As much of a letdown in the wake of seeming certainty as 2012 was, and as much as I’ve started to believe that only the opening of a new frontier can hope to save this frontier culture of ours in the long-run, I don’t lack motivation to get to the polls and cast my one vote today. For those of similar persuasion who do need a little pep talk, however, I believe I can provide.
I have lived among the Left for many years. I have experienced firsthand what they say about us when they are certain they can’t possibly be among anyone but their own kind. And I wish I could say that the news was good — that it portended anything but a continuation of irreconcilable differences and division that will continue to pain this country without an end in sight.
What I can tell you with clarity is that we are a joke and an embarrassment to them, you and I — with our ridiculous flag-waving patriotism, our silly belief in the American Way worthy of non-stop Colbert Report caricature. Our devotion to an old, outdated Constitution that doesn’t even guarantee the “right” to free healthcare. Our quaint ideas about “freedom” having anything to do with being “free” to be taxed less, or not required by the state to do things that are clearly for our own good. America is Changing, becoming a Progressive social democracy where you will be governed by people smarter and better than you, and you’d better get over it. Or not. Who cares what you think, really. Just so you shut up and stop dragging the rest of the country down into the dark ages, forcing your enlightened betters to consider desperate measures such as seeking political asylum in Canada.
You’re a joke. But you’re also an enigma in some sense — a creature whose ideas can’t make any kind of sense or be logically understood, so the only possible explanation is a knuckle-dragging, hayseed cartoon caricature.
Whatever. We’d be moving Forward a lot faster, and “catching up” with the rest of the world, if not for your fake “news” outlets whose broadcast licenses should have been revoked a long time ago. Maybe if you stay in your trailer park or wherever it is that you live and keep your backward, reactionary ideas to yourself this time, things will go right, and your countrymen won’t have to be quite so embarrassed when they apologize to their enlightened European friends about this laughing stock of a country.
Do America and the world a favor. Stay home today. ‘K?
Dealing with years of ignored water damage, in the course of replacing an exterior door on our “new” old house, has me reflecting on the deferred (but never decreasing!) cost of neglect. In particular, it brings to mind Bill Whittle’s classic “Sanctuary” essay, which is always a worthy read.
Check your houses’ essential structures and foundations, folks — both literally and metaphorically — and make needed repairs while the sun is shining. As Bill rightly pointed out, it’s far, far better to face reality — however unpleasant said reality may be — than to close your eyes and let things get even worse.
I published the following on September 11th, 2004, on another site I had back then. That site having gone the way of homepage.mac.com, I thought I’d reunite this post with the rest of my 9/11 series.
Plenty has happened in the decade since, and I’m glad to see that we did ultimately rebuild at the World Trade Center site, even as I’m still concerned that it took us as long as it did.
In September 2001, I was living about 110 miles up the Hudson River from New York City. According to published flight path information, American Airlines Flight 11 passed not so very far from overhead on that morning three years ago, on its way toward New York City and its collision with the north tower of the World Trade Center. I visited Ground Zero two weeks after the terrorist attacks, at which time the fence perimeter allowed one to get within two blocks or so of the site — close enough to experience the twisted wreckage of the towers’ remaining outer walls, the debris everywhere, the people working to search for human remains and clear the site, as something undeniably real. And amid the complex knot of feelings that continued to unravel in the sunken pit of my stomach — including the struggle to address the seemingly impossible question of how any human being could be capable of following through on, much less conceiving of such a vicious attack — I also felt, and still very much feel today, a strong conviction about at least one thing: Ultimately, we must rebuild.
Why care so much about putting some new buildings in Lower Manhattan? After all, the catastrophe of that day is over, its victims irreversibly claimed. Nothing we do now can bring them back to us.
I care about what we do to rebuild, because the towers symbolize something positive to me — they were monuments to human progress, to what people in a free and voluntary society are capable of achieving. And I care because I see vital symbolism in the act of rebuilding itself, of finding and enacting a design that not only mourns respectfully “They are gone”, but also affirms with conviction “We are still here.” That our culture is not going away; that we will continue to aspire, dream, strive, design, build, achieve, and live, in many ways, as we have. That we will create our own future rather than accept the fate chosen for us.
But how to rebuild? What to construct in the emptiness where the towers once stood? For me, architect Sherri Tracinski hit on the key issue in her 2002 article written in disappointed response to earlier WTC redevelopment proposals for buildings that fell short of the the Twin Towers’ stature:
Anything less than a new tower at the same height — or higher — is demonstrating to those who hate us that we intend to cut back, roll over, and give up. It is not the quick, violent suicide of putting a gun to your head, but the slow suicide of a man who has given up trying to live.
“Throughout history,” she reminds us, “many great buildings have been damaged and destroyed in war. What a society does to rebuild afterward is an omen for its future survival.” [emphasis mine]
Twenty-five hundred years ago, a marauding Persian army sacked the Greek city of Athens and burned the Parthenon, the city’s most important temple. What did the ancient Athenians do? They didn’t decide they should make a smaller temple so that it would be less of a target in the future. They didn’t decide that they were guilty of offending the enemy with their wealth and success. They didn’t leave a barren plateau to commemorate the men who died fighting the Persians. Instead, after they roundly defeated the enemy, they rebuilt bigger and better.
The old Parthenon had been built of limestone. The new Parthenon was built of the finest material the Athenians could find—white marble—and decorated with inspiring sculptures of heroes. It was the greatest Greek temple ever built and marked the beginning of the Athenian “Golden Age.”
It is in the wake of historic precedents such as this one that we are left to decide what it is that we will do. Will we “cut back” half-heartedly? Or will we summon the will to replace what was taken from us with something still more ambitious? In July, the cornerstone was laid for the first and tallest building now scheduled to be constructed at the site. The planned “Freedom Tower” would, at 1,776 feet, stand taller still than did the 1,362 and 1,368 foot Twin Towers. Yet if the tone and content of last Tuesday’s Frontline report “Sacred Ground” is to be believed, the construction of the tower seems anything but certain — jeopardized by infighting among rival architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, developer Larry Silverstein, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the city and state governments of New York. Will we blow it by letting the project become mired in egos and politics? Will we be persuaded that we shouldn’t even care — or maybe, just maybe should even be glad to see the towers gone?
It’s at this point that I struggle to fathom stuff like this. It takes a pretty twisted worldview to attempt to brush aside the viciousness and human toll of September 11th and invoke a phrase like “radical architectural criticism” to describe the deliberate flying of aircraft full of people into buildings full of people. People, some of whom chose to jump to their deaths rather than accept the fate that had been chosen for them. Maus creator Art Spiegelman really ought to know better. And he ought to know all about what life in an actual police state is like. James Lileks takes him deservedly to task, on the eve of publication of Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers. (There’s no anchor, so you’ll have to scroll to about the bottom third of the page to find the part about Spiegelman. There’s a pointed note about journalism and the recent carnage in Beslan along the way. Link courtesy of Instapundit.)
That’s how Spiegelman would have us feel about the towers, our culture, and ourselves? Thanks, Art. We’ll remember that.
Clearly there is nothing to stop us from succumbing to this kind of thinking if we choose to do so. How we respond, how we move on, is our choice. I’m moved to remember Senator McCain’s words as he declared in his gentle, measured tone, “What our enemies have sought to destroy is beyond their reach. It cannot be taken from us. It can only be surrendered.” And so indeed, it is left up to us to decide what to do next. We can resign ourselves to accept empty footprints and a hole in the sky, or some modest concession, where the towers once stood. Or we can rebuild with determination to reach still greater heights.
Those who perished needlessly in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, can never be replaced. But I believe we can best honor their memory by our commitment to keeping our enterprising culture alive and thriving.
What we have built still stands tall in our hearts.
Links
Frederick Turner’s “Honor in the Sky” provides another interesting take on the meaning of rebuilding, and offers the imaginative if maybe not practical (?) idea of placing a garden memorial atop the new building(s).
Team Twin Towers [link broken] hosts a page of comments from survivors and others who would like to see the towers or something like them rebuilt.
Another 9/11 has rolled around. And while the grief and anger are still there, and we have renewed cause for concern this year in the rise of ISIS/ISIL, I find that my feelings seem not particularly more pronounced on this day relative to any other. The problems that we are obliged to squarely face endure, and are relevant every day of the year, not just on anniversaries of the September 11th, 2001 Jihadist attacks on the United States.
The sickening brutality of ISIS/ISIL and its ideological fellow travelers such as Boko Haram has been something for the world to behold. If we cannot now see with complete clarity what these scumbags are about, I don’t know what it will take. The fact of things as I see it is that ISIS/ISIL are but a particularly awful symptom, one that is enabled and allowed to exist only to the extent that we lack the resolve to call them what they are and commit ourselves unreservedly to their complete and unconditional defeat.
The broader, underlying problem we face is an erosion of cultural confidence, and I’m sad to say it’s the predictable result of decades of steady, dedicated work by many among us — people whose aim has been to demoralize us and gradually chisel away at the foundations of our belief in who we are and the way that we live. An event such as 9/11 should have brought us to our senses, it seems to me, and brought an end to that idle self-doubt, seemingly born of boredom with years of relative safety and security. But I’ve been proven more wrong in that expectation than in any other of my life. Rather than have a change of heart, our cultural termites dug in and continued their toil. It makes no sense to me to see a culture of great achievement, worthy of celebration and of a strident and confident defense, in such willful and sometimes self-recriminating denial about the threats posed to it. But there it is. It’s an aspect of human nature that I suspect I will continue to struggle to understand for many years to come.
I do feel I’ve made progress, though, in casting off the shadow of gloom this past year and a half or so. It feels as if my thinking has shifted to a point of: OK. So that’s how it is. What are you going to do about it?
Our present condition is not cause to sit in idle resignation. It’s cause to get up, dust ourselves off, and fix the things that matter. And despite all the potential reasons for gloom, I’m doing it with gratitude in my heart, a cheerful demeanor, and a smile on my face — because I’ve learned that no matter what, one cannot allow others to drive him to despair. To have hope of prevailing, we must maintain a steady and undaunted focus on all that is positive in our love for what we hold dear. We must make that love stronger, more resilient, and more lasting than our enemies’ bitterness, brutality, and hate. It’s what I’ve been striving to do, and aim to continue to do, with The No Fear Pioneer (so please give a listen, and stay tuned for more to come).
That’s it for now. As in previous years, I may follow up with some links and quotes later, as I read good work by others. Below are links to my previous years’ 9/11 posts, including the 2009 retelling of my own peripheral but deeply affecting experience of that awful day. As before, I pledge myself never to forget — nor misremember. May we find our way to better times.
Given the way Bill Whittle’s extraordinary “Silent America” essays saved me from isolation and despair years ago, it should have come as no surprise that a series of new videos from Bill was the first thing that gave me any reason for hope after the re-election of Barack Obama in November. More than that even, Bill’s words and ideas in these videos made me feel unexpectedly energized about the prospect of a way forward. Watching them is no small time commitment, but neither is saving our beloved USA, and I can vouch for the fact that Bill doesn’t disappoint. His sober but undaunted thinking seems like exactly what we need now.
I started with “A New Beginning…”, the November 7, 2012 episode of Bill’s semi-regular video podcast, “The Stratosphere Lounge”. In it, Bill advances a big-picture idea that looks beyond the process of politics-as-usual that has repeatedly failed us, to postulate a tectonic cultural shift that may now be possible: American citizens voluntarily contributing to the building of parellel private-sector institutions that will put their sclerotic, unsustainable government counterparts to shame by the comparison of results they produce. There’s more to it than that, and Bill explains and motivates his idea in much greater depth than I can hope to effectively summarize, so by all means give this a watch if you can.
Bill’s thinking seems to me to contain echoes of Virginia Postrel’s “Dynamism”, with a key idea being emphasis of decentralized, voluntary initiative in diverse and numerous laboratories of innovation over attempting to shape the future through rigid central planning.
The book Bill mentions in this video, “The Starfish and the Spider”, is available on Amazon, by the way.
If you might only find time to watch one of these videos, I’d probably suggest starting with “Where do we go now?”, Bill’s talk at the November 12, 2012 Hancock Park Patriots meeting, which is followed by an unmissable Q&A session (OK, OK, that makes two videos) in which Bill demonstrates how an effective President of the United States would handle key issues and address a press corps that actually did its job and asked tough questions:
As I remarked and quasi-summarized in my Twitter timeline after watching “A New Beginning”:
Bill’s is a big dream, but dammit, everything worth having in this country was built by people who dreamed big. It can be done!
Focusing only on the next election is the trap we keep falling into; it’s how we keep losing ground. It’s the best our opponents can hope for. Progressives/Alinskyites have a long-term plan that has changed the culture over decades. That’s the game we need to play, but there’s more…
Our existing cultural institutions — education, entertainment, space exploration — are lost. They are tied to a sinking Leviathan of a state. Our only hope is to build voluntary parallel institutions that outshine them, that will show by comparison what miserable failures they are.
The good news: Culture leads; government only very slowly reacts and follows and struggles clumsily to adapt.
Our present centralized government is born of the Industrial Revolution, a by-gone age. It’s unlikely to survive the next big paradigm shift. It’s ossified, rigid, slow-moving, and economically unsustainable. The future requires dynamism, adaptability, decentralization.
Progressivism’s idea of “Forward” is the dinosaur in the room. It’s rigid, coercive, glued to theory that doesn’t flex when reality defies it. Think of all the technological revolutions that have blindsided us in our lifetimes, that few saw coming, and the impact they’ve had. Things we’re incapable of planning for end up mattering the most. Progress is what happens while Progressives are busy making other plans.
Anticipating what might be the next wave is hard enough. Trying to engineer a rigidly defined future is a losing battle. Dynamism wins.
So many genuinely smart people know just enough to think they can engineer the world. If engineering has taught me anything, it’s humility. Solvable problems have to be very tightly constrained, conditions for solving them clearly defined. Reality can ruin your whole day.
We know what doesn’t work, or works clumsily at best and seems doomed to collapse under its own weight and inertia, but what’s the alternative? What are the practical mechanics of a way out? Building parallel private-sector institutions whose success puts their government rivals to shame.
The crux of Bill’s idea: Pay your taxes. Write that off as gone, lost. Forget it. Budget some of what’s left to help build something better.
It’s a grand and vague idea in some respects, but I do believe with the right approach this can work. Government can’t compete with private sector dynamism.
I stand by that assessment, and I have hope we’ll find that some variant of Bill’s ideas on this will provide a real and achievable way out. If you yearn to reclaim our future as I do, by all means please give Bill’s latest work a hearing.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
