This is never a popular column, and yet I never learn and I write it every year. It starts with this: I am not a big anniversary guy. Wedding anniversaries, sure. But anniversaries of news stories? What's the point of sitting around remembering something you weren't even involved with?
Now, having said that, I certainly understand the impulse to honor those who lost their lives in the 9/11 attacks. I also believe it's useful to remind people who very much want to forget how we were smacked in the face that day by the reality of evil. But every year since 2003, my gut reaction to the 9/11 commemorations has been the same:
We're doing this wrong.
The somber politicians' speeches, the playing of taps, the tears, the ceremonies, the vows to never forget . . .
No. Remembering 9/11 only means anything if we learn the lessons of it, and we haven't learned those lessons. We sort of acted as though we had for awhile - recognizing that we had to go get the terrorists wherever they are, and that we had to stay committed to the effort as a nation over the long term, and that we could no longer trust bad actors or talk naively about "containing" them, and that we could no longer use the inate paralysis at the United Nations as an excuse for our own inaction, and that we had to get past the notion of "responding proportinately" to attacks and think in terms of obliterating these people.
We got that for maybe four years. Five tops. By 2006, we were back to bitching about how sick of it we all were, and how much it seemed to be upsetting people, and how it wasn't as quick or easy as we would have preferred. By the time the Iraq surge turned the tide and put us in a position to ultimately win that war (before Obama lost it, of course), the public had already decided it had had enough of this war crap, and it wanted to go back to challenges that really mattered, like standing in line for two days for iPhones.
And in 2008, when a totally unqualified poseur came along promising to put an end to all of this, we actually elected the slug.
In the meantime, the rest of the world learned a lesson too. It's only a matter of time before America loses its nerve. Putin understood that he could prop up bad guys in Syria and Iran without America making him pay a price. And he could take Ukraine too. Hamas learned that it could launch rockets into Israel and all America would do would be to send John Kerry over there to blather on about absurd terms for cease-fires.
Barack Obama would talk about red lines and then back down as soon as anyone called his bluff, even selling his soul to Putin for a face-saving way out of his own empty words. Bashar Assad could pretend to give up weapons all he wanted, proving we had come a long way from the days when Mommhar Khadafy gave his up voluntarily so as not to end up like Saddam Hussein (even though a guy in a Yankees hat ended up offing him).
And as for ISIS, well, they know Obama's mind pretty well. Storm into Iraq, kidnap, rape, behead . . . and when Obama finally concedes the need to do anything at all (and kicking and screaming, at that), he will give away the option of ground combat troops right from the word go because he's the one who encouraged the rest of us to lose our nerve, and he never had any to begin with.
So big whoop. We remember 9/11. What have we learned from it? Nothing at all. We are a nation of candy asses. Our military is strong and brave but we can't reconcile ourselves to the fact that we actually have to use it if we want to keep order in the world.
Bush and Cheney understood this and still do, and they warned us it would require a lot of commitment, but that the reality laid bare on 9/11 demanded nothing less of us. They remained committed to the effort right to the last - long after the nation had gotten sick of it and wanted to stop hearing about it. Bush and Cheney were true leaders, but eventually the majority of the country didn't think it was worth the trouble to keep following. That's the country's fault, not theirs.
What are we willing to fight for today? Harry Reid will rail against the Koch brothers. A bunch of morons will rail against the Washington Redskins. The "civil rights commission" will swing into action when some guy doesn't want to bake a cake for a gay wedding. And of course, nude celebrity photos.
That's about it.
Remember 9/11? Yep. I remember what I was doing and all that. But I also remember that we had a brief moment of clarity after it happened, and people said it had "changed everything" - and it had, but not for long. Just as we do with the debt, with entitlements, and with all kinds of other things, we returned to our default mindset as a nation that would rather not think about problems if we can possibly avoid it.
Conventional wisdom now is that we overreacted to 9/11. No. For a moment, we dealt with reality because we had to. As soon as it was safe to go back to delusion, back we went. I remember 9/11 all right, and it really pisses me off that we honor the dead only with empty ceremonies and not with the commitment we should have maintained.
It took decades to turn Memorial Day into an orgy of cookouts and appliance sales. We ruined 9/11 a lot faster than that. Oh well. It was a bad day right from the start.
