This morning, I passed a couple of American flags at half-mast, and for about 10 seconds went through the usual frustrating exercise of trying to remember who died. Then I realized that it was the 11th already.
OK. I can see that we would mourn. Unfortunately, 11 years later, that seems to be the only part of our national response that we’re able to agree on in the public sphere, in terms of shorthand, easily understood responses.
As I look at the cartoon commemorations by Robert Ariail and Bill Day, above and below, I don’t see either as capturing what seems to me the proper response — although Robert comes closer. The idea that we’re simply marking another year is true enough. But the implication that we are prisoners of something (who marks time by scratching on a wall? prisoners do) seems off to me. As for the cascade of tears in Bill’s cartoon — well, that was a common cartoon response in 2001, but 11 years later, Lady Liberty needs to have pulled herself together enough to figure out what to do next.
I say this not to criticize my friends the cartoonists. The problem is that they feel obligated to do something to mark the day, and yet there IS no clear, shared, national response that is better defined than what they did. If you’re a cartoonist, you know what to do on the Fourth of July. There is a whole vocabulary of clearly understood images and shared values through which you can communicate to a reader. On 9/11, not so much. There’s sadness, and there’s the passage of time.
For my part, right after the attacks, I had a pretty clear idea of how we ought to respond. Yes, there would be a military response — that seemed obvious to everyone at the time — but I saw the need to go far beyond that, in terms of broad engagement with the world, economically, diplomatically and in humanitarian terms. You can read the editorial I wrote for Sunday, Sept. 16, 2001, on this old blog post.
While I would change a word here and there with the benefit of hindsight, the general thrust of what I believe should be the proper response would be the same.
The bad news is that as a nation, we have practically torn ourselves apart arguing over proper responses since then. On the other hand, the good news is that among our nation’s leaders, there is more of a consensus on what to do. Back to bad news, that doesn’t really extend much beyond aggressive military actions (for Bush, it was invasions; for Obama, a pattern of assassinations). Our leaders’ responses tend to be ad hoc, rather than arising from a coherent vision of the United States playing a constructive role on all fronts in the world.
I’ll be interested to see what speeches our presidential candidates give today, to see what their visions are. Because as a nation, I still think we need a coherent, common vision of the proper way to react to 9/11.
Celeste Headlee
