September 11th had a mystical significance in my family even before the famed attack. On September 11th, 1985, my grandfather, Zaydie Witow, husband to the 'famed' Bubbie, passed away after a long career as an electrical and missile engineer at the Pentagon who worked on foundational designs for the smart bomb, radar, ICBM's, and Arpanet. He began his life the oldest son of a strident communist, he ended his life part of the original generation of neoconservatives, the Richard Nixon generation of lower class strivers who grew to maturity during the Great Depression, and grew to prosperity through a mixture of hard work, national sacrifice, the GI Bill, the highest and most wealth redistributive tax rates in American history, and most importantly, a period of American Gross Domestic Product without precedent or successor, when America was the one world power whose economic capabilities were unbridled by world war and untouched by bombs, and therefore held in its hands more than half the world's manufacturing and purchasing power.
Today, we look at a story like my grandfather's and it's impossible not to notice the legs up he had, but the lesson Zaydie took from it was that America was the land of unbridled opportunity. His parents fled the Czarist tyranny of Russia only for aristocratic tyranny to sumersault into a demotic, Marxist tyranny of the masses, and like so many men of his generation, he spent the best years of his youth fighting against still another, third tyrannical vision of human destiny, whose fondest wish was to consign Jews like him and his grandchildren to oven stacks. When the twentieth century gave so many examples of how attempts to control human destiny resulted in a slippery slope to still worse tyranny, who can be surprised when tens of millions of politically active Americans determined that the best hope for the world is not only an America with the smallest possible government, but an America whose government's highest priority is to use their resources to promote limited government throughout the world?
American history seems to have accelerated so exponentially from my generation's childhoods. Over and over again as we were gradually formed into sentience, we heard from our parents' generation: "You're too young to understand how big a deal this is, but we never thought this day would come and now you all have a brighter future than we ever did." We heard that at the fall of the Berlin Wall and its consequential fall of Communism, we heard that at the peace agreements between Israelis and Palestinians and again at the agreements between Israelis and Jordanians, we heard that at the cessation of Northern Irish hostility. The only people who didn't believe it all were conservatives like my grandfather and his son, leftists like the people they so loathed, and a very particular sub-demographic of pessimistic, cynical liberals like my father, and eventually like me.
But no matter how cynical you are, and no matter how politically dogmatic of the right or of the left, 9/11 was a shock. It was not just the spectacle of it, though the spectacle only emphasized how horrific it was, it was also the human cost of it, which was objectively enormous. It may have seemed more enormous than it was to our generation of Americans, unaccustomed to the death tolls of mass tragedy as perhaps no one in the world has ever been, but even in absolute terms, the tragedy of 9/11 was breathtaking even for an average day in 1945 Dresden or Tokyo. and those who didn't experience it can't possibly remember what it was like for that brief moment when it seemed as though the attacks were only the beginning of a long series of attacks for which 9/11 was hardly guaranteed to be the largest. Nobody knew what was in store for any sporting event, any public square, any airplane, any public transit, even any city. We all spoke as though a nuclear or chemical or biological attack was simply the next inevitability, and some American city would simply disappear from the map along with everyone in it.
It may have seemed during the 1990s as though History was over, but it was just a brief ten year lull, and since then, with Iraq, with the Great Recession, with the election of Trump, with COVID-19, with whatever crises will yet come in COVID's wake, with the slow but spectacular unwinding of Global Warming, 9/11 is still an overwhelming tragedy, but it's just another major American tragedy for a country whose history could, until recently, be interpreted as riotously un-tragic. Not un-tragic because America has never experienced tragedy of course, but because the tragedies seemed to be spooling out at lesser and lesser rates. Perhaps people have to be forgiven for thinking until recently that America was gradually getting better, and that America could consequently lead the world into a better era. But 9/11 was just the first of a long series of unambiguously bad events in the American story happening in absurdly quick succession, which is probably the precise impact Osama bin-Laden wished to have in however infrequently his most realistic and rational moments came upon him.
The spectacle of 9/11 was not a major historical event in itself, it was, rather, a spectacular heraldry of a new era of American history, and therefore world history, announcing that this seemingly blessed and unbothered country, invincible to all evidence in spite of its lack of willpower to see its projects through, its lack of curiosity about other peoples and their beliefs, its lack of self-awareness about how willing the world was to listen to its evangelizing for its way of life when it failed to practice its preachings so often and spectacularly, is in fact exactly as vulnerable as any country should be who is this lazy, this hypocritical, this supercilious, this ignorant of reality.
And now America exists in an era when excess casualty statistics seem to demonstrate that as many as three 9/11's seem to happen every single week. Go on twitter or facebook if you dare, and look at how leftists are positively crowing right now about the triviality of 9/11 in the face of coronavirus. And I can't deny it, the truth is, they're almost absolutely right. Compared to the mass death that's everywhere we look, 9/11 was a brief and spectacular orgy of lethality, but the consequences were mostly over the day after they began, unless one counts the Iraq invasion as happening under 9/11 consequence, and of course, there's a lot of evidence to show that the Bush Administration would have found a reason to go into Iraq anyway...
But history is the deadliest joker on Earth, and just as coronavirus both dwarfs 9/11, and also the very election of Trump can be seen as a direct correlation of consequence from the Republican party's authoritarian mobilzation that happened after 9/11, the consequences of coronavirus and the mass violence it unleashes could then dwarf coronavirus itself. Conservatives have rightly been shamed and held to contempt for trying to minimize coronavirus and making it seem as though this is just a consequence of living in the world. But in 2002, a large part of what once won moderates over to conservative causes was when progressives and leftists made precisely the same points about terrorism. Terrorism prevention and public health are both essential requirements in the battle against premature death, and people who minimize the importance of either are pro-death.
Nobody knows yet what's coming in the wake of coronavirus, in the wake of the 2020 elections' results, in the wake of increased Global Warming and all its meteorological terrors, and nobody knows what belligerence might be provoked in Russia or China against an administration who takes the threats they pose to us seriously. But who can doubt at this point that something is coming, and that after months, perhaps years of staying inside and letting destructive thoughts percolate to a boil, violence not unlike 9/11, perhaps quite like 9/11, and perhaps quite a bit worse than 9/11, could in fact be visited on us, and when that happens, all the security precautions which leftists refused to take seriously last time will become matters of much greater necessity than they ever were in the 2000s, and everybody who didn't give money to Warren or Sanders this year will hold left feet to the fire for reasons that may be counterproductive to mention right now, and with much more reason this time?
We are all prisoners of our perceptions, and can only perceive the ways of the world through our experiences, and even in the same place, even in the same family, the experiences of one generation seem to exist on another planet from the experiences of a different generation. Zaydie was a man of the Nixon and Reagan generation, while the most prominent spokesperson for my mini-generation thus far seems to be Pete Buttigieg, while younger more woke peers seem to be of the generations of AOC and Greta Thunberg. It goes without saying, everyone has their reasons, and everyone thinks they're right. The great tragedy of the world is not due to conflicts of right vs. wrong, but of right vs. right. Lots of people come to all sorts of conclusions in bad faith, but one of the deadliest mistakes in the world is to suspect that people who come to a different conclusion came to it in faith any less good than your own. This is the 'sin' of 'monism', which Isaiah Berlin, my favorite political thinker, defines as these three fallacious points:
1. All genuine questions must have a true answer, and one only; all other responses are errors.
2. There must be a dependable path to discovering the true answer to a question, which is in principle knowable, even if currently unknown.
3. The true answers, when found, will be compatible with one another, forming a single whole; for one truth cannot be incompatible with another. (This, in turn, is based on the assumption that the universe is harmonious and coherent.)
America may seem to many residents like the worst place on earth right now, and compared to the future we still thought we'd have until recently, things are pretty goddamn bad. But compared to what may come, this may yet still seem a golden age, and no matter what our political orientation, what best guarantees the worst possible future is the belief that our side of the argument has the true answer. Nobody but an American has ever been raised to believe that the world is or should be harmonious or coherent, and once we get into our thick skulls that anything more than chaos is a fundamental right of living in the world, the sooner we can be chastened by tragedy into building some corner of that harmonious, coherent universe that even after the last twenty years, we still assume is the way the universe operates.
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