response of answering enormity, in thought, in action and in behavior.
That is not what happened.
Instead we launched a war, a cheap bait-and-switch by an administration that figured it could simply replace one Middle Eastern bad guy with another in the public mind, trade an Osama bin Laden card for a Saddam Hussein. Our so-called leaders knew that the most terrifying thing about a War on Terror was that it was a war without borders, nationality or country. They decided to pretend otherwise by invading Iraq. Today it may be that things are better in one part of that country, not so good in others, but the bottom line is that there remains no compelling reason why the United States should ever have invaded in the first place, and certainly none that can be linked to the events of September 11.
Six years along, and there is little evidence that the intelligence apparatus of the nation is much better than it was on Sept. 12, 2001, when pay-phone messages picked up two days earlier that said "The match begins tomorrow" and "Tomorrow is zero hour" were finally translated. Entrenched government bureaucracies, a resistance to and ignorance of new technology, and a lack of communication among agencies still remain. With so many fiefdoms, programs and initiatives—and so little overarching leadership—it is hard to tell what has improved. But intelligence wonks suspect that if there were another attack, the discussions about our shortcomings would be remarkably similar to those we heard in 2001.
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