Force Feeding

Now that a week’s gone by since the Sept 11 anniversary, we may be permitted to think our own thoughts about it rather than absorb the canned emotions and packaged sentiments prepared for our consumption, required, in fact, like Mom’s Brussels sprouts. That was my reaction at the time, observing the events from the quasi-distance of Los Angeles—that we were being told exactly what to think and how to feel at every moment and punished if we strayed. Poor Susan Sontag took it on the chin when she dared to exercise independent thought and say what should have been obvious: that the hijackers could be called a thousand nasty things, but not cowards. The idea that perverse acts could also be courageous, like many other reflexions, was haram—forbidden. We were not allowed to examine the attacks with the use of our rational faculties.

When Bush used the occasion to declare war, a series of wars really, including one against Congress or anyone squeamish about letting him do whatever he wanted, it reinforced the idea that we were not to actually think about the nature of the attack or its perpetrators or what best to do about them. We were to leave all that to our rulers and obey them.

In previous war epochs, including one I recall quite vividly, our leaders, savory and unsavory alike, felt some need to concentrate their fire on the external enemy, at least at first. They sought to build a domestic alliance in support of the war effort and its accompanying shared sacrifices. But this time was different: there were no shared sacrifices and thus no need for a domestic alliance. When a Democratic centrist like Tom Daschle tried to find a way to offer loyal support while retaining his doubts, he was crushed like a corncob in a North Dakota silo. That created bitter adversaries within, which may have been exactly the point, to say to them, and us, You are defeated. We don’t need you. Squirm all you want. We were banished to a psychological Guantánamo without library privileges. The grunt soldiers facing the consequences in Iraq were among the first to dissent, but they were expendable.

Gentle and forgiving Clyde Haberman in the New York Times remarked in Friday’s paper on the consistent unoriginality of all the speakers at the official Ground Zero memorial ceremony, including Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Spitzer, Giuliani and Clinton, H. They all cited standard phrases from Western Civ 101 or American lit but seemed not have a new idea about what had happened there or much less the human condition. Haberman attributes it in part to the limits of sound-bite politics but notes that Lincoln didn’t need long to soar oratorically at Gettysburg. I am more inclined to cite my old English teachers who said when they marked our compositions, Good writing comes from good thinking. If you don’t have any ideas, no rhetorical tricks will save your essay from cliché.