Happy Sept. 11, Everybody
by James Norton

It seems as though we were celebrating Sept. 11, 2005 just last week, doesn't it? Time flies when you're constantly reminded of suicide hijackings by your president, members of the majority party, and Washington's often stenographic media outlets.

Sept. 11 has morphed from its initial, sacred meaning as a day when we remember the deaths of thousands of innocents into a sort of national political rally for the party in power. It's a jingoistic, flag-waving celebration of American power and self-righteousness that makes July 4 look like Arbor Day in comparison. "Look at how much we got hurt," the script reads. "This gives us the right to do anything we want. And the best way to do that is to empower the executive branch — absolutely."

As a nation, what sort of special events do we have planned for this year? Well, let's see. There's an ABC mini-series that paints President Clinton as an anti-terror slacker and pre-9/11 President Bush as a vigilant hawk while claiming to derive its facts from the 9/11 commission report. A very important presidential speech that will break into tonight's primetime broadcast to scare middle-aged, middle-class Americans into the political mindset of "fight-or-flight." And the backwash from last week's "we have secret prisons... and they rule!" speech, which seemed to exist only to dare powerless Democrats to call the president on his lawbreaking — so that Democrats could be painted as the modern-day equivalent of Nazi appeasers.

The monomaniacal focus on terrorism to the exclusion of other problems is not an accidental goof-up. Having loused up Iraq, Afghanistan, the pocketbooks of working Americans, the environment, the separation of church and state and almost every measureable field of activity that the government might be responsible for, the GOP is rolling the dice. They're hoping that the specter of 9/11 Part 2: The Nine-Elevening will keep people's eyes off of the real consequences of 2001's attack... and the country's tragic willingness to accept the idea that terrorism, like a hill of ants, is best stopped by stomping up and down in one place until everything that bothers us is dead.

Among the various other balls our eyes haven't been on:

The expansion of executive power and collapse of individual liberties — It's exciting to have a government committed to doing things as unambiguously evil as torturing prisoners held on secret, flimsy evidence in overseas prisons. Who would have thought it would've happened here, been exposed, and basically shrugged off by Congress and the Supreme Court? Beyond the new American gulag, we've also seen personal liberties fall apart. Since Sept. 11, we've seen a dramatic diminishing of our ability to protest in public, make phone calls without being spied on, and to receive a fair, speedy trial. Even the dullest-witted of left-wing and independent pundits have managed to make the connection between the constant rhetorical use of the word "freedom" and the steady, even aggresive erosion of legally protected freedoms in the United States. Is there any more clear indication of a terrorist victory than numerous, tangible steps that bring us closer to Uzbekistan, and further from, say, Norway?

Darfur — Everyone seems to know that the life of one American is worth that of roughly one hundred African people. By that metric, Sept. 11's roughly 3,000 dead stack up to a pile of, say, 300,000 Africans. By a swell coincidence, Darfur seems to have hit that number a while ago. So, when do we get to see the ABC mini-series "The Road to Darfur," wherein world leaders are raked over the coals in fictionalized scenes for hanging back and letting murder, starvation and disease wipe out hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly innocent people?

Global warming — Sure, human beings are notoriously shortsighted. And sure, it's easy to put off unpleasant sacrifices until the last possible minute. But isn't the consensus of all serious scientists that the entire world is threatened by carbon emissions worth a few ounces of prevention at this point? Just a few? Perhaps?

Rational political debate — In GOP terms, the national debate has been boiled down to a refreshing simple set of two circumstances. If no terror attack, then Republicans have done a great job protecting us, yet the danger is still high and presidential powers need to be infinite, and we need to be "alert" for future terror threats. If terror attack, then the scaremongers were right all along, thus presidential powers need to be infinite, and we need to rush even more funding into the military at the expense of, well, just about everything else.

Actually fighting terrorism — The most effective anti-terrorism — the kind that measurably saves lives — is accomplished with good old fashioned police work and international cooperation. Was the removal of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, an open incubator of Al Qaeda, productive? Of course. Was the invasion of Iraq and empowerment of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon productive? Well, thousands of people associated with terrorist or anti-American nationalist groups were killed, sure. But dozens of friendly governments and hundreds of thousands of people turned against America with such violence that we've guaranteed another two generations of Al Qaeda members — if not three. And we'll be fighting the fight largely on our own. Arguably... counterproductive. "Terrorists" aren't some finite stack of swarthy people we can just kill and "clean up." They're people who constantly convert — or desert — a violent and fanatic cause based on the current political conditions. Bush's military adventures have turned a thundershower into monsoon season.

People always lean toward authoritarian governments during times of trouble. Fortunately for the United States, we've had relatively benevolent time-of-crisis leaders in the past. While you can make good arguments that Abraham Lincoln and FDR both abused their power to some degree, you can't make a solid case that they did it for anything other than public-spirited — or, at worst, pragmatic — reasons. They didn't promise to protect the American people, invoke draconian powers, and then, for example, forget to declare war on the South and go after Great Britain instead, or sign a peace treaty with Nazi Germany and invade South America. The went after root causes, and thought hard about the tricky topic known as "reconstruction."

This Sept. 11, we won't get an accounting of government failures, or an expansion of private liberties, or, say, a real effort to enforce anti-proliferation treaties that might actually keep us safer from rogue nukes. Instead, we'll get hijacked all over again, and the very same truth that kept us rooted to the television in 2001 will be used as slick wrapping paper for a poisonous government that has shown no interest whatsoever in safeguarding anything beyond its own grip on political power.

Is "The Path to 9/11" what Sept. 11 victims would have wanted to honor them? A pack of lies, distortions and half-truths acting as handmaidens to a political agenda that can no longer be described as "conservative" — and is, indeed, one of the most radical adjustments to the balance of powers we've seen since the Civil War?

Have a great Sept. 11 everybody, and many happy returns.

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)