When September Ends

“You know if we’d lost here in Vietnam, I think it might’ve driven us crazy. Y’know, as a country.”

-The Comedian to Dr Manhattan, Watchmen (1985)

Alan Moore was right. It did drive us crazy. It exposed the limits of America in the 1960s, it made us feel like everything we thought we knew was suddenly not to be trusted. Stalemate against a third-rate Soviet satellite state, corruption in the Oval Office leading to resignation, then the shock of an energy crisis and the coming of stagflation, and then Iran…nobody who saw Argo should wonder how Reagan could win so handily in 1980. People just wanted to forget it ever happened.

Flash forward twenty years.

The first decade of the 21st century was an unmitigated disaster. A controversial election, ultimately awarded to the candidate with fewer votes by a score of 5-4. Then, a rag-tag group of terrorists hits a royal flush on the last card. The country freaks out, the leadership capitalizes, and we go down a rathole of fear and paranoia and blind stupid panic for years. Incompetence is piled on incompetence. A great American city drowns. The economy treads water. The housing market inflates and collapses. The banking sector shits the bed, the economy implodes, and God sends us a messenger in the form of the ex-mayor of Wasilla to show us just how far we sunk. And so, we hand the reins to the nice colored fella…

…and we wake up the next morning and agree to forget how we got here.

The GOP was only too happy to hit the reset button and pass the buck. All the better: they could play scorched earth, launder their brand behind the “Tea Party” label, and rely on a tired nation not to want to re-litigate the past. Yes, we have tens of thousands of troops bogged down in two foreign wars, unemployment is skyrocketing, banks need massive taxpayer bailouts, General Motors is on the verge of collapse…and that’s just how it was when we woke up. No thought to how we got here. Not a lick of consideration to the root causes. Most importantly, no attempt to make sure it won’t happen again. Stock market is running away again, banks are steaming along knowing they have a rescuer of last resort, unemployment – real unemployment, not the formula figure – is still double digits, and the Republicans are running further to the right with every passing election cycle.

I think September 11 drove us a little crazy. It drove us into a world of pant-shitting terror and the kind of stupid that comes when you’re so scared you’ll hurt yourself, like the guy who sees a snake and breaks his leg trying to run. It led us to freedom fries and burning Dixie Chicks records and endless “reality” television and ever-more-drool-faced cable “news”. And we were so embarrassed at what we did to ourselves that we decided to make a fresh start from where we were, without ever correcting what got us there.

Which is how we got here, now. Am I disappointed in Barack Obama over his failure to curtail runaway NSA surveillance? Sure, especially when he campaigned against it five years ago. But I also know full well that had he shut it down in any meaningful way, the first successful terrorist attack would immediately lead to charges that he had kept us from being warned, kept us from defending ourselves, that his indifference to the terrorist threat had let it happen. Hell, that’s already the gist of the constant drumbeat of Benghazi!! from the GOP and its amen corner in the press. Imagine an attack on the scale of the Boston bombing, where the suspects aren’t reeled in by the end of the week, and imagine it happens six months after the NSA publicly shuts down the PRISM project. Guaranteed at least 66% chance of impeachment in the House within a month.

Obama’s had five years to shut this thing down. The Congress has had seven years to raise hell about it. The American people have had four trips to the ballot box where they could have held their elected officials to judgement over the invasion of privacy and the surveillance of an overreaching government. But nobody does. Maybe it’s because we’re still scared, maybe it’s because we don’t much care, but maybe it’s because we’re ashamed to go back and openly look at how we got to the point of needing that program in the first place.

Ronald D. Moore, in his Battlestar Galactica reboot – to this day, perhaps the best artistic comment on September 11 yet – put in Commander Adama’s mouth the cutting sentence “Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore.” That day may be here, it may not. But it needs to come soon. We as a nation have to confront what we did ourselves, and what we were complicit in allowing others to do in our name. We can’t agree to forget, we can’t agree to disagree, we can’t hush it up in the name of comity and good feeling – especially when those who were let up off the mat use it as an opportunity to pull the knives out again and blame others for presiding over the mess they made themselves.

I don’t know what it’s going to take. It’s not as simple as clamping down on big finance and taxing the ridiculously rich and muzzling the watchdogs of the surveillance state. It’s going to take some sober reflection, and some admission that we ourselves lost our damn minds, and acknowledgement that we handed the bullets to Deputy Barney Fife instead of Sheriff Andy Taylor. And we will need to learn and accept what we did wrong so that hopefully we won’t do it again the next time something bad happens.

But on current form, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. Nobody likes to admit they were wrong. We don’t do contrition. Not in America.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.