Three years later
"What happened on September 11?"

"Some bad people did some bad things."

"What did they do?"

"They killed a lot of Americans in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania."

"Why are you hanging out the flag?"

"To remember what happened."

"Why did mommy not want that?"

"A lot of people use the flag for the wrong reasons: to act like only they are right, and everyone else is wrong. I don't mean it that way, but maybe it will seem too much like I do."

The flag stayed -- we'd agreed on it a couple of years ago, as my (wonderful) wife recalled when I reminded her. I understand her feelings; but it's my flag, too; I'm just taking it back for a day. And I'm the only one in the neighborhood with one up.

Which is OK; maybe it's for the best that these things heal over. 9/11 is being used for things it shouldn't be -- as an implicit justification of the Iraq war, as a campaign threat to the faint-hearted. Let's just remember it for what it was: a dastardly, cruel attack, but one that ordinary Americans responded to magnificently. In the aftermath, the country was united as rarely before.

That's what I remember.

Yet being a united, homogeneous group is not what Americans ought to be for very long. Deciding what to do about 9/11 was not easy, and many of the decisions since then have been debatable. On the whole, it's no wonder and a good thing that brief sense of unity didn't last. This country shouldn't aspire to be a band marching in lockstep; we need to debate, and hear the other side with an open mind. 9/11 shouldn't and didn't end that.


=====
More 9/11 remembrances, thoughts, and analyses:

Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain, New York Times 9/10

Rituals of Grief, on a Day Eased Only by Time, New York Times 9/11

September 11 and its aftermath; Juan Cole is concerned that Al Qaeda has achieved more of its goals since 9/11 than the US has.

Jeff Jarvis is an angry centrist: angry to be in the crossfire, angry to see fringes taking over the election.

Matt Welch reprints his first article after 9/11, "Go Gently Into That Good Argument."

More, 11pm:

Jim Henley refers readers to his 9/10/2003 thoughts: there's been enough time for most to mourn.

110 Stories, a poem by John Ford (via Henley and Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:07:00 PM -- |    

 
Anything goes -- if you vote for it
One of the better entries from a strong field of responses to Washington Monthly's question "What if Bush Wins?" was David Greenberg's "The Triumph of Anything Goes":

Fifteen years ago, conservatives put forth the 'broken windows' theory of crime. If small street crimes are tolerated, the theory went, neighborhoods begin to accept them as normal and the result is more lawlessness. The same thing will happen if a democracy tolerates Bush's ruthless behavior as business as usual. If voters validate this modus operandi, it won't just accelerate; it will cease to draw even the modest level of scrutiny and outrage that the administration's transgressions have attracted so far. Failing to protest these breaches of the norms that govern political conduct will encourage more such violations.

Amen. Greenberg provides plenty of examples; I provided a few more in a July 25 post "The democratic case against Republican rule." Among the latest examples are the widely noted smear of George Soros by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, via Lloyd Grove and Kevin Drum:

"You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where - if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from," Hastert mused. An astonished Chris Wallace asked: "Excuse me?" The Speaker went on: "Well, that's what he's been for a number years - George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." Wallace: "You think he may be getting money from the drug cartel?" Hastert: "I'm saying I don't know where groups - could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."

Again: that was the Speaker of the House of the United States of America, claiming an opponent might be connected to illegal drugs. See also Daniel Pipes' tissue of innuendoes about and misrepresentations of Tariq Ramadan justifying -- and perhaps causing? -- the moderate Swiss Muslim scholar's visa denial.

Bob Somerby, who writes the "Daily Howler," wrote after last week's Republican convention:

...But if the Democrat[s] ever plan to get off their keisters and fight for the values they claim to respect, they’re going to have to take a page from the Republican camp.

Forty years ago, the GOP did something quite smart; it began to develop a meta-narrative to explain its place in the world. That meta-narrative is Liberal bias, a pleasing tale the GOP recites to explain all unpleasant events. (You saw Bush do it last night.) Voters have heard about “liberal bias” for decades. Any time an event occurs which puts the GOP on the defensive, hacks haul out this pleasing excuse. And they’ve learned to use this old script quite well.

The time has come when our uncaring Democrats have to start telling the truth to the people. But what meta-narrative should the Dems tell? They need to tell an accurate narrative: Every four years, Republican hacks make a joke of our lives, inventing strange stories about the Dem candidate. They distract; they deceive; they direct us to trivia; they make a joke of our public discussion. [...]

The DNC needs a meta-story—the Republicans keep making a joke of your discourse. But to tell a story, again and again, DNC honchos have to believe it—and care. We see no sign that they really do care, and that explains our quadrennial clowning. Clearly, the Washington press doesn’t care. Does the DNC care? Let them prove it.

I guess I'm late to the party, but by now I agree with just about all of this. My one quibble is that "the Republicans keep making a joke of your discourse" isn't quite the snappy formula that "liberal bias" is.

My candidate? "Anything goes" -- and it has the added advantage of not merely being a pleasing excuse, it's the actual state of affairs. These people -- including but not limited to Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, DeLay, and Hastert -- will stop at no tactic, no falsehood, no smear to keep and expand their power. Some of these were barely credible: Boo! Saddam was in cahoots with Al Qaeda. Some are patent slander: a vote for Kerry makes another 9/11 more likely. Some were credible, but dishonestly analyzed and misleadingly presented: we're sure Saddam has WMD programs, even WMD -- and we'll move heaven and earth to make our experts agree with us and paint our opponents as "soft on terror." Some are political hijackings: don't like your Texas districts? change 'em; don't like being opposed? hunt down your opponents with federal help. And some bode poorly for standards of conduct in the years ahead: Hastert's smear of Soros, or Pipes' smear of Ramadan.

But now the story of the hour appears to be forged documents further impugning Bush's service with the Air National Guard -- an inept dirty trick that appears to be a swipe at Bush. If the documents are forged, and were generated by the Kerry campaign -- a charge I've not seen yet -- I'll be angry and very disappointed. But regardless, the controversy has derailed a number of talking points all at once: the "fortunate son" theme, Kerry's service under fire versus Bush's champagne unit siesta -- and Republican abuses carried out in plain view by the leaders of the party, not by anonymous troublemakers.

But I'll still say it: whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, if you're planning to vote for "anything goes" Bush and his party, you should reconsider. Like the saying goes: just because you're on their side doesn't mean they're on your side.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:00:00 AM -- |    

 
Beslan hostage takers may not have included Arabs
The Washington Post reports that Russian "officials backtracked on their claim that the [Beslan] hostage takers included 10 Arabs, but the Kremlin insisted that a "multinational group" of extremists was involved."

I stand by the word "pigs" in my angry headline last week ("Chechen, Arab pigs kill Russian children") -- although even that slanders the Sus scrofa species, come to think of it. I now think I should have simply said "terrorist" rather than assigning nationalities when the facts were clearly not yet all in.

It may yet turn out that some of the terrorists at Beslan were Arab; the possibility seemed and seems important to me. But it was at best unseemly to focus on that possibility in the headline, rather than on the victims. And at worst it was inaccurate and inflammatory, even read as intended (some Arabs, not all). I apologize for my lapse.


=====
UPDATE, 9/12: Kathryn Cramer has done a great job researching who the Beslan attackers were; no Arab nationals yet among those she's identified from varied press reports. Not only that, depending on which Russian official is doing the talking, there were either no Chechens among the attackers, or 6 out the 10 identified so far. The "zero Chechens" claim may be driven by not wanting the Chechnyan war to be partly responsible for the Beslan atrocity. Finally, an Economist item Cramer cites says that verified Chechen-Al Qaeda links are "few and tenuous." As Cramer puts it: "Make-Up of the Beslan Terror Group a Political Football."

UPDATE, 9/22: Shamil Basayev has apparently e-mailed a Chechen web site to say there were two Arabs among the attackers.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:10:00 AM -- |    

 
Daddy!
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card getting emotional about his boss:

"It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child,' Card said. ''I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children." (Sarah Schweitzer reporting for the Boston Globe, via Jim Henley)

Ewww.

Allow me to reciprocate: I see Dubya as someone else's (bratty) 10-year-old-child, who unfortunately for all concerned is at the wheel of a large piece of machinery he can't control. I know I as a parent would do all in my power to get him out of the driver's seat. George? Barbara? Can you have a word with your boy?

OK, I realize Card is the not the rhetorical wizard that, say, Zell Miller is, but doesn't that really make this worse? It's unconscious, unaffected, patronizing contempt -- kind of like the missing WMD "joke" earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the Kerry campaign response regrettably implied Bush wasn't a good enough daddy: "Any parent that ran a household the way George W. Bush runs the country...", blah, blah, blah. Oh well.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:19:00 AM -- |    

 
Without honor
Mocking Purple Hearts with band-aids...

...that's today's Republican Party for you. (Via Matthew Yglesias, who describes it as "mocking injured war heroes for not being injured enough for your tastes.")

Maryland side note: a commenter on Yglesias' site wonders if the man in the upper right corner of the "on101" "Dishonor" link is Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael S. Steele. The picture's not great, so I'm not sure either, but it might be him. As I recall, he spoke on the first day of the convention, which is when the band-aids got handed out.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:28:00 PM -- |