Diving Into the Muck : Surveying the Post 9/11 Political Landscape

Every year, it seems, I remember and recall the events of September 2001 in a different manner. The first anniversary of 9/11 fell on a day in which I wasn't scheduled for work until the afternoon, and I took the occasion to drive out of the urban center of New York's Capital District into the surrounding farmlands and wooded areas of the upper Hudson Valley. Taking winding Highway 2 vaguely northeast, through small hamlets like Clums Corner and Quackenkill, I found myself wandering through the forests of Grafton Lakes State Park, where I lingered for the better part of an hour by a placid pond, observing the silence and memorializing the dead. With each passing year, the trauma of that day faded a bit, as might be expected, and with each year my dismay at the direction chosen by the country in response to the September atrocities began to weigh equally in my mind. Eventually, it became difficult to ponder the attacks without also pondering the effects.

What has long stayed fresh in my mind, however, was the remarkable sense of unity that gripped the country in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Never much prone to flag waving, I was moved by the genuine affection others displayed in affixing pins to their lapels, and when a homeless African-American patron entered our library with a large American flag dangling from his shabby backpack, I think my heart swelled to a degree I wouldn't have thought possible in an old cynic like me. It seemed a time to listen to others, to reflect on similarities rather than differences, and to acknowledge that now was not the moment to lapse into petty bickering or partisan politics. Perhaps it was that spirit of compromise that led me to offer at least moral support to the campaign in Afghanistan - a military effort that most of my fellow leftists staunchly, if silently, opposed. To this day, I'll argue that the reasons given for launching attacks upon Afghanistan were far more reasoned, justified and perhaps necessary than those offered for our ill-fated mission into Iraq. On a personal level, ever since reading of the Taliban's destruction of the majestic and historic Buddhas of Bamyan in the spring of 2001, I had harbored a hope that the international community might come together to stop this menace to civilization. Religious extremists of any stripe have never and will never receive any quarter from me.

The unity of post 9/11 America has faded rapidly ever since, and to reflect back on those early days now seems almost a quaint exercise in nostalgia. Politically, at least, we seem to have once again entered a phase of rancorous inertia, an era in which both political parties offer little but utter disdain for each other - not simply for each other's political philosophies, but each other's constituency and the very air they breathe. No doubt many observers on both sides of the political aisle see very little that was noble in the actions of Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who found himself so moved by the topic of offering (or not offering) health coverage to individuals deemed illegal that he inadvertently called out the president as a liar during a televised speech to Congress. I have my doubts as to how inadvertent such an action was, and suspect the behavior was both premeditated and modeled after the numerous displays of disruptive actions taken at town-hall meetings across the nation - shouting matches that may have their roots in good old fashioned Yankee pluck (I doubt our Revolutionary founders would have spent much time sitting calmly on their hands during rancorous debate), but that represent a more dismaying turn towards obstruction over discussion.

My fondness for the United Kingdom includes a respect for the often raucous behavior on display during addresses to the House of Commons and Parliament. The back-and-forth shouting between bemused politicians and a prickly Prime Minister seem rooted in a love for discussion, debate, argument and humor. Yet, I'm not at all sure we're ready or will ever be ready for this kind of tradition in the U.S. of A., where our gift of gab and wordplay lies far below that of our British brethren, where our educational systems continually spit out poorly-informed and small-minded representatives, and where the art of debate is considered something as quaint as the Geneva Conventions by a group of individuals who have left the teachings of Cicero behind in their eagerness to adopt the methods of military-think and business-speak. And one might add that even in the nearly-anything-goes world of British politics, accusing a speaker of lying is considered off-limits, seen in this factsheet on House customs.

I'm not surprised that the first instance in recent history of a president being heckled during a Congressional address came from a South Carolina good ol' boy and was directed at a black man. I'm not sure what else one would even expect from the likes of Mr. Wilson, who was one of only seven senators back in 2000 to vote against the removal of the Confederate Flag from the state capitol, who served as an aid to the noxiously racist and notoriously pro-segregationist Strom Thurmond, and who has continually inserted himself into anti-immigrant and anti-gay rights issues. His post-apology tour has already led him into the welcoming arms of Sean Hannity's FOX News program, in which both discussed the double-standard of a political landscape in which Democrats are allowed to lustily boo President Bush but a Republican daring to speak truth to power must go on the defensive.

The booing of President Bush following his claims that Social security funds would run out within the next several decades wasn't one of the Democrats' finest moments, but neither was it their worst. Congressional disapproval has always largely been limited to body language, coughs and snorts of derision, laughter, a few "no's" here and there. One certainly shouldn't sit in silence to something one passionately disagrees with or believes to be an untruth. But a wide gulf exists between wordless sounds of disapproval and disgust and the shouting out of an explicit charge of lying. This is far from civility and far from open candor. This is the response of an enraged and entitled child who thinks it's his turn to speak.

Just in case anyone suspect me of playing a rather predictable political hand by attacking those to the right of my sensibilities, perhaps I should outline another fairly recent incident of improper behavior during a Presidential address. When the anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan was invited to attend the 2006 State of the Union Address by President Bush, as the guest of Rep. Lynn Woolsey, my first thought was one of satisfaction that there would at least be the presence of a civilian in the building who disagreed with and challenged White House actions. Whatever one thought of Ms. Sheehan personally, one could not deny her grief and her right to speak out against policies which had killed her son. She might serve as a silent sentinel in the balcony, quietly and nobly rebuking the powers that be. Sheehan, however, did not choose this approach. Like an earnest college sophomore attending their first cafeteria rally, she chose to wear a t-shirt emblazoned with the legend, "2,245 Dead. How many more?" Hardly the most reactionary of slogans, yet still out of bounds inside a House that does not allow slogans on any clothing. Personally, I'm somewhat annoyed to live in a country where one can be arrested for wearing a T-shirt at a mall but can lawfully bring automatic weapons to a President's speech, but there's only so much room here for my proselytizing. Suffice to say that instead of remaining in the hall as a silent rebuke to the President, Sheehan put up a fight, refused to cover up the shirt, and was escorted out in handcuffs. While many of my political friends focused more on the injustice of such actions, I had to counter that there is a time for angry protest and a time for calm dissension. Sheehan's absence in the hall that night, to my mind, could only be viewed as a loss, not a gain.

Of course, what's the use of dissension if all dissension has come to mean is plugging one's ears or blacking out a television address? If one begins to argue that one needn't consider any opposing argument - indeed, if one begins to suggest that any member of the opposition is unworthy of attention, respect or courtesy - events like the rather silly tussle over President Obama's harmless back-to-school speech to students will simply become more and more common on both sides of the aisle. It's disheartening to read of Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer describing the planned speech as "an invasive abuse of power," as if Presidents have never before addressed a national audience, or to watch TV pundits work themselves into a lather of outrage over the potential brainwashing of helpless students. One wonders how such apoplexies might have gone over a few years back, when any questioning of presidential authority was being commonly labeled "un-American". But such is the nature of politics - idiocy masquerading as bravery in order to gain short-term victories. Far more disheartening were events like as the decision by a local San Diego-area school board decision to black out the President's speech. Following some angry responses by parents, two trustees at the La Mesa - Spring Valley school board who voted in favor of the blackout have offered apologies for their decisions, claiming that upon actually viewing the speech, they realized their fears were overblown. One particularly outspoken trustee has refused to capitulate, informing the local newspaper that the President's request for a national audience represented a "direct assault on the Constitution" and added that he "would not and will not ever support this sort of selfish, socialistic message as public school curriculum".

Now, I've never exactly turned to school boards for nuggets of wisdom or insight into complex world affairs, having long ago concluded that most boards represent people at their most small-minded, reactionary and ill-informed, a small slice of American life more concerned with banning books than opening minds. And so I'll leave the comments by the enraged trustee to soften and shrink in the sun, noting only that, whatever one might think of socialism or indeed the entire ongoing debate over health coverage, I'm not sure "selfish" is the operative term that springs to mind (in fact, I'm not sure what the correlation would be between socialist theory and selfishness, and have always thought that one thing proud capitalists should insist upon is that their philosophy will always have staying power due to their unapologetic defense of the notion of human selfishness and self-interest). I'm more interested in the blacking out of a speech, any speech, that one suspects one will have disagreements with. No doubt I might have felt uneasy with the notion of my child being asked to attend a lecture given by our preceding President in favor of military expansionism. But the act of censoring the speech itself - of labeling the very event so dangerous as to require pure expurgation - probably wouldn't have crossed my mind as an acceptable response.

Why do we have such difficulty stressing the toleration of opposing viewpoints as an admirable human trait? We are we losing the ability to disagree with others while maintaining a modicum of respect and civility? One often hears the response that "the stakes are too high," but the stakes are always high for the concerned parties, whether one is discussing Islamic fascism or school lunch programs. No, I suspect a larger reason is a general disdain for the very features of the Enlightenment that help distinguish much of Western thought from that of the rest of the world - an insistence upon empathy and broader cultural understanding. This notion is still anathema to many. One need only consider Allan Bloom's late-1980s questioning of all Greek-inspired modes of Western thought to see how prevalent this suspicion remains. Why, he asks, do college curriculums force Western students to study and partially accept non-Western thought and customs when these very non-Western cultures being studied teach an unapologetic ethnocentrism? Why, he asks, is it only in Western nations that one finds "some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one's own way"?

I would argue it is this very openness that allows for the greatness of Western thought - a willingness to engage the unknown and ponder the unfamiliar. Rather than waste valuable energies defending the gates against any and all dissenting thought, why not open up the discussion, consider the opposition, offer counter attacks, and agree to disagree while taking away newly gained insight? Perhaps such an approach is radical - certainly, questioning one's own knowledge and certitude flies in the face of the moral smugness currently on display in Washington. But I view the true radicals as those wishing to shut out the flow of human thought through sheer noise and expurgation. Eight years ago, at least a few artificial boundaries fell as citizens viewed one another as fellow individuals, regardless of differences. At the turn of the next decade, I find it truly dispiriting to think that we require acts of atrocity to help us recognize each other's worth and importance.