“To this appalled, sad American, and New Yorker, America has never seemed farther from an acknowledgment of reality than it’s been in the face of last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality. The disconnect between what happened and how it might be understood, and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by virtually all our public figures (an exception: Mayor Giuliani) and TV commentators (an exception: Peter Jennings) is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.
Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is okay. America is not afraid. “They” will be found and punished (whoever “they” may be). We have a robotic president who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by the Bush administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand, along with the whole American people, united and unafraid, behind President Bush. Commentators inform us that grief centers are in operation. Of course, we are not being shown any horrific images of what happened to the people working at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That might dispirit us. It was not until Thursday that public officials (again, with the exception of Mayor Giuliani) dared offer some estimates of the number of lives lost.
We have been told that everything is or is going to be, okay, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not okay. And this was not Pearl Harbor. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the colossal failure of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about the future of American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a sensible program of military defense. But clearly our leaders—those in public office, those aspiring to public office, those who once held public office—with the voluntary complicity of the principal media, have decided that the public is not to be asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed to us contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by nearly all American officials and media commentators in these last days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
Our leaders have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.
—Susan Sontag, 9. 11. 01
Not only will Jeff Mangum 