9/11, the Great Recession and the war in Iraq did something to the American public that it will take decades to figure out, but in a heartbeat I would argue they felt a terrible falling away of control over and confidence in the staying power and progress of their own lives. Those three global events were also intensely personal and psychologically harmful.
It has been seventeen years, and that does not seem possible. I was tempted to begin a sentence with “we of a certain age” know how we found out about the planes smashing into the Towers and the Pentagon and a Shanksville field. We remember the men and women leaping from the Towers, their slow-motion collapse, the apocalyptic lead-gray clouds hurtling down tight streets, the deaths of firemen and police officers, the uncertainty about what was coming, the blood-lust desire for vengeance.
Three thousand Americans died on television. The images are theatrical, indelible, cathartic, a seismic event that shifted our consciousness as a people.
Seventeen years later, thousands of troops are still fighting in Afghanistan, 6000 Americans are dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, over 50,000 were wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghani’s died, Americans practiced torture and covered it up, the Patriot Act appears to have protected us but also further inured us to an erosion of privacy. The overall cost for this is 1 trillion dollars and climbing.
Two wars were fought by less than 1% of the population. After the attack on the Twin Towers, Bush neither raised taxes to pay for what would follow (the minimal shared sacrifice one might have expected) nor asked Congress to reinstate the draft. Instead, he encouraged us to continue to believe that nothing was needed from us. Instead, he brought us Cheney and Rumsfeld and John Yoo, lawyer/author of the legal basis of enhanced interrogation/torture, and for several years allowed them free reign on the wars. Even though George Bush asked that Muslims as a whole not be blamed, the seeds of the present immigration fear were dispersed here.
We still do not know the process as to how we came to invade Iraq. Bush made the decision, but we do not know who pushed for or against, the arguments as they evolved, or all the primary players and how they maneuvered behind the scenes.
When we destroyed Iraqi infrastructure and destroyed its patterns of life, we changed social currents and set loose a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, religiously cleansed neighborhoods through militia-bred terror, empowered the Iranian Revolutionary Guards so that Iran now dominates Iraqi politics, and created the conditions necessary for the creation of ISIS, a Sunni movement helped along by many career Iraqi military personnel.
We do not have an accurate count of how many of our own soldiers came home with traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, bereft of limbs.
In 2008 the economy collapsed in the worst downturn since the Depression. In 18 months almost 8 million jobs disappeared until Bush’s TARP, Obama’s economic recovery program and other factors began to turn it around.
No one was held responsible for this collapse, none of the financiers, no CEO’s. No one went after the creators of subprime mortgages who knew their products were fraudulent and pushed them anyway. Too many Americans believed that their homes were actually banks whose value would rise forever and which they could tap for equity. Rick Santelli, an Ayn Randian ideologue and CNBC anchor threw a splenetic rage about those who took on high risk mortgages as “losers” and that maybe we needed a new “tea party” to make our economic policy right. The Republican Tea Party faction roared into life, a collection of legislators devoted to eliminating financial regulations and cutting spending to the “losers” (the poor, the down on their luck, the ones who were not Randian supermen like themselves). Our Puritan disdain for the bankrupt, the broke and the hard-up was given new life. Our Puritan worship of the wealthy as meritorious, as an earthly elect, became more explicit and potent.
At the time of the 2008 election, Bush’s approval ratings stood at 29%. Chris Rock is at least partially right — George Bush gave us Barack Obama — who inherited two wars, a broken economy shedding jobs at a faster rate at any time since the Depression, and Iran pushing at speed toward the possession of nuclear weapons. We were in a kind of freefall. He took office under a burden of crises that needed immediate attention.
