Whatever else the homicidal Muslim gangs thought they were going to
accomplish on September 11, none could have predicted that five years later
the site of their attack in lower Manhattan would remain 16 empty acres.
More than nothing is happening at Ground Zero. Work has begun on the
transportation hub designed by architect Santiago Calatrava. Because the
hole is so deep, you have to look hard to see that the dirt floor has become
busy with construction workers in orange hardhats. Most of the work is
taking place below ground, preparing footings and foundations to hold the
2.6 million square-foot Freedom Tower, whose theoretical completion date is
2011.
No matter these first signs of productive life, one's eyes inevitably move
to the slurry walls, the huge slabs of torn, gray concrete that ring the
site. The slurry walls will come down eventually, but after five years they
have burned themselves into memory as the sad, oddly dignified remnant of
the event.
Ground Zero, uncompleted and broken, is an apt metaphor for the consequent
events in America that came after it--the war on terror, Iraq, the fall into
partisan division amid war, and the insular politics that left this awful
unbuilt site. The site is an unclosed grave. It is a rebuke surely to New
York's politics, but a mocking rebuke as well to a national ethos of public
life that would rather wallow in problems than resolve them. Ironic it is
that in our time the state of being most avidly sought after tragedy is
"closure." In truth, we'd rather not.
Ground Zero has been the perfect storm of New York politics. Yes, politics
by its nature is a slow process of extrusion. And yes, New Yorkers are
famously opinionated. But in New York self-expression--the exhibiting of the
glorious self--is a god worshipped many times a day. And so everything is
fought over--the design of the tower, the meaning of the Memorial, the
money--and no one gets to decide anything. Process, debate and not least,
litigation, become the main event.
Something similar happened to our national politics through these years. It
is one thing to disagree with the decision to go into Iraq, to oppose it and
abhor its most painful consequences. It is something else, as some have
done, especially in Congress, to withdraw and withhold support for a
presidency amid war and to work to thwart virtually every aspect of its war
program in Iraq and everywhere. When a Senator Lieberman partially dissents,
the party purifies itself.
This is not opposition in normal political times. This is not Social
Security reform; it is not a capital-gains tax cut. It is a war, or whatever
euphemism one wishes to use to describe resisting the up-and-running forces
that planned 9/11, London, Madrid, the foiled airline-bomb plot and all the
other murders of innocent civilians whose crime was that they affronted
radical Islam.
Presumably we want to succeed in this enterprise, that is, stop them.
Instead, we stop ourselves--feeling it necessary to contest, at length and
in the loudest public way, surveillance techniques, interrogation
techniques, the rules of engagement for U.S. military personnel, the holding
of prisoners.
Is it possible to see all this as the inevitable yeastiness of an active
politics? Once again, yes. And yes as well that there is a point past which,
as with Ground Zero, it becomes mostly egoistic self-indulgence. Wallowing.
An army that declares a ban on "hooding" and "water-boarding" prisoners, as
ours did this week with the release of its new Field Manual, is an army
fully engaged in the current politics of inversion. This is a politics that
amid war expands prisoners' rights even as it restricts the freedom of
travelers in airports at risk from the uncaught cohorts of the prisoners.
One would think that a system serious about staying steps ahead of a
declared mortal enemy--whether by military means or diplomatic
engagements--would prefer to do so with a nation closer together than
farther apart. Not us. Our evident presumption is that we can remain deeply
divided politically, work daily to deepen the divide, and still prevail.
This is a novel and untested theory.
At some point in the five years of the anti-terror wars, George Bush, *****
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld should have extended their hands across the aisle
to try to break the fall of our politics. Some good might have come of it.
Or perhaps the offered hand would have been slapped away. We'll never know.
It's too late for that. If the Democrats win the House in November, the war
on terror overnight becomes a footnote in the smaller but infinitely more
familiar war to win the White House.
September 11 and the place it left behind, Ground Zero, are entering the
realm of abstraction. Oliver Stone can make a movie that transforms the
event into a kind of cataclysmic natural disaster, disconnected from the
politics that flew planes into the buildings 108 stories above. So be it.
Ground Zero has been a zero-sum game for so long that it becomes hard to
complain much when the mythmakers move in to fill the void.
So I'll offer a personal myth. Since September 11, the most uplifting thing
I have seen as I walk daily to work past the 16-acre site has been the
constant, truly constant, stream of people who come there year round--in the
bitterest, windy days of February--to stand outside the galvanized steel
fence and look in. A paradox: The failure of political will to close the
wound has allowed everyone in the world who wished to see it, to see it.
And so for nearly 2,000 days, uncounted numbers of people, often families,
have come to Ground Zero. Whether they arrive in a state of curiosity,
anger, fear or pain, it doesn't matter. What has been available for them to
see has not been renewal or designed remembrance. There is only the sight of
something undeniably monstrous. All these people have looked and come to a
private conclusion about what it meant.
My myth is to believe they are filling the world with more gravity and moral
seriousness about September 11 than one might have guessed from the downward
spiral of our politics since that day. What eventually becomes of Ground
Zero isn't so important anymore. More good than one might have hoped for has
walked away from 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.
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