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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 11, 2011
Fleeting clarity
"Kennedy's dead, he was hit in the head!"This is a memory I carry from when I was 10 years old, and getting acclimatized to a Canadian public schoolyard (after earlier education a long distance abroad). The news of Nov. 22, 1963, long before social media, was broadcast by a chorus of crass little boys, two of whom I recognized as having beaten me up the day before. They seemed delighted, even though, as their subsequent remarks revealed, they did not know who Kennedy was, precisely. Only that he was important, and dead. Everyone around my age and older remembers what they were doing when they first heard that news; everyone knows that everyone remembers. Likewise, the events of 9/11, 10 years ago today, made a bump in our consciousness, and for the rest of our lives meditative eddies form behind that obstacle in the fluid of time. Ten years ago, on that Tuesday morning, when I rose with a Wednesday column to write, a bit at a loss for a subject, I learned the news gradually. I had a phone message to return from a friend in New York. I dialed, but could not get through. When I tried again, I got a recorded message saying that phone service to Manhattan was down. This struck me as interesting. Turned on an old radio, which seemed to receive only the CBC. (They have radios like that in hell.) Some "arts" program continued, interminably. Tried the Internet, but could get no signal from any major North American news agency. Curiouser and curiouser, I then called up the Times of India, and in one glance at the photo on their "index page," I gathered what had happened. Even before garnering more details (the news was still breaking, with rumours and speculations), I uncapped my fountain pen; for now I had a subject. I knew immediately it was al-Qaeda; I'd been expecting the Islamists to try again on the World Trade Center since 1993. My surprise was that they had succeeded so brilliantly. The first thing I wrote down were verses from Kipling, summoned from memory: "Our world has passed away / In wantonness o'erthrown. / There is nothing left today / But steel and fire and stone." This piece, entitled For All We Have and Are, was once widely known, and often invoked on war anniversaries. It was written in 1914, at the outset of the Great War, when the world of our grand- and great-grand parents was being transformed by unspeakable violence, for which they could never have been prepared. It is worth looking up: line after line applies equally well to the events of 9/11. Lest I leave my reader with an impression of omniscience, let me now admit to having been naive. In the first few weeks after the terrorist attacks, I was convinced that the world had indeed changed, and that no one could go back to the "gliberal" (glib + liberal) attitudes of Sept. 10. In the few days after, even leftists of my acquaintance were declaring solidarity with the U.S., unselfconsciously distinguishing good from evil, and hailing the virtues of Western Civ. In a bar, the very Thursday of that week, only one heroic leftist said that America "had it coming," thanks to the legacy of U.S. imperialism and . blah blah blah. But after looking at the faces of the others around the table, she shut right up. By Christmas of 2001, this had passed. "Amerika," now plunged into Afghanistan to root out the terrorists at source, was once again bogeyman by default; Islamists were already being excused as victims. And we were hearing smug little lectures to the effect that 3,000 dead was a small number, by European historical standards; that the Americans should "get over it." The death toll at Pearl Harbor was in the same range (a little lower). Our "British" world was then so engaged in the enterprise of defeating Hitler and friends, and so eager for American help, that no one suggested they should just get over it. In those days everyone, even pacifists, understood that an act of war was an act of war. Body count does not come into it, for the argument is not essentially statistical. Ten years after 9/11, the clear initial response of the Bush administration is mired in layers of contradiction and hypocrisy. Only the lamentation survives, over the fallen of that day; but twisted into a very politically-correct sentimentality, with secular sub-themes of "hope" and "closure." The memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral (transferred to another venue after an "act of God") is typical of arrangements by America's self-loathing governing class. Evangelicals and Catholics were not invited into a sanctuary where, in addition to the progressive bonzes of Episcopalianism, we find a progressive rabbi, a progressive Hindu priest, a Tibetan "nun and incarnate lama," a progressive imam, and a singer from Afghanistan. The U.S. president will tour all three attack sites, emoting abstractly, while likewise avoiding any traditional American reference. America was attacked. And it is as if the attacks succeeded. I would almost prefer a chorus of crass little boys. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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