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A very fitting article. It is long, but well worth the read.
"To those who understand, no explanation is necessary, for those who don't, no explanation is possible."
Spoiler'd for length. Source here: http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/2424/30/
"To those who understand, no explanation is necessary, for those who don't, no explanation is possible."
Spoiler'd for length. Source here: http://www.steynonline.com/content/view/2424/30/
Spoiler:
Topical Take Friday, 11 September 2009
Eight years is a long time - longer than most wars last. I don't know quite when the sensibility of that immediate post-9/11 era slipped from the present into history, but the new Administration and its post-Bush language - "overseas contingency operation", etc - was merely formal confirmation of the transition. The mood delineated in the piece below now belongs to a lost era. By 2007, the father of Tom Burnett had withdrawn his support for the drearily passivist if not actively appeasing Flight 93 memorial, and "Let's roll!" had evolved, in the Danish cartoons crisis and elsewhere, into "Let's roll over". This essay appears in The Face Of The Tiger and was written about a week after September 11th:
It was the accumulation of events that set the tone. One plane hit, then another, then the Pentagon was smoking, the White House was evacuated, the towers crumbled, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, there were other flights missing, there were bomb scares… For a few hours that Tuesday it felt like the Third World War, and so commentators fell into war mode. And by the time the networks had shuttled Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and the other empathetic glamour gals to the scene it was too late to revert to the banality of “healing” and “closure” and all the other guff of a soft-focus grief wallow.
Even on that first day they were saying “everything’s changed”. But what exactly? The main difference seemed to be tonal. These days, an army of grief counsellors can arrive at a high school shooting quicker than a SWAT team. But, when they showed up last week to ply their grisly trade, they found few takers. In my general store, on the TV up above the ammunition and tampons, the local station, temporarily lacking any other local angle, fished a pain-feeler out of the Rolodex. “But a lot of people are saying they feel very angry,” the interviewer gamely pointed out.
“That’s okay,” said the grief counsellor. “Often, in the early stages, when we’re processing pain and hurt and sorrow, it can emerge as anger. So it’s okay to feel anger.”
Clustered round the TV, sipping coffee, the guys were vaguely irritated by this, raising the interesting question of whether it’s okay to feel anger toward the grief counsellor. “Processed pain” is as bland and unsatisfying as processed cheese, and its self-evident irrelevance to the occasion seemed the most pitiful bad taste. It reeked of victimhood, the cult of the age but the last thing most Americans wanted to project at a time when there were so many real, actual victims under the rubble in New York and Washington. The New York Fire Department lost more members in one day than the US armed forces have lost in the last 20 years. And they had no time to have their grief professionally counselled, just a few moments to blow the soot and dust off their helmets and get back in there.
If you want a word for the mood of this immediate aftermath, try “primal”. In a feminised culture, guys were back – big burly firemen evoking Iwo Jima and raising the flag atop the ruins of the World Trade Center. Watching tanks rumble down the street, Manhattanites were amazed to discover that the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue really is an armoury, and not just, as it is to most New Yorkers these days, a heritage site you can rent for art and antique shows. On the steps of the Capitol, members of Congress broke into a spontaneous performance of “God Bless America”. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about an historic event, “America The Beautiful” is about the topography, but, when it comes to the nation, Irving Berlin said it simplest and said it best:
God Bless America
Land that I love
Berlin wrote those lines sincerely and without embarrassment. He was a Jew and he endured slights: When he married a society girl, Ellin Mackay, she was dropped from the Social Register. When Ellin’s sister took up with a Nazi diplomat in New York and went around sporting a diamond swastika, she suffered no such social disapproval. Throughout his life, fate seemed determined to test to the limit Berlin’s faith in both America and the simple certainties of popular song. But he never forgot being a child in Temun, Siberia, when the Cossacks rode in and razed his village, sending his parents scuttling west. About his adopted land, he had no doubts, and his were the words Americans turned to. Sung on Federal property in normal circumstances, they’d be considered religious enough to attract a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union:
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With a light from above…
But even the ACLU isn’t dumb enough to launch church-and-state lawsuits when half of Lower Manhattan is filled with prayer vigils. Prayer, not grief counselling: the real thing, not its ersatz lo-cal substitute.
In my state, New Hampshire, the “Live Free Or Die” state, there were thousands of flags. Dawn Dupont of Pembroke stood out on the road holding her “Beep To Bomb Bin Laden” sign, and the overwhelming majority did. The students at Plymouth State College made a huge “Live Free Or Die Against Terrorism” banner and unfurled it in the state capital, Concord. A neighbour of mine put up the biggest flag in town and demanded a massive military response. “But she’s a Democrat,” I said to a friend. “And a lesbian.” “Ah, yes,” he replied, “but she belongs to the hawkish wing of the lesbian movement.”
There are a lot of them around. The New Statesman would be foolish to assume the warmongers are all GOP cowboys.
In the midst of all this, the globetrotting celebrity Bill Clinton, making a rare appearance back in the United States, showed up on the streets of Lower Manhattan and, for the first time, looked oddly anachronistic. America’s would-be Ex-President-For-Life, he suddenly seemed irretrievably stuck in the day before yesterday. If the Clinton era was characterised by anything, it was public passivity – sometimes because people were content (the economy), sometimes because they were ambivalent (abortion), sometimes because they just didn’t want to know about it (his sex life), sometimes because they were scrupulously non-judgmental to the point of ennui (altogether now: “Everybody does it”). The GOP seemed to find the era tonally offensive as much as anything else. In 1996, Bob Dole howled, “Where’s the outrage?” Three years later, William Bennett wrote a book called The Death Of Outrage.
Well, there’s outrage now, as well there should be, though how it will be directed remains to be seen. If September 11th marked the close of the passive era, then it ended in a spectacular, awful but telling way. The perfect symbol of what Dave Kopel (in National Review) calls “the culture of passivity” is the airline cabin, the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. Massachusetts and California can only aspire to cloud cuckoo land, but up there where the air is rarefied a Federal regulatory authority can bring Utopia into being at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The commercial airliner is an Al Gore dream. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun control. You are by obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you’re rude to her, there’ll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification for all this is a familiar one - that in return for surrendering individual liberties, we’ll all be collectively better off. That was the deal: do as you’re told, and the Federal Aviation Administration will look after you.
Last Tuesday morning, the FAA failed spectacularly to honour their end of the bargain – as I’m sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts, they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you’ll meet no resistance. Indeed, in their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the nearest the western world gets to the condition of those terrorists’ home states. We’ve all experienced those bad weather delays where you’re stuck on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says, “Hey, we’ve been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet Coke?”, and the stewardess says he’ll have to wait, and the guy’s cranky enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks “Yeah, I’m pretty thirsty, too”, but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c’mon, sit down, pal, quit whining, don’t make a fuss, they’ll only delay us even more.
And so, on those Boston flights that morning, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one. If they’d tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA’s assurance: go along with them, be cooperative, the Feds know how to handle these things. I’m sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there’s not very many of them and they don’t have any real weapons, maybe if some of us were to… But by the time they realised they were beyond the protection of the FAA it was too late.
The full story of what happened on three of those four terrible flights will never be known. But we do know something about the final moments of United Airlines Flight 93, the decisive event of the day. Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and others phoned their families to tell them they loved them and to say goodbye. Denied even that consolation, Todd Beamer couldn’t get through to anyone except a telephone company operator, Lisa Jefferson. He explained three men were on board and one seemed to have a bomb tied around his waist. She told him about the planes that had smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mr Beamer said they had a plan to jump the guy with the bomb. He asked her if she would pray with him, so they recited the 23rd Psalm:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…
Then they rushed the hijackers.
Miss Jefferson kept the line open. At 9.58am, the plane crashed, not at Camp David or the White House, but in a field in Pennsylvania. Jeremy Glick knew that he would never see his three-month old daughter again, Todd Beamer that he would never know the baby his wife is expecting in January. But both men understood that they could play their part in preserving a world for their children to grow up in. By being willing to sacrifice themselves, Mr Glick and his comrades saved thousands, perhaps including even the Vice-President and other senior officials. They were not passive.
One of the smartest observers of the American scene, Virginia Postrel, noticed something about these men: they were all technology-company executives. David Brooks, the author of Bobos In Paradise (“bobos” being “bourgeois bohemians”, the new ruling class) has been mocking these tech execs for years. They put their companies in low-rise identikit buildings in boring office parks, a feature of the landscape I have no strong views on one way or the other but which Brooks feels symbolises the deficiencies of the age:
Nowadays when you walk amidst the office parks, you see a country that is great but insufficient too - great in its scientific accomplishments, in its tolerance and in its industriousness.... and yet insufficient because of its self-satisfaction and complacency.
Warming to his theme, he comes close to indicting the office park as an un-American activity:
When you scan through the great figures who are supposed to represent the American spirit, almost all of them seem hopelessly out of place in office parks. We used to think America was a pioneer nation, but the people in the office parks haven’t thrown off the comforts of civilisation to strike out on their own: This isn’t the realm of the Puritan, the Cowboy, or the Immigrant.
So too you can’t fit George Washington in an office park. He may have embodied the American spirit when we were a nation fighting great wars for freedom and democracy, but it is hard to see Cincinnatus getting excited about an IPO.
Nor is it easy to imagine Lincoln parking his Chevy Suburban in one of the oversized spaces and fiddling with his Palm Pilot on his way to the morning meeting. Lincoln was too grand and too political for an office-park nation.
I don’t suppose Lincoln would have given his office park any more thought than he gave his log cabin. But, insofar as there were any consolations on September 11th, it was because of the heroism of the “office-park nation”. Why’s that so surprising? Thomas Burnett headed a company that’s making the devices that replace heart valves smaller. These men worked in the most dynamic sector of the economy, where people start their own businesses, develop new products, and maybe don’t worry enough about how swank their office is. Pace Brooks, they’re the new pioneers, the first settlers: they strike out for new territory – the undeveloped plot on the sub-division on the edge of town – throw up a rude dwelling and get on with the important stuff. According to a friend, Burnett was a “patriot”, a hunter and military history buff whose office had busts of Lincoln, Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. It’s what’s inside the office park that counts.
Miss Jefferson believes she heard what were Todd Beamer’s last words: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!” Then they jumped the hijackers.
“That’s Todd,” his wife Lisa said. “My boys even say that. When we’re getting ready to go somewhere, we say, ‘C’mon guys, let’s roll.’ My little one says, ‘C’mon, Mom, let’s roll.’ That’s something they picked up from Todd.”
As it turned out, the men from the office park would have been instantly recognisable to Washington and Lincoln. They weren’t self-satisfied or complacent at all.
Could you or I do what they did? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which civilians – salesmen, waitresses, accountants, tourists – are in the front line. America will need more Todd Beamers and Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the air. The culture of passivity is spread very wide throughout the west - the belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty.
We know now that, for all its promises, the Federal Government wasn’t up there over upstate New York when Flight 11 doglegged and began homing in on Washington. We know, too, that when you’re facing terrorists willing to kill and die that the decisive moments are the first – the few minutes before they’ve established control or killed their first stewardess. So the next time it happens, Americans have a choice: they can follow FAA guidelines – or they can say screw ’em and their worthless assurances, and rush forward to overpower the fanatics, even if the FAA has seen to it they’ve nothing to charge them with except the rubber chicken. If you want a name for it, try the “Minutemen” – after the men of the Revolutionary War who were pledged to take the field at a minute’s notice.
Across the placid, prosperous post-war decades, all the great words have been appropriated: if “courage” means facing up to your drinking problem, what’s left for a fellow on a business flight who jumps the whacko with the bomb? In his Inauguration Address, George W Bush enjoined the American people to be “citizens, not subjects” and, although no one paid much attention at the time, last week gave us some fine examples. Slate’s Mickey Kaus thinks nothing’s changed – that the sleeping giant will get bored, go back to sleep and this will all be off the front pages by Thanksgiving. But at least the horror and heroism of September 11th has usefully brought into focus the two alternatives the next time this happens (and it will, sooner than we think): you can be the kind of citizen who acts, or you can be the kind who just sits there and lets the Federal Government regulate his cutlery.
C’mon, guys. Let’s roll.
from The Face Of The Tiger
Eight years is a long time - longer than most wars last. I don't know quite when the sensibility of that immediate post-9/11 era slipped from the present into history, but the new Administration and its post-Bush language - "overseas contingency operation", etc - was merely formal confirmation of the transition. The mood delineated in the piece below now belongs to a lost era. By 2007, the father of Tom Burnett had withdrawn his support for the drearily passivist if not actively appeasing Flight 93 memorial, and "Let's roll!" had evolved, in the Danish cartoons crisis and elsewhere, into "Let's roll over". This essay appears in The Face Of The Tiger and was written about a week after September 11th:
It was the accumulation of events that set the tone. One plane hit, then another, then the Pentagon was smoking, the White House was evacuated, the towers crumbled, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, there were other flights missing, there were bomb scares… For a few hours that Tuesday it felt like the Third World War, and so commentators fell into war mode. And by the time the networks had shuttled Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and the other empathetic glamour gals to the scene it was too late to revert to the banality of “healing” and “closure” and all the other guff of a soft-focus grief wallow.
Even on that first day they were saying “everything’s changed”. But what exactly? The main difference seemed to be tonal. These days, an army of grief counsellors can arrive at a high school shooting quicker than a SWAT team. But, when they showed up last week to ply their grisly trade, they found few takers. In my general store, on the TV up above the ammunition and tampons, the local station, temporarily lacking any other local angle, fished a pain-feeler out of the Rolodex. “But a lot of people are saying they feel very angry,” the interviewer gamely pointed out.
“That’s okay,” said the grief counsellor. “Often, in the early stages, when we’re processing pain and hurt and sorrow, it can emerge as anger. So it’s okay to feel anger.”
Clustered round the TV, sipping coffee, the guys were vaguely irritated by this, raising the interesting question of whether it’s okay to feel anger toward the grief counsellor. “Processed pain” is as bland and unsatisfying as processed cheese, and its self-evident irrelevance to the occasion seemed the most pitiful bad taste. It reeked of victimhood, the cult of the age but the last thing most Americans wanted to project at a time when there were so many real, actual victims under the rubble in New York and Washington. The New York Fire Department lost more members in one day than the US armed forces have lost in the last 20 years. And they had no time to have their grief professionally counselled, just a few moments to blow the soot and dust off their helmets and get back in there.
If you want a word for the mood of this immediate aftermath, try “primal”. In a feminised culture, guys were back – big burly firemen evoking Iwo Jima and raising the flag atop the ruins of the World Trade Center. Watching tanks rumble down the street, Manhattanites were amazed to discover that the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue really is an armoury, and not just, as it is to most New Yorkers these days, a heritage site you can rent for art and antique shows. On the steps of the Capitol, members of Congress broke into a spontaneous performance of “God Bless America”. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about an historic event, “America The Beautiful” is about the topography, but, when it comes to the nation, Irving Berlin said it simplest and said it best:
God Bless America
Land that I love
Berlin wrote those lines sincerely and without embarrassment. He was a Jew and he endured slights: When he married a society girl, Ellin Mackay, she was dropped from the Social Register. When Ellin’s sister took up with a Nazi diplomat in New York and went around sporting a diamond swastika, she suffered no such social disapproval. Throughout his life, fate seemed determined to test to the limit Berlin’s faith in both America and the simple certainties of popular song. But he never forgot being a child in Temun, Siberia, when the Cossacks rode in and razed his village, sending his parents scuttling west. About his adopted land, he had no doubts, and his were the words Americans turned to. Sung on Federal property in normal circumstances, they’d be considered religious enough to attract a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union:
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With a light from above…
But even the ACLU isn’t dumb enough to launch church-and-state lawsuits when half of Lower Manhattan is filled with prayer vigils. Prayer, not grief counselling: the real thing, not its ersatz lo-cal substitute.
In my state, New Hampshire, the “Live Free Or Die” state, there were thousands of flags. Dawn Dupont of Pembroke stood out on the road holding her “Beep To Bomb Bin Laden” sign, and the overwhelming majority did. The students at Plymouth State College made a huge “Live Free Or Die Against Terrorism” banner and unfurled it in the state capital, Concord. A neighbour of mine put up the biggest flag in town and demanded a massive military response. “But she’s a Democrat,” I said to a friend. “And a lesbian.” “Ah, yes,” he replied, “but she belongs to the hawkish wing of the lesbian movement.”
There are a lot of them around. The New Statesman would be foolish to assume the warmongers are all GOP cowboys.
In the midst of all this, the globetrotting celebrity Bill Clinton, making a rare appearance back in the United States, showed up on the streets of Lower Manhattan and, for the first time, looked oddly anachronistic. America’s would-be Ex-President-For-Life, he suddenly seemed irretrievably stuck in the day before yesterday. If the Clinton era was characterised by anything, it was public passivity – sometimes because people were content (the economy), sometimes because they were ambivalent (abortion), sometimes because they just didn’t want to know about it (his sex life), sometimes because they were scrupulously non-judgmental to the point of ennui (altogether now: “Everybody does it”). The GOP seemed to find the era tonally offensive as much as anything else. In 1996, Bob Dole howled, “Where’s the outrage?” Three years later, William Bennett wrote a book called The Death Of Outrage.
Well, there’s outrage now, as well there should be, though how it will be directed remains to be seen. If September 11th marked the close of the passive era, then it ended in a spectacular, awful but telling way. The perfect symbol of what Dave Kopel (in National Review) calls “the culture of passivity” is the airline cabin, the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. Massachusetts and California can only aspire to cloud cuckoo land, but up there where the air is rarefied a Federal regulatory authority can bring Utopia into being at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The commercial airliner is an Al Gore dream. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun control. You are by obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you’re rude to her, there’ll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification for all this is a familiar one - that in return for surrendering individual liberties, we’ll all be collectively better off. That was the deal: do as you’re told, and the Federal Aviation Administration will look after you.
Last Tuesday morning, the FAA failed spectacularly to honour their end of the bargain – as I’m sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts, they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you’ll meet no resistance. Indeed, in their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the nearest the western world gets to the condition of those terrorists’ home states. We’ve all experienced those bad weather delays where you’re stuck on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says, “Hey, we’ve been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet Coke?”, and the stewardess says he’ll have to wait, and the guy’s cranky enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks “Yeah, I’m pretty thirsty, too”, but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c’mon, sit down, pal, quit whining, don’t make a fuss, they’ll only delay us even more.
And so, on those Boston flights that morning, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one. If they’d tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA’s assurance: go along with them, be cooperative, the Feds know how to handle these things. I’m sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there’s not very many of them and they don’t have any real weapons, maybe if some of us were to… But by the time they realised they were beyond the protection of the FAA it was too late.
The full story of what happened on three of those four terrible flights will never be known. But we do know something about the final moments of United Airlines Flight 93, the decisive event of the day. Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and others phoned their families to tell them they loved them and to say goodbye. Denied even that consolation, Todd Beamer couldn’t get through to anyone except a telephone company operator, Lisa Jefferson. He explained three men were on board and one seemed to have a bomb tied around his waist. She told him about the planes that had smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mr Beamer said they had a plan to jump the guy with the bomb. He asked her if she would pray with him, so they recited the 23rd Psalm:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…
Then they rushed the hijackers.
Miss Jefferson kept the line open. At 9.58am, the plane crashed, not at Camp David or the White House, but in a field in Pennsylvania. Jeremy Glick knew that he would never see his three-month old daughter again, Todd Beamer that he would never know the baby his wife is expecting in January. But both men understood that they could play their part in preserving a world for their children to grow up in. By being willing to sacrifice themselves, Mr Glick and his comrades saved thousands, perhaps including even the Vice-President and other senior officials. They were not passive.
One of the smartest observers of the American scene, Virginia Postrel, noticed something about these men: they were all technology-company executives. David Brooks, the author of Bobos In Paradise (“bobos” being “bourgeois bohemians”, the new ruling class) has been mocking these tech execs for years. They put their companies in low-rise identikit buildings in boring office parks, a feature of the landscape I have no strong views on one way or the other but which Brooks feels symbolises the deficiencies of the age:
Nowadays when you walk amidst the office parks, you see a country that is great but insufficient too - great in its scientific accomplishments, in its tolerance and in its industriousness.... and yet insufficient because of its self-satisfaction and complacency.
Warming to his theme, he comes close to indicting the office park as an un-American activity:
When you scan through the great figures who are supposed to represent the American spirit, almost all of them seem hopelessly out of place in office parks. We used to think America was a pioneer nation, but the people in the office parks haven’t thrown off the comforts of civilisation to strike out on their own: This isn’t the realm of the Puritan, the Cowboy, or the Immigrant.
So too you can’t fit George Washington in an office park. He may have embodied the American spirit when we were a nation fighting great wars for freedom and democracy, but it is hard to see Cincinnatus getting excited about an IPO.
Nor is it easy to imagine Lincoln parking his Chevy Suburban in one of the oversized spaces and fiddling with his Palm Pilot on his way to the morning meeting. Lincoln was too grand and too political for an office-park nation.
I don’t suppose Lincoln would have given his office park any more thought than he gave his log cabin. But, insofar as there were any consolations on September 11th, it was because of the heroism of the “office-park nation”. Why’s that so surprising? Thomas Burnett headed a company that’s making the devices that replace heart valves smaller. These men worked in the most dynamic sector of the economy, where people start their own businesses, develop new products, and maybe don’t worry enough about how swank their office is. Pace Brooks, they’re the new pioneers, the first settlers: they strike out for new territory – the undeveloped plot on the sub-division on the edge of town – throw up a rude dwelling and get on with the important stuff. According to a friend, Burnett was a “patriot”, a hunter and military history buff whose office had busts of Lincoln, Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. It’s what’s inside the office park that counts.
Miss Jefferson believes she heard what were Todd Beamer’s last words: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!” Then they jumped the hijackers.
“That’s Todd,” his wife Lisa said. “My boys even say that. When we’re getting ready to go somewhere, we say, ‘C’mon guys, let’s roll.’ My little one says, ‘C’mon, Mom, let’s roll.’ That’s something they picked up from Todd.”
As it turned out, the men from the office park would have been instantly recognisable to Washington and Lincoln. They weren’t self-satisfied or complacent at all.
Could you or I do what they did? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which civilians – salesmen, waitresses, accountants, tourists – are in the front line. America will need more Todd Beamers and Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the air. The culture of passivity is spread very wide throughout the west - the belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty.
We know now that, for all its promises, the Federal Government wasn’t up there over upstate New York when Flight 11 doglegged and began homing in on Washington. We know, too, that when you’re facing terrorists willing to kill and die that the decisive moments are the first – the few minutes before they’ve established control or killed their first stewardess. So the next time it happens, Americans have a choice: they can follow FAA guidelines – or they can say screw ’em and their worthless assurances, and rush forward to overpower the fanatics, even if the FAA has seen to it they’ve nothing to charge them with except the rubber chicken. If you want a name for it, try the “Minutemen” – after the men of the Revolutionary War who were pledged to take the field at a minute’s notice.
Across the placid, prosperous post-war decades, all the great words have been appropriated: if “courage” means facing up to your drinking problem, what’s left for a fellow on a business flight who jumps the whacko with the bomb? In his Inauguration Address, George W Bush enjoined the American people to be “citizens, not subjects” and, although no one paid much attention at the time, last week gave us some fine examples. Slate’s Mickey Kaus thinks nothing’s changed – that the sleeping giant will get bored, go back to sleep and this will all be off the front pages by Thanksgiving. But at least the horror and heroism of September 11th has usefully brought into focus the two alternatives the next time this happens (and it will, sooner than we think): you can be the kind of citizen who acts, or you can be the kind who just sits there and lets the Federal Government regulate his cutlery.
C’mon, guys. Let’s roll.
from The Face Of The Tiger
