Unqualified Offerings

I went to a funeral
Lord it made me happy
Seein’ all those people
I ain’t seen
Since the last time
Somebody died

Lyle Lovett, “Since the Last Time“

9/11 hit me hard emotionally for a handful of reasons. For about an hour, I was aware that my wife was scheduled to drive past the Pentagon that morning, and with cell networks overloaded, I couldn’t reach her. I am also, generally, a weepy sort – well, not full-on bawling, but I choke up easily and my eyes readily water in response to fictional or nonfictional tragedy, whether it’s Buffy’s mom or lost dogs or typhoon victims. It is quite the edifying spectacle, I assure you! Also, politically, I was seized with the irrational fear that the country would respond to the attacks in pretty much the way it ended up responding to the attacks. I was in a funk for days and I wasn’t the only one.

But there’s a line in Frederick Turner’s poem, Genesis, that “Those who say war is horrible speak only half / the truth; the other half is joy,” and the other half of the truth of 9/11 is how much fun it was.

Let’s be clear what I mean by fun. I’m not talking about callous disregard for the dead. But especially on the internet, 9/11 was a party. A funeral party, but a party for all that. (”They were tellin’ funny stories.”)

I bring this up because some of you weren’t there. (On the internet.) You were too young, or not so virtual. For those of us who knew the few extant political blogs and congregated around Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, Mickey Kaus and Joshua Micah Marshall’s sites, there was a feeling of excitement, community, and pride in the sense of being in at the start of something new. Blogs were at least four years old, mind you. But 9/11 and its aftermath showed blogging’s value as a news and opinion medium. (And, oh yes, its limitations.) We were some subset of sad, scared, outraged. But we were those things, hard as it is to believe now, together, and we were seeing and eventually making what we imagined to be a new kind of response to this kind of event. (And oh yes, for good – or evil.)

In the minutes and hours of the day itself, you had sources of instant access to better information (and disinformation) than you could get from legacy media. In the days after, you could dive into Pakistani newspapers or military analysis. I remember how proud I was when Glenn Reynolds first quoted one of my emails, and then how proud I was when my wife excitedly called to say, “I didn’t know you read Instapundit!” If you were an anti-anti-American you had the satisfaction of chortling with your fellows over the latest “refutation” of Noam Chomsky or “takedown” of Arundhati Roy. If you were an anti-interventionist you enjoyed the furious energy that went into a site like Antiwar.com. If you were a civil libertarian, the internet reminded you that you were not alone. You started your own blog and got your first links. Bliss it was in that atrocity to be alive, but to be on the internet was very heaven. (”Lord, what was the need to give these people to the fire, that the light of their passing might shine above Meetup.com?”)

The above is a version of something I’ve discussed in years past. If you’re an intellectual, you like disputation, and you really like being right, or thinking you are. When something demonstrates that people must support our politics, it makes us unavoidably happy to that extent, never mind the body count. But how different was it for the country as a whole? Our elites in government and media had lots of people paying attention to them and lots of opportunities to speak now in hushed tones, now in manly bellows. Their complete failures elevated their status. (Those of us in the blogosphere imagined ourselves variously as their pedagogues and their nemeses. In reality we were their fandom.) Stars got to hold benefits promoters got to put together. Everyone who got paid to talk into a microphone embarked on a new career of thanking The Troops after every third commercial break. (”You mean I get the satisfaction of feeling like I’ve put my social role in perspective, but without my salary going down? Win!”)

And for the vox pop, there was the immediate satisfaction of community (”All my friends they came”), even a kind of contentless solidarity. And the greater satisfaction that Homer Simpson experienced in the Simpsons casino episode:

Homer – “You have a gambling problem.”
Marge – “That’s true. Will you forgive me?”
Homer – “Sure. Remember when I got caught stealing all those watches from Sears? Well, that’s nothing because you have a gambling problem. And remember when I let that escaped lunatic in the house because he was dressed like Santa Claus? Well, you have a gambling problem!”

No matter what vicious, stupid, vainglorious thing the country did since that day, Americans could tell themselves, “We were attacked!” and excuse their own sins, even name those sins as virtues. 9/11 gave the country a sense of license. And license is the most fun there is.