Matt Zeitlin

Finally, after electing a president who wasn’t defined by an irresponsibly belligerent response to the murder of 3,000 Americans, I think we can gain some perspective on how the events that day revealed much of America and its political leadership to be fundamentally weak, immature and irresponsible.

Many countries have seen tragedies. Many countries have been attacked by outsiders. And they have nearly all responded by drawing in on themselves and becoming more hostile to the outside world. But America is different. Our understandable anger and paranoia turned into something horrible, not only for those Americans who have seen their constitutional values destroyed and their friends and relatives sent off to die in a pointless war, but for all the Iraqis and Afghans who have died needlessly or have found themselves locked up in a Kafka-esque island fortress for being aligned with the wrong warlord in the Hindu Kush. One would hope that America’s size, strength and influence would breed a certain sense of responsibility and humility, an awareness of how our actions affect the entire world, for good as well as evil. Instead, we had a political class intent on war and the nullification of our the principles that are the supposed bedrock of our nation.

Instead of tempering our anger and fear and distrust, they played on it. The media and the public, instead of being wary of demagogues who use times of fear to advance nefarious ends, were enthralled with the idea of projecting power and strength, with little care for the consequences we’d bring upon ourselves or inflict on to others. We were hurt and humiliated, but not chastened.

In stark contrast to the collective failure of our leaders, the culture has largely recovered. Though the memory of 9/11 was manipulated by those who have nothing but contempt for our cosmopolitan, urban centers that are the driving force of our culture and our economy, the victims were largely New Yorkers. They were blue staters, living in a city whose greatness is a product of its diversity and dynamic cultural energy, values that a revanchist, hostile right can’t stand. And New York, the site of the attacks, recovered. There were those who talked about how humor and irony would be impossible after 9/11. How New Yorkers would give up their decadence, get settled down and have kids. But it never happened. New York retained its essential cosmopolitan identity. Comedy and irony, two great American values which seem to be infused into the lifeblood of our cultural capital, are still with us. New York is still New York, though scarred. It’s noteworthy how the culture of American — that ineffable product of 300 million people interacting and desiring and producing — survived the trauma of that day, while our politics, which is marked by unconscionable amount of cynicism, bad faith and utter uncaring for those hurt by the power wielded by America, could not. It suggests that while we can come under the thrall of bad people, we are still, in some sense, good.