Getting Back to Normal

Here we are at nearly six months after September 11, and many people are saying that the time has come to get back to normal. They are not saying this because the security situation has changed fundamentally since then. The international terrorist network still exists. The clock is still ticking while states lethally hostile to the United States develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. The problem is that the emergency changed the subject for almost everyone with a political agenda. Now the people with agendas want it changed back.

The bulk of the unrest is among partisan Democrats, of course. They want to talk about HMO regulation, women's issues, reparations for slavery, anything at all but foreign affairs and military strategy. The biggest effort to break free is the investigation, indeed the dozen investigations, into the Enron affair. This is showing signs of becoming the Democrat's version of the Vince Foster suicide: there comes a point when the the persistence of the investigators becomes the scandal.

That said, though, there are also quite a number of "conservatives," variously defined, who also wish to have done with post-911 politics. Moral reformers are frustrated that the Bush Administration has scarcely a word to say in opposition to abortion these days. The general drift of the Administration's social-service policy is pro-family, so the reformers' unhappiness is not acute. Among the most unhappy people in America, however, are Libertarians and some business groups.

War may or may not be the health of the state, but it certainly makes discussions about supply-side economics and privatization irrelevant. It is possible that the tax cuts the Bush Administration got enacted in its first few months will remain in place, but there will be no more. Since cutting taxes is the only reason some Republicans run for office, the Administration has not had a particularly easy time with its own party.

It's hard to exaggerate the stupidity of some business executives. As I write this, the airlines seem to have scored a victory over national solidarity. After a tussle with the Department of Transportation's new Transportation Security Administration, they now insist that they can maintain "VIP" lines at the airports for the expedited security screening of frequent fliers. Sentiment at the airports is fragile enough these days because of the long delays; all that makes the inconvenience tolerable is the knowledge that it's part of a national effort. Creating a two-tier system of service simply reminds people how much they disliked the airlines even before September 11

The precedent that gives hope to those who wish to return to the issues of September 10 is the rise and fall of the current president's father. George Herbert Walker Bush had astronomical approval ratings at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, yet his popularity collapsed by the beginning of the next year, and he lost the election of 1992. Luck was a factor, of course. A shallow recession began during that period, just serious enough to incline the public to dissatisfaction with all incumbents.

More important, however, was the quick, partisan revision of history that the media generally embraced. In this view, the limited victory in the Gulf had not been a victory at all, because the war had not definitively solved the problems of the region. This was part of a larger critique, which held that the Bush I and Reagan Administrations had been concentrating too much on foreign affairs. This interpretation might not have had much effect, had not Bush I implicitly embraced it. His opponents taxed him for talking to foreigners too much, so he exerted himself to speak about domestic affairs. He did this badly.

Today we see much the same arguments being made about Afghanistan as were made about the Gulf War eleven years ago, often by the same people. The case is harder to make this time around, because the Administration said that the Afghan campaign was simply the beginning of a long war. Almost no one, beyond a few anti-globalists, is making the 1992 Clinton campaign's implicit argument that the US should disengage from the world. The suggestion that military security can be handled by multilateral organizations is hard to take seriously, perhaps even by the people who make it. The upshot is that we are no closer to normal today than we were on September 12. Perhaps better, a political culture that focuses on military and security issues has become normal.

Some things from before 911 do seem impossible to get rid of.

There is a story about US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. When Black died in 1971, the minister who was supposed to speak at the funeral wanted some personal information for the eulogy. In one of God's great practical jokes, a copy of the book The Greening of America that the justice had been reading in his final days fell into the minister's hands. That book, by Charles Reich, was one of the wonders of the Counter Culture era, a purple-prose tract for the movement that reached the bestseller lists just as the hippie phenomenon ended. Black's copy was copiously underlined, so the minister based his eulogy on those passages. Mourners had to restrain themselves from revealing that the justice had underlined those passages he thought most ridiculous.

In much the same way, the commission in charge of creating a temporary memorial in lower Manhattan to the victims of the World Trade Center has decided to create it around the Globe, the sculpture by Fritz Koenig that had stood in the middle of the World Trade Center Plaza. Now, the aesthetics of the World Trade Center complex were always controversial. Many people found it too big and too sterile, though most New Yorkers warmed to it in time. The one feature no one liked, ever, was that Koenig sculpture.