Friday, May 9, 2008
OK, we all have anniversary fatigue. But if administration critics cede 9/11 to the right, Karl Rove wins.
Sep 10, 2002 | Probably everybody has a 9/11 anniversary breaking point, the moment when the excess becomes unbearable and it seems time to hide in Dick Cheney's abandoned bunker for the rest of September, at least. I thought mine was the day I learned "American Idol" winner Kelly Clarkson would sing the National Anthem at the Lincoln Memorial on Wednesday. It seemed the logical extension of the whorish product placement and commercial tie-ins that "Idol" perfected: Now its new product, Clarkson, would be magically placed in the official 9/11 anniversary tableau, à la Forrest Gump, as though she were a real American pop star, not someone nobody ever heard of a year ago, and Americans needed her art to heal us.
But that wasn't the low point. In fact, in a stunning display of decency and common sense, Clarkson tried to pull out of the 9/11 performance, afraid it seemed a cheesy marketing stunt that would diminish the solemn occasion. (But the management company that owns her now, 19 Entertainment, either cajoled or cudgeled her into singing.) If only President George W. Bush had Kelly Clarkson's good judgment. Bush's management group has announced its plans to use 9/11 to hype his coming war with Iraq, the president is going along with the strategy, and we're all expected to watch and applaud.
The president's handlers are not even shy about their effort to hijack the day of mourning. August appeared to be a very bad month for the Bush team's effort to sell the Iraq war -- Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell made dueling speeches contradicting one another, the president's father's closest advisors came out against the son's saber rattling, as did most world leaders, all while Bush was enjoying his customary monthlong vacation. Administration officials say it was all part of the sales plan.
"From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," chief of staff Andrew Card told the New York Times this week. Besides, Bush's top political advisor, Karl Rove, admitted, "the thought was, in August the president is sort of on vacation." But White House officials boasted that Sept. 11 provided their boss with the perfect event to kick off his campaign to market a preemptive strike against Saddam.
"Everybody felt that was a moment that Americans wanted to hear from him," Rove told the Times. The anniversary events will let Bush "seize the moment to make clear what lies ahead," the strategist explained. On New York's Ellis Island -- chosen over Governor's Island because the Statue of Liberty made it "a better shot" on television, Bush aides said -- the president will make a 10-minute speech that uses the 9/11 tragedy to justify his war with Iraq -- an "emotional precursor" to a longer address Bush will give to the United Nations the following day.
Even without the news of Bush's 9/11 Iraq-war "marketing" plan, the anniversary was shaping up to be a trifecta of bad taste: the worst possible synergy of entertainment, commerce and politics. The temptation to just check emotionally out of the whole thing is understandable. But I think administration critics have to resist 9/11 fatigue, and anniversary backlash. Because if we cede 9/11 to the Republicans, Karl Rove wins. I'm determined to do the near impossible: Hold on to my conviction that Sept. 11, 2001, was a day we have to mourn and remember, an assault by a genuine enemy that produced both horror and heroism, a singular tragedy we should observe, in our own individual ways, no matter how politicians and businesses have degraded it.
Among lefties and even some liberals, it's becoming fashionable to try to diminish 9/11, especially the anniversary. Every anniversary roundup story contains the obligatory quote from some smartass noting that the 3,000 lost that day can't compare with other global tragedies: as many as 800,000 massacred in Rwanda in 1994, 200,000 in Bosnia in the early '90s; North Korea's famine and floods; Japan's Kobe earthquake; Bangladesh, Bhopal, Chernobyl.
But I don't understand the need to establish a hierarchy of loss -- even after getting a faceful of lefty backlash last week as the guest host of Laura Flanders' "Working Assets Radio" show, talking about the looming anniversary. An irritated caller made the point that Sept. 11 is also the anniversary of the 1973 U.S.-backed coup against Chile's elected leader Salvador Allende, which led to the murder of tens of thousands of Chileans. He suggested that that 9/11 outrage was a bigger tragedy than the death of a mere 3,000 people 29 years later.
But why can't we deplore both Sept. 11s? One answer is that the second is getting remembered to death; the first is virtually forgotten. But diminishing the deaths of 3,000 people doesn't seem the way to correct injustice. And yet that's second nature to those lefties whose political views grow out of a reflexive self-hating anti-Americanism. I was relieved, a year ago, at how few commentators on the left took the Noam Chomsky line -- that the al-Qaida attack was essentially payback for American misdeeds all over the world -- whence it's a short walk to suggesting that those 3,000 who died deserved it, if only for failing to rise up and overthrow our bad leaders. Yet we're hearing an echo of that America-hating nihilism as part of the backlash to anniversary excess.
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