Archive Columns:Society and Politics

Post September 11th

   It is a lovely and a good thing to join hands and weep for our brother's sake, and a natural thing to want to know the contours of our calamity, but there is a point beyond which these first good and necessary acts begin to take on a maudlin look and selfish odor.

    Let me phrase this another way. I WISH NPR WOULD SHUT UP!!!

    Or this: Could those of us who are not personally grieving perhaps get on with it, for ourselves and for the sake of those who are?

     America has always leaned naturally to excess, usually in an endearing and innocent way, as in, say, Mt. Rushmore or our unparalleled selection of breakfast cereals. But an excess of sentimentality and chatter-posing-as-news is a relatively new phenomenon, a change from the taciturn, shucks ma'am personality embodied in our grim pioneers, our dour Yankee forbears, and the stoic Gary Cooper American of an earlier era.

    I think this verbose and emotional style is a product of the people who matured on the Watergate hearings and who in their own minds invented love. Later they invented reproduction and the oddly arrogant idea that you would drive more sensitively than usual once alerted to their Baby On Board. They are the people who brought you Cum Baya, flower power, the kiss of peace at church, and the concept of strangers joining hands in a circle. They are, alas, my people, the boomer generation.

    It is more feminine, more natural and often quite touching, this weepy, relentlessly loquacious style, but it has two dangers: once started, it cannot easily stop itself, and because of this, it tends to lack all proportion. If the western world can go into paroxysms for weeks when a well-meaning but mostly pitiable princess dies in a car crash, how long must be our wallow when something really dreadful happens? And how does it serve, when half the people on the radio sound as if they just came from Voices in the Family, congratulating themselves on their inability to cope, while the other half, only superficially more rational, find nothing a little strange in spending two days discussing what might be meant by freezing assets?

    Viewed against the other millions of people in history who have suffered meaningless death and destruction and have forborne them with less blather, the media's obsession has begun to seem indulgent, no longer justified by news, properly understood, but by the assumption that there is in our victimhood, as in all boomer experiences, something particularly exceptional.

    Obviously, the mode and scale of this disaster were indeed exceptional, but that was all covered in one or two weeks. The talk now just endlessly speculates on every possible ramification, an exercise that does not serve so much to inform as to underline our disbelief that we actually live in the same world as the rest of humanity. We have had an honest national naivete in this area for a long time, but by our endless media reiterations, we prolong it and cling to it in a way that makes it willful and unbecoming, no longer naivete, but self-absorption that hints finally of arrogance.

    Let us be more humble in this, which is to say, let us be more strong. For us and those who have much to mourn, let us grow up and move on.

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