After New York: Looking Ten Years Ahead Incipient trends often announce themselves early. As I squint at America today in the blinding afterglow of the New York Human Bomb Attack, she lifts her bloodied skirt and exposes some fresh skinless trends for the coming decade.
Caution about predicting trends, please. I openly confess the weight of pain and shock still sitting on my chest from the attack two months old. In business projections over previous similar periods, I have been more than 50% accurate. Can I match that record?
The name of this event will burst out from us like an alien from the bowels of language. It could linger hidden for a few years. No chance it will be called 9/11 or Twin Towers terrorists. The body-politic collapsed along with the Twin Towers. Our name for the event will regurgitate that visceral element.
The New York Human Bombers were self-guided ideologues. They stabbed us directly with a scimitar of imagination. A stab into the global womb of Modernity. The name will embody those elements. December 7, 1941 survives today as Pearl Harbor, rarely invoked as A Day of Infamy. "Pearl Harbor" opened up a fresh term in English and swallowed the only extant images of the burning ship hulks in the Harbor. Pearl Harbor, a Gibraltar of English meaning, explodes among us today as a "sneak attack".
Life in America. Today, tomorrow, the short run --- rings out from our morning alarm clock as a "live for today" mood. A year of pizza and guts-on-the-ground terrorism brought this mood to Israel. Our old hippies may soon start gulping Viagra, inseminating parts of America with a return to sexual license. Young people, engorged with natural hormones may erect new Babel towers of drugs, music and hedonism.
The nature of patriotism also changed the moment jet fueled flames shoved lovers into space sixty stories up. Days and years before the falling death, the flaccid plea to "Support our government." lay cold-dead on the ground. Years of bitter, bullet-to-the-brain partisan cruelty eviscerated any heartfelt national support for our government.
Today, "Support America" flows off our tongue and out our teeth as easily as a song about "We, the People", about "We, the American Ideal".
The War of 1812, (which America unknowingly lost) terminated with a military victory in New Orleans. The proud victory occurred days after the President inked a humiliating peace treaty. Ignoring the time problem, newspapers trumpeted the battle triumph. Jackson, kicking ass at New Orleans, cemented the first cornerstones of America's national ego. The conquerors of a continent. Today our national identity re-emerges. Two hundred years of eating amber waves of grain, and miscegenating immigrants from sea to shining sea, we conquered human diversity. The American skin, in 200 years, shed its desiccated English pall to become the sunburned, dog-pulling-little-bathing-suited Coppertone girl.
The New York Human Bombers' flames and roiling clouds jet fueled into our brain the Official End of the Cold War. Russia now opens a bear hug for her American ally. We tickle her furry chest.
Four well-established American trends born in the Cold War could now be trounced before our eyes. First, the forty-three-year Cold War, 1948 to 1991, exaggerated America's anti-intellectual predilection. In the previous forty three years, America's deep anti-intellectual roots stayed deep where roots belong. Above ground the urbane and academically vital elite America toasted our glamorous public intellectuals. H.L. Mencken, John Dewey and Walter Lippman whispered wisdom into ten million ears.
The Cold War exposed the tar-covered bodies of American intellectuals. They smeared themselves, genuflecting to socialism and communism. Our American intellectuals never missed their daily devotion to the rosary of socialism. The American intellectual endured the frozen Gulag blood lust of Stalin, the miscarriage of East European slave states, the finger twitching ensconcement of nuclear missiles in Cuba and the eye-gouging Chinese Cultural Revolution. Blind intellectual socialist religion assured the division between regular Americans and intellectuals. Intellectuals, the people Spiro Agnew aptly called "effete intellectual snobs" and "nattering nabobs of negativity". America could never cotton to these ideologues as public intellectuals.
During the forty three year Cold War, there was no "other side". "Anti-socialism" grew from spore to seed to small shrub. It poked its head out of the ground late in the Cold War as a new species: Free Market Democracy. Too new to hoist serious spokespeople to the national platform. The closest person to walk on stage during the Cold War espousing Free Market Democracy was the brilliant William Buckley. Brilliant, but orthodox Roman Catholic; too religious and too Right-eous to sit at table as our stimulating intellectual companion.
Watch this change. We may soon get public intellectuals as the baggage of discarded socialism drops off the 20th Century morgue gurneys.
Secondly, Mainstream Churches suffered termite rot in Cold War America, stomped nearly to death by fresh-pine Baptist churches about 1970. Congressional prayers sang out evangelical hallelujahs every day for decades after that. The original termites that destroyed Mainstream Churches swarmed out of the National Council of Churches which took a vigorous stand against the Viet Nam War. The Viet Nam War slashed through the heartland of America where global politics never sounded like a drum of moral teaching. Baptists stayed out of that fight. Today's two Baptist leaders, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, country bumpkins to the core, recorded their inanity for posterity as they blamed the New York Human Bomb Attack on American morality. No! No! Pat and Jerry; American church-goers reject you. We'll sister-in new timbers in our Mainstream Churches, returning for regular Sunday homilies.
Third, anti-Semitism in America nosedived, a straight line decline since 1963. The First Vatican Encyclical at that time raised its hallowed head, spoke a firm voice and decapitated American Catholic prejudice for good. Israel's two lightening-brilliant military victories over arab Goliath bronzed the Jew as an heroic-Viking. The last fires of anti-Semitism smoldered in the Black community; tolerated, with a degree of curiosity in the blustering stupidity of Louis Farrakan. The anti-white Islamic racism of Farrakan, now embarrasses his followers along with the former black onlookers as the New York Human Bombs obliterated these last smoldering coals of Black anti-Semitism.
A farcical version of anti-Jewism (a more appropriate term than anti-Semitism, as you will see) has been present for decades among American Liberals and Pacifists. Israel, they blame for all Arab problems, poverty, third worldism and suppression of women. The farce moved to front stage in the last two months among vestigial lefties who now blamed a Jewish conspiracy in support of Israel for America's problems. Lefty liberalism lay dying for many decades, for many reasons including the wrong calls in global politics, gender liberation and the Cold War. But this recent surge of anti-Jewism in the face of the New York Human Bombs riles America. America overwhelming loves Israel, a love that lives deep in the national psyche. This Biblical love thrived for decades before Jewish-American influence. Beginning in the 1950's, America supported Israel when Jews were still banned from NY law firms, banned from the top military ranks, elective office, banking and from senior spots in the State Department.
Fourth, the Cold War generated our current national identity: "Free Market Democracy". This identity solidifies day by day. The coming decades permanently plant it in our garden of national values .
The next dichotomy in America, replacing liberal-conservative, will probably unsheathe itself from two emerging battle grounds of classic American political life: Globalism and Democracy.
Anti-terrorism, in America, will deliver specific consequences. Expect the creation of a domestic anti-terrorist institution with more teeth and more competence than any agency since the early days of NASA. It could evolve within five years. Such an agency may not emerge quickly. It may take another terrorist attack to replace the first bumbling agency that we build. Such an agency will be unique in its competence, surpassing the only other competent Federal agency: the elite, austere and effective State Department. I predict one consequence that tight controls of you and me will create: an outlaw territory, Idaho and Nevada, for people who choose to live outside our identity-card world.
The first genuine entrance of Americans to global hegemonic responsibility (I love that phrase) begins now with our historically-extraordinary creation (I love that too) of the anti-terrorist alliance. This will incite a moral/political battle between the interests of global commerce and tribal survival. Tribal institutions, bizarre and diverse, pervasive, deep and extensive, cling to our planet. Many people will champion these tribal interests over the interests of global commerce in substantive, nuanced and morally important campaigns.
Someday soon, somebody will notice that terrorism is most effective against democratic societies.
But what defines "democratic" societies? We will soon drive on to this new moral/political battle field. Wherever the battle joins, we will be forced to admit that democracy in America means overbearing factions ( bad) and miscegenating immigrants from sea to shining sea (good). Democracy in America is already a fruit tree, root stock with ten different fruit branches of Diversity its banquet offering. The fruit will become our pride.
One grafted fruit branch stares at us every day; it's everyday. The Cold War played a significant role in killing Jim Crow. The moral authority of African Americans was firmly established by their service in WW2 and Korea. The Cold War made the persistence of Jim Crow, until 1963, a moral embarrassment for the United States on the World stage. It ended with a little help from Lee Harvey Oswald and Lyndon Johnson, in just one year.
Our current form of democracy is a comparable embarrassment. No European democracy clutches so tightly to the skirts of commercial interests, as the U.S. This will change as new modes of democratic governance move out of the taboo zone of American thought into the realm of experimentation and innovation that they now enjoy only in Israel. We might experiment with random legislatures (jury-like selection of representatives with fixed terms in office), unity governments and quick run-off elections.
The issue of global protection of tribal institutions and championing new forms of democracy may be the place where the former mantle of "liberalism" settles.
Summary of trends:
* Live for today hedonism.
* New patriotism gulps-down the diversity of America in one bite.
* Cold War officially over:
** Return of public intellectuals.
** Resurrection of Mainstream Churches.
** Rapid disappearance of anti-Semitism and parallel extinction of pacifists and lefties.
** Solidified free-market-democracy identity.
* Emergence of competent anti-terrorist agency.
* Growing comfort with global leadership mantle.
* Reformation in our doctrines and practices of Democracy.
* Recasting old political right/left divisions into new global political divisions.
The New York Human Bombs impacted us. Am I going to be right about some of the consequences?
Michael Phillips Nov. 2001