Right Wing Nut House

The ancients firmly believed in destiny, that fates ruled the affairs of men. These fates, or Moirai, were the daughters of the Goddess of Necessity Themis and spun the thread of an individuals life so that events played themselves out along a predestined string. This placed the hapless mortal in the position of being pulled this way and that by the Gods with no chance of doing anything to affect what happened to him.

In this framework, all the large events of history were explained by a kind of predetermination, unmovable historical forces where man was the captive of events, riding the waves of time unable to change direction while taking part in the drama of history for the amusement of the Gods.

We know better today, of course. Or at least we should. Instead, it appears that the Moirai are alive and well and comfortably ensconced in the editorial offices of the New York Magazine, playing havoc with rational thought and being joined in their revelry by the more modern gods of revisionism and political partisanship.

What makes my critique of their series of “essays” about a world where 9/11 never happened so spiteful is first and foremost the utter waste of a brilliant idea. It is a travesty that such an exciting concept was treated by the participants with a kind of bored cynicism more appropriate to a review of the newest Manhattan Bistro rather than a serious attempt to add anything of value to our cultural understanding of 9/11. In fact, whether by design or not, the only participant in the project who spent more than 5 minutes thinking about the premise was Andrew Sullivan.

Mr. Sullivan should be commended for his effort but skewered for his laughably shallow extrapolation of what a 9/11-less Bush presidency would have been. Indeed, this intellectual conceit appears to have taken on the morphology of a vicious, extraordinarily voracious bug in that it seems to have bitten almost every essayist involved in the project. The exception being author Tom Wolfe who either didn’t understand the directions given to him by the editors or simply gave up on the project and wrote whatever meandering thoughts on our post-9/11 culture that happened to be ready for transfer from mind to pen to paper.

In truth, it is shocking to read some of the reveries by people who are generally considered to be our cultural elites. Perhaps the format - a short essay (and I mean in some cases short!) encompassing thoughts on the subject from the perspective of their interest or expertise - did not lend itself to the kind of serious effort that would have illuminated some larger truths about where we are as a people 5 years after 9/11.

The question I would have then is why bother? Even the historians Doris Kearns-Goodwin and Douglas Brinkley gave responses so banal that they may have been rejected by a high school newspaper. Al Sharpeton’s contribution is incoherent. Frank Rich, who actually made a slight effort to address the question, came up with some pretty off the wall scenarios either trying to be amusing or proving that he’s simply daft.

There are some themes that seem to run through the majority of pieces. George Bush would have been a one term President. We would have continued to sleepwalk through history awaiting a hammer blow by Osama. Saddam would still be in a cage and presumably, children would still be flying kites in his paradise prison camp. Liberals are good, Conservatives are bad.

Am I missing anything? Oh yes, New York is a great town with great people. And, in the strangest of all the essays, the Deputy Mayor of Economic Development and Rebuilding Dan Doctoroff sees 9/11 if not as a godsend then as a fortunate happenstance of history in that all of his pet redevelopment projects for Lower Manhattan that had been languishing in bureaucratic limbo all these years got a serious boost when the yokels in Washington opened the money spigot and billions of dollars began to make their way into the bowels of his bureaucracy.

Always nice when someone can see the silver lining in just about anything.

By far the most egregious sin committed by all the essayists (with a couple of exceptions) was this almost surreal failure to grasp the larger forces of history at work between 2001-2006 of which 9/11 was a symptom and of which George Bush was positioned to manage better than any alternative personality on the political scene. While most of the essayists posited that Bush would have stuck with a domestic agenda and given the issue of terrorism short shrift, it seems obvious that he would not have been vouchsafed the choice.

If, as seems likely, Osama Bin Laden would have attacked us somewhere in the world if 9/11 had failed, the idea that Bush would have continued to ignore terrorism as a threat is belied by the testimony of Condi Rice before the 9/11 Commission. Rice related how Bush was sick of the United States “swatting flies” when it came to striking back at terrorism. An attack on Americans overseas would have initiated a confrontation with Bin Laden in Afghanistan that almost certainly would have involved regime change. In this alternate scenario, Bush emerges as a wartime leader and the 2004 election goes ahead as a battle between Bush and the man the Democrats nominate to counter Bush’s national security credentials; none other than John Kerry.

The point is that you can muck around with history all you want, play virtual history games to your hearts content, but there are larger trends at work that defy any change of direction as the result of one event. In this respect, even a cataclysm like 9/11 only ripples the pond a bit. I believe that going after Osama and Saddam were historical necessities that 9/11 made even more logical. Regardless of how both those military adventures turn out, they were the right choices at the time.

It is tempting to believe that the world would be a much quieter place without George Bush and 9/11. But it seems clear - and is even admitted by some of the essayists - that the forces of Islamic radicalism were not going to leave us alone regardless of who was in the White House or what party controlled Congress. The same Hizbullah that attacked Israel didn’t need George Bush to build up its strength over the years and lie in wait for the right opportunity to strike. The victory at the polls by Hamas was not the result of anything that the United States could have done differently. And the mullahs in Iran, hell bent on getting their hands on nuclear weapons, paid more attention to A.Q. Khan and his black market nuclear bazaar than to anything happening in the United States.

This strange obeisance to the fates when liberals talk and write about George Bush is one of the strangest outgrowths of Bush Derangement Syndrome. As if the thread of the Bush presidency could have been glimpsed 6 years ago and that everything that has happened since - including 9/11 - was predictable. Dahlia Lithwick of Slate.com uses this theme to show how evil George would have pushed through draconian law and order measures regardless of whether or not 9/11 happened. Tom Friedman writes if not Osama, it would have been China as Bush’s “obsession.”

I suppose this attitude is inevitable given the dangerous and frightening times we live in. But to have so much of it appear in one place and defined by so many people who should know better makes it all the more mystifying.