HAIL
AND FAREWELL
How
is it that a great republic sustains itself? How do we keep the
democratic ideal before us, in a world preoccupied with instant
gratification, with allegiance to tribe and creed above all else?
A
democracy must always face in three directions at once, confronting
the future and the past just as unflinchingly as it does the present.
The greatest test of maturity for a nation, as for an individual,
is the capacity to plan ahead. And how well we perceive the future
depends in good part upon how well we have learned the lessons
of the past.
This
may all seem obvious enough, especially to readers of a history
magazine. But as a nation, we continually seem unable to remember
such concepts. Most recently, a number of disturbing reports suggest
that we are not doing nearly as well as we should in either commemorating
the 9/11 terrorist attacks—or in preparing for the attacks
that are surely to come.
Jim
Dwyer and Kevin Flynn’s recent book, 102 Minutes,
is mostly a brilliant piece of reporting by two journalists tracing
the heroic efforts of individuals to escape the burning towers
on September 11, 2001. But it also traces once again the failures
of two successive administrations to properly assess and react
to a terrorist threat that had struck the exact same target as
long ago as 1993—failures that were elaborated on at depressing
length in last year’s congressional investigations. Richard
A. Clarke’s now famous article in the January/February 2005
issue of The Atlantic serves as a terrifying survey of
just how little we have done to truly secure our homeland. And
then there was the news that the FBI’s $170-million effort
to bring its computer networks into the 21st century has failed
utterly, and it will take at least three-and-a-half more years
to—as columnist Maureen Dowd wrote—“fix something
that should have been put in place right after 9/11—or even
20 years ago.”
It’s
not that we have been completely passive in the wake of 9/11.
Some would argue that our intitiation of regime change in Afghanistan
and Iraq is making us all safer by changing the fundamental, long-term
dynamics of the Middle East. They have a point, and this is also
a vital task. But America remains woefully vulnerable to attack
at home, and it doesn’t take a magazine article or a book
to know this. Despite the nationwide hunt for carry-on tweezers
at our airline terminals, even the most casual observer can see
that our great public spaces and memorials remain largely unguarded,
our chemical plants and other hazardous materials barely protected,
our borders porous, and our ports all but wide open. Even our
airport security is not what it should be—as I discovered
a couple years ago, when I was routinely waved around metal detectors
with a large walking cast on my leg. I know from personal experience
that to walk through the busiest train terminals, public squares,
museums, and sporting venues up and down the major cities of the
East Coast, at least, is to encounter only a minimal police presence,
and perhaps a few, obviously bored and distracted National Guard
troops in camouflage uniforms, usually talking to each other instead
of scanning the crowds.
This
is hardly sufficient—and it is also nothing new. Throughout
our history, we have generally refused to acknowledge the cost
of true preparedness, and ended up paying a much higher price
as a result. From the Revolution right through the Spanish-American
War, we almost always preferred to depend on hastily organized,
underpaid, and ill-supplied volunteers for our national security.
“Millions for defense but not one penny for tribute”
made a nice slogan, but it was rarely one that a penurious Congress
was willing to live up to, even when the fate of the continent
hung in the balance. This handicap was usually overcome by skilled
military leadership and the courage of our soldiers, but it led
to many unnecessary losses and a few notable disasters. The War
of 1812 witnessed a botched attempt by our militia armies to invade
Canada, the capture of our nation’s capital, and the torching
of the White House.
The
Civil War saw thousands of Union troops suffer from an ill-run
supply system that allowed “dead-horse contractors”
and “the sybarites of shoddy” to sell them rifles
that didn’t work, rotten food, and boots and uniforms that
fell apart in the mud and rain. The Spanish-American War brought
more such boodling of our amateur army, with American troops—including
Fiorello La Guardia’s father—dying from the notorious
“embalmed beef” they were given to eat. Even after
their victory in the Revolution, our very first American army
was still paid so erratically that only a dramatic, wily speech
by George Washington kept the troops from marching on the Continental
Congress, with who knows what consequences for the nascent country.
Much
of this shortsightedness can be attributed to a deep suspicion
of large, standing armies—not a bad predilection for a young
republic protected by two oceans. But there was little inclination
to adjust to changing realities. Although Teddy Roosevelt and
others frantically urged “preparedness” on us during
World War I, it took more than a year after our declaration of
war in April, 1917 to field so much as a division in France. In
the 1930s, Congress quickly quashed attempts by Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration to put some public works money into revitalizing
the navy—even after Hitler had come to power, and Japan
was already well on the march in Asia. For that matter, Roosevelt
was barely able to keep a military draft in place in 1940, after
World War II had already begun. Even in 1950, the first wave of
North Korean invaders encountered decidedly inferior American
units, underequipped, undertrained, and badly demoralized.
The
Cold War finally forced a change in our national attitude toward
preparedness. We have certainly maintained a bigger, more capable,
more professional standing military than the nation has ever had
before.
But how have we supported our bravest men and women here at home—besides
lots of yellow-ribbon car decals, I mean? Too many Democrats have
offered up clearly unworkable “solutions” to the war
in Iraq from an immediate withdrawal to posting a timetable for
when we will go. The administration, in turn, has insisted that
we can fight a vital, global campaign for freedom with no draft,
private contractors, and tax cuts for all. President Bush’s
leading advisor, Karl Rove, went so far as to ridicule Democratic
demands for an improved intelligence and policing efforts at a
Republican fundraiser—when of course much of the war against
terrorism will also have to be fought at that level. Politics
is with us always, yet I can think of only one other president
who has so actively sought to use a war to crush his political
opposition at home. That was Woodrow Wilson, and the end result
was our disastrous rejection of the League of Nations, and a twenty-year
backslide into isolationism.
Perhaps one reason our reaction has been so muddled has been our
inability to properly commemorate what we feel about 9/11. Speeches
on the anniversary have tended to quote from the likes of Lincoln—as
if we have no original thoughts to add on the preservation of
our country. Even more disturbing has been the continuing lack
of any physical commemoration.
In
the immediate wake of the attack, the one thing I could not have
envisioned was that there would still be nothing on the site of
the World Trade Center nearly four years later. New York, after
all, was the same city where the Empire State Building was erected
in less than 18 months. In the days immediately following September
11, most New Yorkers probably would have voted to put the Twin
Towers back up just as they were. Barring that, I believe, we
wanted something that would have astonished the world—something
that would have made a profound statement about the resilience
of a democracy, in the face of even the most ruthless terror.
Yet
right from the beginning, the effort to replace the towers has
been uncoordinated, inept, even cavalier. Only a public hue and
cry kept a set of buildings that looked like nothing so much as
an array of hypodermic needles from being erected on this hallowed
ground. Survivor groups have wrangled endlessly about whether
all the victims of the attack should be memorialized together
or not. Both Washington and the private sector have remained utterly
indifferent to the whole process, and the developer who owned
the towers has been obstructionist at best. The man most responsible
for overseeing the reconstruction of the site, New York Governor
George Pataki, has simply been missing in action for most of the
last four years.
The
result has been that what should have been the most moving and
obvious element of any memorial—the ruined shards of the
old towers’ trellises, left jutting starkly up from Ground
Zero after the attack—were simply carted off to a dump,
while Daniel Libeskind’s original master plan for the site,
which was often graceful, original, properly somber, and designed
to echo the Statue of Liberty, has now been whittled away to nothing.
The new “Freedom Tower” as currently designed will
be the Twin Towers minus one, another urban glass box, with a
windowless, twenty-storey, concrete base. As the architectural
critic Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, the new design “evokes
a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top…The
temptation is to dismiss it as a joke..The Freedom Tower embodies,
in its way, a world shaped by fear.”
Is this the best we can do? We are, after all, the nation that
gave the world what may well be the most poignant war memorial
the world has seen, Maya Lin’s tribute to our Vietnam dead.
Both Lin’s mournful wall of names, and the more traditional
statue of three soldiers planted in front of it, were controversial
when first erected but they actually work well together—a
rare example of a successful artistic compromise. Nearly as moving
is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and Saint-Gaudens’ frieze
of the Massachusetts 54th, along the edge of Boston Common. The
Lincoln Memorial, of course, is overwhelming in its solemn majesty,
a monument to a great president that has become a sacred icon
and gathering place of democracy in its own right.
Other
monuments have been less successful. The recent memorial to our
Korean veterans seems as confused and ambiguous as the war they
fought in—a patrol of life-sized troops moving over a wedge
of terrain; their color and expressions so odd and spectral it
might have been subtitled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Christopher
Walken.” The new World War II memorial on the Washington
Mall has been nearly as controversial as Lin’s design was,
fervently supported by some, criticized by others as bombastic,
gargantuan, and out of place.
We
must do better when it comes to remembering the events of 9/11,
just as we must speak now against the day when terror returns
to our shores. Any society that cannot properly frame its past,
that cannot eulogize its dead and celebrate its heroes, renders
itself mute. If we cannot give voice to the past, we will hardly
be able to sound the certain trumpet needed for the task ahead.
