ABSOLUTELY THE ONLY THING I'M GOING TO SAY ABOUT 9/11

On September 11, 1777, George Washington and the ragged men who at that point made up what was called the Continental Army faced General Sir William Howe at Brandywine Creek, twenty-five miles south of Philadelphia, for what would become one of the largest battles of the American Revolutionary War. It was a crucial battle. At stake was not only the safety of Philadelphia, but of New York, where the port received what little in the way of ammunition, arms and supplies the new nation had managed to procure from France and other half-friendly nations in Europe. If the British took New York, the war would be lost. If the British won at Brandywine, they would almost certainly take New York. Most of the known leaders of the American independence movement, including all the men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, were under sentence of death. If British forces put down "the rebellion," those men would be hanged. There were other reasons to fear the advancing British armies as well. On several occasions in the past year, both the British regular forces and their Hessian mercenaries had responded to victory on the battlefield by looting the countryside, burning houses, barns and fields, killing noncombatant men and women, committing rape. It was absolutely, fundamentally crucial that Washington stop the British at Brandywine.

If you're sitting there scratching your head and wondering why you never heard of this battle--I mean, this is the kind of thing Hollywood movies are made of, isn't it? The brave general of the underdog forces faces the superior power of the evil empire--it's because we did lose. We not only lost, we lost big, and shamefully. Over 1500 American soldiers ended up either shot or in British custody. Of the rest, more than could be counted turned tail and ran, including some of the men Washington considered his best officers. What was worse, this was not the voluntary militia Washington had been trying to fight with before the summer. This was his first shot at creating a real American army, with troops enlisted for the long haul and given at least some training before they marched into battle. As far as he could tell, it hadn't done much good. The prospects looked bleak. We were in the middle of a war. Washington didn't have a year or two to train men before he would have to send them off to fight. If this was the best we could do, we were going to end up subjects of the British crown before the winter was over.

I bring up September 11, 1777, because it was something September 11, 2001, was not--it was a day that changed America forever. Because we lost at Brandywine, the Continental Congress finally managed to get off its collective ass and do what needed to be done to make America a nation and not just a reaction--levy taxes, procure supplies for the army, set terms for enlistment and punishments for desertion. No matter what the Montana Freemen and their intellectual cousins in "patriot's militias" might think, a nation is a structure of laws and institutions, not a collection of loose cannons relying on their ability to blow away the opposition to keep the peace. Because we lost at Brandywine, we became a nation in more than name.

When I started this section, I promised myself that I would not say one single word about the terrorist attacks on 9/11. Everything that could be said had been said, often many times over, so that practically everybody was sick to death of the whole thing. If one more talking head on one more cable station said that "America was changed forever," I was going to run out and kick something--with any luck, one of those talking heads. I'd had enough of Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Wolf Blitzer, Margaret Carlson and both McNeill and Lehrer. (Well, okay, I'd had enough of them even before 9/11. And yes, I do know that McNeill is dead.) It had gotten to the point where, if somebody said "9/11" on a news broadcast, I got up and made some tea.

I'm talking about 9/11 anyway because last night I couldn't get up and make some tea. I'm sitting here with an injured knee that has decided it does not actually want to bend. If I get myself into a chair, my right leg sticks out in front of me. If I want to get up from the chair, I need somebody to help haul me to my feet. My children think this is very funny, for which they may find their Christmas stockings a little less full than they were last year. Let's just leave it at this: the news came on, yet another newscaster on CNN thundered ponderously about "the day that changed America forever," and my son was upstairs murdering evil alien spaceships in the bedroom with the PlayStation in it.

I want to say the only thing that is really important about what happened in this country as a result of September 11, 2001: it did not change America forever. In fact, it barely changed America at all. In spite of the Department of Homeland Security, in spite of John Ashcroft's frontal assault on the Bill of Rights, in spite of the Bush administration's endless posturing about starting a war in Iraq, for the vast majority of Americans nothing at all was different after 9/11. Within two weeks of the attacks, the movie theaters were full of people, the malls were crowded, and the hottest topic on the Net was just how little Brittney Spears was wearing in her latest video.

Except in those areas directly and physically affected--New York City, the area around the Pentagon, the commuter suburbs in New Jersey and Connecticut--by September 20, it was as if the event had never taken place. Four months after the attacks, I asked the students I taught in an English composition class to write three paragraphs on what they feared most. Only one of them mentioned 9/11, or terrorists, or anything connected to either--and this was in Connecticut, where we had had an anthrax death. What were my students most afraid of? That their husbands or wives or girlfriends or boyfriends would leave them. That their parents or children would die. That they'd flunk out of school. That they'd get fired and have to move back home. That their cars would break down on lonely roads in the dark. That Chucky was for real.

I've given that assignment every term since, and the answers are always the same--except that, after the first time, not a single student ever mentioned anything to do with terrorism. What's more, I get similar responses talking to the adults I know. A lot of them are worried about a possible war in Iraq--that it will be long, that it will destabilize the Middle East, that Bush's people still don't know how to aim and won't get Saddam this time, either--but none of them fears a repeat of 9/11. None of them has done a single thing to make himself "safer" from the threat of such an attack. None of them dusts her mail or spies on the Pakistani family that's moved in up the street. Most of them accept the idea that there should be increased airport security in principle, but find the steps that are actually being taken to be both annoying and ridiculous. In the midterm federal elections of 2002, Enron was a bigger issue than the War on Terror, and Enron was barely an issue at all.

People are worried about their jobs, the economy, their children, their children's schools, their retirement funds, and whether they're going to be able to get into the new Harry Potter movie without waiting on line for two and a half hours. They're worried about the possibility that their teen-age daughter's boyfriend will get her pregnant. They're worried about how hard they're finding it to lose weight or quit smoking. They're worried that the company they work for will raise the employee contribution for health insurance and they won't be able to afford the coverage. They're worried about their credit card debt, or not. In other words, they're worried about exactly what they would have been worried about if the attacks on 9/11 had never happened.

If the purpose of terrorism is to weaken the enemy by panicking the population--by changing the lives of the people forever--then this act of terrorism failed.

If anything, we've tended to find all the pomp and ponderousness about the War on Terrorism, and "the grave danger we face in a new world of insecurity," to be...rather silly. No sooner had the government established its color-coded terrorism alert system than it became the focus of stand-up routines on Letterman and Leno. No sooner had airport security been tightened than the Net was full of jokes about grandmothers hauled off flights for having knitting needles in their luggage while Osama bin Laden sailed through the checkpoint carrying an atom bomb and three Death To The Great Satan posters in his bare hands. Almost immediately after the attacks, you could buy toilet paper with Osama bin Laden's face on it from a dozen American-based sites on the Web. Almost immediately after that, you could buy the same item with John Ashcroft's face on it from just as many places.

Christmas came, and we did what we always did. We bought too many toys. We spent too much money. We ate too much food. About half of us went to church, and about half of us didn't. New Year's came, and the ball still came down in Times Square. The security was a little tighter than in previous years--which meant that it was only practically nonexistent instead of completely so--but we didn't stay home for fear that some idiot would lob a bomb into the middle of a lot of inebriated nutcases who think it's really fun to ring in the new year by standing around in the dark cold and having strangers throw up on their shoes.

We went to ball games and rock concerts and operas. We went to museums and stock car races and pep rallies. We got married and divorced and pregnant and sick. We graduated and flunked out and made the honor society and fell in love and sent fan letters to Christina Aguilera and Eminem. We cared too much about who won what game when and where.

The stock market was up and running again within a week, in spite of the fact that its home was only blocks away from the World Trade Center site. Stockbrokers went back to being stockbrokers and corporations went back to being corporations. The new spirit of national unity that supposedly came out of 9/11 resulted in one "American" company after another laying off workers the way they did at every Christmas season, nearly 50,000 in all. The new appreciation Americans were supposed to show for government activism in the aftermath of government responses to the terrorist attack resulted in our voting for more anti-government-activism candidates than ever. The adulation we were supposed to exhibit for George W. Bush as Our Wartime President went down in a blizzard of Enron jokes. Three months after the event, Rudy Giuliani's halo was off and he'd reverted to being a world class jerk even New Yorkers could barely tolerate.

We put American flags on our front porches and United We Stand stickers on the rear windows of our cars--and then the Republicans went back to insinuating that Tom Daschle was the spiritual cousin of Hitler, and the Democrats went back to insinuating that the President of the United States had the IQ of a hamster with Alzheimer's Disease.

There were racial incidents after 9/11. Although most of us ignored the TIPS initiative's urging that we turn ourselves into officious busybodies sniffing out the merest hint of "terrorism" around our neighbors' back yard barbecues, some of us took the challenge and made the anonymous calls. We had to sit through the spectacle of three perfectly innocent men hunted down on the highway in Florida for telling the very same kinds of jokes Letterman and Leno were making on TV--caught in the act by a humor-challenged Anglo woman with an overactive imagination and very little common sense. We had to put up with story after story about Arab-American policemen, secret service agents and soldiers singled out for special searches as security risks at airports.

The worst news was that although the rest of the country was laughing, too many members of the current Presidential administration were not. It was a good thing the ACLU was winning, but not so good that it had to go to court in the first place. The Attorney General of the United States seemed to have read only one of the amendments in the Bill of Rights, the second. That might be good, since if you were going to be subjected to summary arrest without due process, you might actually need that gun. Every federal law enforcement agency responded to the attacks by demanding a laundry list of end runs around the Constitution--wiretaps on private homes, the right to infiltrate churches and religious groups to spy on "terrorists," the right to hold people without bail and without trial. Even the kind of conservative who normally wears a picture of Waco on one sleeve and a picture of Ruby Ridge on the other didn't figure out what was wrong with all of this. Anytime anybody anywhere protested the assault on civil liberties, Ashcroft and company gave ponderous sermons about how we were all Aiding And Abetting The Terrorists.

No matter how often the authorities tell us to panic, we aren't interested. No matter how many sermons we hear about These Perilous Times and The New World Reality after 9/11, they spur us to no more serious action than it takes to produce a skit for Saturday Night Live. We buy Osama bin Laden dart boards for our dormitory rooms, not gas masks to protect ourselves from chemical warfare. We construct animated Web movies of Colin Powell singing "Day-O" while American bombers blow Osama to pieces in his cave, not bunkers to hide in in case an invasion happens. The real symbol of our national response to 9/11 isn't that over-the-top Memorial Service, or the flags on every windowsill, or the pathetic (if rather touching) spectacle of the members of Congress singing "God Bless America" off key on the Capitol steps. It's a digitally remastered picture of the Twin Towers with a new tower shooting up between them, flipping bin Laden and his buddies an eloquently unambiguous bird.

We know that there's only one way to aid and abet the terrorists, and it's not to protest when authoritarian idiots try to shred the Bill of Rights in the name of national security.

The only way to aid and abet the terrorists is to allow September 11, 2001 to be a day that changed America forever.

I'm not saying we shouldn't take them seriously. We have to take destructive people seriously, whether they're loners like McVeigh or members of a communalist jihad. Destructive people are just that--destructive. They can cause a lot of damage if they aren't caught and stopped, which means we have to catch and stop them.

But the 9/11 terrorists put me in mind of one of my grandmother's favorite expressions: any jackass can burn down a barn.

Destruction isn't much of an accomplishment. These are not people who have discovered new medicines, built new industries, invented new labor saving machines. In spite of the fact that many of them were very well educated, among the best educated people in their home countries, they have produced no new knowledge, or philosophy, or art. They haven't written books or made movies or composed music. They haven't founded companies or universities or hospitals or museums. The culture they wish to install not only at home but over the rest of us is a nightmare time travel trip backwards into the days of ignorance, savagery, and despair--rape victims stoned to death in public, girls forbidden to learn to read, indoor plumbing and central heating branded as the tools of Satan.

So, no, September 11, 2001 was not a day that changed America forever, thank God.

We were horrified at the carnage, and appalled, and disgusted, and in mourning, and upset, and grieved, and pained, and repelled and royally pissed off.

But we were not impressed.

Copyright © 2002 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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