http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no10/berube.html
Nation and Narration
Michael Berube
Imagine the 43rd Presidency without Osama bin Laden, the year 2001 with an uneventful
September 11.
It's January 2002, one year after Bush's controversial inauguration, and the White House is a shambles. Having passed the tax bill that was the only rationale for his Presidency in the eyes of his financiers, George W. Bush is in deep doo-doo. The post-New Economy recession is in full swing, and working Americans have discovered to their dismay that the $300-$600 rebates they received back in 2001 will cover a couple of heating bills and winter clothes for the kids, and that's it; over the next fifteen years they'll see another $15 from the tax cut, having no capital gains or estate tax relief to look forward to, while the executives at Halliburton look to pick up $15 billion each. The same holds true for the executives of Enron and their $60 million severance packages (severance packages for CEOs having been exempted from taxation by a little-noticed rider to the bill), except that Enron's spectacular collapse has fired one House investigation into Bush's and Cheney's financial interests in deregulation, one Justice Department investigation into Enron's role in crafting Bush/Cheney energy policy, and another broader Senate investigation into corruption and influence- peddling in the new administration.
All three investigations have been denounced by Rush Limbaugh, William Kristol, and the Wall Street Journal as "a monkey wrench in the very engine of prosperity," but nobody is listening to these toadies anymore. They've been discredited not only by their unflagging support for Enron but also by their earlier denunciations of the review of the Florida election returns, which, though ambiguous in many respects, indicated beyond all doubt that more Floridians intended to vote for Gore than for Bush in November 2000--and that Florida Republicans, knowing well in advance that they were in for a dogfight, deliberately struck thousands of black voters from the rolls while filling out fraudulent absentee and military ballots months before the election. And since more Americans voted for Gore than for Bush nationwide in the first place, the new President's legitimacy hangs by a thread. The Electoral College is soon to be abolished, and sweeping reforms in voter registration and voting tabulation systems are being enacted in every state of the union. It doesn't help matters that 84 percent of Americans think that Bush "isn't working hard enough" as President, largely because he has not yet returned from summer vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. As for Bush's cabinet . . . what cabinet? O'Neill and Rumsfeld have made early departures, as predicted by Beltway insiders from day one; Gale Norton has resigned under pressure after having been discovered clubbing baby seals off the coast of Alaska; and attorney general Ashcroft is widely criticized for continuing to hold his controversial "prayer breakfasts" in which he calls on Jesus Christ to "smite the unbelievers."I think it's safe to say that the events of September 11 changed everything, don't you?
* * *
Like the deadly particulate matter floating in the air of lower Manhattan, the political fallout from September's terrorist attacks will have immeasurable toxic effects for decades. The narrative of that fallout remains to be written--indeed, it remains to be lived and experienced. But it's already becoming possible to see several important story lines taking shape in U.S. political culture.
The early days now seem like days of hysteria: there was the justifiable hysteria of New Yorkers who feared that the bridges and tunnels were the next targets, and there was the ugly hysteria of right-wing pundits for whom the attacks changed nothing but the volume of their daily screeds. One unwittingly ludicrous example was provided by the celebrated hack Shelby Steele, who was writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal denouncing the UN conference on racism when the planes hit, and merely tweaked it into a September 17 column denouncing global crybabies in general--some of whom were apparently flying those planes, although the connection wasn't made quite clear. (News flash: advocates of reparations for slavery kill 6000 in New York!!) More dangerous were the early responses of people like Andrew Sullivan--and Ann Coulter and Rich Lowry of the National Review; Coulter went so far as to lose her job at the Review, less for the content of her written work (according to editor Jonah Goldberg's October 3 column) than for her public demeanor after her incoherent follow–up essay was spiked. And Goldberg's postmortem has the ring of truth, for Coulter's now-infamous line, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity," was after all not terribly different from Lowry's plan for "identifying the one or two nations most closely associated with our enemies, giving them 24 hours notice to evacuate their capitals (in keeping with our desire to wage war as morally as possible), then systematically destroying every significant piece of military, financial, and political infrastructure in those cities."
This is strong stuff--so strong, in fact, that in response to Sullivan's vile suggestion that Gore voters would form a "fifth column" of decadent leftists in university towns and on the coasts (you know, where a lot of those decadent Oscar Wilde types live), any rational person could've replied that throughout September and October, you couldn't do better recruiting work for Al Qaeda in Muslim nations than to distribute free copies of the National Review.
Of course, some of the right's hysteria was understandable: remember, they excoriated Arab terrorists for days after the bombing in Oklahoma City, only to be compelled to swallow hard once the white kid with the crewcut emerged as the perp. Think of their tension, their long-unfulfilled desires to rage, rage against the backward cultures of Islam: by September 11, 2001, the right had been waiting more than six years to vent, and some of them simply lost control.
Interestingly, though--and devastatingly for the left--they reined themselves in; after the first few queasy weeks, there would be no more talk of crusades and conversions and infinite justice. For who knew, until September 11, that Grover Norquist, longtime tax nut and conservative organizer extraordinaire, had been cultivating Arab-American voters for the GOP? (So assiduously, it turned out, that he'd had his President lunching with some Hamas and Hezbollah supporters, as Franklin Foer pointed out in the New Republic.) And who knew that the hard right would scotch its plans for systematically destroying the capitals of Muslim nations the minute they realized that they couldn't get to Afghanistan without going through Pakistan?
Prevented by their own President from conducting a hate campaign against Arabs, the harpies of the culture-war right turned to a safer domestic target--students and professors. In a remarkably crude, incompetent pamphlet, the Joe Lieberman-Lynne Cheney outfit, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, combed college campuses for seditious statements like "ignorance breeds hate," "hate breeds hate," "our grief is not a cry for war," "an eye for an eye leaves the world blind," "knowledge is good," and "if Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity." (All but one of these are actual statements cited by ACTA as evidence of insufficient patriotism on U.S. campuses. Afficionados and adepts will recognize the last item as the words of Joel Beinin, the antepenultimate item as the words of Mahatma Gandhi, and the penultimate item as the motto of Faber College in Animal House.) Lynne Cheney has not commented on the pamphlet, and may in fact be in a secure undisclosed location for all I know; Lieberman's office has issued one of those "distancing" statements that stops short of taking the Senator's name off the letterhead.
Meanwhile, even as the New Republic continued to publish the work of liberal writers, the editorial staff collectively staged what Stuart Hall once called the Great Moving Right Show, and kept right on moving until they passed the National Review. Think I'm kidding? Count the number of times each magazine has criticized Ariel Sharon since September 11, and you'll get some sense of why I respect the National Review's Middle East coverage more. Or read every post-9/11 editorial signed by the editors, like the October 29 clarion call to "weaponize" our courage. (In his bunker in Baghdad, a shaken Saddam Hussein looks up from his copy of TNR: "Nothing would please me more than to fight American armed forces in the daughter of the mother of all battles--but I cannot face the fearsome senior editors of this weekly magazine.") Or look at their vicious attacks on Colin Powell, who is apparently unfit to run the State Department and should be replaced by someone wiser, someone with a firmer grasp of the perfidy of Arabs, perhaps someone who has attended the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, like editor Lawrence F. Kaplan. <snip>