The End of American Exceptionalism

After watching the endless coverage of the events surrounding the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attack including a movie made for television, (shown without commercial interruption!), I was torn by a number of uncomfortable emotions. All those who lost family members and friends certainly deserve our sympathy; the victims were, after all, innocent victims and victims, moreover, of an attack they had no way to prepare for. Thus, to call much of the coverage pious, even overly mawkish, would seem close to sacrilegious. Yet, it was disturbing to also harbor thoughts about how much the day fed into the agenda of the current administration. The film broadcast by ABC seemed a strange melange of expose on the one hand and whitewash on the other. It did nothing to combat our stereotypical view of the Islamic world. The overall message, sadly, seemed to be that we just value American lives far more highly than any others. I could not keep myself from thinking about what a similar day of commemoration would look like in Lebanon five years from now, where nearly a thousand innocents were killed, many of them children. Or, for that matter, what would such a day of remembrance one day mean in Baghdad where some estimate that as many as 100,000 Iraqis have died? And, on an even larger scale, taking a longer historical perspective, who are we to wring our hands over the death of innocents? It was not Islamic fundamentalists who participated in an almost world-wide nightmare in which 60 to 70 million died. It was not Islamic fundamentalists who found a rationale for the death of thousands in two nuclear holocausts. The two world wars were conflicts in which good Christian gentlemen went at one another with demonic abandon and didn't seem to mind dropping hellfire from the skies on not just combatants but the elderly, the women and the children. Yet we are exposed almost daily to endless pontification about the horrors of Islamic terrorists. In one sense, however, 9/11 clearly marked a significant historical change. No longer would the U.S. feel immune to the consequences of its involvements. The luxury of two world wars and a host of foreign adventures (only the most outstanding of which were Korea and Vietnam) fought with impunity, separated by the Atlantic and the Pacific was over. Ultimately, perhaps, the meaning of the loss of the 3,000 lives in the 9/11 attacks will be to serve as a check on American policies drafted with no regard for their possible impact on our own people. Perhaps, as a result of their sacrifice, we have truly become globalized.