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NYT -- Frank Rich -- Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?: "And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing. So do tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. We have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved ahead."

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Charles Dickens

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Sep 10, 2006, 1:06:10 AM9/10/06
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The New York Times

September 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/opinion/10rich.html?pagewanted=print
By FRANK RICH

"THE most famous picture nobody's ever seen" is how the
Associated Press photographer Richard Drew has referred to his photo of
an unidentified World Trade Center victim hurtling to his death on
9/11. It appeared in some newspapers, including this one, on 9/12 but
was soon shelved. "In the most photographed and videotaped day in the
history of the world," Tom Junod later wrote in Esquire, "the
images of people jumping were the only images that became, by
consensus, taboo."

Five years later, Mr. Drew's "falling man" remains a horrific
artifact of the day that was supposed to change everything and did not.
But there's another taboo 9/11 photo, about life rather than death,
that is equally shocking in its way, so much so that Thomas Hoepker of
Magnum Photos kept it under wraps for four years. Mr. Hoepker's
picture can now be found in David Friend's compelling new 9/11 book,
"Watching the World Change," or on the book's Web site,
watchingtheworldchange.com. It shows five young friends on the
waterfront in Brooklyn, taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding
break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as
cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.

Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. "They were totally relaxed
like any normal afternoon," he told Mr. Friend. "It's possible
they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it." The
photographer withheld the picture from publication because "we
didn't need to see that, then." He feared "it would stir the
wrong emotions." But "over time, with perspective," he
discovered, "it grew in importance."

Seen from the perspective of 9/11's fifth anniversary, Mr.
Hoepker's photo is prescient as well as important - a snapshot of
history soon to come. What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack
on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country
that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker's
photo aren't necessarily callous. They're just American. In the
five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust
themselves off and keep going explains both what's gone right and
what's gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the
nation finds itself in today.

What's gone right: the terrorists failed to break America's back.
The "new" normal lasted about 10 minutes, except at airport
check-ins. The economy, for all its dips and inequities and runaway
debt, was not destroyed. The culture, for better and worse, survived
intact. It took only four days for television networks to restore
commercials to grim news programming. Some two weeks after that Rudy
Giuliani ritualistically welcomed laughter back to American living
rooms by giving his on-camera imprimatur to "Saturday Night Live."
Before 9/11, Americans feasted on reality programs, nonstop coverage of
child abductions and sex scandals. Five years later, they still do. The
day that changed everything didn't make Americans change the channel,
unless it was from "Fear Factor" to "American Idol" or from
Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton.

For those directly affected by the terrorists' attacks, this
resilience can be hard to accept. In New York, far more than elsewhere,
a political correctness about 9/11 is still strictly enforced. We
bridle when the mayor of New Orleans calls ground zero "a hole in the
ground" (even though, sadly, he spoke the truth). We complain that
Hollywood movies about 9/11 are "too soon," even as "United 93"
and "World Trade Center" came and went with no controversy at
multiplexes in middle America. The Freedom Tower and (now kaput)
International Freedom Center generated so much political rancor that in
New York freedom has become just another word for a lofty architectural
project soon to be scrapped.

The price of all New York's 9/11 P.C. is obvious: the 16 acres of
ground zero are about the only ones that have missed out on the
city's roaring post-attack comeback. But the rest of the country is
less invested. For tourists - and maybe for natives, too - the hole
in the ground is a more pungent memorial than any grandiose official
edifice. You can still see the naked wound where it has not healed and
remember (sort of) what the savage attack was about.

But even as we celebrate this resilience, it too comes at a price. The
companion American trait to resilience is forgetfulness. What we've
forgotten too quickly is the outpouring of affection and unity that
swelled against all odds in the wake of Al Qaeda's act of mass
murder. If you were in New York then, you saw it in the streets, and
not just at ground zero, where countless thousands of good Samaritans
joined the official responders and caregivers to help, at the cost of
their own health. You saw it as New Yorkers of every kind gathered
around the spontaneous shrines to the fallen and the missing at police
and fire stations, at churches and in parks, to lend solace or a hand.
This good feeling quickly spread to Capitol Hill, to red states where
New York had once been Sodom incarnate and to the world, the third
world included, where America was a nearly uniform object of sympathy
and grief.

At the National Cathedral prayer service on Sept. 14, 2001, President
Bush found just the apt phrase to describe this phenomenon: "Today we
feel what Franklin Roosevelt called 'the warm courage of national
unity.' This is the unity of every faith and every background. It has
joined together political parties in both houses of Congress."
What's more, he added, "this unity against terror is now extending
across the world."

The destruction of that unity, both in this nation and in the world, is
as much a cause for mourning on the fifth anniversary as the attack
itself. As we can't forget the dead of 9/11, we can't forget how
the only good thing that came out of that horror, that unity, was
smothered in its cradle.

When F.D.R. used the phrase "the warm courage of national unity,"
it was at his first inaugural, in 1933, as the country reeled from the
Great Depression. It is deeply moving to read that speech today. In its
most famous line, Roosevelt asserted his "firm belief that the only
thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning,
unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat
into advance." Another passage is worth recalling, too: "We now
realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each
other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we
are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to
sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such
discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective."

What followed under Roosevelt's leadership is one of history's most
salutary stories. Americans responded to his twin entreaties - to
renounce fear and to sacrifice for the common good - with a force
that turned back economic calamity and ultimately an axis of brutal
enemies abroad. What followed Mr. Bush's speech at the National
Cathedral, we know all too well, is another story.

On the very next day after that convocation, Mr. Bush was asked at a
press conference "how much of a sacrifice" ordinary Americans would
"be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily
routines." His answer: "Our hope, of course, is that they make no
sacrifice whatsoever." He, too, wanted to move on - to "see life
return to normal in America," as he put it - but toward partisan
goals stealthily tailored to his political allies rather than the
nearly 90 percent of the country that, according to polls, was rallying
around him.

This selfish agenda was there from the very start. As we now know from
many firsthand accounts, a cadre from Mr. Bush's war cabinet was
already busily hyping nonexistent links between Iraq and the Qaeda
attacks. The presidential press secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned
Bill Maher's irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding "all
Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."
Fear itself - the fear that "paralyzes needed efforts to convert
retreat into advance," as F.D.R. had it - was already being wielded
as a weapon against Americans by their own government.

Less than a month after 9/11, the president was making good on his
promise of "no sacrifice whatsoever." Speaking in Washington about
how it was "the time to be wise" and "the time to act," he
declared, "We need for there to be more tax cuts." Before long the
G.O.P. would be selling 9/11 photos of the president on Air Force One
to campaign donors and the White House would be featuring flag-draped
remains of the 9/11 dead in political ads.

And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing.
So do tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack
us on 9/11. We have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved
ahead.

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