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 f war is the powder
keg of history, then battle is the match. Years, decades, and sometimes
centuries can all be altered in hours at places like Salamis, the
Teutoberger Wald, Adrianople, Waterloo, the Somme, or Pearl Harbor
— when thousands are killed, and even more bodies and minds
maimed. Even though the dead at the World Trade Center were not
predominantly male, young, in uniform, and at battle, the horror
of September 11 marks a similar fault line in the history of our
people.
Ostensibly
we can calibrate our losses — almost 6,000 dead, nearly a half-trillion
dollars of stock and capital gone, 50 billion in property destroyed,
250,000 Americans put out of work, tens of thousands risking their
lives in combat in the Middle East, one in four of our citizens
reporting to be unable to sleep a month after the disaster. But
there will be ramifications far beyond the shooting that we now
see and hear, as shockwaves from those minutes at World Trade Center
and Pentagon reverberate for years to come in ways we can now scarcely
imagine.
Before Shiloh,
Ulysses S. Grant believed that the Civil War would be ended by "one
great battle." Afterwards — more casualties on April 6-7
1862 than in all of America's wars to that time — a few prescient
generals on both sides knew that rifles and canister shots made
the courage of frontal charges suicidal. In response to the carnage
on the Tennessee River, a previously "crazy" Sherman would
go on to think the once unthinkable — like the March to the
Sea. Just as generals woke up on April 8th to a new world, so we
have as well. Gone is the old idea of easy retaliation through the
cruise missile, and with it the fear of losing a single American
life to protect freedom and the helpless. Like it or not, when 6,000
innocents are butchered in our streets — and their killers
unpunished and promising far more to come — some very deadly
things to save our progeny will be discussed, well beyond the fighting
now going on in Afghanistan.
In peace and
affluence, we have shuddered with revulsion at Hiroshima, but forget
what suicidal fanaticism at Okinawa had weeks earlier taught Americans
of that age — 2,000 kamikaze attacks, 34 ships sunk, 368 damaged,
over 12,000 American dead, 35,000 more wounded, along with 100,000
Japanese killed and another 100,000 civilian casualties, all in
hand-to-hand fighting to take an island miniscule in comparison
to the far better defended and armed Japanese mainland.
But such black
days of history not only reinvent what is thought militarily possible
and allowable, but radically realign politics as well. Before Thermopylae,
the Spartans were considered an insular, if not bizarre, people.
Yet once Leonidas and his 300 fell for Greek freedom, for a half-century
his countrymen were looked upon as the real stalwarts of Greece.
The 6,000, in the manner that the Thermopylae 300 once galvanized
the Greeks, will resonate with our troops in the Middle East and
unite the country under a moral imperative not seen in the last
half century.
After the cheering
in the streets on news of our dead on September 11th in so many
Arab countries, I do not think many Americans will ever again see
Yasser Arafat as a real peacemaker, the medieval yet ultra-modern
sheiks of Saudi Arabia as friendly — or even some of our NATO
allies that argued for 21 days before invoking Article Five of mutual
assistance as real comrades in arms. Neither our diplomats nor strategists
have yet quite grasped that the world has been turned upside down
— that Russia is a more powerful and friendly country than
Saudi Arabia, that India might be a better recipient of American
military aid than Egypt, and that the Middle East is not on the
rise against the West, but more isolated, impotent, and dependent
than ever before. The 6,000 dead in an instant have replaced past
fantasies with reality.
Culture is
not immune to the ripples of battle. The accelerators of Modernism
were Verdun and the Somme. Perhaps the present brand of Postmodernism
was born in France after the inexplicable and humiliating German
romp through the Ardennes in 1940. The crater in New York at the
very epicenter of American arts and letters will have a similar,
if not more profound, effect. With a rubble pile instead of the
World Trade Center on the skyline, it will be very difficult a few
blocks away at the nexus of American culture to suggest that facts
are mere historical fictions or reality but textual expressions
of power — or that feces on canvass and urine-jars best capture
the ordeal of the human condition. Not that such art and literature
born out of cynicism and nihilism will vanish as we proceed with
this war and the inevitable losses, blunders, and paradoxes to come.
They will not — at least for a time. But most people, desperate
for transcendence and something real — and perhaps even beautiful
— amid catastrophe and recovery, will now gradually grow uninterested
in the clever, but empty games of the glib and bored. We have thousands
of dead, after all, to mourn, the threat of still more lethal attacks,
and a war in their memory to win — and our art, literature,
and history will reflect that.
The gospel
of multiculturalism preached that all societies were equal and that
the "other" was but a Western bogeyman. But we know now
that people who do not vote, treat women as chattel, torture to
death dissenters, and whip opponents of their primordial world are
different folk from us, now and in the past. Polygamy, clitorectomy,
and stoning — in absolute terms that affect the way women eat,
breath, and live — are a world away from the debates over affirmative
action or the glass ceiling. Nor are our puritanical antagonists
even sincere in their hate — if their use of cell phones and
their children in Western universities are any indications. Our
own cultural relativists prove to be the naïve and silly, and
now may well be asked by the less sophisticated whether they would
enjoy living in the anti-Western world of the Taliban and what exactly
they would be willing to do to prevent more children from being
incinerated in New York.
Pacifists shamed
us into thinking that all wars were bad; relativism convinced us
that we are no different from our enemies; conflict resolution and
peace studies hectored us that there was no such thing as a moral
armed struggle of good against evil; and academic specialists preached
there was too much complexity in the Middle East ever to act decisively.
September 11th and the struggle we are now witnessing have returned
us to the classical view of war as a tragic fact inherent to humans
that transcends culture when evil exists unchallenged. We may rediscover
that it is not wars per se that are always terrible, but the people
— Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, and bin Laden — who start them.
And we may also learn from the fighting now going on between our
own soldiers from the middle classes arrayed against so many of
these affluent and educated terrorists that wars can often arise
not out of real, but rather perceived grievances. In response, the
way in which Americans look at defense spending, immigration, foreign
aid and alliances, domestic security — and war itself —
will be altered for decades by September 11th.
The sight of
airliners obliterating people and the wave of fury it has aroused
have also brought back moral seriousness. A current popular memoir
of Bill Ayers that recounts with nostalgia the life of a campus
terrorist of the 1960s now seems not cute, but grotesque. After
witnessing the heroism at the World Trade Center, we are more likely
to think of all the poor blue-collar policemen whom the present-day
professor's friends once wished to dismember, rather than sympathize
over mocha and latte with his professed zeal and upscale idealism.
The nightmare of battle does not reinvent the way people think and
act, as much as remind them of enduring truths long forgotten and
deemed trite in the luxury of peace. War, the historian Thucydides
wrote, really is "a violent teacher." And the present
one is no exception.
Just as September
1, 1939 shattered sympathy for Fascism and discredited appeasement,
so September 11 will sound a death knell to easy and fashionable
anti-Americanism. Some on our campuses have been teaching some very
silly and scary things these last decades. In the weeks ahead the
American people may see and hear them firsthand in protests —
and they will not enjoy the slogans of these aristocratic and tenured
while our more industrious classes on their behalf are battling
fascism a world away. What will we make of demonstrations to stop
Americans from punishing murdering terrorists and their fascist
hosts, cruel men who now boast of having vaporized civilian men,
women, and children — with pledges of more to come? After the
calamity of September it will be impossible to convince our citizens
that America caused or deserved this from principled opponents who
despise women, kill gays, destroy the venerable monuments of culture,
and torture religious and political dissidents — and still
manage to wager on the global stock market and compare the prices
of tuition at American universities.
Battles even
of an hour or two can also transform more stealthily the lives of
thousands of ordinary folk well apart from the grand cosmology of
politics, war, and culture. Among the grieving in New York and Washington
there are right now undiscovered brave and courageous souls who
will vow to remember their fallen in all that they do and say for
the duration of their lives. And these tens of thousands of writers,
poets, and actors to come may do and say quite a lot that will shape
the world ahead in art, literature, and culture. If the past is
any guide to the future, we shall see their influence soon enough
at shops, on television, and in bookstores for decades hence —
and with it the knowledge that the voices of the battlefield dead
can still speak among us.
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