http://smirkingchimp.com/node/545

Why Ask Why? Five years after 9/11, the question remains unanswered
By Matt Taibbi
Created Sep 14 2006 - 8:52am
So, why did they hate us after all?

We sure blew off that question nicely. As with everything else in this
country, our response to 9/11 was a heroic compendium of idiocy, cowardice,
callow flag-waving, weepy sentimentality (coupled with an apparently
bottomless capacity for self-pity), sloth, laziness and partisan ignorance.

We dealt with 9/11 in many ways. We instantly dubbed everyone who died in
the accident a hero and commissioned many millions (billions?) in mawkish
elegiac art. We created a whole therapy industry to deal with our
9/11-related grief, made a few claustrophobic two-star Hollywood movies
about the bombings, read Lisa Beamer's book and bought that DVD narrated by
Rudy, watched Law and Order entertainments about sensational murders
committed that morning and left for Jerry Orbach to solve, made bushels of
quasi-religious references to "hallowed ground." We made many careers out of
assigning blame for the attacks, with the right blaming Bill Clinton,
Michael Moore blaming George Bush and the clinically insane blaming those
mysterious demolition experts who allegedly wired the bottoms of the towers
with the explosives that "really" caused the tragedy. And we talked about
9/11 -- to death. We blathered on so much about the attacks and whined so
hard about our "lost innocence" that the rest of the world, initially
sympathetic, ended up staring at us in suicidally impatient agony, a can of
kerosene overturned above its head, like the old lady sitting next to Robert
Hays in Airplane!

We did just about everything except honestly ask ourselves what the hell
really happened, and why.

That process of self-examination was flawed from the start. We were screwed
the moment Fareed Zakaria wrote his infamous "The Politics of Rage: Why Do
They Hate Us?" essay for Newsweek a few weeks after the attacks. The
question -- why do they hate us? -- was maybe the right question, but that
was only if everyone could have agreed on what it meant. For what do we mean
by they, and what do we mean by us? I for one am not entirely sure we're
clear on these points, even now.

That we couldn't agree on who they were should be obvious by now. To the
Bush administration the answers to the they/us questions were, respectively,
"foreigners" and "America." From the outset the Bush crew showed that they
were both unwilling and unable to budge from the post-WWII political
paradigm they'd all grown up under, and viewed the 9/11 events purely as an
attack on the American nation-state by a belligerent foreign power. Their
solution to the terrorism problem revolved entirely around a strategy for
dealing with those foreign nation-states that were the "sponsors" of
terrorism -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea. It was characteristic of
the fourth-rate minds in this White House that they not only immediately got
lost in the wrong political paradigm in response to the bombing, but picked
the wrong country, Iraq, to punish for the crime. If we give them another
ten years at it they'll probably end up introducing market reform to
Antarctica as a backup plan.

Bush and his buddies grew up in the Cold War, an era where two countries
dominated the world and even the scraggliest warlord in the central African
jungle was usually a client of one or the other. It was a fun time for the
overgrown Risk-playing nerds inhabiting America's think tanks, who spent
half a century describing all human life as an ongoing chess match between
life-affirming American capitalism on the one hand and, on the other, the
bloodsucking communist religion cruelly foisted upon the world by a
conspiratorial bund of grubby German Jews (Hitler was eighty years too
late!) and French homosexuals. That was what it came down to: World politics
for half a century was a pissing match between two warring factions in the
sociology department of the international University of Well-Fed White
People. Things were so simple, even George Bush could understand them.

Well, things have changed since then. The operating conflict on earth now is
no longer capitalism vs. communism, but one pitting organization vs.
anarchy. All over the world, the borders of nation-states are blurring and
becoming more and more meaningless. From the north Indian subcontinent, to
the jungles of the Amazon basin, to the Middle East, and especially to West
and Central Africa, nations are fast losing their integrity while local
warlords and gangs are taking over. In some places in the world, authority
changes more from block to block than nation to nation. In countries like
Pakistan, which last week was forced to sign a humiliating peace accord with
belligerents on its own territory of Waziristan, a tribal leader can twist
the nipples of a nuclear power and not only keep his neck but come out ahead
of the game afterward. In the late Eighties and early Nineties the Risk
nerds squealed with delight over the supposedly unipolar world created by
the fall of the Berlin Wall, but actually the change was from bipolar to
apolar. There was anarchy and a crisis of international identity on the
other side of that wall. Our pole, one might say, turned out to be a lot
smaller than we thought it was.

So what happened? We never got that far in our reasoning. The farthest we
ventured, before returning to our regularly scheduled programming, was a
vague concession that the world was now "different." "All of this was
brought upon us in a single day -- and night fell on a different world,"
said George Bush in his "Churchillian" State of the Union address that next
January. "The United States confronts a very different world today," opined
the 9/11 commission report. It was "After 9/11, A Different World," as CBS
News put it. Different how? Well, that's the part we haven't really figured
out yet.

For the most part, America looks pretty much like it looked before 9/11. We
spend most of our time pounding Ding-Dongs and Sonic burgers, watching ESPN
and surfing porn sites, while transnational corporations -- the silent
allies of drug cartels and warlords in the dismantling of the traditional
nation-state -- install turnstiles in Congress and steadily move our entire
manufacturing economy overseas. Our culture is a parade of idiot reality
shows where ordinary citizens eat caterpillars for money and Southern jocks
drive moving billboards in a circle at 200 mph in front of euphoric crowds
of a hundred thousand. In the intellectual north, our braver political
dissidents dress in T-shirts with the face of George Bush morphed onto a
pig's body and watch documentaries in which other intellectuals brag about
being tricked by the Republicans into voting to invade the wrong country.

So what's changed? Well, we now hang our heads when we remember that dark
day, kneel before the appropriate icons (Pat Tillman, firefighters, the
Flight 93 passengers) at the appropriate times, and periodically make sure
to remember the Big Lesson, a.k.a. Anything Can Happen, Even to Those Such
as Us. The Monday Night Football crew this week commemorated 9/11 by
bringing a firefighter named Tim Buckley into the booth; when asked what was
different now, the humbled Buckley said that after 9/11, you have to think
about things more when you go out on a call. "You don't know what to expect,
after something like that," he sighed, shaking his head. Somber nods all
around to that in the booth, and then, with the snap of a finger, back to
the field -- Third and 16 for the struggling Raiders . . .

In this light one could almost view our response to 9/11 as a triumph of the
American system. If nineteen knife-wielding lunatics blowing a hole in the
middle of Manhattan on international television can't even temporarily knock
us out of "What, me worry?" mode, you have to feel pretty good about our
future chances for remaining just as cheerfully numb through even a more
serious disruption of our fantasy existence.

America's response to 9/11 was basically to blow off the entire question of
why it happened, change the set-design behind the same old us-vs.-evil
commies cowboy-movie worldview, and to patch the hole blown in our
self-esteem with a crude mix of stage-managed self-congratulation and
sentimental claptrap. Our failure to actually win our subsequent
self-declared war on the evildoers we explained away by using a modern
innovation, i.e. taking a New-Agey approach to our shortcomings and
forgiving ourselves for our little imperfections. In the Dr. Phil age,
actual achievement isn't important, so long as you're comfortable with
yourself! Make a list every morning, think about the good things in life!
Living in Madison Avenue's irony age helps also -- when even Tony Soprano
pours his heart out to a shrink every week, it's not hard to convince
Americans that they're still tough, even though Osama bin Laden is still
doing bong hits on Al Jazeera five years after we boldly promised to kick
his ass.

Whatever happened to actually being tough? What happened to speaking softly
while we carry that big stick? Of staring problems bravely in the face, of
taking the world seriously? History long ago washed that generation of "us"
away, along with the world we still think we live in.
_______

About author Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson