Post-9/11 unity isn't coming back

I may be feeling particularly nihilistic this morning, but I don't see the point of spending much energy lamenting the loss of our post-9/11 "unity," as President Obama does in an op-ed for USA Today:

Firefighters, police and first responders rushed into danger to save others. Americans came together in candlelight vigils, in our houses of worship and on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Volunteers lined up to give blood and drove across the country to lend a hand. Schoolchildren donated their savings. Communities, faith groups and businesses collected food and clothing. We were united, as Americans. 

This is the true spirit of America we must reclaim this anniversary — the ordinary goodness and patriotism of the American people and the unity that we needed to move forward together, as one nation.

Ten years on, that unity seems like a mirage. We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country—so much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to even temporarily obscure them. Each side would suspect—and accuse—the other of exploiting the attack to further whatever agenda was already on their plate. And each side would probably be right. Instead of grief and anger, we'd just have anger.

There is no more good faith. We can't wish it back.

9/11 and Sylvester Stallone

In the movies, at least, it's the bad guys who torture.

Ben and I consider the legacy of 9/11 in our Scripps Howard column this week. Ben lumps Venezuela and China in with Al Qaeda, which perplexes me. And I conjure up a discussion that will surely keep me from ever truly entering the ranks of serious, respected, and well-known pundits: 

It was common in 2001 to hear that America had “lost its innocence.”

Certainly, the country did seem to lose some of its nobility. Look no further than the films of Sylvester Stallone.

Laugh, if you like. For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, though, Stallone’s B-movie blockbusters also served as morality tales — fantasies that illuminated the stakes of the Cold War against the Soviets. In “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” Communist evil was demonstrated when a Russian officer strapped Stallone to a metal stand and tortured him with electric shock.

The message was clear: Torture was for the bad guys. We were the good guys. That stance was affirmed in real life, when Ronald Reagan signed the U.N. Convention on Torture — in part to shame the Soviets — which prohibited the infliction of “pain or suffering” for the purposes of obtaining information.

We know now that America resorted to torture in the first years after 9/11, inflicting pain and suffering on terror suspects — some of them bad guys, yes, but some of them innocent — and almost never in a “ticking time bomb” scenario. At least three men were “waterboarded;” many others subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and worse. Some of them died.

None of this is disputed. But Americans seem mostly fine with it.

Nobody has ever been prosecuted.

Stallone’s latest hit, incidentally, was “The Expendables.” In that movie, the villains strap an innocent woman to a table and poor water on her face and down her throat — all but drowning her. It is a perfect demonstration of waterboarding. In some movies, at least, the bad guys are still torturers.

America is not the villain of 9/11: That distinction belongs to Al Qaida and the 19 men who hijacked planes that day. But are we the heroes of this decade? That’s tougher to say.

9/11/01

My workday began a little earlier than usual the morning of September 11, 2001. I was a young City Hall reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, used to covering night meetings, but a special committee in charge of crafting the town's tax abatement policy met at 8 am that day, and the topic was important enough that I was there.

The meeting was being run by Jim Henry, a member of the city commission. I didn't notice when he slipped out of the gathering—but suddenly he burst back in. The Twin Towers and Pentagon had been hit by suicide bombers, he said. There was terror in his voice. "It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel," I thought. The meeting was over. I went back to the office.

I spent most of the rest of the day in the newsroom, watching the tiny television as the first tower—and then the second—came down. The Journal-World put out an extra edition that afternoon; I spent my day vainly trying to get NYTimes.com and CNN.com to load.

It wasn't long before I had a realization: I had become a reporter because I wanted to see history with my own eyes. And history was being made half-a-continent away. One thing led to another, and in late October I found myself in my car, driving to Pennsylvania and New York to interview people and see the devastation with my own eyes.

Weeks had passed, but the devastation was still fresh—particularly in New York, where a facade of one of the towers still rose high above the street, higher than any building I knew in Kansas. A fire was still burning in the pit of Ground Zero, and the entire section of lower Manhattan smelled—as I think I wrote for the Journal-World at the time—like a giant, rancid barbecue pit.

The experience changed my life, profoundly, though it would take some time for the changes to make themselves apparent—and perhaps they still are. The changes were most noticeable in three areas of my life:

• I LOST MY FAITH: This, admittedly, was a process that had been going on a long time. For some years prior to 9/11, I had realized that I didn't believe that Christianity was the exclusive route to God—a hard realization, considering my upbringing and my Mennonite college education. Nonetheless, I continued to attend church, finding a happy home at a quite liberal Lawrence Mennonite congregation. I justified myself with the thought that while Christianity wasn't the only way to God, it was the language of faith I'd been given. The direction, pointed at God, was what mattered.

In the aftermath of 9/11—and as religious conflicts seemingly found their way into the news more and more often—that approach made less and less sense to me. It wasn't that Christianity and Islam were different languages trying to describe the same phenomenon; both languages, and multiple others, constantly asserted that they were the only true language. And I realized that without God making Godself visible to sort it out for us, there was no way to properly pick out the true approach; it would all be guesswork and gut feelings, at the end of the day. No way to know you're right, and a million ways to go wrong. I decided that if God existed, God would forgive me for refusing to play a game I couldn't possibly know how to win. And in the process, I'd remove myself from a grander battle of truth assertions that no human could ever really adjudicate. There were better ways to spend my time; the words of hymns and prayers started to taste like lies in my mouth.

About a year after 9/11, I called my pastor and told her I was leaving the church.

A key part of my Mennonite faith, incidentally was a very strict pacifism. Without that faith, my unbreakable nonviolence crumbled. I remain extremely dovish. But it doesn't bother me that Osama bin Laden is dead; it would've, a little, 10 years ago.

• I STARTED TO CARE ABOUT POLITICS: I'd always been interested in politics, but as the first phase of the Afghanistan War wound down and as the campaign for the Iraq Invasion began—and as hints emerged that the United States was torturing terrorist suspects—my cynicism and detachment dropped by the wayside. I got angry at all the ways the Bush Administration seemed to violate civil liberties, manipulate public opinion, and conduct war. I began to read more deeply than I ever had: the New York Times and Washington Post, every day. As many books as I could read—my devotion to novels suffered mightily in favor of research from Thomas Ricks and Jane Mayer and Seymour Hirsch and so on and so forth.

My anger made it more difficult to continue under the guise of an objective, neutral reporter. So when the opportunity arose in late 2007 to do opinion writing for Scripps Howard News Service, I jumped. I didn't turn back.

• MY WORLD GOT BIGGER: I had never been in New York before the trip that took me to the still-smoking Ground Zero. I spent the week making my way gradually, stopping at towns along the way to interview ordinary Americans about how their lives had changed. Along the way, I began to realize the country was much, much bigger than I'd ever contemplated.

It wasn't just the distance—although a 2,000-mile solo driving trip will give you plenty of time to contemplate. It was the experience. In New York, I was taken to the apartment of a Puerto Rican family to interview them about their experiences; they were excellent hosts, but my mind reeled at their living conditions—a well-appointed apartment, yes, but how could a family of four live in such a space? That's what single-family houses were for! It dawned on me in a visceral way that not everybody lived the way I had been raised in rural Kansas.

Which was obvious enough, even to me, but I'd never felt the difference before. And in the years after I left New York, I began to chafe. Not only did I read more widely, I wanted to travel more widely. (Which I did to the limited extent a reporter's salary would allow.) Before 9/11, my expectation was to have a career in Kansas newspapers. Maybe I'd even end up with a big regional newspaper in Kansas City or St. Louis. Somehow, I ended up in Philadelphia. Freelancing. It is nothing I ever would have anticipated, or even aimed for, until it happened.

Philadelphia is not better than Kansas. But it is certainly different, and different from my wife's Arkansas upbringing. We live with our son in a smaller apartment than the one I visited in New York, and we find it mostly satisfying. And I feel fairly certain I wouldn't be here without 9/11, and the reaction it produced in me.

It is, perhaps, narcissistic in the extreme to take a look at a key moment in our nation's recent history and reflect on what it means for me personally. But history doesn't exist merely in the broad sweep: It changes lives, dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people at a time. I am a different man today than I was on 9/11 because 10 years have passed, and because I am married and have a son now. But I am a different man, too, because 9/11 happened. Because of that, my son is living a different life than he would have. It's all normal, and it's all completely different.

Rick Perry: Anti-science because liberals like it

National Review's Rich Lowry defends Rick Perry against the "anti-science smear":

Perry’s offenses against science consist of his statements on evolution and global warming, areas where “the science” is routinely used to try to force assent to far-reaching philosophical or policy judgments unsupported by the evidence.

Unless he has an interest in paleontology that has escaped everyone’s notice to this point, Perry’s somewhat doubtful take on evolution has more to do with a general impulse to preserve a role for God in creation than a careful evaluation of the work of, say, Stephen Jay Gould. Perry’s attitude is in the American mainstream. According to Gallup, 40 percent of Americans think God created man in his present form, and 38 percent think man developed over millions of years with God guiding the process. Is three-quarters of the country potentially anti-science?

Similarly, Perry’s skepticism on man-made global warming surely has much to do with the uses to which the scientific consensus on warming is put. It is enlisted as support for sweeping carbon controls that fail any cost-benefit analysis and gets spun into catastrophic scenarios that are as rigorous as Hollywood movie treatments.

In other words, Lowry is saying that Rick Perry is against the established science—but that's OK because liberals use science to try to advocate for liberal policies. Thus, if liberals said something like, "The sky is blue, therefore we must raise taxes," Perry would assert that the sky is pink. And Lowry would approve.

Now, I don't particularly care what Perry as an individual thinks about evolution or climate. But as a potential national leader, I'm concerned because—based on Lowry's defense—it signals an overall approach of ignoring actual facts and settled knowledge if those facts and knowledge suggest policy actions that Perry doesn't like. Rather than come up with a counter-proposal for action, or arguing (as Lowry does) about cost-benefit analyses, Perry simply gets to decide that reality isn't real. It might be too narrow to suggest that such an attitude is "anti-science." It's more like "anti-empirical knowledge." And that's a kind of relativism that "hard headed" conservatives like to decry.

Today in inequality reading: Can middle class marriages be saved?

In a July column with Ben Boychuk, I suggested the growing American inequality of the last 30 years probably had something to do with the fact that more Americans are "opting out" of marriage:

One of the prime benefits of wedlock is the economic security that comes from partnering. But such security has been increasingly difficult to come by: America's median household incomes have stagnated since 1980, even though many more households now have both a mother and a father working outside the home. That stagnation is easy to attribute to conservative policies that have steered more money to rich individuals and big corporations at the expense of workers.

In other words: It's much harder to raise a family. No wonder more middle-class Americans are "retreating from marriage," choosing cohabitation or divorce over the increasing economic strains of commitment.

That assertion was greeted with some skepticism, but now I've got some backing from Don Peck in his new article at The Atlantic, "Can the Middle Class Be Saved?"

In the March 2010 issue of this magazine, I discussed the wide-ranging social consequences of male economic problems, once they become chronic. Women tend not to marry (or stay married to) jobless or economically insecure men—though they do have children with them. And those children usually struggle when, as typically happens, their parents separate and their lives are unsettled. The Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson has connected the loss of manufacturing jobs from inner cities in the 1970s—and the resulting economic struggles of inner-city men—to many of the social ills that cropped up afterward. Those social ills eventually became self-reinforcing, passing from one generation to the next. In less privileged parts of the country, a larger, predominantly male underclass may now be forming, and with it, more-widespread cultural problems.

What I didn’t emphasize in that story is the extent to which these sorts of social problems—the kind that can trap families and communities in a cycle of disarray and disappointment—have been seeping into the nonprofessional middle class. In a national study of the American family released late last year, the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox wrote that among “Middle Americans”—people with a high-school diploma but not a college degree—an array of signals of family dysfunction have begun to blink red. “The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”

Conservatives like to blame lower-class refusal to marry on welfare—and perhaps it plays a role—but the truth is that unemployment and poverty do plenty to damage the institution of marriage on their own.

Read the whole thing. It's a long and mostly discouraging article that focuses on the effects of inequality, generally. There's hope, but it will take decades to achieve—if at all—by which time late-30s men and women like myself will have been displaced, economically, but younger generations.

What kind of history are they teaching at Bowdoin College?

In an otherwise fascinating overview of the Great Courses company in City Journal, Heather Mac Donald takes pains to contrast the company's market-driven approach of bringing the canon to its audience to the overly PC approach to curriculum taken by actual colleges. Here's a typical example high in the piece:

This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600–1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck. A Great Courses customer, by contrast, can choose from a cornucopia of American history not yet divvied up into the fiefdoms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, with multiple offerings in the American Revolution, the constitutional period, the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, and the intellectual influences on the country’s founding.

Here's some actual highlights from the Bowdoin College history program offerings for Fall 2011:

110. Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Europe
Dallas Denery T 8:30 - 9:55, TH 8:30 - 9:55
A wide-ranging survey of pre-modern European history, beginning with the reign of the Roman Emperor Constantine (c. 272 – 337) and concluding with the Council of Trent (1545-1563). Particular attention is paid to the relation between church and state, the birth of urban culture and economy, institutional and popular religious movements, and the early formation of nation states.

142. The United States since 1945
Daniel Levine T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55
Consideration of social, intellectual, political, and international history. Topics include the Cold War; the survival of the New Deal; the changing role of organized labor; Keynesian, post-Keynesian, or anti-Keynesian economic policies; and the urban crisis. Readings common to the whole class and the opportunity for each student to read more deeply in a topic of his or her own choice.

201. History of Ancient Greece: Bronze Age to the Death of Alexander
Stephen O'Connor T 2:30 - 3:55, TH 2:30 - 3:55
Surveys the history of Greek-speaking peoples from the Bronze Age (c. 3000–1100 B.C.E.) to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. Traces the political, economic, social, religious, and cultural developments of the Greeks in the broader context of the Mediterranean world. Topics include the institution of the polis (city-state); hoplite warfare; Greek colonization; the origins of Greek “science,” philosophy, and rhetoric; and fifth-century Athenian democracy and imperialism. Necessarily focuses on Athens and Sparta, but attention is also given to the variety of social and political structures found in different Greek communities. Special attention is given to examining and attempting to understand the distinctively Greek outlook in regard to gender, the relationship between human and divine, freedom, and the divisions between Greeks and barbarians (non-Greeks). A variety of sources—literary, epigraphical, archaeological—are presented, and students learn how to use them as historical documents. Note: This course fulfills the pre-modern requirement for history majors.

232. History of the American West
Connie Chiang T 10:00 - 11:25, TH 10:00 - 11:25
Survey of what came to be called the Western United States from the nineteenth century to the present. Topics include Euro-American relations with Native Americans; the expansion and growth of the federal government into the West; the exploitation of natural resources; the creation of borders and national identities; race, class, and gender relations; the influence of immigration and emigration; violence and criminality; cities and suburbs; and the enduring persistence of the “frontier” myth in American culture. Students write several papers and engage in weekly discussion based upon primary and secondary documents, art, literature, and film.

243. Old Regime and Revolutionary France
Meghan Roberts M 11:30 - 12:55, W 11:30 - 12:55
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, many heralded King Louis XIV as the most powerful monarch to ever rule. By the end of the century, however, the French people overthrew this vaunted monarchy. Topics include: why did France have a revolution? What conflicts--social, cultural and intellectual--helped shape politics and society? What were the global implications of events in France, especially for the enslaved populations of French colonies? How did the Revolution impact everyday life, including social relationships and material culture? Why did the French Revolution become radical and--all too often--violent?

274. The Shot Heard 'Round the World: The History of the American Revolution
Strother Roberts M 9:30 - 10:25, W 9:30 - 10:25, F 9:30 - 10:25
For those who lived through it, the American Revolution was a very personal experience. It pitted neighbors against neighbors, tore local communities apart, and destroyed families. It ruined livelihoods and ended lives. But the Revolution was also a global phenomenon. Its ideological origins lay in ancient Greece and Rome. Its economic causes stretched around the globe to the tea plantations of China. It spawned battles fought from the icy tundra of the subarctic to the tropical waters of the Caribbean. Its ideals and values have inspired generations from around the globe. Only by studying the complexity of the Revolution, by placing the local experiences of newly-minted Americans within the global backdrop of their times, can this formative stage of United States history be fully understood.

307. Topics in Medieval and Early Modern European History
Dallas Denery T 1:00 - 3:55
A research seminar for majors and interested non-majors focusing on Medieval and Early Modern Europe. After an overview of recent trends in the historical analysis of this period, students pursue research topics of their own choice, culminating in a significant piece of original historical writing (approximately 30 pages in length)

I can't imagine that this course offering is substantially different from the one Mac Donald referenced. And certainly there are also classes—The History of Latinos in the United States, "Bad" Women Make Great History: Gender, Identity, and Society in Modern Europe, 1789-1945—that emphasize a gender- or race-based view of history. What's more, that's fine: Not to get overly PC about it, but "other" people have long experienced and shaped history in different ways than what we've received from the Dead White Males. There shouldn't be a reason, moreover, that the Dead White Males and the Dead French Women can't co-exist on the same campus.

But it's simply not the case—as Mac Donald implies—that those kinds of courses are taught at Bowdoin to the exclusion of the kind of broad sweep of history classes she apparently prefers. Mac Donald's problem can't be that the gender- and race-based curricula have pushed the more traditional stuff out of Bowdoin's offerings. The problem, apparently, is that they exist at all.

Netflix Queue: 'Bodyguards and Assassins'

The movie that "Bodyguards and Assassins" reminds me most of is Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." Like the Gibson flick, "B&A" seeks to tell an origin story—instead of a religion, we're looking at the birth of modern China—and sanctify it through bloody martyrdom.

The year is 1906, and we're in Hong Kong. Real-life revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen is expected to visit soon to plot a series of uprisings that will result in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty and usher in, as the characters say, a "people's republic." They also call this a democracy—and we even hear a quote from Abraham Lincoln early on. To aid his cause, a small group of men commit themselves to protecting him from an assassination plot, by any means necessary.

I won't spoil the details of how they succeed—if it's a spoiler to you that Sun Yat-Sen doesn't die, then read your history, son—but suffice it to say that there are many intricate fight scenes, and many, many sacrifices made by the good guys. And here's where Gibson comes in: While many bad guys die in the course of events, those deaths are a blur. The pains inflicted on the good guys, meanwhile, are mapped out in painstaking detail: every thrust of the spear, every hook tearing at flesh, every drop of blood spilled—often in slow motion. When a character dies, we're given their obituary on-screen: Name, date of birth, and date of death. It's meant to make you identify with these men, and their cause, and it succeeds.

Adding to this myth-making is the film's treatment of Sun himself: We're not allowed to see his full face in full focus until the last few minutes of the movie. There's something reminiscent of religions that ban the depiction of their gods and prophets in this: Sun Yat-Sen is a man, it turns out, with a face and everything—but he's clearly something more than a man.

I don't want to make too big a deal of this: Certainly our own film industry has given us plenty of "America Eff Yeah!" moments, so it's tough to begrudge the Chinese their own. (Though it plays more subtly than some other Chinese flicks I've seen lately, there's still a latent "foreigners are bad" vibe going on here, though it's understandable given the colonialism the Chinese endured during this time.) And it's certainly effective—I found myself moved a number of times throughout the movie. The film is undeniably entertaining.

And yet...

The Chinese movie industry, like China itself, is growing bigger and more sophisticated—slowly but surely offering a challenge to Hollywood's domination of the global box office. And movies like "Bodyguards and Assassins" are clearly meant to shape the audience's view—both domestically and abroad—of what China is all about. It's fine to be entertained by "Bodyguards and Assassins." One hopes non-Chinese viewers of the movie take some time to learn what the real modern China is all about, both for good and for bad.