dwarven1
Lonely Mountain Arms
WONDER LAND
Reality Happens
London's bombs go off inside America's head.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, August 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into rural Pennsylvania. In just over an hour, they killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Not more than a year later, nothing was more important in the lives of many Americans than that they extinguish the Patriot Act and drive George Bush and every remnant of his presidency from office, including the "unconstitutional" war on terror.
March 11, 2004, terrorists cut from the same Islamic cloth as September 11 blew up four Spanish commuter trains, covering Madrid's main station with parts of 191 dead people and 1,460 others, often horribly wounded. But the needle hardly moved in the politics of "George Bush's war on terror." In the U.S., nothing was more important than "closing" a holding pen for Islamic terrorists in Cuba.
July 7, 2005: the London bombings. In the four weeks since this happened, I have talked about it, on the West Coast and East Coast, with people one could describe as "non-Bush voters." To a man and woman, they say in so many words that the time has come to "get tough on the terrorists." One event, London, appears to have caused an internal reassessment among some Americans formerly ambivalent about the war on terror.
Profiling, a forbidden thought in some political quarters since hyper-thyroidic New Jersey state cops were rousting black people on the turnpike, is a subject for polite company. After years of reading how our "policies" were creating Islamic recruits to jihad, the London bombing has created recruits for the war on terror.
What happened?
Reality happened. September 11 was, in a sense, unreal. T.S. Eliot reflected in 1922 on "unreal" postwar London:
I had not thought death had undone so many
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
I think for some, what happened that day--passenger planes flown into buildings, the slow death of the towers--was just too much, off the charts, a trauma and a personal concussion. Something like that. July 7 London was more comprehensible. Americans were able to absorb London more clinically, observers from afar. London also happened to an English-speaking people, so every televised comment back to the U.S., from the first witnesses to the police reports of apprehended and named terrorists, was understood and internalized. Then the British media, God bless them, reduced the madness to one, right cliché: The bombers are our neighbors. Three years in, the battle lines finally come clear.
The American psyche, or some part of it, has seemed disinclined to believe terrorists could be anything other than invaders from another planet. Seasonal, like the hurricanes. No matter that the Lackawanna Six, who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, were as much "the neighbors" in upstate New York as the bombers from London's suburbs. No matter that the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers revealed they too were "the neighbors" or, worse, a fifth column. No matter. Within a year of September 11, one of the most controversial, bitterly contested parts of the Patriot Act was the provision on surveillance of books checked out at the library.
We had become captive to the wrong media cliché. Saying 9/11 "changed everything" meant nothing. That allowed another cliché to take hold and define the policy debate after 9/11: Whatever else, we can't "sacrifice our fundamental values." (I think much of this had to do with the fact that the opposition personally didn't like the Patriot Act's designated evangelist, John Ashcroft, especially after hearing he held Bible readings at work.)
The London bombings imprinted on hardwired political minds the crude fact that Islamic terrorists have reduced the taking of lives they don't like to a banality. They play cricket or go rafting, and then they blow up the neighbors. It was easier than ever to connect the dots of the July 7 narrative: The London "neighbors" look like they're out to get us.
No, we are not going to flush John Locke and Thomas Jefferson down the toilet. "Speech," no matter how stupid, will remain free and protected; vocalized incitement to violence against the neighbors won't. Some of the Patriot Act's most aggressive measures, such as searches of personal and business records, almost surely will be sunsetted in the final bill. Courts will preclear and review some investigations. The FBI director himself must press his seal to library and bookstore searches.
Tony Blair said last week that after September 11 much of the world "turned over and went back to sleep again." So why won't Ambien and Valium induce again the sleep of fatal innocence? The sleeper cells, if they're sharp, will play cricket and pump gas for two years while the West's politicians and editorialists convince the new antiterror recruits that the war's tactics are still worse than the threat.
I think the burden for preventing that, for consolidating the new center-left recruits, lies with President Bush. The post-9/11 slumber was both psychological and political. It became a partisan mindset. London was electroshock therapy. Mr. Bush needs to speak to his public opposition, suggest some understanding of their former discomfort and restate the stakes. Why? Because the widest and deepest possible popular opposition to Islam's homicidal strain is crucial to ending it. Their primary target is the public will. They need to see, not now but two years from now, amid a presidential election, that on July 7, they blew it.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
Reality Happens
London's bombs go off inside America's head.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, August 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into rural Pennsylvania. In just over an hour, they killed nearly 3,000 Americans. Not more than a year later, nothing was more important in the lives of many Americans than that they extinguish the Patriot Act and drive George Bush and every remnant of his presidency from office, including the "unconstitutional" war on terror.
March 11, 2004, terrorists cut from the same Islamic cloth as September 11 blew up four Spanish commuter trains, covering Madrid's main station with parts of 191 dead people and 1,460 others, often horribly wounded. But the needle hardly moved in the politics of "George Bush's war on terror." In the U.S., nothing was more important than "closing" a holding pen for Islamic terrorists in Cuba.
July 7, 2005: the London bombings. In the four weeks since this happened, I have talked about it, on the West Coast and East Coast, with people one could describe as "non-Bush voters." To a man and woman, they say in so many words that the time has come to "get tough on the terrorists." One event, London, appears to have caused an internal reassessment among some Americans formerly ambivalent about the war on terror.
Profiling, a forbidden thought in some political quarters since hyper-thyroidic New Jersey state cops were rousting black people on the turnpike, is a subject for polite company. After years of reading how our "policies" were creating Islamic recruits to jihad, the London bombing has created recruits for the war on terror.
What happened?
Reality happened. September 11 was, in a sense, unreal. T.S. Eliot reflected in 1922 on "unreal" postwar London:
I had not thought death had undone so many
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet
I think for some, what happened that day--passenger planes flown into buildings, the slow death of the towers--was just too much, off the charts, a trauma and a personal concussion. Something like that. July 7 London was more comprehensible. Americans were able to absorb London more clinically, observers from afar. London also happened to an English-speaking people, so every televised comment back to the U.S., from the first witnesses to the police reports of apprehended and named terrorists, was understood and internalized. Then the British media, God bless them, reduced the madness to one, right cliché: The bombers are our neighbors. Three years in, the battle lines finally come clear.
The American psyche, or some part of it, has seemed disinclined to believe terrorists could be anything other than invaders from another planet. Seasonal, like the hurricanes. No matter that the Lackawanna Six, who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, were as much "the neighbors" in upstate New York as the bombers from London's suburbs. No matter that the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers revealed they too were "the neighbors" or, worse, a fifth column. No matter. Within a year of September 11, one of the most controversial, bitterly contested parts of the Patriot Act was the provision on surveillance of books checked out at the library.
We had become captive to the wrong media cliché. Saying 9/11 "changed everything" meant nothing. That allowed another cliché to take hold and define the policy debate after 9/11: Whatever else, we can't "sacrifice our fundamental values." (I think much of this had to do with the fact that the opposition personally didn't like the Patriot Act's designated evangelist, John Ashcroft, especially after hearing he held Bible readings at work.)
The London bombings imprinted on hardwired political minds the crude fact that Islamic terrorists have reduced the taking of lives they don't like to a banality. They play cricket or go rafting, and then they blow up the neighbors. It was easier than ever to connect the dots of the July 7 narrative: The London "neighbors" look like they're out to get us.
No, we are not going to flush John Locke and Thomas Jefferson down the toilet. "Speech," no matter how stupid, will remain free and protected; vocalized incitement to violence against the neighbors won't. Some of the Patriot Act's most aggressive measures, such as searches of personal and business records, almost surely will be sunsetted in the final bill. Courts will preclear and review some investigations. The FBI director himself must press his seal to library and bookstore searches.
Tony Blair said last week that after September 11 much of the world "turned over and went back to sleep again." So why won't Ambien and Valium induce again the sleep of fatal innocence? The sleeper cells, if they're sharp, will play cricket and pump gas for two years while the West's politicians and editorialists convince the new antiterror recruits that the war's tactics are still worse than the threat.
I think the burden for preventing that, for consolidating the new center-left recruits, lies with President Bush. The post-9/11 slumber was both psychological and political. It became a partisan mindset. London was electroshock therapy. Mr. Bush needs to speak to his public opposition, suggest some understanding of their former discomfort and restate the stakes. Why? Because the widest and deepest possible popular opposition to Islam's homicidal strain is crucial to ending it. Their primary target is the public will. They need to see, not now but two years from now, amid a presidential election, that on July 7, they blew it.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
![[wink]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/002.gif "Wink [wink]")
Not that I'd know much about that either. [twisted] [twisted]
