| Ugh. Mark Steyn's recent column about the Underwear Bomber reminds me of all that was so egregiously wrong about the past decade.
It's odd actually - but, personally, the last decade has been pretty incredible. The birth of my children. Attending graduate school in Missoula, the swirl and rush of the 2006 election campaign, the completion of the work in 2008. Other things, too, like the Red Sox finally cracking it open - not once, but twice - the dominance of the Patriots, some memorable trips to faraway places, a brief and enjoyable hiatus in the Bay Area, these things made the naughties, for me, pretty swell.
But on a wider level, the naughties were a stinker: 9/11, sinking earnings and a flat-lining economy, looming ecological disaster, the Bush administration, Iraq and the associated collapse of the media, a bungled Afghanistan, Dick Cheney, the hamstringing of progressives on health care reform, Blackwater, and torture, just to name a few off the top of my head. An evil, vile time, and lot of the most reprehensible events that occurred are clearly lain at our own feet.
And why? Read Steyn's simpering, fear-soaked column wringing its hands over airport security and cloaked in gutless he-man bravado. It's a voice worshiping Armageddon, and demanding you, too, get on your knees in obeisance to his fear, cloaked in nationalist rhetoric, and demanding the blood sacrifice of liberals. It's craven, calculated, political, and completely amoral. And that's what drove us to Iraq, to the loss of habeas corpus, to torture: the careful manipulation of fear for partisan, political gain.
I remember when it began: with John Walker Lindh's capture a few weeks after 9/11. Say what you will about the man - whether he's a traitor addled by religious fervor or a misunderstood pilgrim caught up in events - there was something rotten about his treatment after capture...the beatings, the torture, the quick application of "justice," and the weird gag order imposed on him and his family that forbids them to speak about his handling by the US government, clearly none of which serves our national security interests.
But the really notable element to come out of Walker Lindh's capture was the rhetoric coming out of the right that was prominently featured on cable television talk shows. Remember this?
We need to execute people like John Walker [Lindh] in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors.
Ann Coulter said this, January of 2002. Later Coulter hid behind her claim it was a joke, but it wasn't funny when I heard it sitting on my inlaws' couch in Berkeley, California, when she and her ilk d*mned an entire metropolitan area of several millions as treasonous because of Walker Lindh. What was notable, though, was that it marked the end to that that post-9/11 feeling of unity that was so pervasive everywhere. Coulter's remarks were an announcement, a piercing fanfare, that 9/11 was going to be crassly exploited to go after the left, politically.
To be fair, what really sunk us was that a lot of lefties - and notably, the media -- bowed down for fear of appearing "weak." Still, it was right-wing fear that moved them. And that grating, arrogant, fear-laden tone is what I'll remember most about the politics of this decade... |
