The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

One never knows quite what to say -- or what not to say -- when confronted by the anniversary of a tragedy. In the weeks and months after September 11, I felt stricken a sense of hollowness, of dumbness in the face of the overwhelming complexity, and the absolute simplicity, of what had happened.

Five years on, that sense for me persists; not so much from any experience of an unhealed wound (I was no more wounded than any other New Yorker with no friends or family among the dead), as from an awareness of how much more complex the task of unraveling the far-reaching consequences of those attacks. The empowerment of a reckless administration was only the beginning; the setting-in of a culture of irrational fear has been even more widespread and corrupting. And this, in turn, has led to a kind of News at 11 crime-report culture where the shocks (water bottles! bird flu! sea levels! teen sex!) come fast and furious. The public desire to get something purposefully done (about, say, health care coverage, greenhouse gas emissions, the wealth gap, or wholesale slaughters in various parts of the world outside of Iraq) might have been nurtured by our political leadership. They might have taken the moment of national (indeed, global) unity and made something of it.

Instead, the opportunity was squandered. The sole active decision of the Bush administration that can be yet defended was the choice to remove the Taleban from power in Afghanistan and to break up the base of the Al Quaeda network's support; now, our inconsistent and Iraq-centric policy in Asia has made the the success of the former seem perhaps temporary. As for the latter, I don't doubt it had powerful effects. But we have insisted at the same time on becoming a recruiting poster for future networks of armed terror. The excuse that these people "hate freedom" is worse than laughable -- it's a bald-faced denial of the obvious truth that nobody likes a superpower, particularly one that shows, through its actions (secret torture prisons, anyone?) its contempt for rule of law and its own ideas.

And that only scratches the surface. And doesn't take into account my own lack of transformation -- I trundle along, much as usual. Do I go out of my way to eat only locally-produced food? I don't. I even drive a car now, and tell myself I have to have it. I even sometimes drive it to do things like get a bargain on wine. Future of the globe be, apparently, damned. Damn.

There's a lot I haven't addressed above -- the absence of which now makes me cringe. But I'll post this anyway.

A few links, at least. Nothing you wouldn't have seen elsewhere.

Without knowing a scrap about architecture, I tend to agree with the tenor of this NYT review by Nicolai Ouroussoff (reg. req'd, sorry) about the proposed downtown buildings. As in, I just think they're dull and corporate, and I think they should be in Phoenix.

Josh Marshall (citing, incidentally, a good article by James Fallows, in the Atlantic), had some thoughts less inarticulate than my own.

This (now-deleted) post at MeFi -- its harebrained sense of programmatic "rememberance" and the pile-on of reflexive snark that ensued, are a good example of why I shy away from addressing any of this.

Finally, can I just note that if you don't comment on this post, the terrorists really will have won this time. I've been holding them off....getting....so....very....tired....