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WB: The Sixteen Acre Ditch
Billmon:
This is not, I know, the most inspiring way to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the event that essentially kicked off the new American century — which at this point seems unlikely to last even a decade. If you want the standard patriotic rhetoric (hallowed ground, blessings of democracy, forward strategy for freedom, etc.) you’ll have no trouble finding it elsewhere. There’s no shortage of the stuff today (whitehouse.gov is a good place to start). But I personally don’t think the record of the past half decade (or the current condition of Ground Zero) really justifies that kind of self-serving, self-justifying pablum.
Do you?
The Sixteen Acre Ditch
I think the real hole in lower Manhattan, or the real trauma, is the one we can’t see, the one that’s been driving our lives for the past 75 years, and will probably drive it for another 75 years at least, namely the Great Depression.
For a good twelve years, all the best minds in the country tried to pull us out of that hole, and of course they failed. They had to fail, because this wasn’t a problem that could be “fixed” in any kind of a hurry.
But then came WW II, and the Great Depression was over…. It was over, wasn’t it?… No, not at all–because we never worked our way out of it in the first place, or not, at least, through what would have had to be a long and tedious process of political and economic trial and error, accomodation, social regression and progression.
No, with the “Cold War,” we just kept the military machine running at full speed, and so we could never address the Great Depression–could never learn what it had to teach us, for good and ill. We only found ways to keep it from “coming back,” not that it really stopped “coming back,” as traumas never stop coming back in the middle of the night, or with the sharp report of a firecracker….
And when the Cold War suddenly cooled down (or, shall we say, “warmed up”?), what should suddenly appear but our dear, dear friend, the “War on Terror”? Yet another quick fix, and another missed opportunity to mend “the great hole in Lower Manhattan”.
This short-term, quick-fix process of coping with that “big hole” (the trauma of 1929), argues a widespread lack of faith in the slower healing processes of democracy, as these were conceived by the authors of the Constitution (such a lack of faith was already at work, to be sure, on the eve of the Civil War…).
And so “America,” understood as a political process correcting its own internal convulsions, may never actually happen, and we’ll just have to keep kidding ourselves with an endless routine of pledges and flags, of flags and pledges.
Or else–who knows?–“America” may happen in China, centuries hence. Because the Chinese (or so we hear) have known, and have known for thousands of years, the ways to ride with the longer rhythms of healing.
Posted by: alabama | Sep 12 2006 2:29 utc | 11
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