The Way We Were

[thedrifter]

September 11, 2007
The Way We Were
By Rick Moran

A photograph, partially torn at the corner and suffering from being stuffed into a drawer full of screwdrivers, wrenches, and assorted knick knacks and gewgaws reflected the fluorescent light in the kitchen off its scratched surface making it difficult to identify. Why we call it the "utility drawer" is beyond me. I suppose it's because anything and everything that doesn't have its own place eventually ends up being carelessly thrown in there -- parts of one's life that defy categorization or stuff that we can afford to forget about.

The picture is unremarkable. It is a photo of me from 6 years ago standing on a dock, the river over my shoulder. I'm wearing a Chicago White Sox hat pulled low over my eyes, protecting them from the bright sun. It is a picture taken by my friend Patty before a few of us went out for a late afternoon river ride.

The date time stamped on the back was September 9, 2001.

Interesting how photographs pull memories out of your head as a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat. You don't think about a particular day or experience until something else acts as a catalyst and the memories all come back in a rush. For instance, sometimes when I smell strawberries I think of the lip gloss worn by one of my first girlfriends back in high school. The memories are so powerful, I can almost taste her lips on mine and smell the perfume she used to wear.

That's one of those memories that cause you to pause and smile, a warm feeling washing over you as the intensity of the recollection brings about an actual physical reaction. And then it's gone and try as you might, you can't conjure up that same memory with the same intensity until the next time you are caught unawares and whatever it is that triggers remembrance is set in motion.

So it was with this scratchy, damaged photograph I accidentally pulled out of a kitchen drawer yesterday, September 9, 2007. But the memory of the event that it elicited was fleeting. More to the point, the photograph acted as one part of a memory bracket with my own mind's eye in the here and now acting as its counterpart. I was looking at my pre-9/11 self and contemplating what I had become in 2007.

The radical coincidence of finding a photograph on the exact same date that it was taken years earlier was serendipitous. Would that everyone could be so lucky. In that late summer of 2001, there was no shadow moving across the land, no premonition of danger, not a clue that less than two days later the America we had gotten so familiar with -- omnipotent, invincible, striding confidently toward a fat, happy future -- would be brought so low. And all our silly pretensions about being immune to the evils that plague the rest of the planet would come crashing down in a series of searing, unforgettable images, dust and smoke blotting out the sun that just hours before shone so benevolently on a land seemingly oblivious to what evil was capable.

The photograph doesn't show that we were sleepwalking toward disaster for the previous decade. But the memory of what occupied the attention of the man in picture at that time is as clear as day to me. I was on vacation for the week and was going on a trip on Thursday. My biggest concern about flying at the time was that the cross country flight didn't allow smoking and I dreaded the thought of having to endure perpetual nicotine fit for the entire 5 hour flight.

If the man standing in the kitchen contemplating the past could have sent a message to the man standing on the dock in the photograph telling him about 9/11, you can well imagine what the reaction would have been. Disbelief, anger at such thoughts invading the complacency we all felt about our safety, and perhaps confusion - a profound befuddlement that surpassed his capacity to grasp that such things could happen in America or anywhere else for that matter. He would have had no frame of reference that could illuminate the terrible consequences of raw, unreasoning hatred directed against strangers whose only transgressions were in the fevered imaginings of a radical ideology that gave its adherents permission to commit murder in the name of God.

Time is not absolute. Our memories prove that. Reminiscing can bring the past back to us, telescoping time and space so that the smells, the tastes, and the emotions we felt at any given moment can exist in both the present tense and the yesteryear of our thoughts. It is a blessing and a trap that the human mind works in this way, gifting us with faces, events, and feelings from the long ago that bring joy to our hearts but at the same time, entangling us in unwanted skeins of retrospection, recalling all too clearly those times that are best left unremembered - orphan memories that no one wants but can't escape.

And if those memories can play tricks on us so as to cause us to recall events incorrectly, we rarely recollect false emotions or senses. I know that the man in the photograph and the man in the kitchen are the same person. But the emotional world of 2001 in which the man in the photograph lived did not include the 9/11 attacks or the realization that the slow, inexorable march of time would cover that open wound with a healing scab, lessening the horror but leaving behind an inexpressible sadness at what was lost that day.

We are the same, that man in the photograph and me. But the emotional wall between us that makes any real connection impossible is a direct result of the man in the kitchen having lived through 9/11 and its momentous aftermath. Try as I might, I can't quite recapture the absolute certainty I felt at that time that nothing in America would ever really change. It's not so much that I believed we would never be attacked. It's just that I and most Americans never had the thought enter our heads. It wasn't unbelievable or unimaginable. It simply didn't exist in this universe.

That, I suppose is the biggest difference between the man in the photograph and me. And to this day, that difference is coloring our politics, our culture, and refashioning America below the surface into a different place than the country inhabited by the man on the dock. No one knows what that America will look like a decade, two decades from now. The forces of denial and appeasement are strong. But I hope if I pull that photo out years from now, I will still recognize the world in which the man on the dock lived and recall the things he considered important and vital about America.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

September 11, 2007
Why the Left Must Deny 9/11
By James Lewis

In the endless Summer of Love there is no 9/11. And to tens of millions of dreamy folk on the Left, the Summer of Love never stopped. For those people there is no dangerous Ahmadi-Nejad in Tehran, threatening a fiery new holocaust for Tel Aviv and Washington, DC. There is no nuclear proliferation by mad little mass-murdering Kim Jong Il. There is no Osama Bin Laden stirring up terror cells around the world -- just a poor, confused man somewhere in the mysterious, deeply spiritual East, whom we have offended in some terrible way.

For the Dreamy Left there is no history, and no fundamental human conflict. There was no Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor half a century ago -- except as a terrible misunderstanding, because our parents and grandparents were just so ignorant and racist in that benighted time. There was never a Cold War, there is no necessary war ever, there is no human value worth fighting for. We have transcended all that by our saintly morality and good will. History was mostly a big misunderstanding. Reality is only an agreement. Peace and Love are forever and ever, and nobody has to do anything to make it so, except to wish for it hard enough. If everybody wants it, it will be so.

For decades I've seen the bumper stickers: "Visualize World Peace," "If you think it, it will happen." What I never really grasped is that millions of reality-impaired people actually believe that. Last summer, the good people at "World Jump Day"

"plan to shift the orbit of planet Earth in order to 'stop global warming, extend daytime hours and create a more homogenous climate.' They were going to achieve this by having 600 million people jump up in the air at the same time."
I blush to say this, but I think I know those people. They're my liberal friends. They think wars happen because Americans are evil -- not because we were attacked by the Emperor cult of bushido Japan, or war was declared on us by the Hitler fanatics of Nazi Germany. Or, least of all, by Soviet imperialism, the greatest peace-loving movement on earth. Or by Osama Bin Laden. They are the people who are convinced today that if only the United States left Iraq, there would be peace, and that Saddam Hussein wasn't such a bad guy after all.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin got it exactly right: "The West are wishful thinkers. We will give them what they want to think." It worked like a charm for the Soviets for more than seven decades, in spite of all the known horrors. The Left simply extends an open invitation to con artists and sociopaths everywhere, and guess what? They come buzzing around like fat flies to horse droppings. Where are you, Charlie Trie, and Norman Hsu? Where are you Bill Clinton and the Reverend Jim Jones? Come and get it!

So when the world turns out to be different from dreamland and 9/11 happens in front of our eyes, somebody else has to be blamed. Because God is Love and Love is Love and Reality is Love. If that's not true, it's because of the evil people. (Like Republicans and neocons, and fat white middle-aged men with Southern accents and cruel faces, and mean people in military uniforms like in the Hollywood movies ... and you know what they're really like. Kluxers in sheets, every single one of 'em. You can tell just by looking at them.)

I've never understood why the Left hates Republican presidents so much, though I've heard them say it for decades. The Democrats didn't just oppose Eisenhower politically, they feverishly hated and despised him. The same for Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and so on until George W. Bush. (The next Republican president will also be hated and slandered. It's totally predictable.)

Oddly enough, LBJ was also fervently hated by the Left, even though he was a liberal Democrat who transformed the grief over Kennedy's assassination into the trillion-dollar War on Poverty. Yet he was still hated by the Left, with real, eye-popping, carpet-biting hatred.

I never understood it.

Until 9/11 happened -- and the Left went right along believing what they did before. Life changed right in front of all of our eyes, with the dark, smoking Twin Towers. And on the Left, nothing changed.

Then I think the saner folks in the country started to get it.

I had a dark, heavy-hearted feeling during the Clinton years that we were in for some terrible blow, because the country was pretending that the Summer of Love was back, Bill Clinton was President and nothing bad would ever, ever happen again. To me it looked like we were just asking for it.

When 9/11 happened, half the political world woke up. But not the other half, on the Left. The Left can't be wrong. If the facts on the ground contradict what's in their heads, the facts must be wrong.

That's not just true for the Mooney Left, but even for the Hard Noam Chomsky Left. Because the Chomsky Left is only the Mooney Left grown more verbose. Like Chomsky, the Hard Left believes that ordinary people are easily suckered by the Big War-Mongering Corporations, just like the ad campaigns for Coke and Pepsi. Chomsky calls is "manufactured consent". That just means that normal people can't be trusted to think for themselves. They are constantly suckered by the Big Evil Corps.

Reality is too painful for these folks. It's too scary. They protect themselves by a powerful, invisible shield of psychic Saran Wrap. It's just like the miracle of plastics.

I never really understood that, because, frankly, it would mean that half of my contemporaries were mad. Or -- let's use a nice word -- they are "in denial." But not just the normal, everyday denial, the kind that doctors see when their patients are dying in the hospital. Rather, the Left denies entire categories of shared physical danger that are plainly visible to all us, every single day. They just turn those facts upside-down, or shift the responsibility to the wrong side. In Winston Churchill's perspicacious phrase, they blame the fire brigade, not the fire.

It's like blocking out an oncoming ten-wheeler truck even as it bears down on you, hooting its ear-splitting powerhorn. What truck? I don't see any truck!

Well, get across the street, you fool, I feel like shouting. But of course that doesn't do any good either. They are shielded. They are impenetrable.

So why are plainly un-sane people allowed to vote? I think we need to give a reality test before anybody gets a vote in a democratic society. Just put every aspiring voter in front of a ten-wheeler, and slowly drive it toward them, honking the big horn, and giving them plenty of time to walk away. If they escape alive, they can vote. If not, well, tant pis, as the French would say. (That's not what you might think it means).

OK, that's not exactly right, but why should millions of plainly deluded folks be allowed to sink the civilized world, in the face of clear and present danger?

Well, we get to watch them again today. Just notice how they are in denial. As Ronald Reagan said on a memorable occasion debating Jimmy Carter, "There he goes again." On September 11, there they go again.

Don't get upset. Just watch them being themselves. And don't ever let them to cross a busy street without adult supervision.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

Ellie

[thedrifter]

September 11, 2007
Six Years Later
By J.R. Dunn

In September, 2001, I was working for a company two blocks off Wall Street, just a five-minute walk from the World Trade Center.

It was a good job. A business database company, very much of the dotcom era, easygoing, loose, and lucrative. I worked about half the week at home and half at the office. Living in Jersey at the time, I commuted by way of the PATH train - the single New York area subway in which there is no crime, no graffiti, and no problems. The terminal was at the WTC, deep in the basement of the Twin Towers, accessed by the longest escalators I have ever seen. I must have gone through that station a thousand times over the previous few years. I doubt there was a single occasion when I didn't look around me and think, "They're coming back - one of these days, this may no longer be here."

All the same, I was as shocked as anyone when it happened. I awoke that Tuesday to find the city already under attack. One tower was ablaze, and even as I watched the other was hit. They're going to go, I thought. Nothing built by man can take that kind of abuse and remain standing. So I watched and I waited, occasionally glancing out the back window at the smoke on the northeast horizon.

Only a week before I had gone on a weekend trip to Manhattan with my girlfriend. We took the Hoboken ferry across the Hudson. A nice little trip, even though the approaches to the ferry itself might have been designed, constructed, and decorated by the dumber members of the Soprano mob.

It was an almost perfect day, much the same as September 11. We made the crossing in near-silence, content to the take in the view of the city, the glint of the sun on the river and the harbor beyond. The ferry docked at the World Trade Center itself. We got off and walked hand in hand past the Financial Center buildings and on through the plaza and into the city.

Now I watched it fall. Mass murder carried out on the precincts of my own life. Blood and bone scattered across the very stones I had walked just hours before.

My company didn't lose anyone. One woman with whom I worked left the PATH station just as the first 767 hit, looking up at the sound of screams just as it plunged into the building. She thought at first it was an accident. The staff at my office watched the activity from the third floor windows. They were appalled and terrified by the hurricanes of debris that followed the collapse of the towers. They evacuated in early afternoon, walking up the East River parks to 14th Street.

Apart from that, I don't know. I have made no effort to examine the photos of the victims. I'm not certain if anyone I knew personally was killed. But I know that people I spoke to, people I rode to work with, people I knew were caught in that apocalypse, and that will suffice.

I bought a shirt on the concourse about two weeks previously, and I sometimes wonder what happened to the pretty girl who helped me. I'm sure she got out safely. The concourse, after all, was underground, just above the stations. But terrible possibilities exist - the debris from the original crashes, the elevators that plunged a hundred stories or more to the lobby. So sometimes I still wonder.

Word of the Pentagon strike came through. I tracked the news carefully, afraid that the next moment would bring word of another attack. Another city struck, another massacre carried out. Shortly after noon I heard the rumble of jets, and aware that no aircraft were supposed to be flying, I raced down the stairs and outside. Something about the tone and depth of the sound told me what I would see - two F-15s, at full military power, leaving the ground rumbling behind them as they headed toward that pall on the northern horizon. I turned to go back inside, thankful that no other cities would be targeted that day.

I spent most of the rest of the day calming near-hysterical friends and acquaintances in the New York area, all of them prepared to flee from terrors generated by rumor: that the airliners had been loaded with plague germs, that someone was spraying nerve gas in the streets. Many were extremely ill-informed, with no idea of what an F-15 was, and utterly terrorized at the sound of the fighters crossing the skies overhead. It took time and effort to get them calmed down. Today, many of them will assure you that the attack was carried out by Halliburton, or the CIA, or the Israelis.

Two days later I got into Manhattan. I had to take a roundabout route - the train to Midtown, a subway to 14th Street, then on foot to the Financial District. That pillar of smoke remained ahead of me as I walked south. I passed impromptu memorials at fire stations, homemade signs asking if anyone had seen a missing daughter or husband. While crossing Livingston Street I was confronted by two cops who ordered me to walk a block over to continue downtown. They were protecting number 110, the Department of Education. There were over a hundred cops surrounding that building (considerably more than at City Hall), along with concrete barricades and dozens of police cars. With the city on its knees and manpower and equipment needed elsewhere, the educrats, not conceivably in anyone's line of fire, demanded and got the highest level of protection. A little piece of 9/11 lore that should not be lost to history.

An alien landscape awaited me downtown. A fog of stinking smoke covered the area, shards of metal and concrete thrusting up through it. There was an awful stench, a combination of burning organics and plastics and other elements. Hundreds of figures were working amid the ruins. Hundreds of others milled about on the surrounding streets. The North Tower had completely vanished. The South Tower was a blackened stump oozing smoke. (I always thought that an appropriate memorial would simply have been the keep the stump of the South Tower as it was, but I was never asked.)

I talked to a cop about volunteering. They had plenty of hands, he said. They were looking for pros now - construction or demolition, people with experience. I went on. They didn't need me for that.

Ahead of me was a stand of buildings I knew well. They'd played a big role in events. Rudy Guiliani's headquarters had been on the ground floor, in the Brooks Brothers storefront. Now they stood unbelievably battered, nearly unrecognizable. As I passed them I became slightly disoriented. I couldn't quite grasp what I was looking at amid all that chaos. A flat space enclosed by a curb, an isolated city block, lay about fifty yards ahead of me. I stood eyeing it, wondering what it could be. I thought I knew where I was, but that blank space had no place in my mind's topography. A move of a few more feet, another glance, and at last I knew. A small park had stood just across Broadway from the WTC entrance. One of those islands of civility that exist all across Manhattan. A place packed with small trees, and benches, and concrete chess boards. I had walked through it every time I left the WTC.

That's what I was looking at. That's what that empty space was. Smashed flat and scraped clean as if it had never been anything else. There was no sign of what had done the damage. The raw force of the collapse? A wave of debris sweeping everything before it then smashing into the buildings beyond?

A small chunk of concrete lay at my feet. I bent to pick it up. It crumbled slightly in my hand, having suffered God alone knows what kind of stresses and pressures. I walked on through the near-silent crowd, two thoughts prominent in my mind.

Looking at the other buildings that surrounded the site, that extended uptown nearly as far as the island itself: They thought they could destroy this.

And looking over at the ruins across the street: No one will ever be able to degrade that.

There have been other cruel Septembers in New York.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
W.H. Auden wrote those words over sixty years before, mourning the lost opportunities of the 30s, regretting the role he himself had played. A few days before, Ribbentrop and Molotov had signed the "Nonaggression Pact" in Moscow, establishing permanent friendship between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and though a series of secret ancillary clauses, clearing the way for Hitler's conquest of the "lost German territories" to the east. Only that morning Hitler's Panzers had crossed the frontier into Poland. Within two weeks they would be joined by Red Army troops. World War II had begun in earnest.

The situation presented a clear choice to leftists like Auden. They could close their eyes, ignore what could not be ignored, and continue their support of the system that had betrayed them. Or they could acknowledge their errors, abandon the party -- the cult, really -- that so many had dedicated their lives to, and search for a new basis of action and belief to confront one of the most dangerous eras of modern history.

Thousands did exactly that. They made the correct choice. The communists achieved their apex of power in the Western world in the 1930s. During that decade they utilized their control of the Popular Front, their opposition to fascism, and the fears generated by the Depression to gain greater influence than at any time before or since. And it was all thrown away, in that summer of 1939, with a single flick of a pen. Overcome with the same sense of disgust and self-loathing as Auden, they fled the party and its associated organizations in droves. Because in the end, and despite any accusations of ignorance, and foolishness, and self-delusion, they recognized evil when they saw it.

September 1939 was one of those rare occasions when the movements of history coincide with those of daily life to present us with a clear choice between what is acceptable, and what is not. So was September 2001. Yet if you look for the thousands who followed the path of Auden and the others, who went through a change of heart at that moment, who clearly heard the hiss of the serpent and turned away, you will look in vain.

I was half wrong, on that September afternoon six years ago. The Jihadis couldn't take down the West that they hated. They had no Plan B, no capability of carrying out the fantasies they harbored. One shot and that was it - they haven't laid a glove on us since. They have been on the run across the globe, in Somalia, in the Philippines, in Indonesia, and at last in Iraq. Only in isolated pea-patches such as Waziristan have they been able to construct any semblance of their demented little caliphate, and time will see to that.

But I was wrong in believing that no one could degrade the tragedy of 9/11. I underestimated the power of human perversity, as we all sometimes do (we might well go mad if we didn't). It has been degraded, endlessly and absolutely, and from all angles and by all possible methods. It has been degraded to boost political careers. It has been degraded in films. It has been degraded in the columns of well-known newspapers and magazines. It has been degraded in the classroom. It has been degraded as a smart career move. It has been degraded for laughs. It has been degraded for money. It has been degraded to weave grotesque conspiracy theories. It has been degraded in Congress. It has been degraded in the courts. And it will be degraded once again tomorrow as it was today.

There's a difference between the rebels of Auden's day and ours. The radicals of that epoch were, despite everything, still part of the community, still members of the society they wanted to change. The rebels of our day are no such thing. They have cut themselves off completely, isolated themselves from the culture that nurtured them.

Joseph Brodsky, yet another poet -- the first American poet laureate, in fact -- had a word for these types. He called them, simply enough, the Enemy. The people who will not go by the rules, the ones who are part of nothing, the ones who live for themselves alone. We all know them. We deal with them every day. We have evolved strategies for how to handle them. We keep them at arm's length, we speak to them only when necessary and otherwise keep our distance. But we often forget the effect they have on everything, on every level from the day to day to the world historical.

We have grown tolerant of them since Auden's time. A little too accepting, a little too quick to let them get away with things. Today they own entire sectors of society - the academy, the media, the entertainment world, most of politics. The price for that is very high. And the price is always paid by someone else.

That chunk of concrete long ago crumbled to dust. I keep in a small jar, and pick it up and look at it whenever the doubts grow too large, which is not that often. Because I learned something in that first week of September. Something not easily put into words. Something about community, and what we owe each other, and how the heart connects with the things of the great world. All those thousands who coughed in the smoke of ruin and smelled the ghastly stench of atrocity also learned it, and took it away with them when they left.

But I know that there are people who learned nothing. And that I will not accept.

We will take down the Jihadis in due time. A war of the type we're engaged in has its ebbs and flows, its bad days and good ones, but I have no doubt of how it will end. But there's another war too, one that went on in secret long before the towers fell, and that will still be going on long after the last Jihadi is executed. A society cannot survive divided as ours exists now, with vast sectors under the control of those who loathe their own. We will have to come to terms with them eventually, while this war goes on or afterward. We will not be a civilized society until we do. Long after Iraq is quiet, and Jihadism has found its nameless grave, our struggle may well just be beginning.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

'America the Ugly'
Six years after 9/11, it's notable how little the politics of the left have changed.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Tuesday, September 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on us that took place on this very day six years ago, several younger commentators proclaimed the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941, had done to the old isolationism, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001, had done to the Vietnam syndrome. It was politically dead, and the cultural fallout of that war--all the damaging changes wrought by the 1960s and '70s--would now follow it into the grave.

I could easily understand why they thought so. After all, never in their lives had they witnessed so powerful an explosion of patriotic sentiment--and not only in the expected precincts of the right. In fact, on the left, where not so long ago the American flag had been thought fit only for burning, the sight of it--and it was now on display everywhere--had been driving a few prominent personalities to wrench their unaccustomed arms into something vaguely resembling a salute. One of these personalities, Todd Gitlin, a leading figure in the New Left of the '60s and now a professor at Columbia, even went so far as to question the inveterately "negative faith in America the ugly" that he and his comrades had tenaciously held onto for the past 40 years and more.

Having broken ranks with the left in the late '60s precisely because I was repelled by the "negative faith in America the ugly" that had come to pervade it, I naturally welcomed this new patriotic mood with open arms. It seemed to me a sign of greater intellectual sanity and moral health, and I fervently hoped that it would last.

But I could not fully share the heady confidence of my younger political friends that the change was permanent, and that nothing in American politics and American culture would ever be the same again. As a veteran of the political and cultural wars of the '60s, I knew from my own scars that no matter how small and insignificant a group the anti-Americans of the left might for the moment look to the naked eye, they had it in them to rise and grow again.

In this connection, I was haunted by one memory in particular. It was of an evening in the year 1960, when I went to address a meeting of left-wing radicals on a subject that had then barely begun to show the whites of its eyes: the possibility of American military involvement in a faraway place called Vietnam and the need to begin mobilizing opposition to it. Accompanying me that evening was the late Marion Magid, a member of my staff at Commentary, of which I had recently become the editor. As we entered the drafty old hall on Union Square in Manhattan, Marion surveyed the 50 or so people in the audience and whispered to me: "Do you realize that every young person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other?"

The memory of this quip brought back to life some sense of how unpromising the future had then appeared to be for that bedraggled-looking assemblage. No one would have dreamed that these young people, and the generation about to descend from them politically and culturally, would within the blink of a historical eye come to be hailed by many members of the very "Establishment" they were trying to topple as (in the representative words of Prof. Archibald Cox of Harvard Law School) "the best informed, the most intelligent, and the most idealistic this country has ever known."

More incredible yet, in a mere decade the ideas and attitudes of the new movement, cleaned up but essentially unchanged, would turn one of our two major parties upside down and inside out. By 1972, only 11 years after President John F. Kennedy had promised that we would "pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty," George McGovern, nominated for president by Kennedy's own party, was campaigning on the antiwar slogan, "Come home, America." It was a slogan that to an uncanny degree reflected the ethos of the embryonic movement I had addressed in Union Square only about a decade before.

In sharp contrast to my younger friends, I could not help fearing that something like this might happen again. On the one hand, those who thought that we had brought 9/11 down on ourselves and had it coming were in a very tiny minority--even tinier than the antiwar movement of the early '60s. On the other hand, they were much stronger at a comparably early stage of the game than their counterparts of the '60s (who in some cases were their own younger selves). The reason was that, as the Vietnam War ground inconclusively on, the institutions that shape our culture were one by one and bit by bit converting to the "faith in America the ugly." By now, indeed, in the world of the arts, in the universities, in the major media of news and entertainment, and even in some of the mainstream churches, that faith had become the regnant orthodoxy.

But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the influence of these sectors of the culture was limited to their inhabitants. John Maynard Keynes once said that "practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Keynes was referring specifically to businessmen. But bureaucrats and administrators are subject to the same rule, though they tend to be the slaves not of economists, but of historians and sociologists and philosophers and novelists who may be very much alive even when their ideas have, or should have, become defunct.

Nor is it necessary for the "practical men" to have studied the works in question, or even ever to have heard of their authors. All they need do is read the New York Times, or switch on their television sets, or go to the movies--and, drip by drip, a more easily assimilable form of the original material is absorbed into their heads and into their nervous systems.

The few people I knew who shared my apprehensions believed that if things went well on the military front of what we were calling World War IV (the Cold War having in our scheme of things been World War III), all would be well on the home front too. And that was how it appeared from the effect wrought by the Afghanistan campaign, the first front to be opened in World War IV. For a short spell, the spectacular success of that campaign dampened the nascent antiwar activity on at least a number of campuses. But I felt certain that, as other fronts were opened--with Iraq most likely being the next--opposition not only would grow but would become more and more extreme.

I turned out to be right about this, and yet even I never imagined that the new antiwar movement would so rapidly arrive at the stage of virulence it had taken years for its ancestors of the Vietnam era to reach. Nor did I anticipate how closely the antiwar playbook of that era would be followed and how successfully it would be applied to Iraq, even though the two wars had nothing whatever in common.

To be sure, this time, mainly because there was no draft, there would be no student protesters and no massive street demonstrations. Instead, virtual demonstrations would be mounted in cyberspace by the so-called netroots and these, more suited to the nature of the new technological age, would prove an all-too-effective substitute. And so on the sixth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the main issues agitating this country are how quickly we can extricate ourselves from Iraq and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline for abandoning the field.

Here too the antiwar playbook of the Vietnam era is being very closely followed. In 1972, Richard Nixon was elected by landslide to a second term as president, but in campaigning against George McGovern's call for us to withdraw from Vietnam, Nixon did not sound an opposing call to fight on to victory. On the contrary: He too promised to get us out of Vietnam. The difference was that he also promised to accomplish this with our honor intact.

Today, like the McGovernites with respect to Vietnam in 1972, the overwhelming majority of the Democrats in Congress, and all the Democrats hoping to become their party's candidate for president, want America out of Iraq, and the sooner and the more completely the better. And like Nixon in 1972, many Republican members of Congress, along with a few of the Republicans running in the presidential primaries, also want out, but with our honor intact.

Well, Nixon did get us out of Vietnam. By 1975, when the North Vietnamese communists conquered the South, not a single American soldier was left in the country. But never in American history had our honor been so besmirched as it was by the manner of our withdrawal. Having left with the promise that we would continue to help save the South Vietnamese from communism by supplying them with arms, Congress nevertheless refused to send them so much as a bullet when the communists of the North were already storming the gates. As President Bush recently reminded us, to the sputtering rage of those who did not wish to be reminded, the price "was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.' "

It is impossible at this point to predict how and when the battle of Iraq will end. But from the vitriolic debates it has unleashed we can already say for certain that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did not do to the Vietnam syndrome what Pearl Harbor did to the old isolationism. The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way. But is it strong enough in its present incarnation to do what it did to the honor of this country in 1975? Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Inspired by 9/11, troops vow to keep up fight
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
By Ted Roelofs
The Grand Rapids Press

Six years ago today, Michael DeBolt knew his life was destined to change.

He had good reason.

DeBolt, 24, just had signed up for a Marines infantry unit. The next month, the 2001 graduate of Union High School in Grand Rapids shipped off to boot camp.

Two tours of Iraq later, DeBolt is out of the Marines. He is married to Andrea, 25, and has a 9-month-old daughter, Rylee.

But like many troops who served in this increasingly unpopular war, DeBolt is convinced it is a battle worth fighting. He believes it is tied in with Sept. 11, 2001. And he believes we should stick it out.

"We are used to our microwaves and TV dinners and our cable. We are used to things being automatic. Let's think logically about this. It's not just a push of a button over there."

Among those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan, his is not an uncommon sentiment.

Even with the grim numbers of this war -- nearly 3,800 U.S. troops killed and more than 27,000 wounded -- many of those who sacrificed the most are least likely to advocate withdrawal.

Seven in 10 Americans think the war was a mistake. Nearly two-thirds want a decrease in U.S. troops or all troops removed. Most disapprove of President Bush's handling of the war.

As Gen. David Petraeus goes before a deeply divided Congress to defend the Bush administration's surge policy, it is an issue that looms large over the 2008 election.

But in families such as that of Grand Rapids police dispatcher Michael Krenz, it is less about politics than about belief.

Six years ago today, David Krenz was watching television coverage of the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. He was a junior at Ottawa Hills High School then, and he told his father something had to be done.

"He said, 'I want to go now,'" recalled his father, Michael Krenz.

His older brother, Dan, who is in the Army, persuaded David to finish high school. The younger Krenz shipped out for basic training two weeks after graduating in 2002. He was part of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Cpl. David Krenz, 23, on his third tour of Iraq, is scheduled to return home soon for a 10-day furlough. His latest tour has been extended to April; he had been scheduled to return home in January.

"He likes what he is doing," Michael Krenz said. "When David found out he was going for the third time, he said, 'This is going to be a lot better than the first time.'"

David's older brother left the Army earlier this year after two tours of Iraq. But Michael Krenz also has a daughter, Elisabeth, 22, who is ready to take her turn.

An Army medic in Indiana, she hopes to get the same assignment as her brothers, Krenz said.

"She has been craving her chance," he said.

Although even Bush has conceded that Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, polls continue to show that about a third of Americans believe he was.

And regardless if there was no direct connection, Krenz said, we are fighting the same type of enemy in Iraq.

"I do believe it is connected," Krenz said. "I believe there are terrorist cells working within Iraq."

Ionia County resident David Huhn was 23 when he joined the Marine Corps in 2004.

"What happened (on Sept. 11) really hit home," said his mother, Portland resident Diane Huhn.

"He wouldn't sign papers (to join the Marines) until he was guaranteed infantry."

In December 2005, Huhn was among 10 Marines killed in an attack near Fallujah. He was the first soldier from Portland killed in combat since the Vietnam War. He died 10 months after he came home for the funeral of his father, a Vietnam veteran who died of a heart attack at age 54.

Last month, Diane met with members of her son's Marine unit. Some of them were just finishing their fourth tour of Iraq.

"A lot of them extended their stay in the military so they could stay together. If he (David) wouldn't have been killed, he would have been right there with them."

Huhn still believes the invasion of Iraq was the right response to the Sept. 11 attacks. She also believes the troops should stay until the job is done.

"My husband was in Vietnam and he always felt let down, that they never finished what they were in for.

"If we pull out too soon, it's almost like a slap in the face of those who served."


Send e-mail to the author: troelofs@grpress.com

Ellie

[Alphaonethree]

( " If we pull out too soon ") The seed of freedome will not have a chance to grow.