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The Post 9/11 Generation

The Twin Towers

On September 11, 2001, our nation – and much of the world – watched – in shock, with emotions raw – as two towers, two massive feats of engineering, symbols of the triumph of capitalism and technology, of greed and power, of America and freedom, stood with gaping holes burning on a crisp, clear September morning. Then the towers fell.

In that moment, we Americans were united and much of the world with us. We are all Americans! We are all New Yorkers!” Le Monde declared. Vigils were held in Tehran for the victims. Around the world, there was outrage and sadness over the events. We were a long way from freedom fries and Ahmadinejad.

Three Generations

Three generations of Americans stood before their televisions sets and on the streets of New York City and Washington D.C. and watched these events unfold: the Greatest Generation which had endured the Great Depression, fought a cataclysmic world war, and set America on a path to isolate the Soviet Union and win the cold war; the Baby Boomers split into two camps: those liberals who had seen the corruptions and hypocrisies of their parents’ world and marched in support of civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and against the Vietnam war and American imperialism; and those conservatives who decried their parents’ tepid stand against Communism, wanting this totalitarian ideology declared the evil that it was, who wanted to fight Communism wherever it was and destroy it, and who at the same time, wanted to preserve traditional values at home, to ward off the rapid changes the Baby Boomer liberals and the Greatest Generation had put into motion; and then there was us, a generation without an identity, who had not yet been shaped by great movements or moments in history, and who saw the two towers burning fall. On 9/11 we were all one people.

On 9/12 we began to put each of our selves back together.

Those in the Greatest Generation, elderly, stood aside, offering advice, waiting to be called upon for service and sacrifice, looking at FDR’s marshaling of America’s resources after Pearl Harbor as a model.

Our generation, uncertain, waited for guidance.

Those in power, Republicans and Democrats of the Baby Boom Generation, panicked. Congress passed bills expanding government power without reading or understanding them; the directive went down from the President: the gloves are off: we must use any means necessary to stop another attack; the media, sensing the mood of the country, placed American flags on every broadcast and avoided asking tough questions.

Karl Rove

But as the dust settled, old divisions began to reassert themselves. Perhaps the most pivotal figure in the domestic fallout that followed was Karl Rove. Rove had been trying to find a defining moment which he could use to create a new political consensus, to create a transformation in the electorate. He saw that 9/11 would be a transformational event, and that it could be the defining event of the early 21st century.

So he decided to harness this anti-American attack and to use it to isolate those views he saw as threats – the views of the liberal Baby Boomers. He believed history had provided him with the lever to move the electorate and the country into his ideological camp. Rove thought he could use 9/11 to initiate a shift in the electorate and consolidate his party’s hold on power. Gradually, his strategy backfired, and America became more polarized than ever, split roughly along the same lines as they had split in the 1960s. The Baby Boomers, united on September 11, 2001 had become polarized again by September 11, 2002.

Here is where we leave history leaves us today – with out parents’ generation hopelessly polarized, bringing to this pivotal moment in history their various prejudices and suspicions; somehow, the challenges we face from islamist radicals, from global climate change, from a failing health care system, from the demands of globalization have become subordinated to a culture war in which there can be no winner. Like a bickering couple, this generation has polarized around every issue and made each issue serve a purpose in their larger and more petty generational conflict.

The Post 9/11 Generation

My generation – those who have graduated high school between 1997 and the the present, the post 9/11 generation – has been shaped almost entirely by the post-Cold War administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. We have watched and sometimes participated in this war of our parents, but have never been entirely invested in it. Instead, we volunteered locally, we created communities over the web, we started businesses, we marched against war on our campuses – we made a difference in each of our local communities, but made no impact on our nation’s course.

We can see the enormity of the problems facing us, and we realize the pettiness of so many of the issues that take up the media’s attention. While our society waste reams of paper debating whether to accept gay marriage, evolution, or presidential trysts, the issues of civil liberties, terrorism, environmental issues, health care, education, and free speech (including net neutrality), are largely ignored. After 9/11, my generation realized that we would soon be inheriting this world with all of it’s burdens and responsibilities, and today, six years on, we see a fucked up world falling apart and we are divorced from the levers of power, unable to alter the unfortunate trajectory of our history.

We, the post 9/11 generation, are a cynical generation. But we hold out for the promise of hope.

This is why we must show up at the polls and caucuses this winter to determine which candidates we will have to choose from. We must not let this election pass us by. This next election is our chance, our opportunity to make our voices heard. And we cannot let another four or eight years pass with more of the same petty culture wars overshadowing the real and pressing issues we face. Our parents may not have to deal with these issues, but we will.

2008 must be the year we lay our claim to the leadership of our country. We may yet have another chance before these issues are hard upon us; or this may be our last chance to prepare for coming storm.

Categories
Domestic issues Law Politics The War on Terrorism

The meaning of is is

Dahlia Lithwick, by far, my favorite Slate columnist, wrote this piece today about Michael Mukasey’s supposed “independence” as proved by his understanding of what torture is. It all depends on what the meaning of the word is is.

Categories
Election 2008 Foreign Policy Obama Politics

The Real Obama

There have been a few profiles in the past few days of Senator Obama, timed perhaps to coincide with the beginning of the sprint for the Democratic nomination.  I already posted some excerpts from Andrew Sullivan’s excellent piece and the candidate himself seems to have picked up on the meme himself.  The theme of Sullivan’s piece was that no other candidate had the promise or the potential of Obama and that Obama and Obama alone could truly respond to this unique moment in American history, both culturally within our country and as our representative abroad.  James Traub has a piece that is somewhat more critical in the New York Times Magazine this past weekend.  Traub reports that Obama is supported by most of the Democratic foreign policy elite, aside from a few of President Clinton’s top aides, who support Hillary.  However, among many voters, Traub sees the problem as this:

Democratic voters seem to be torn between the hope of reshaping a frightening world and the fear of being terribly vulnerable to that world.

Traub concludes:

Obama concedes that he has a problem. “We have not fully made our case yet,” he admits. “I think the American people know in their gut that we need significant change, and I think they’d like to believe what I’m saying is possible.” But they need, says this former law-school professor, “a permission structure.” They need to know that they’ll be safe with Barack Obama. Or unsafe with Hillary Clinton.

Two months before the presidential primaries begin, it still looks like a hard sell.

From the Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett reaches a similar conclusion while analyzing Barack Obama’s charisma and personal appeal.  He explains how he researched Obama’s past trying to find some dirt from his years at Harvard Law, but that oddly enough he could not find anyone who disliked Obama.  Barnett finds this extraordinary – for a top student at a top school who won every honor and excelled, graduating magna cum laude would not have aroused significant jealousies and other petty remembrances.

The results surprised me. Regardless of his classmates’ politics, they all said pretty much the same thing. They adored him. The only thing that varied was the intensity with which they adored him. Some spoke like they were eager to bear his children. And those were the guys. Others merely professed a profound fondness and respect for their former classmate…

The people that Obama so thoroughly charmed generally weren’t the charm-prone types. I say the following as a well known Republican partisan–the fact that his classmates so universally held him in the highest regard suggests that Barack Obama may truly be a special person.

Working for the Weekly Standard however, Barnett is forced to conclude:

There’s still time for the man that I’ve heard is the real Obama to emerge. If he does, he’ll be formidable. But time is growing short.

Both Barnett and Traub reach similar conclusions: they both believe that Obama has greater potential than any of the other Democratic candidates; that he is “special”, and extremely intelligent; and that he’s not quite ready.

You might recall I concluded the same thing after hearing him speak at Washington Square Park this September:

What he is missing is something that everyone around him can sense–his audiences, his aides, himself. Perhaps it is a certain resolve to take on the responsibility; perhaps it is a sense of certainty that he will be able to perform the job. What is missing is both obvious and amorphous.

He is missing just this thing. He is not yet ready. But come January, I believe and hope he will be.

Categories
History Politics

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

[digg-reddit-me]Last Wednesday, Leonard Lopate had Cathy Wilkerson on his show on WYNC Public Radio. Wilkerson was a member of the Weathermen, a radical organization that had splintered off from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1969 in order to undertake more extreme actions such as bombings and other terrorist attacks on U.S. government facilities. The Weatherman’s goal was to effect the overthrow of the American government. At the very end of the interview, Lopate asked Wilkerson about why today’s antiwar movement was weaker than the antiwar movement Wilkerson was part of in the 1960s.

Lopate: There are many different theories for why we don’t have as strong of an anti-war movement today as we did in the 60s and 70s. The draft is given as one of the reasons. Do you think the excesses of groups like SDS may also have played a role?
Wilkerson: Quite to the contrary, I think actually more people are active today and that young people are far more sophisticated about world issues today than we were [in the 1960s].
Lopate: Well we’re not seeing the marches, that we saw the same kind of activ… people throwing themselves at the Pentagon…
Wilkerson: There’s plenty of local marches and plenty of local action which doesn’t get in the press necessarily other than the local press. There’s far more activism now than there was then. What’s lacking is that sense of engagement with power. We had that in the 60s because we had come out of the civil rights movement which was the foundation of everything we did and they had won and changed the conversation in this country, so we had the sense that young people could really change something, in a way that young people today have never had that experience. And so there isn’t the public sense of engaging with power. [italics added]

Categories
Domestic issues The War on Terrorism

Dead Certain

From the New York Times’ review of Robert Draper’s Dead Certain and Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency this weekend:

In an interesting comparison with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s sweeping power in World War II, Goldsmith says Roosevelt relied on persuasion, bargaining, compromise. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense. This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

This arrogance is the defining characteristic of the Bush administration.

Categories
Foreign Policy History Morality

John Laughland, loon

In his column over at the Guardian, Laughland has taken a very interesting concept for an article – as demonstrated by his subtitle: “It is no accident that those who advocate war for humanitarian reasons end up justifying torture” – and neglected to explore the subject.  Laughland instead has chosen to muddy the moral issues at stake.  Described by Wikipedia as a “a British eurosceptic conservative journalist, academic and author”, he manages to take moral relativism to Chomskian levels.  Right here is a glimmer of the article he might have written:

It is therefore no coincidence that the US administration that justifies its wars in the name of claims about humanity and its right to liberty also advocates the use of torture to protect these.

He then goes on to implicitly question the genocides of the post-World War II era and to mock the fact that people think someone should have intervened.  Apparently, Laughland, whom the Guardian called the “PR man for Europe’s nastiest regimes” – and then apparently gave him a column – took some lessons from World War II that few others did.  Neither Neville Chamberlain’s trip to Munich nor the Holocaust seems to have made much impression on Laughland; apparently the lesson he has taken is that we must avoid war at any price.  This is a position Gandhi took as well – in the midst of Hitler’s crimes – and I can certainly imagine someone making a strong case for it.

Laughland is not that person: he seems to understand the weakness of his position, and rather than forthrightly stating that we should allow genocide because state sovereignty is the most important virtue, he tries to deny that these crimes take place.  He says that he is opposed to humanitarian interventions, and then explains that the interventions were not all that humanitarian.  These are two distinct points.  The problem is that he declares his opinion if Position A and tries to justify it by citing a support of Position B.

Laughland concludes his article using a familiar phrase from the pre-World War II period:

We need instead to renew the deep conviction that seized the collective conscience of mankind in 1945 that the international system, and the ideas that underpin it, should be structured so as to ensure peace at any price. [my italics]

Unfortunately, I think those currently promoting this most recent article are realizing what Laughland is saying.  Laughland believes the only principle that should be used to organize international affairs is state sovereignty.  I don’t know many liberals who would support that.  And I personally believe there are greater principles that are often at stake.

Categories
Election 2008 Politics

Geraldine Ferraro attempting to defend Hillary

Geraldine Ferraro, former vice presidential candidate in 1984, spoke to the New York Times attempting to defend Hillary against accusations that Hillary’s campaign was “playing the gender card” in responding to the quote politics of pile-on unquote. Judge for yourself how well she did:

“We can’t let them do this in a presidential race,” [Ferraro] said. “They say we’re playing the gender card. We are not. We are not. We have got to stand up. It’s discrimination against her as a candidate because she is a woman.”

Categories
Election 2008 Foreign Policy Giuliani Obama Politics

Obama v. Giuliani

Giuliani decided to echo Hillary Clinton’s attacks on Barack Obama last Friday, saying that Obama’s decision to engage in aggressive diplomacy with Iran was “naive” and “irresponsible”. The Obama camp responded thus:

While Rudy Giuliani may embrace Hillary Clinton’s policy of not talking and saber rattling towards Iran, Barack Obama knows that policy is not working. It’s time for tough and direct diplomacy with Iran, not lectures from a Mayor who skipped out on the Iraq Study Group to give paid speeches, and who was naive and irresponsible enough to recommend someone with ties to convicted felons for Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is what I like to see, and the statement is on par with the Obama camp’s response to Hillary Clinton’s campaign when they started to attack Hillary defector David Geffen.

Categories
Humor

Saturday Night

Categories
Humor

Absolutely Hilarious, but NSFW

A video called Dead Hooker Wake Up Call. Posted after the jump.