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September 12, 2011

Beyond Commemoration Sunday: Remembering to Forget

By Robert Hariman

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Commemoration Sunday is over, and America has resolved once again to never forget the terror attack of 9/11/01.  That terrible day should not be forgotten, but concerned citizens might ask whether 9/11 has much to do with the problems defining the US today.

Al Qaeda didn’t destroy this Fisher Body plant in Detroit, Michigan. Didn’t have to. Nor, as the comic Andy Borowitz has astutely pointed out, have foreign terrorists threatened to dismantle “some of the most essential functions of the US government, from Social Security to the Federal Reserve.”  You had to go to the recent Republican Party Presidential Debate at the Reagan Library to hear that.

To steal a phrase from Barbie Zelizer,  9/11 commemorations may be another example of “remembering to forget“: It is easy to remember the planes hitting the Twin Towers, but difficult to face the massive cost of 9/11–according to Sunday’s New York Times, $3.3 trillion and counting, with the greatest portion by far the result of an ill-advised and fraudulently justified rush to war.  And while that national treasure was being squandered, jobs were being lost by the thousands every month: 2.3 million between 2001 and 2007, and the hemorrhage hasn’t stopped since then.

This is how the US should look: a gleaming city. It need not even be a “city on a hill,” just a city that shows the signs of strong investment guided by government policies representing a dedicated and intelligent effort to lift the nation to new heights.  Unfortunately, the photograph is not from Milwaukee or Buffalo or New Orleans or Portland or any other American city.  Welcome to the Jinzhou New Area on the northern side of Dalian, China.  It’s what you can do if your national economic policy is dedicated to creating jobs, and if you aren’t spending a trillion dollars on an unnecessary war in Iraq, and if you are not held hostage to economic policies that now have a proven track record at benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes.

Is the comparison unfairly selective?  Sure, and one could show pictures of poverty in China and gleaming office towers in the US.  But consider this: Detroit has been in trouble for a long time–the first Chrysler bailout was in 1979–while everything you see in the second photograph has been built since the establishment of the Dalian Economic and Technological Development Zone in September 1984.  Detroit is still waiting for its “market solution,” while Dalian exemplifies what capitalism can do when it is made to serve the national interest.

The US economy is experiencing serious structural problems due to government policies at home and abroad.  Terrorism has nothing to do with it, save as a distraction and an invitation to mismanagement of national resources.  For the record, American democracy isn’t broken beyond repair. It is is serious trouble, however, and not least because the Republican party is prepared to reduce the nation to Third World status in order to win elections.  And as Mike Lofgren has trenchantly argued, don’t think they don’t have the political will or the policies to do it.

Along with the memory of 9/11, it is imperative that Americans recall just how much has been lost in the last ten years.  And why.

– Robert Hariman

(cross-posted from No Caption Needed)

(photos: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre/The Ruins of Detroit and Jim Ford/Evanston.)

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  • Anonymous

    To the first image, from Ozymandias, not Shelley’s but Horace Smith’s, a peer writing in competition with Shelley:

    We wonder,—and some Hunter may express 
        Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness 
          Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, 
        He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess 
          What powerful but unrecorded race 
          Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

    Shelley:

    `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away”. 

    • http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ Ralfast

      Once London was the seat of a global Empire, that stretched forth across the seas. Rule Britannia indeed. Yet today, it is a distant secondary capital, bowing to the wishes of those it once ruled in America, China and India.

      The Mighty Have Fallen, and Will Fall Yet Again….

    • http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ Ralfast

      Once London was the seat of a global Empire, that stretched forth across the seas. Rule Britannia indeed. Yet today, it is a distant secondary capital, bowing to the wishes of those it once ruled in America, China and India.

      The Mighty Have Fallen, and Will Fall Yet Again….

  • Anonymous

    To the first image, from Ozymandias, not Shelley’s but Horace Smith’s, a peer writing in competition with Shelley:

    We wonder,—and some Hunter may express 
        Wonder like ours, when thro’ the wilderness 
          Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, 
        He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess 
          What powerful but unrecorded race 
          Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

    Shelley:

    `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
    Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
    Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
    Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
    The lone and level sands stretch far away”. 

  • tinwoman

    China isn’t much of an example for us to follow.  From environmental devastation to human rights abuses, not to mention the fact that China has failed to lift 800 million rural peasants out of poverty, China doesn’t meet the standards of a developed country.

    The picture looks sleek and modern, but it’s just a picture, and that’s China all over—surfaces that look good and hide ugly realities.

    China is anti-union and anti-workers rights–who cares if they have lots of jobs?  They are jobs many people would literally rather kill themselves than toil at.

    For shame, Bag.

    • Hariman

      I know a number of people–all progressives–who have worked and traveled in China.  They all agree that China has serious problems–who would deny it?  Nonetheless, they all are very impressed by how the country is moving in the right direction in many areas, including lifting 500 million people out of poverty in twenty years.  They also note that the US is moving in the opposite direction in many of the same areas: here people are being driven into poverty as jobs are being taken elsewhere and workers’ rights are under attack, and across the board the general welfare is being abandoned.  Today, the choice between living in the US and China may still seem obvious, but the question is, who will be better off in thirty years or fifty years?  There I am not so optimistic.  The continuation of economic trends in the US doe not bode well for liberal democracy.  China needs to improve politically, but progressives can learn from China as well.   

    • http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ Ralfast

      Yet it follows the pattern of how developed countries became such.

      The Industrial Revolution Redux.

    • http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ Ralfast

      Yet it follows the pattern of how developed countries became such.

      The Industrial Revolution Redux.

  • Gasho

    Regarding that “ill-advised and fraudulently justified rush to war” — we will NEVER get back on track until we deal with that.  If the politically powerful can start wars and violate the most important laws of the land and international treaties and walk away scott-free [with a book deal], then our entire system of laws and all the checks and balances are worthless. Without any effective checks on power, we’re doomed to become unstable and fall apart.  

    Unregulated Capitalism over time does not lead to freedom – it leads to unchallenged rule and radical luxury for the elite and lawless savagery and the struggle to survive for the rest of us.  This would typically be followed by a revolt.China is just playing out a different system.  Less freedom, less individual opportunity, more central control and national vision, with the possibility of utopia if it goes right and guarantee of an oppressive hellhole if it doesn’t.It’s just like the philosophers of old said it would be.  We thought we’d hit the magic balance with our Constitutional checks and balances laid on top of a capitalist system.  Looks like that worked for a little over 200 years.  Not bad.  But WE LET IT FALL APART by not taking the Constitution seriously.  We let the conservative base undermine and dismantle it. Fox News, Bush and Cheney’s War, Chemical Warfare (Fallujah, especially), Torture! and Murder, Wiretapping, Voting Fraud and manipulation, Politicizing the JUSTICE Department, Presidential communications via political email servers, Perpetual War Powers [via a war on a concept?!], .. and these are the things I can think of off the top of my head from the last 10 years.  Where are the trials?  Without any attempt to enforce the laws, there is no justice.  Down the toilet we go like so many civilizations before us.. unless we can reinstate the Constitutional system, which is going to be a tall task at this point.

    • Linda

      Well said. And all too sadly true. What’s so funny ’bout peace love and understanding? it doesn’t sell. The rich can’t get richer on it. Let us eat cake!

  • Gasho

    Regarding that “ill-advised and fraudulently justified rush to war” — we will NEVER get back on track until we deal with that.  If the politically powerful can start wars and violate the most important laws of the land and international treaties and walk away scott-free [with a book deal], then our entire system of laws and all the checks and balances are worthless. Without any effective checks on power, we’re doomed to become unstable and fall apart.  

    Unregulated Capitalism over time does not lead to freedom – it leads to unchallenged rule and radical luxury for the elite and lawless savagery and the struggle to survive for the rest of us.  This would typically be followed by a revolt.China is just playing out a different system.  Less freedom, less individual opportunity, more central control and national vision, with the possibility of utopia if it goes right and guarantee of an oppressive hellhole if it doesn’t.It’s just like the philosophers of old said it would be.  We thought we’d hit the magic balance with our Constitutional checks and balances laid on top of a capitalist system.  Looks like that worked for a little over 200 years.  Not bad.  But WE LET IT FALL APART by not taking the Constitution seriously.  We let the conservative base undermine and dismantle it. Fox News, Bush and Cheney’s War, Chemical Warfare (Fallujah, especially), Torture! and Murder, Wiretapping, Voting Fraud and manipulation, Politicizing the JUSTICE Department, Presidential communications via political email servers, Perpetual War Powers [via a war on a concept?!], .. and these are the things I can think of off the top of my head from the last 10 years.  Where are the trials?  Without any attempt to enforce the laws, there is no justice.  Down the toilet we go like so many civilizations before us.. unless we can reinstate the Constitutional system, which is going to be a tall task at this point.

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