Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12? - New York Times
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September 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?
By
FRANK RICH

"THE most famous picture nobody's ever seen" is how the Associated Press
photographer Richard Drew has referred to his photo of an unidentified World
Trade
Center victim hurtling to his death on 9/11. It appeared in some newspapers,
including this one, on 9/12 but was soon shelved. "In the most photographed
and videotaped day in the history of the world," Tom Junod later
wrote in Esquire
, "the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by
consensus, taboo."

Five years later, Mr. Drew's "falling man" remains a horrific artifact of
the day that was supposed to change everything and did not. But there's
another
taboo 9/11 photo, about life rather than death, that is equally shocking in
its way, so much so that Thomas Hoepker of Magnum Photos kept it under wraps
for four years. Mr. Hoepker's picture can now be found in David Friend's
compelling new 9/11 book, "Watching the World Change," or on the book's Web
site,

watchingtheworldchange.com
. It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn, taking what
seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer
sun
and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the
background.

Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. "They were totally relaxed like
any normal afternoon," he told Mr. Friend. "It's possible they lost people
and
cared, but they were not stirred by it." The photographer withheld the
picture from publication because "we didn't need to see that, then." He
feared "it
would stir the wrong emotions." But "over time, with perspective," he
discovered, "it grew in importance."

Seen from the perspective of 9/11's fifth anniversary, Mr. Hoepker's photo
is prescient as well as important - a snapshot of history soon to come. What
he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would
recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast.
The
young people in Mr. Hoepker's photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just
American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to
dust themselves off and keep going explains both what's gone right and what's
gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds
itself in today.

What's gone right: the terrorists failed to break America's back. The "new"
normal lasted about 10 minutes, except at airport check-ins. The economy,
for
all its dips and inequities and runaway debt, was not destroyed. The
culture, for better and worse, survived intact. It took only four days for
television
networks to restore commercials to grim news programming. Some two weeks
after that Rudy Giuliani ritualistically welcomed laughter back to American
living
rooms by giving his on-camera imprimatur to "Saturday Night Live." Before
9/11, Americans feasted on reality programs, nonstop coverage of child
abductions
and sex scandals. Five years later, they still do. The day that changed
everything didn't make Americans change the channel, unless it was from
"Fear Factor"
to "American Idol" or from Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton.

For those directly affected by the terrorists' attacks, this resilience can
be hard to accept. In New York, far more than elsewhere, a political
correctness
about 9/11 is still strictly enforced. We bridle when the mayor of New
Orleans calls ground zero "a hole in the ground" (even though, sadly, he
spoke the
truth). We complain that Hollywood movies about 9/11 are "too soon," even as
"United 93" and "World Trade Center" came and went with no controversy at
multiplexes in middle America. The Freedom Tower and (now kaput)
International Freedom Center generated so much political rancor that in New
York freedom
has become just another word for a lofty architectural project soon to be
scrapped.

The price of all New York's 9/11 P.C. is obvious: the 16 acres of ground
zero are about the only ones that have missed out on the city's roaring
post-attack
comeback. But the rest of the country is less invested. For tourists - and
maybe for natives, too - the hole in the ground is a more pungent memorial
than
any grandiose official edifice. You can still see the naked wound where it
has not healed and remember (sort of) what the savage attack was about.

But even as we celebrate this resilience, it too comes at a price. The
companion American trait to resilience is forgetfulness. What we've
forgotten too
quickly is the outpouring of affection and unity that swelled against all
odds in the wake of Al Qaeda's act of mass murder. If you were in New York
then,
you saw it in the streets, and not just at ground zero, where countless
thousands of good Samaritans joined the official responders and caregivers
to help,
at the cost of their own health. You saw it as New Yorkers of every kind
gathered around the spontaneous shrines to the fallen and the missing at
police
and fire stations, at churches and in parks, to lend solace or a hand. This
good feeling quickly spread to Capitol Hill, to red states where New York
had
once been Sodom incarnate and to the world, the third world included, where
America was a nearly uniform object of sympathy and grief.

At the
National Cathedral prayer service
on Sept. 14, 2001, President Bush found just the apt phrase to describe
this phenomenon: "Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called 'the warm
courage
of national unity.' This is the unity of every faith and every background.
It has joined together political parties in both houses of Congress." What's
more, he added, "this unity against terror is now extending across the
world."

The destruction of that unity, both in this nation and in the world, is as
much a cause for mourning on the fifth anniversary as the attack itself. As
we
can't forget the dead of 9/11, we can't forget how the only good thing that
came out of that horror, that unity, was smothered in its cradle.

When F.D.R. used the phrase "the warm courage of national unity," it was at
his
first inaugural
, in 1933, as the country reeled from the Great Depression. It is deeply
moving to read that speech today. In its most famous line, Roosevelt
asserted his
"firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless,
unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert
retreat
into advance." Another passage is worth recalling, too: "We now realize as
we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we
cannot
merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must
move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a
common
discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no
leadership becomes effective."

What followed under Roosevelt's leadership is one of history's most salutary
stories. Americans responded to his twin entreaties - to renounce fear and
to sacrifice for the common good - with a force that turned back economic
calamity and ultimately an axis of brutal enemies abroad. What followed Mr.
Bush's
speech at the National Cathedral, we know all too well, is another story.

On the very next day after that convocation, Mr. Bush was asked at a
press conference
"how much of a sacrifice" ordinary Americans would "be expected to make in
their daily lives, in their daily routines." His answer: "Our hope, of
course,
is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever." He, too, wanted to move on - to
"see life return to normal in America," as he put it - but toward partisan
goals stealthily tailored to his political allies rather than the nearly 90
percent of the country that, according to polls, was rallying around him.

This selfish agenda was there from the very start. As we now know from many
firsthand accounts, a cadre from Mr. Bush's war cabinet was already busily
hyping
nonexistent links between Iraq and the Qaeda attacks. The presidential press
secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned Bill Maher's irreverent comic response
to 9/11 by reminding "all Americans that they need to watch what they say,
watch what they do." Fear itself - the fear that "paralyzes needed efforts
to
convert retreat into advance," as F.D.R. had it - was already being wielded
as a weapon against Americans by their own government.

Less than a month after 9/11, the president was making good on his promise
of "no sacrifice whatsoever." Speaking in Washington about how it was "the
time
to be wise" and "the time to act," he
declared
, "We need for there to be more tax cuts." Before long the G.O.P. would be
selling 9/11 photos of the president on Air Force One to campaign donors and
the White House would be featuring flag-draped remains of the 9/11 dead in
political ads.

And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing. So do
tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11.
We have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved ahead.

Copyright 2006

Posted by Miriam V.