Time to Make the Right Choice

Much has been written in this campaign season about how this year's major party presidential candidates are the most disliked candidates ever. Articles such as this one, or this one, or this one (just a tiny sample) have dissected this phenomenon in great detail.

I hear from friends and acquaintances on the left how they would never even conceive of voting for Trump, but they just can't bring themselves to vote for Clinton. They talk of voting for the Libertarian candidate Johnson, or the Green Party candidate Stein, or just not voting at all. The anguish among no small number of lifelong Republicans who can't stomach Trump, but can't bring themselves to vote for Clinton either, is also "a thing", as we say nowadays.

I can understand why a lot of people, even die-hard liberals, have their problems with Clinton. Bill and Hillary Clinton are perceived as the secretive power couple who play by their own rules and feel accountable to no one. While (in my opinion, anyway) much of that reputation has been manufactured by their political enemies, some of it is a product of their own actions. The matter of Hillary's private email server, however much she may seek to downplay it, is incredibly problematic, and symptomatic. The FBI investigation found no evidence of offences warranting prosecution, but in his statement to the press FBI Director Comey also made it clear that there was serious negligence involved. In talking about the matter, Clinton continually emphasizes the former while ignoring the latter, perpetuating the existing narrative that the Clintons are pathologically secretive and, when accused of wrongdoing, will defend themselves with legalistic arguments while appearing tone-deaf to the political and moral issues raised. To some extent I can empathize with the Clintons' intensive pursuit of privacy, given the long list of discredited conspiracy theories that have dogged them now for decades, but they just don't seem to get how their perceived lack of transparency fuels these very conspiracy theories.

But let's get serious here. Donald Trump is, as I previously wrote—good lord, was it really almost a year ago?—at best Berlusconi and at worst Mussolini, and my assessment leans more and more to the latter. He is a man with demonstrable fascist tendencies. He is, to quote the Washington Post, "a unique threat to American democracy". This man must under no circumstances become President of the United States. I am not the sort of person who is given to hyperbole, but I believe that the election of this man to the highest office in the nation could set in motion events that would make the disastrous end of the George W. Bush administration look trivial by comparison.

And after the inauguration, it's bunga bunga time!

While the rest of us are distracted by this current circus of a presidential campaign, the Trump team is making its transition plans. In a recent New Yorker article, Evan Osnos writes about those plans, not as a matter of speculation but as a product of good old-fashioned journalism. If you like what was achieved during eight years of Obama, too bad, because you can expect to see all that undone as quickly as possible if Trump wins. And you are not going to like where it goes from there. Read that article.

Consider also that regardless of who wins the presidency, the chances are good that we will still have a Republican majority in both houses of Congress post-election. Trump will need congressional support to put many parts of his program in place and congressional leaders will want something in return. So you can expect plenty of collateral damage not initiated by Trump himself, such as when he signs off on that infamous hypocrite Paul Ryan's pet project of destroying Social Security as it currently exists.

Come on, Paul, just kiss his ass one more time. It's for the good of the party.

Then, at a more visceral level, consider the man's performance in the first presidential debate against Clinton, which took place a couple of days ago as I write this. He was obnoxious and rude. He was petulant and childish. He showed no evidence of preparation beyond his few pet talking points. He demonstrated no knowledge of history and no grasp of how government actually works. He lied and he blustered. He complemented his third-grade vocabulary (and inability to form complete sentences) with the arrogant, bullying antics of an actual—extremely spoiled—third-grader. He was Trump at his trumpiest. The next day he blamed his erratic performance on his microphone, like that same third grader making lame excuses for not doing his homework. We have heard so much in this campaign about how he's going to negotiate or renegotiate all kinds of deals with NATO or Mexico or Russia or China or Iran or whomever. God help us if that's how he plans to do it.

Who's laughing now?

And so it is time to make a choice, and let's be clear about what that choice is. The choice is between Clinton and Trump, period. Forget Gary Johnson. Forget Jill Stein. Forget about writing someone in on your ballot. And don't even think about not voting.

Coming back to those people who don't want Trump, but don't want to vote for Clinton: disaffected, disappointed Republicans generally say they'll vote for Johnson instead; erstwhile Democratic voters tend toward Stein (or say maybe they'll write in Sanders). They think they are registering some kind of symbolic protest. I have empathy for their frustration with the candidates on offer, but as far as I'm concerned they are just registering their political immaturity.

Gary Johnson seems like a nice enough guy, but I've listened to a number of interviews with him over the last few months and he always sounds kind of incoherent to me, talking out of both sides of his mouth about how we should drastically roll back government regulation, but we should have a legal, regulated market for marijuana and we should strengthen the EPA, which, the last time I looked, was a regulatory agency that perpetually angers anti-regulation ideologues. I could cut him some slack for his "what's 'Aleppo'?" moment if he had then come back and said sorry, I'm tired and had a little memory lapse there, and then made a coherent policy statement, but instead we got some vague nonsense of an answer once he understood what the question was. I saw him and his running mate, Bill Weld, on Chris Matthews' show tonight and that topic came up; he owned up to his little brain freeze on Aleppo but then dismissed it by saying words to the effect that knowing every detail is not so important anyway. Then he and Weld went on to assert that we will only find a solution in Syria by cooperating with Russia, which may well be true, but then they talked about how completely untrustworthy Russia is. So where does that leave us? We look to a president to make the hard decisions, not just to tell us that the decision is hard.

I've also listened to some interviews with Jill Stein, and to me she comes across as well-meaning, idealistic, but just a little bit nutty. That impression notwithstanding, I will say that I actually find a huge amount of stuff in her party's platform that I personally could sign up to under other circumstances.

But here's the thing: Jill Stein is not going to win this election. Neither is Gary Johnson. Neither is Bernie Sanders, or Mickey Mouse, nor anyone else you might think of writing in. Sorry. Like it or not, it's just a fact that the solid core of committed Trump and Clinton voters is too large for any other candidate to have even a remote chance of winning. Your vote for any of the above is a vote that is not going to the only candidate who actually does have a legitimate chance to defeat Trump, and that is playing with fire for the sake of making some kind of statement that is going to change exactly nothing if it gives Trump the presidency. Presidential races are won in the states, not at the national level, and sometimes state races are won by very small margins. Remember Florida in 2000.

A variant on the "I'll protest by voting for Johnson/voting for Stein/writing someone in/not voting" approach I heard someone mention in an NPR interview today was "I'll register a protest vote if Clinton is clearly ahead, but I'll vote for Clinton if the polls say the race is tight." That's the wrong approach on two counts. First, all polls have a margin of error, many that the media like to report on are poorly designed and therefore not very accurate, and they tend to focus on the national mood overall rather than on the individual state races. Second, and more importantly, Trump needs to not just lose, he needs to lose big. The electoral vote in the individual states and the popular vote overall need to send a very clear message that the Trump program of "make America hate again" is rejected and repudiated by the vast majority of American voters. He needs to lose by such clear margins in every state that his almost certain charge that the voting was "rigged" will look ludicrous.

I myself will vote for Clinton, and I will do so gladly and not reluctantly. I am painfully aware of her flaws, but I am equally aware of her very genuine qualifications for the office. If you have to hold your nose to do the same, I understand, but do it. With a Trump presidency averted, by all means focus your attention on remaking the Democratic Party into something more to your liking, or on building up the Green Party, or on whatever other cause is near to your heart. There is a time for symbolism, and there is a time for pragmatism. Every one of us needs to be clear on which time we're currently in.

Please Just Go Away

Dick Cheney, the Freddy Krueger of American politics, is at it again. Like a horror movie monster who keeps coming back when you were sure he could terrorize us no longer, this week Cheney and his minion daughter Liz have surfaced on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to tell us how badly President Obama is botching Iraq policy under the title, "The Collapsing Obama Doctrine".

Back to Terrorize Us Some More

I've been less than impressed by Obama's foreign policy, which has frequently struck me as somewhat unfocused and directionless. That is not to say that I am not happy about specific policies such as his moves to bring our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end, but if there is some overarching program guiding US foreign policy under his administration, I've had a hard time discerning exactly what it is. There are also what I consider to be some real blunders, such as the failed "reset" of relations with Russia or the "red line" fiasco regarding chemical weapons in Syria. 

But if there is one person who has absolutely zero standing to criticize the president, it's Dick Cheney. That one of the leading lights of the George W. Bush administration would author (or co-author) the words, "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many" is an utter denial of his own role as an architect of the mess that is Iraq in the year 2014, and a direct insult to anyone who has bothered to pick up a newspaper in the last decade and a half. If ever there was a case of the pot calling the kettle black—no pun intended—this is it. So humor me while I return to the days of yesteryear to remind you of some of what we lived through in the years 2001–2008 under Bush and Cheney and their pals.

Long ago I shared what was to be a tale in three parts of my discovery of an old but apparently unread copy of the Boston Globe dated August 22, 2001 in a forgotten corner of my shed. In part one I shared my experiences from that period as I found myself inextricably entwined in dot-com madness that eventually ended in tears—and redemption. In part two I reflected on the period immediately following, which saw both the country and my new job under attack simultaneously. In the third and final installment I thought I would finally open up that paper and share my profound meditations on what I found in there and how it relates to my life now (or maybe just ramble and rant in my usual fashion), but I just somehow never got around to it.

So at last I open up the paper, and… there is actually not that much worth remarking on. There is a story on the front page about Senator Jesse Helms, the arch-conservative republican from North Carolina, deciding not to run for another term. I always thought of Helms as a pompous blowhard extremist and I was glad when he finally exited the scene; by today's Republican standards he would probably be viewed as a right-of-center moderate who could never win a Republican primary election. Otherwise the first few pages mostly contain local and national stories of murder and mayhem, and mundane policy discussions about topics that have long been forgotten but no doubt seemed pretty important at the time.

The international section is a little more interesting. There is a story about Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat agreeing to hold talks about ending eleven months of continuing violence. Another story is about a bombing by ETA in Spain—don't hear much about ETA anymore. There is a report about the US considering easing sanctions on Sudan, citing a reduction in support for terrorism; war and genocide in Darfur still lay a few years in the future. Towards the back of the section there is a story about how the US Army was performing surveillance missions in support of NATO peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans (remember the Balkans?) by means of "miniature spy planes… guided by remote control"—the term "drone" had clearly not yet entered our everyday vocabulary.

The lead story in the business section is about the Federal Reserve cutting the Federal funds rate to 3.5%, the seventh cut since the beginning of the year. Currently it's 0.25%, where it's been since the end of 2008. More than half of the business section is taken up by the previous day's stock prices and other financial market information; I can't even remember how long it's been since the Globe stopped publishing that, since it's all freely available online.

As for the rest… In sports, the Red Sox were in second place in the AL East, several games behind the Yankees, as so often. The prime time TV schedule listed a bunch of shows that I don't even remember, but then I'm not a big TV-watcher anyway. There was still a small classified ads section; I guess Craigslist hadn't yet completely killed that.

Of all the stories in that old paper, there was really only one that still seems very timely, namely this one from above the fold on the front page:  "Bush Takes Firm Line as Surplus Dwindles—Defends Tax Cut, Says Overspending Is Danger". The story begins with this:

With two reports preparing to announce that the federal budget surplus has melted away in recent months, President Bush launched a defense of his budget choices yesterday and argued that overspending by Congress is a bigger danger to Social Security and Medicare than his $1.35 billion tax cut.

[Note: that $1.35 billion number was an error; the Globe published this on Aug. 24: "Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story on Page 1 Wednesday about the dwindling federal budget surplus misstated the amount of President Bush's tax cut over the next decade. It is expected to total $1.35 trillion."]

The story continued:

Today's OMB report is expected to reflect a $150 to $160 billion surplus, the second-largest in history. But nearly all but $1 billion of that will probably be composed of the Social Security surplus, which Bush, like most politicians, has promised not to touch. And while the OMB report may show the administration only a few steps short of touching that surplus, other calculations based on a slightly different set of economic assumptions indicate that the White House has in fact dipped into the surplus, a circumstance the Congressional Budget Office may reflect in its report to be released Aug. 28.

It then went on to discuss Bush's promise that his budget would ensure economic growth of 3.2% as the economy faltered in the wake of the dot-com bust, while the Democrats prepared to attack him for funding a tax cut with money that could have been spent on education or defense. Representative quotation:

But Democrats, preparing for a media blitz to accompany the release of the OMB report today, seemed undaunted. "George Bush inherited the strongest economy and the biggest surplus in history. We had eight years of fiscal improvement, and in eight months he's wiped it out," said Tom Kahn, Democratic staff director for the House Budget Committee.

Well, we're still chewing on that one, aren't we? Looking back, that story looks to me like the first real taste of what was going to be eight years of ideologically driven foolishness; a series of profoundly bad decisions that, at the end of the G.W. Bush presidency, would find the country embroiled in two largely stalemated wars, the economy in shambles, the federal government running massive spending deficits and a huge segment of the population feeling the kind of deep existential fear that few of us had experienced since the Great Depression. This article reminds us that as they left office, Bush's approval rating was 22% and Cheney's was an even more abysmal 13%. Four years after Bush just sort of disappeared from sight, seemingly overnight, we still have a long way to go toward recovery, but once in a while we should compare that to the state of the country as it stood a little over five years ago.

Actually… no.

There are many who would argue that the G.W. Bush administration is history now, and we need to look forward and not dwell on those years. Obama has already completed a full term in the White House and is over a year into his second, so whatever may be wrong with the country, it's all about his policies and his performance now. But I reject that. As alluded to above, anything you can say about where we are now needs to be looked at in light of where Bush, Cheney and co. left us some five years ago. Furthermore, the Republican opposition would apparently like nothing better than to not only take us back to the discredited policies of the Bush years, but to double down on them. And now, once again, we have Cheney turning up in the media to continue his campaign to rewrite history. We need to remember where we were, how we got there, and why we can't go back to that place.

Let's review some of what happened during those years. As the Bush era started with his inauguration in January of 2001, the dot-com boom was transforming itself into a giant bust, as I recounted in the first part of this little saga. That wasn't Bush's fault by any means; chalk it up to the strange wave of mass euphoria that somehow led otherwise intelligent people to believe that in the Internet era, giving things away for free is a highly-promising business model, followed by the sudden discovery that it actually isn't. I will remember the summer of 2001 as a period in which the Internet economy was crashing down around our ears, taking jobs and wealth with it. Our president wanted us to believe that cutting taxes would fix this. Unfortunately, even at the time there was no evidence that this actually works. Here is someone's nice little analysis that summarizes this well; here is a more formal analysis by the Center on Budget Policy Priorities. The one qualification here is that tax cuts to low-income people do have some stimulative effect, because people in that category tend to spend every dollar put back into their pockets; unfortunately the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 skewed in the other direction. But don't listen to me; just do a Google search on "evidence that tax cuts stimulate the economy" and draw your own conclusions.

We of course went to war during those years, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. I remember when the first shots were fired in Afghanistan; we were there to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harbored it. There were all kinds of declarations about how we would be there to rebuild Afghanistan as a nation, we wouldn't abandon them as we had prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, and we would generally heave Afghan society from the seventh century into the twenty-first. And what actually happened? 

Well, we got rid of the Taliban government, and in its place installed the fabulously corrupt Karzai government (oh wait, I forgot, Karzai was elected by his countrymen, wink wink). In early December 2001 we located our main targets, bin Laden and his lieutenant al-Zawahri, at Tora Bora and then (according to the 2009 report of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) let them escape to Pakistan because General Franks and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld failed to commit the troops needed to kill or capture them, preferring instead to rely on Afghan fighters to do the job (it would be nearly a decade later—under Obama—that bin Laden met his end, and al-Zawahri remains at large). We heard all about how America had to remain engaged in Afghanistan rather than to abandon it to its own devices, and instead help it to become a modern democracy, ignoring both the congenital Afghan allergy to foreigners trying to come in and tell them how to do things and the historic inability of any central Afghan government to control much of the country beyond Kabul (recommended reading: Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the War against the Taliban by Stephen Tanner).

Then the Bush administration just sort of lost interest in Afghanistan, letting the situation devolve into a stalemate between the US and its allies on the one hand and a reconstituted Taliban on the other. No, we had more important things to do, namely to invade Iraq on the pretext of fabricated claims that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction and conspiring to hand them over to our enemies. So off we went, authorized by Congress—with the votes of, among others, then-Senators Hilary Clinton, John Kerry and Joe Biden, let us not forget—to apply the might of the US military to removing Saddam and his cronies from office, but with no actual plan for what would come next. 

Lacking any strategy for a post-war Iraq, the Bush administration instead blundered from one tactical error to the next, with Cheney playing a prominent role. The list of screw-ups is far longer than I could document here without boring you any more than I already have (more recommended reading: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 by Thomas E. Ricks and Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran). But just to summarize: Thousands of American servicemen and -women died. Thousands more went home with life-changing injuries, not a few of them discovering in the process that no real consideration had been given to how they and their families would be provided with the support and the resources they would need to cope with their new reality for the rest of their lives. Hundreds of billions of American tax dollars were spent on the war itself, with billions more wasted to support ill-conceived projects that accomplished absolutely nothing (one more book recommendation: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren).

We of course have to consider the legacy of the war that Cheney so vigorously—and with such blatant disregard for the facts—promoted on the Iraqis themselves. We don't know the precise numbers, but we can safely say that tens of thousands of Iraqis died in the war and its immediate aftermath. Thousands more have died in the civil war that followed and that has continued with varying intensity ever since. As I read practically every day about people being killed or maimed by this or that bombing in Iraq, or about a government led by a prime minister who tolerates, if not promotes, a practically institutionalized culture of corruption, and who seems determined to disenfranchise large segments of the population and turn Iraq into a client state of Iran (see the recent article about Nuri al-Maliki by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker), I wonder whether the average Iraqi thinks he is better off now than under Saddam. I also wonder why anyone is surprised by the rapid advance of the Sunni-led ISIS militia in the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, given Maliki's aforementioned determination to cut them off from any kind of influence or power over the institutions that control their lives. I also wonder how the Cheneys can pretend that the logical consequences of the Bush administration machinations that brought Maliki to power are somehow Obama's fault.

The current Cheney op-ed asserts that "[t]his president is willfully blind to the impact of his policies. […] President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom." What a breathtaking exercise in hypocrisy and cynicism. What a sad commentary on the state of our society that a major newspaper will publish such nonsense, and that a large segment of our country will no doubt eagerly lap it up. The one thing George W. Bush did right was to just sort of go away when his time in office was up. I wish Dick Cheney would finally follow him.

What Was, What Is, What Will Be—Part Two

I promised this story would be continued whenever I got around to it, so now I'm getting around to it. I know that you've been waiting in suspense to hear how it continues. Recall that when we left off, my job had just been saved by the appearance of a benefactor from the Far East, who had founded a new company, Phoenix, from the ashes of XYZ Corp. 

The initial period right after the creation of the new company was one of improvisation, because there were no physical facilities as such. Phoenix rented a couple of offices in one of those places that rents out temporary office space, and into that were crammed a few desks and some file servers and networking equipment. Most of us either worked remotely from home or at a client site.

Right before XYZ Corp. finally threw in the towel, I had been staffed on a project to redesign the Internet presence for a large regional bank. I was taking over the security design part of the project from a colleague of mine, a competent member of our information security group at XYZ, but a guy who was also a little over-intense in his devotion to the principles of what we in the business affectionately refer to as "infosec", and generally kind of an oddball; the kind of person who presents a happy, friendly facade but who simultaneously gives off a vibe of having  something dark and troubling bubbling away under the surface. At some point he mentioned to me that he took regular medication for chronic depression; I don't know why he felt like sharing this with me and it wasn't something I necessarily wanted to know anyway, but it did explain some things.

But as the uncertainty created by XYZ's slow death spiral mounted, it turned out that my colleague was having marital problems at the same time, and I guess the situation got to be too much for him at some point. He began skipping meetings and ignoring deadlines for the one project he still had—the aforementioned bank project—and ultimately stopped showing up for work at all. I was given the task of taking over his role and cleaning up the mess that he had left with what was now going to be my client. I hate taking on those kinds of assignments, since starting out a consulting assignment with an already irate client is generally somewhat less than amusing. But hey, this was no time to be picky about work assignments.

There was another complicating factor in all this as well. The bank we were working for had also been an investor in XYZ. Not a major investor, but the sum of money that their CEO had committed with great fanfare as part of a "strategic partnership" wasn't trivial, either. That commitment was not without controversy, coming at a time when XYZ was already on the ropes, and Mr. CEO was left with a fair amount of egg on his face when XYZ gave up the ghost just three months later. Word was that he was not terribly happy about this.

So I knew that the meetings I had scheduled for my first on-site visit on a Tuesday morning in early September of 2001 were going to be somewhat challenging, happening as they were under the double shadow of both the overall flame-out of XYZ and the acute mess that had been left by my now ex-colleague. The office I needed to visit was just over the border in a neighboring state, about an hour and a half away. I arranged to get a ride with another of my colleagues who was working with the client. It was a beautiful fall morning as we drove down there.

It was about 9 AM when we got into the building in which we were supposed to meet our other colleagues. I went to find the guy from Phoenix who was in charge of our group to ask where to park myself until my first meeting. He was on the phone with someone, talking in kind of an agitated way and saying things like, "a plane?" Another colleague turned to me to say that apparently an airplane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York.

I had been to the top floors of one of the towers a couple of times for business meetings and I remember watching the traffic of small planes and helicopters flying up and down the Hudson River and thinking how weird it was to be so high up in a building that I was actually looking down at air traffic going by. So when I heard that a plane had hit one, I assumed it must be an accident, that a small plane had somehow veered off course and into one of the towers. But when I finally got online a few minutes later and went to the CNN web site to get some details, I saw a picture of a gash across most of the front of the building that didn't look like it was made by a little four-seater Cessna. About the same time, the same colleague who earlier told me about the plane hitting one tower announced to whomever happened to be listening that another plane had just crashed into the other tower. I remember at that point just sitting down in a state of slack-jawed disbelief, with the feeling of all my blood rushing to my head, and thinking: This is Pearl Harbor. 

Somewhere in the midst of all this it was also announced that we all needed to attend a very important meeting at 10 AM with the client's management team. We spent the time until then doing the same thing as everyone else around us, i.e., scouring news web sites to try to find out what was going on. Somewhere in there it was reported that a plane had now crashed into the Pentagon as well. A little before 10 we all trooped off to our client meeting.

As the meeting was getting started, someone stuck his head in the room and announced that one of the WTC towers had collapsed. The meeting itself was a relatively short one. The gist of it was that the bank had had a relationship with XYZ Corp., and XYZ was no more. Nobody in the bank knew anything about this company "Phoenix", and certainly nobody from the bank had asked anyone from this unknown company to come on site, ergo our group had no reason to be there and we were to vacate the premises immediately. On the way out of the meeting room I paused to take in some news updates on one of the TV sets that had now been set up in various places in the office and learned that the other WTC tower had also just collapsed.

Ultimately, the work would resume, since Phoenix had in fact legally taken ownership of all of XYZ's client relationships and contracts, and the project would be brought to a successful conclusion. But for now, we just had to pack up and clear out. The immediate problem I had was that I had gotten a ride there with my one colleague, who had disappeared pretty much right after we arrived, and I hadn't seen him since, nor was he answering his cell phone. So I ended up sitting on a bench outside the office building for the next couple of hours until he eventually turned up and we drove home listening to the radio and trying to make sense of the events of the morning.

I arrived home to begin what would be days of shock, confusion, speculation, rumor-mongering and marathon CNN viewing. The sudden and unexpected demise of the bank project left me without much to do, but nobody was really doing much work anyway in those first few days after the attacks. A lot of people from our office had been traveling to client sites all over the country and were now stranded as a result of air traffic being suspended for the next several days, so the focus of company management was mainly on how to get everyone back home somehow.

That first week or so after the attacks was a very strange interlude. What I remember most of all was that it was just very quiet. Air traffic had come to a standstill, and so the accustomed periodic sound of planes heading to or from Boston Logan Airport, which is around 10–15 miles from my house, was strangely absent. Traffic of other kinds was also pretty low-key. Everyone was in a state of shock, wandering around in stunned silence, infused with a sort of undifferentiated dread about what might happen next. There was mass paranoia about vague, unconfirmed reports of plots to poison reservoirs or spray nerve gas over population centers from crop-dusting planes. The general mood was that we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop, with no real idea about when or where or how that might happen.

The silence was initially broken for me by groups of people standing on various street corners around town waving signs that said things like, "Honk if you love America!" and cars honking back in response. I sort of understood the thinking and sort of didn't. Was this  the best we could come up with in the way of a response?

I of course wondered what this meant for me personally. Were we going to war? If so, with whom? If we've just relived Pearl Harbor, is the right thing to do to enlist in some branch of the military? That latter thought came and went quickly, considering that at that point I was already 40 years old, but it was there nonetheless. If I'm a citizen of this country, and this country is under attack, am I not obligated to do my part in some active way?

What I did expect to happen was to see my taxes raised to pay for whatever response was going to be undertaken. I hardly consider myself to be a hawk with regard to military matters, but I fully expected that part of the response to this event was going to be to rain down death and destruction on its authors, and I did not have a problem with that. And I emphasize: part of the response—more on that later. But I assumed that I and everyone else would  be asked to sacrifice in one way or another in order to support what was going to come next. 

Remember, this was only a couple of years after Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation", had been published. You may not have read the book, but at the time, all the media coverage would have ensured that you nonetheless would have been familiar with its theme: a celebration of the generation that endured the hardships of the Great Depression and then went on to endure the additional hardships of fighting and winning World War Two, a time in which every citizen was called upon to live with rationing of food and strategic materials, to scrimp and save and recycle, to pay his income taxes and the special Victory Tax and buy War Bonds to help finance the war effort, to supplement the food supply by planting victory gardens, and so on.

Donald Did His Part

I was of course asked to do no such thing. On the contrary, my president told me to go out and spend. He wanted me to "[g]et on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Instead of asking me to chip in a few bucks more to help fund the war in Afghanistan, and the one he had just started in Iraq, in 2003 he actually cut my taxes. My president didn't want me to sacrifice a thing. On the contrary, he wanted me to live my life as if absolutely nothing had changed. I know I'm not the first to make this point, but that doesn't make it any less valid: what a missed opportunity. In the wake of 9/11, Americans were ready to do whatever needed to be done, to contribute and to sacrifice whatever it would take to ensure such a thing would not go unanswered. But the leaders of our country just said, "Thanks all the same, but that really won't be necessary. Maybe you should take a nice vacation instead."

The other missed opportunity: the chance for maybe fifteen minutes of introspection. I in no way wish to excuse or apologize for the cold-blooded murder of thousands of people in the service of a political cause infused with a heavy dose of religious extremism. But when the president of the USA boiled the genesis of this event down to this: "Americans are asking 'Why do they hate us?'… They hate our freedoms.", he hardly did the citizens of his country a service. Sure, I  realize that from a rhetorical standpoint, a speech given a week and a half after the event was probably not the right time to say, "guys, maybe some part of this was our own fault." But there could have been a policy response that at least implicitly recognized this principle. We could have asked ourselves what these guys were so angry about that they would do such a thing, and whether we should at least consider what implications that might hold for how we comport ourselves. What did we get instead? A misguided effort to try and reshape the Middle East by force, framed in idealistic language but smelling suspiciously of an obsession with settling old scores, executed in breathtaking ignorance of the history and the political and ethnic dynamics of the region and leaving a legacy that I suspect we will all still be chewing on for many years to come.

More than a decade later, I'm reminded of all this more often than I would like to be. For the last nine months or so, every two to three weeks I find myself in the offices of a current client in Jersey City, NJ, which are situated right on the banks of the Hudson River, directly across the river from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Right outside the building is a monument consisting of a twisted hunk of steel from one of the World Trade Center towers. In the background, across the Hudson, I see the slowly rising frame of the new Freedom Tower, which in the course of various visits to NYC over the years I have watched grow from a muddy hole in the ground to its present state, in which it appears to have reached something approaching its planned final height of 1,776 feet. I think about the horrible spectacle for which the people in that building must have had a front-row seat on that day some eleven-plus years ago. I wonder what it will be like, when that new building has itself been standing complete for a decade or more, to convey to the generation looking up at it what it was like on that day in September of 2001.

What Was, What Is, What Will Be

So now I've veered way off course from my original story about how I found an old newspaper and what I found in it. I guess I'll tell you about that some other time.