Columnist Frank Rich: America won’t be fighting a sanitized, Hollywood war

Frank Rich

Friday, Sept. 21, 2001 | 5:23 a.m.

Frank Rich is a New York Times columnist.

Then you grieve for the city whose once indelible profile was mutilated, just like that, on one beautiful September morning.

After that you think of your country, and another kind of shock sets in. Something has been lost there too, but not all of what's gone may be a cause for mourning.

We live in a different America today than we did only the day before Sept. 11. Yes, as it's incanted hourly, we have lost our untroubled freedom of movement that we consider a birthright. We have lost our illusion of impregnability. But beneath those visceral imperatives, an entire culture has been transformed. This week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decadelong dream, even as it dumps us into an uncertain future we had never bargained for.

The dream was simple -- that we could have it all without having to pay any price, and that national suffering of almost any kind could be domesticated into an experience of virtual terror akin to a theme park ride. The first part of that dream had already started to collapse with the fall of the stock market, the rise in unemployment and the evaporation of the surplus, well before terrorists achieved the literal annihilation of the most commanding edifice of American capitalism.

But the dream's second part was still going strong right until Sept. 11. The previously planned cover that People magazine scrapped that afternoon to make way for the thousands dead was yet another story about shark attacks. Never mind that the rate of shark attacks has been routine this year, and that sharks are a statistically minuscule cause of mortality at any time. (There have been at most two deaths in any year since 1990.) The great shark scare of 2001 -- already speeding to the dustbin of history, along with such other summer ephemera as Gary Condit, Robert Blake and Lizzie Grubman -- was typical of an age in which we inflated troublesome but passing crises into catastrophes that provided the illusion of a national test of character, or some kind of moral equivalent of war, but in fact were for most of us merely invitations to indulge in cost-free hyperventilation.

From the rampaging fears over school shootings following Columbine (at a time when U.S. juvenile homicide rates were falling to a 33-year low) to the protracted bellicosity surrounding Elian Gonzalez to the California blackout that didn't happen at the start of this summer, we've been looking for a Pearl Harbor. But always a Pearl Harbor of few casualties -- always a Pearl Harbor that could readily be brought to "closure."

That fat, daydreaming America is gone now, way gone -- as spent as the tax-rebate checks, as forgotten as the 2000 campaign's debate over prescription-drug plans, as bankrupt as our dot-com fantasies of instant millions, as vaporized as the faith that high-tech surveillance and weaponry would keep us safe. The America that saw Disney's "Pearl Harbor" is as far removed from the America that was attacked on Sept. 11 as the America that listened to Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" was from the America attacked at Pearl Harbor. "Instead of the next big thing being some new technological innovation or medical breakthrough," wrote David Rieff of our post-Tuesday nation in the Los Angeles Times this week, "the next big thing is likely to be fear."

For the America that is gone, the America that could have it all and feel no pain beyond that on cable TV, George W. Bush was the perfect president. We could have a big tax cut (or at least some of us could) along with increases in spending for better schools and defense -- and all without having to dip into the Social Security stash. We could lick our energy crisis -- does anyone still remember the energy crisis? -- while still guzzling gas. Faith-based institutions would take care of the poor and unfortunate. No serviceman would have to spend any more time in harm's way than Bush (or most political leaders of his generation, regardless of party) did during Vietnam.

Since Sept. 11 there has been a towering leader in view -- Rudolph Giuliani -- and, in a lucid and rational Colin Powell, potentially another. The big-three network anchors have upheld pre-Drudge journalistic standards, offering reportage rather than blather and rumor, doing their part to steady a country that still gathers at the tube, not the computer screen, at a time like this. In all this we've been blessed, for there were 48 hours during which the president was scarcely visible or articulate.

The country is rooting for Bush, as it must. We need him to become the president of the America we have now. This means in part a U-turn in style -- more face time with his fellow citizens, less scripted rhetoric from the alliterative phrasemakers who stick pretty words in his mouth (as they did on Sept. 11) that sound as if they were written by the same glib stylists who gave him "home to the heartland" and "communities of character."

But style is the easy part. What's more pressing are changes in content. Many of his administration's previous policies are either irrelevant or contrary to a war-bound nation's interests. Education and tax cuts are no longer our top priority. The unilateralism the administration has practiced in walking away from the Kyoto accord on global warming and the ABM treaty is anathema to the building of an international coalition to fight a war.

But most of all, Bush will have to prepare the nation for something many living Americans, him included, have never had to muster -- sacrifice. In his pronouncements thus far, the president has expressed sorrow and vowed to "whip" evil, but surely he will soon have to prepare Americans to give up far more in wartime than curbside check-in at the airport. Anyone who lives in New York has seen this week how many Americans are prepared to do this. That's the example our mayor and governor set, and it's the example thousands of New Yorkers have followed with open hearts.

Though polls show that we overwhelmingly support the idea of going to war, they don't indicate whether we understand that idea. The killers who attacked us on Sept. 11 had an all too ruthless eye for appraising how little we knew the day before. We have no choice now but, as a horror-struck Hamlet said after being visited by the ghost, to "wipe away all trivial fond records" from the table of memory, and hope that our learning curve will be steep.

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