by Kevin Merida, Washington Post
We are a nation of countless labels, with too many separate identities to have morphed into One America in a single year. Not even the horror of terrorist-guided planes slamming into iconic buildings can make us what we’re not. You still can’t define this country in a word or phrase or sentence. Not even in a Philip Roth paragraph. For what would it say?
So many distinctions, one nation. A nation of classifications and no single set of emotions. How are we supposed to feel today as Americans? That’s what the big anniversaries seem to demand of us -- some accounting of national oneness. And that’s the tricky part, for there are no linked ways to process 9/11.
We can’t measure change of the spirit, of the psyche. That’s an internal question. What we do know is that there have been no earthquake-size shifts in society. Nothing seismic that’s stuck, that we can see. People didn’t change careers in record numbers, or rush off to purchase home-security systems, or boost church memberships appreciably. Ultimately, they found their salvation elsewhere.
Shopping at malls dropped off for about six weeks, economists say, but then the shoppers went back. Voter turnout in post-9/11 elections was its usual dismal self. There were predictions that truckloads of patriotic citizens would flood Army recruitment offices, but no meaningful surge in military enrollment occurred. There were reports that the desire of Americans to protect themselves would soon send gun sales through the clouds, but those reports were greatly exaggerated. Some said American rage would give the citizenry a fry-the-terrorists mentality that would last, but no movement in American support for the death penalty was seen. Some said partisanship would cool, that squabbling politics would be replaced by a new, collaborative politics. Now that’s a laugher. Justice Priscilla Owen. The D.C. mayor’s race. Even the debate over the shape of the Department of Homeland Security. Politics as usual.
Some predicted that funny would no longer be funny. Even the late-night talk shows bought into that for a while, first abandoning their monologues and then tailoring them for taste. But that didn’t last long. Between January and Sept. 4 of this year, Jay Leno did 217 jokes aimed at the president, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. You think cracks about George W. Bush’s intellect were off limits? Not.
Cynicism: back with a vengeance. CBS is returning “The Beverly Hillbillies” to our living rooms as “reality TV,” so we can gaze at authentic back-country folks on screen and the hip can laugh at them.
Hip or rube, we’re all targets now. We don’t need to manufacture expression on terrorism. We could toss a pebble anywhere and strike an opinion on this subject. Keep tossing and we’d hit different opinions.
Two snapshots, two poles of experience:
Georgiana Cunningham, a 31-year-old aide to Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.
Larry Robertson, a 15-year-old sophomore at Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Cunningham grew up middle class in California and Oklahoma, the daughter of an Episcopal priest. She owns a condo in Mount Pleasant and loves alternative rock.
“I think we have all internalized a greater insecurity, or sense of fear,” she says. “One day I drove by the White House and saw a bike messenger cruise through the cordoned-off part of the street, and I thought, ‘How easy it would be for him to take in a bomb.’ The air conditioning went off in the Hart Building the other day. Right away we wondered if there was another anthrax attack. . . . So I guess it has affected me, huh?”
Robertson will turn 16 later this week, but he seems much older. Already a slam poet virtuoso, with too many awards to remember, Robertson dreams of winning the Nobel Prize for literature. When he was 8 he saw his mother mugged right before him, at 7:30 a.m. in their neighborhood, as they were crossing Brandywine Street SE on their way to catch a bus. “Give me your [expletive] money. Give me your [expletive] money.” Robertson remembers the mugger’s exact words.
What does this have to do with 9/11? Fear. Robertson has a running buddy who was robbed while washing his clothes in the laundry room of his apartment complex. Twelve months ago, on the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked and more than 3,000 people died, this same friend turned to Robertson and said, “It’s not like we don’t dodge bullets every day.” He didn’t say it cavalierly, didn’t mean to be unsympathetic. Robertson understood.
“People feel more vulnerable? I don’t understand why,” he says. “There’s terrorism within already. Nothing has really changed. The hole just got bigger for us to fall in. This was just an expansion. But it’s all the same. Being scared is being scared. Being afraid is being afraid.”
Robertson and Cunningham are not tied together by geography or race or gender or any of the ways we’ve come to segment the population -- but they are equally American, with equally understandable perspectives on the worst act of terrorism in our history.
In war, we expect a transformation that ripples through society, that’s felt by all of us, or at least most of us.
After World War I broke out in the summer of 1914, anti-German fever swept the land. Colleges canceled courses in German history. German measles became known as “liberty measles,” sauerkraut as “liberty cabbage,” wieners as hot dogs. The town of Berlin, Mich., shelved its name.
We are at war again, at least that’s what the president and his team keep saying. But what are we supposed to feel this time? We’ve been asked to be strong and resolved and not fearful. And yet since last Sept. 11, there have been at least 14 warnings, alerts, announcements, advisories issued by the federal government concerning potential terrorist strikes. Some have been issued to the public in somber tones from a podium, some have been directed to local law enforcement agencies and FBI field offices. Taken together, this collection of cautions could be seen as eerily unsettling or frustratingly vague.
At this stage of the War on Terrorism, a war without an ending, the most dramatic, observable change in the hop of everyday life is our security hysteria, driven by the people who are running the war. The U.S. Capitol has become an ugly, walled-off super-fortress. We’re asked to step out of our shoes at airport checkpoints. You can stand in a long, long, long, long line waiting to get your ticket taken at FedEx Field, the result of “heightened security.” And what exactly happens when you finally make it to the front of the queue? A guy in a black shirt pats your binocular case a couple of times and lets you in. This procedure will thwart al Qaeda?
There has always been a thin line between logic and lunacy. Our government buildings are safer than our schools. We fortify our stadiums, but leave unprotected our movie theaters -- the entertainment choice of 29 million people a week.
There is a tale that symbolizes how easily we can be divided in our reaction to terror:
At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, a sprawling, 321-acre complex that has been open to the public since 1938, officials are preparing for an $11.5 million security renovation next spring that will fundamentally alter the character of the place. The centerpiece of the construction project is a wrought-iron fence that will wrap its way around the campus, shutting out neighbors who now use NIH’s tennis courts, who use its bike route, who now walk through its parklike grounds to get to the Medical Center Metro station. Understandably, the neighbors roared.
“Neighbors had come to think of this as the neighborhood campus,” said Tom Gallagher, director of NIH’s Office of Community Liaison. “There was that ambiance from the 1950s that never got lost. And quite frankly, nobody wanted it to get lost.”
Meetings were held, more meetings were held. But the neighbors didn’t win. NIH is arguably the world’s leading biomedical research center, and after 9/11 it was urgently urged to beef up security. Forget that there had been a federal study in 1995 that reported NIH was vulnerable to “penetration, violence and destruction.” Along comes 9/11, panic time. So sometime in 2004, when the security upgrade is finally finished, NIH will look like another government citadel. In fact, it’ll look a lot like the White House and the vice presidential mansion, same black fences. It’ll look like a place you wouldn’t even think about approaching without special credentials and an escort.
Gallagher is rueful about the turn of events. “The people on the outside lost a campus. The people on the inside lost a community.”
Americans are always searching for definition, markers that signify who we are. For if we know that, it is easier to categorize our reaction to tragedy.
The market research firm Claritas has a system that segments the U.S. population into 62 clusters, clumping Americans by demographic similarities, lifestyle patterns, behavioral characteristics. Businesses lap up this data to target their ideal consumers.
Who are we? Urban Achievers. Starter Families. Gray Collars. New Homesteaders. Shotguns and Pickups. Pools and Patios. Money and Brains. Bohemian Mix. Big Fish, Small Pond. Inner Cities. Grain Belt. Mines and Mills. Rustic Elders. Latino America. Towns and Gowns. American Dreams.
They are labels, headings for our constellation of identities. When crunch time comes, people assert who they really think they are.
Kay Coles James is director of the Office of Personnel Management, an agency usually heard from only on snow days. During the early confusion of last Sept. 11, as federal agencies wondered what they should do, whether they should close, there was a simple question about blinds. Should the shades be drawn shut on the windows of federal buildings? James’s reaction was personal, visceral, like so much of the response to this awful thing, then and now.
“Leave those shades open,” James instructed. “Frankly, if a plane was coming through the window, the last face I wanted them to see was that of an angry black woman.”