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September 11, 2006
Five Years
It's really hard to believe that five years have passed since September 11, 2001. It's difficult to comprehend all that has transpired in the time since then, for both our society and my small corner of it. For the vast majority of Americans, I think that those hijacked planes were like cold and jagged scalpels cutting into our collective cocoon. The Nineties were an age of hope, unprecedented prosperity and, I think it is safe to say, a generally strong undercurrent of confidence and self-satisfaction. The zeitgeist of the Nineties ended on 9/11.
What an idyllic little world we had built for oursevles as of September 10, 2001. Still, it would be too simple, and unfair, to characterize the September 11 attacks, to borrow Donald Kagan's terms for the Peloponnesian War, as "a tragic event, a great turning point in history, the end of an era of progress, prosperity, confidence and hope, and the beginning of a darker time": to a significant extent the Clinton era was one in which we, as a society, collectively drank the Kool Aid.
Beyond America's shores, the intensifying smoke from a distant fire was increasingly clear to all who cared to look carefully. I can remember travelling to China in the summer of 2001 amidst all kinds of hints of bad craziness-the sense that something was going to happen-stemming from travel advisories, the underlying vibe, my own gut, etc. The world we tried to make with the end of the Cold War had, in fact, been steadily unravelling for some time.
In other words, looking back on the decade that preceded September 10, 2001, we should have seen that something was indeed coming. Stepping out on a limb (its always easy to talk about what we should have seen once history has shown her cards), what do I see looking back on the last 5 years? What do I see in my nation and the rest of the world that could really drive the next 5 or 10 years?
Well, here are some random thoughts from a madman:
1. Before the rest of the world, we are a Roman society without Roman values. That is perhaps the worst thing you can be. In foreign policy terms, it would be better to be French than what we are.
2. The political leadership of Western societies is really quite weak, and that reflects deeply divided but also apathetic elecorates. In the US we have resorted to war, whatever the arguments against it, because ordinary political channels no longer seem to be able to meaningfully and forcefully address anything. And this isn't just about Iraq: both the UN and our Western allies eroded their credibility throughout the Nineties in places like the Balkans. Negotiations became an endless cul-de-sac.
3. Within America, the War on Terror has allowed us to miss the story of the decade on the domestic front: the Fed has done a terrible job regulating the monetary supply. Its' strategy has essentially led us from one potentially devastating financial bubble to another.
4. Similarly, global warming is a serious challenge, but the absence of any of our mainstream political actors from the debate (they were too busy talking about security) has allowed public discourse on the subject to be framed by a bunch of people who never ran for sheriff, with predictable results.
5. The cyber-balkanization of America continues apace, making any kind of real public discussion harder and harder.
6. They never should have cancelled Frasier, Seinfeld or Friends. Staleness, warts, etc. and all, they were vastly superior to what dominates the network landscape today. I'm not sure exactly how this will influence geopolitics, but I am sure that it will.
Posted by dag at September 11, 2006 1:58 PM