• So many things have changed. My New Quincy bedroom overlooks De Wolfe Street, and every day I can hear ambulances and fire trucks and police cars wailing past, cutting down from Mt. Auburn to Memorial Drive. I never really noticed them before, except as part of the background noise of a busy college town, across the river from an even busier city. But now, when the sirens rise and fall outside, I feel a trace of dread, and sometimes I go to the window and stare out, looking across DeWolfe, over the Cambridge rooftops, toward where the Prudential and the Hancock buildings can just barely be seen, gleaming against the September sky. I suppose that I'm just making sure that they're still there. • So many things have changed. There was a good-sized terrorism scare in Boston this weekend: it started with John Ashcroft warning officials that the Hub might be a target, and quickly metastasized to embrace rumors of anthrax on the subways, toxins in the water, and god-knows-what-else. My own mother called up to urge me to drink bottled water — a conversation, I realized later, that was repeated between countless anxious mothers and their Harvard offspring over the course of the weekend. People talked about leaving town; I skipped out on a Friday night trip to Fenway Park. The promised terror never came, of course — or perhaps it did, in a way. There was no violence, but there was fear, as there will be for many days to come. "Now we know how the Israelis feel," people say. This isn't quite true, of course; in Israel, there is a new bombing every week, or still more often, and the bombers target restaurants and buses and nightclubs, not landmarks like the Twin Towers. Here in America, in time — if there are no more attacks — the tension will ease somewhat, and life will return to normal. If there are no more attacks. • So, many things have changed. Perhaps only temporarily — perhaps, the sudden urge to join the CIA will recede, perhaps my friends in ROTC won't be shipped off to war just yet, perhaps people will stop going online to research the draft. But for now, at least, there is something different in the air — a new seriousness, a sense that the easy decadence of the last decade is on the way out, and that something new is being born. We have been given the gift of knowledge by these attacks, if nothing else; the knowledge that history doesn't end (at least not yet), the knowledge that everything is vulnerable, and that civilization is still, as Joseph Conrad wrote at the turn of a different century, "like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds." It is a bright and beautiful thing, true, but it is vulnerable, fleeting — it can be attacked, crippled, destroyed. Even here, even in America. Memento mori, the monks say. Remember that you must die. In our long, splendid summer, we all forgot. But now it is autumn, and we remember again. • So many things have changed — but some have not. Among them, alas, is the character of a sizable chunk of the Harvard student body, whose reactions to the September Massacre have neatly illustrated the increasing moral bankruptcy of our civilization's overeducated elites. There have been flags, true, and moving vigils, and even the Crimson editorial page has managed to maintain a healthy mix of outrage and resolve. Everyone is not lost, by any stretch of the imagination. But so many are — enough to make me despair for the honor and the future of this institution, which I love so well. Among the lost are those who write long, poisonous e-mails likening the outburst of patriotism to a fascist takeover; those who invent and disseminate "evidence" that the media is whipping up anti-Arab hysteria; those who parse things that should not be parsed, making meaningless distinctions between "acts of war" and "crimes against humanity"; those who seem more concerned over the (remarkably few, in a land of 280 millions) instances of anti-Muslim backlash than over the terrorist acts themselves; and above all, those who suggest, though rarely in so many words, that we somehow had this coming — because of our refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, or support the International Criminal Court, or anyone of a hundred one-worlder pet issues, as if the terrorists were a collection of outraged U.N. bureaucrats, instead of murderous fanatics intent on tearing up the liberal political order, root and branch, and remaking the world to suit their dark designs. These self-indulgent, overpampered Harvard students, these peace-mongers, these fools who quote Gandhi — an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind — as if the words of the Mahatma were enough to settle any debate, these craven types with their banners and slogans (what do we want? peace! when do we want it? now!), these people who do not understand, because they will never understand, that true peace comes not through wishful thinking but through the hard, heavy work of courageous men — of them let it be said, as the Prophet Jeremiah said of Israel's leaders three thousand years ago, they dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace' , they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. |
• Again, the Bible, with apologies to my secularized schoolmates. To everything there is a season, warns the Book of Ecclesiastes, a time for peace and a time for war. We have reached, alas, the season of war. Not because our enemies are strong — not because the riflemen of Afghanistan are likely to ride down across the Great Plains tomorrow, putting our cities to the torch. No, this is a time for war because the men who visited this horror, this slaughter upon us are still weak, still striking from the shadows, still hiding themselves in the remotest regions of our ever-smaller globe. Today we are still the world's sole superpower, still capable of calling on Russian aid, still able to bring troubled nations like Pakistan into line. Tomorrow it may not be so easy — tomorrow China may be stronger, or Russia more fractured; Europe may be more antagonistic, or the Middle East still more unsettled and anti-American. And most importantly, tomorrow the bin Ladens of the world — and yes, the Husseins and Iranian mullahs as well — may not be striking at us with our own jets transformed into flying bombs, but with darker, deadlier weapons. Anyone who has seen the satellite photos of dead animals scattered around Afghani terrorist compounds
knows well that bin Laden aims at killing us softly, if he can — with poisons in the water, and with germs in the air. And anyone who has read the unhappy story of the U.N.'s failed weapons inspections in Iraq "knows that Saddam aims at something even worse — at achieving a
dream of nuclear weapons, with which he might threaten to fulfill Oppenheimer's hushed Los Alamos whisper, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. So we must fight now, while the sun is still high over our empire, while the barbarians are still gathered at the border, and not yet at the gates. This will not be an easy war, and whatever President Bush may promise us, it may not end in victory. By fighting, we risk losing ourselves in a bloody quagmire, we risk destabilizing the world, we risk all the wealth and power that our civilization has piled high over the years. We risk much — but we risk more if we do not
fight. Our enemies do not believe in peace, whatever the fools on the steps of Widener may tell themselves. Instead, they believe in the lessons of Khobar Towers, and of the U.S.S. Cole, and of the embassy bombings in Africa — the lesson that America is, as bin Laden likes to say, a "paper tiger," too decadent to fight. We must show
them our claws now, or they will put us to the torch tomorrow. • At least for now, before the casualties mount and the failures begin and the inevitable partisanship rears its head, we seem to be showing the necessary steel for the task ahead. And at the risk of sounding predictable, let me say how glad I am, and how fortunate we are, to have such a collection of hard men and women (Condaleeza forever!) at the helm of state today. Rumsfield and Powell, Cheney and Wolfowitz, all make me feel far more secure than the collection of ineffective hand-wringers (Anthony Lake, Warren Christopher) who dominated the Clinton years. (Think, for a moment, what a tissue of squandered opportunities Clinton's foreign policy now seems.) And yes, in that list of leaders I include George W. Bush, whom even I have always considered a good but slightly callow man, but who seems so far to be rising to the occasion — as America's leaders always have, so far. Call it Prince Hal becoming Henry V, if you will, but Dubya is growing up, and his speech last week before the Congress was one of the one of the finest political addresses that I have ever heard — and certainly the best American speech since the close of the Cold War. A friend tells me that she watched the speech with a collection of Harvard Housemates, who spent the entire thirty minutes heaping scorn on the President. This should not surprise, but it does sadden. Blinded by their prejudices, too many Harvard students are losing touch with reality — if, indeed, they ever were in touch with it to begin with. • There is more to be said — and there will be more said, in the days and weeks to come, as the shape of our new war becomes clarified. For now, though, I will end with poetry. There has been more of it in the last week, circulated via e-mail and inserted into essays, than I can ever remember. Some things, it seems — like bombings and bloodshed and sudden, undreamt-of destruction — are better spoken of in a different voice than our usual, lumbering American prose. So here is just one verse, of just one poem — the first verse of W.H. Auden's "September I, 1939," written as the Nazi tanks were blitzing their way into Poland: I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. RGD |