Great Writing and Analysis from Salon: Post 9/11 America

[Hissyspit]

Jack Rabbit posted this article from Salon in the Editorials section earlier tonight, but I wanted to emphasize certain parts of the work by Salon exec editor Gary Kamiya, since some do not have access to Salon. Brilliant description of America and American behavior in the past four years:

"...Sept. 11 had changed everything forever, the war party and
its supporter's repeated. The apostles of the New Righteousness used the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center to anathematize anyone who failed to embrace the cause. To dissent, even to analyze, was to dishonor the dead, virtually to commit high treason. Those few who tried to stop King George's Crusade from marching to Jerusalem (or Baghdad, in this millennium-later iteration) were swept away like the black protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, hosed off the streets not with water but with the saintly blood of the 9/11 victims. Pundits railed against an elitist "Fifth Column" and compared dissenters to Neville Chamberlain-like "appeasers." In one of the great failures of the opposition in American history, the Democrats and the mainstream media joined the angry mob. A few mumbled some pathetic caveats as they waved their pitchforks, but their bleats were drowned out as the patriotic horde swept on to Infinite Justice.

Beyond the calls to war and vengeance, Americans were told that this was a transforming moment, an epiphany. It was a Great Awakening, not just a political but a spiritual watershed. A pious young writer insisted that after 9/11, irony was dead; he received a large book contract to expand upon his paean to sincerity. Analysts from across the political spectrum argued that the terror attacks, like a vast memento mori, were a manifestation of death and evil that would forever change our superficial, sensation-addled culture. For conservatives, those qualities were in the service of anger; for
liberals, of analysis -- but there was no disagreement about the need for transformation.

Today, the issue of how to comport ourselves in the wake of 9/11 is moot: It has been almost four years since the attacks, and most Americans -- without forgetting the tragedy or disrespecting the dead -- have gotten over it. But our current situation raises almost identical issues, of morality, personal conscience and the responsibility of the media.

For those opposed to the Iraq war and appalled by the moralistic blackmail practiced by the right, it has never been easy to separate legitimate mourning and reflection on the significance of 9/11 from hysteria and unreflective anger. (Indeed, one of the sadder consequences of George W. Bush's divisive war has been the way it has scattered what could have been a shared American grief.) The "9/11 changed everything" line became a tool
used by the right; it overstated the significance of what was not,
historically speaking, an epochal event, and implicitly laid the groundwork for the Iraq war."

MORE AT http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/29/aruba/index_np.html