Precious Moment
The president needs to explain the stakes while we are all still listening.

September 20, 2001 8:40 a.m.

he dead are everywhere. Except that their families, still hopeful, label them merely as "missing." On shop windows, lampposts, subway entrances, telephone boxes, any empty space of wall, there are posted white sheets of paper showing a grainy photograph of the missing person, his name, address, telephone number, sometimes the name of the company for which he was working a week ago, and usually a simple message: "We love him and miss him very much."

The Lexington Avenue armory, where families went last week for news when the police and hospitals know nothing of their loved one's fate, has its four walls festooned with such appeals. A gay video store in the west Village advertises a fund it has joined in establishing for the families of five missing local firefighters. A taxi driver has a "missing" appeal pinned next to his laminated identity card.

The dead themselves, staring or smiling out of the photographs, are of every color, religion, class, and physical appearance. Death admitted even foreigners that day — people from 32 nations, including about 200 Brits, are thought to be buried in that mass American grave on southern Manhattan.

But the vast majority of the dead are of one ethnicity — the American ethnicity — which has taken Koreans, Irishmen, Blacks, Cubans, WASPs, Poles, and Puerto Ricans and given them its own distinctive stamp of free-spirited optimism. In blue denim work-shirts, in three-piece suits, in yarmulkes, in wedding tuxedos, in the extravagant costumes of high-school proms, even — especially poignantly in a few cases — in First Communion white, they smile out at us, looking forward happily to a future that now will never arrive.

Even now as the city takes up its business and returns to normality, New York resembles nothing so much as a vast war cemetery. The posters mimic war graves. And not just the families of the dead mourn.

But the mood of those eight million mourners is hard to analyze. It is subtle and shifting. No single word — revenge, sorrow, anger — does it justice. Certainly it includes sadness; some passersby weep as the read the death notices. It is also defiant; no one talks of making concessions to avert the further wrath of the murderers; many wear patriotic red, white, and blue ribbons on dress or lapel. At the same time it is more calm and judicious than a mere desire for revenge. What New Yorkers seem to want is a measured and accurate punishment and the prevention of any such barbarism in future — in short, a victory over terrorism that will give meaning to the sacrifice of the dead.

The Canadian poet, Captain John Macrae, gave perfect expression to this desire in his poem, "In Flanders Fields," on the graves of the First World War in Flanders:

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

For the moment at least these feelings are shared throughout America and the civilized world.

Americans know that the dead perished solely because they shared their nationality. That knowledge has permitted the nation to cast aside the confusions and divisions of "identity politics" and to embrace an old-fashioned common patriotism as the birthright of all.

Abroad there have been countless expressions of sympathy and solidarity. The most dramatic was the sight of the Queen of England, who by tradition remains silent through all national anthems, singing the "Star-Spangled Banner" during the memorial service in St Paul's Cathedral — and then silently wiping away a tear. But ordinary Europeans in their thousands have quietly sympathized with an American tourist or thanked him for the part played by the U.S. in keeping their own continent free.

We express this common solidarity across oceans by describing the attack on the World Trade Center as an attack by barbarism on civilization. But that is not the full truth. It was an attack by barbarism on a particular civilization — namely, Western industrialized capitalist civilization in its self-confident American form. And that civilization has enemies not only in Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan, but also in moderate Arab nations, in Europe, and in America itself among such groups "deep green" environmental extremists like the Unabomber, left-over anti-American academic Marxists, the purveyors of ethnic separatism, opponents of economic liberty, and those curious embittered souls who hate their country because they hate their parents.

In the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center's destruction, those voices were stilled. But as the mood of outrage at the death of innocent people gradually fades — and even the most justified outrage must fade over time — so the critics now remaining in the shadows will emerge to explain, excuse, and justify the terrorism directed against this civilization — and to hobble the antiterrorist measures needed to combat it.

Already, indeed, we are starting to hear the first tentative expressions of "moral equivalence." And worse.

In Britain a Labour MP, George Galloway, has argued that in much of the world "people will consider the U.S. to have had to swallow its own medicine." (Note the shifty transfer of this odious opinion from Mr. Galloway's mouth to the mouths of "people" in much of the world.)

Or the headline over an article in the (Manchester) Guardian: "They can't see why they are hated" — Americans, that is, not terrorists and murderers.

Or this moral reflection contained in an editorial from the leftist New Statesman:

American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privileges of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favor of a different order. If the United States often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.

This was too much for Michael Moore, the interminable wit of Roger and Me, who responded indignantly (and ungrammatically):

If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the planes' destination of California — these where places that voted AGAINST Bush!

It's good to know that if the terrorists ever hijack a Cruise missile and send it in America's direction, Mr. Moore will be on hand to divert it from Berkeley or the Upper West Side of Manhattan to less deserving voters such as the coal miners of West Virginia.

For the moment, however, such opinions are rare. And when expressed, they have encountered such scorn and contempt from other and the general public that their authors have quickly retreated. Mr. Moore, for instance, withdrew the above remarks from his website when, like Queen Victoria, we were not amused.

But this period of moral clarity may be short lived. It coincides, after all, with the time when we are still digging up the ruins of the World Trade Center, still hoping to find survivors, still mourning the deaths of those who were climbing down the smoke-filled stairwells when the stricken building finally collapsed on top of them.

With the terrible consequences of terrorist evil in front of their eyes, ordinary Americans (and ordinary Brits, etc.) cannot easily be convinced that their own desire to bring the perpetrators to justice is that same evil seen from a different and less biased vantage point. All the more reason then for the U.S. and allied governments to use this extraordinary interlude — when ordinary people are willing to listen because of what they have seen — to explain what is at stake in the long twilight struggle against terror. And to lay the groundwork for it in the public mind.

There will never be a better opportunity. The haters of America and Western civilization are still half-afraid of public anger. And when they do speak, their arguments are drowned out by the silence of the dead.

Editor's note: This piece is based on a column that originally ran in the Chicago Sun-Times.