On the morning of September 11th -- three months ago today -- I went into a phone booth at a hotel near my evacuated office building, where I'd taken refuge to watch CNN, and called my parents and girlfriend to let them know I was all right. I wasn't the only one making such a call; in fact, I had to wait in line. Many in the Washington, D.C. area were so shaken by the Pentagon plane crash and the slew of bomb threats that ensued that they felt in mortal danger. The roads backed up as some fled the city, believing we were under an all-out attack. The panic wasn't helped by the President's cross-country joyride aboard Air Force One.
It all seems such an overreaction now. But it also seems emblematic of how rapidly and dramatically -- and continually -- political discourse in this country has shifted over the past three months. Again and again, a prevailing week-old wisdom has emerged, only to be shattered almost immediately by the events of the next week or even the next day. Remember when Colin Powell was supposedly guilty of putting diplomacy ahead of our war objectives, and was accused of stalling the Afghan campaign so that we could assemble a coalition government to replace the Taliban? Well, that criticism exploded with the near-simultaneous fall of Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. And remember how there was no way we were going to be able to defeat the Taliban before winter descended on Afghanistan and millions of refugees starved? Um. . .
That's just the beginning. Remember when Bill Maher was going to lose his show for calling U.S. military tactics "cowardly"? Remember when the barrage of anthrax mailings was the next wave of Al-Qaeda's systematic attack on our homeland? Remember when Osama bin Laden seemed so horrible and terrifying that no one (save a brave few) was even up for making fun of him?
Remember when Islam was supposed to be a "peaceful religion," end of story? Remember when political partisanship was over? Remember when it was inconceivable that an American could infiltrate the Taliban or Al-Qaeda? Remember when pacifists actually seemed worth arguing against?
Remember Donald Rumsfeld before he was cool?
We've been on a political and emotional roller coaster over the last three months -- forced again and again to invest in assumptions that were debunked almost immediately, rather than slowly and in the (seemingly) normal course of events. In the 19th century, there was a debate among geologists over whether "catastrophism" or "gradualism" (also called "uniformitarianism") was the best theory to describe the way change came to the earth. Catastrophists believed sudden events like mass extinctions caused by floods (think the Bible) were the main source of change; gradualists like Charles Lyell opted for more long-term, evolution-style mechanisms such as earthquakes and sea level shifts.
We've just witnessed a striking period of political catastrophism.
We seem to be coming out of this phase now -- gradually, of course. The ground continues to shift beneath us, but we're gaining steadily in perspective. Journalistically, the best indicator of this may be Andrew Sullivan's latest article in the New York Times Magazine. The attack of September 11, Sullivan argues, was strategically stupid. "[Al-Qaeda] clearly miscalculated. By committing such a vast atrocity, they all but guaranteed an overwhelming response, one that would cripple the network's finances and military bases." Who would have thought we'd be reading that three months after those attacks?
I've noticed the same catastrophic pattern in my own thinking. A week or so after September 11th, I was in Pittsburgh visiting a friend, and found myself grossed out by the American flags everywhere. At the time, in my robust individualism, this spontaneous display of patriotism seemed repellent to me.
Now, I want my own flag.
Is there a larger point here? Well, perhaps that the past three months' grand display of fallibility -- which has been spread evenly across the U.S.'s ideological spectrum -- ought to inspire us to take a fresh look at the nature of political discourse in this country. Generally, our disputes take much more time to get sorted out; usually, conventional wisdom takes much longer to change. And sometimes lengthy debate is indeed necessary. But often, bad ideas are just that -- bad ideas -- and should be immediately recognized as such. On many occasions in domestic politics, we should be able to cut through all the nonsense and achieve the right political answer far more quickly and urgently -- far more catastrophically, so to speak -- than we traditionally have.
And what defines urgency? We're not always in a crisis or at war. But politics always matter, frequently in a life-or-death sense to someone somewhere. If the past three months make us all a bit more skeptical of received wisdom -- and more volcanic in our response to typical political spin -- that can't be a bad thing.
Anachronism Watch. You'd think that a college English major like myself would know better than to speak of the Christian "author" of Beowulf (as I did in my last column). As reader Annie Heckel, an English graduate student at the University of Rochester writes,
Something. . .that you might want to consider if you ever happen to use [Beowulf] as an example again: we don't actually have any idea who [the] true author is. You are correct that Christian writers have had a hand in the transmission of the text, but I believe that their role was limited to that of actually committing the work to parchment, rather than any sort of compositional role. While this may seem like a rather nit-picky point, it's really a fairly important one, partially because of the way in which it differs so markedly from modern conceptions of "the author."
My apologies.