Issue #1, Summer 2006

The Seeds of Victory Gardens

The years since September 11 have been the ultimate test of a generation’s resolve. How are we doing so far?

On September 15, 2001, with Lower Manhattan still smoldering, I was invited to appear on CNN to discuss whether the young Americans who lived through the placid 1990s would know how to respond to the testing of a time of war. Twenty-six years old and having recently written a book that was, in part, about how my generation viewed the world, I agreed to pass myself off as some sort of expert on a situation no one clearly understood.

Pointing to the heroes in their twenties and thirties who had already lost their lives in the World Trade Center, I said I was confident that today’s Americans would rise to the occasion because, after all, it has “really been the lesson of American history that, in every moment of crisis, a generation that has had the responsibility to step up to the plate has done that.”

Nearly five years later, it’s clear that, thus far, when it comes to this generation’s moment of crisis, I was wrong.

In 2001, Americans were victims of a vicious attack perpetrated by those committed to stopping the expansion of freedom and democracy around the world. Immediately after, we seemed ready to take part in a massive response. But we have not, at least not in any way analogous to the scale of the efforts of previous generations.

Our national discomfort in dealing with September 11 was highlighted with this April’s release of Universal Pictures’ United 93, the first Hollywood movie to deal directly with the terrorist attacks. Despite a massive publicity campaign, widespread press coverage, and overwhelming critical acclaim, Americans steered clear of the film at their local multiplex. In advance of the premiere, a Manhattan theater pulled the movie’s trailer after patrons complained; the manager told Newsweek that “I don’t think people are ready for this.” In Los Angeles, audience members viewing the trailer at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre shouted, “Too soon!”

That the charge that United 93 came “too soon” seemed to hit such a chord among many tells us more about America and September 11 than about the speed of moviemaking. Historically, the timing of Hollywood movies about major national traumas has reflected America’s confidence in and comfort with the nation’s response to these threats. In instances when we are proud and optimistic about our answer, Hollywood sounds the trumpets; when we are uneasy with ourselves, Hollywood is silent.

Almost immediately after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hollywood began churning out movies dealing with the attack and the war. When Republic Studio’s Remember Pearl Harbor–the first film to fictionalize the attack–premiered less than six months later, reviewers didn’t criticize the timing; instead, they harped on the wooden acting and the plodding plotline. “Guess we’ll just have to accept it as the first of the Far Easterns,” wrote The New York Times in naming the genre of movies about the war with Japan. “There’ll be more.” There were. And they came quickly. In the three years after Pearl Harbor, Hollywood released more than half a dozen films dealing directly with the attack, part of a flood of World War II films made while the conflict still raged. Production for Casablanca began just weeks after Pearl Harbor, and Yankee Doodle Dandy was released on Memorial Day 1942.

Hollywood’s response to World War II mirrored our sense of national purpose, national unity, and confidence is the cause. A generation later, the war in Vietnam elicited a very different response on and off the screen. During the entire span of the conflict, only one major film addressed it directly: the abysmal 1968 John Wayne offering, The Green Berets. When Robert Altman wanted to depict the sadness and absurdity of that war, he set his 1970 black comedy, M*A*S*H, during the Korean War, two decades earlier. It was not until the late ’70s that The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, and Apocalypse Now appeared, and another decade would pass until Hollywood produced films that dealt with Vietnam directly, such as Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill, and Good Morning, Vietnam.

The roiling public debate over United 93–movie industry market studies revealed that an unusually high percentage of moviegoers characterized themselves as “definitely not interested” in seeing the film–underscored Americans’ ambivalence over what has and has not occurred since September 11, 2001.

Forty-three months after December 7, 1941, President Harry S Truman rode triumphant in an open car through the rubble of conquered Berlin, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill all but danced through the debris of Adolf Hitler’s command offices. This March, 55 months after September 11, President Bush snuck into Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden still at large and his ideology of anti-democratic fanaticism a growing force in the Middle East. Our military is weaker, our standing in the global struggle against the terrorists’ ideology is lower, and our nation’s esteem in the eyes of people around the world has been diminished. The deaths of those on United 93, as well as those who died elsewhere, have not yet been avenged; the story that began that day still does not have its ending–and the uncomfortable fact is that this ending does not seem to be in sight.

Previous generations would have shuddered at the thought of our national honor being so disgraced; we seem to shrug our shoulders. When the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, killing 100 Americans, 16,000 young men from around the country–many of them Wall Street bankers and the flower of the Ivy League–walked away from their careers and enrolled in Army camps to train for a conflict the United States would not even enter for another two years. After Pearl Harbor, every American–in uniform or at home–took part in a total response that entailed personal sacrifice as well as national dedication. Today’s men and women serving in the military are more disconnected from the fabric of America–and from daily life on the home front–than in any previous global conflict in our history.

Why is this? Is it because this generation of Americans has been addled by video games and remote controls and simply cannot rise to the challenge? Has our material prosperity dulled the edges of our ability to rally in a time of danger? Perhaps, yet similar worries were expressed about the Americans who rose to the occasion during every conflict since 1776.

The real difference seems to lie in the character of our national leadership. In the aftermath of September 11, Americans wanted not only national action, but also to be part of a response–yet no national leader has stepped forward with a vision to call ordinary Americans to contribute to the nation’s struggle.

Since September 11, too many in both of our two parties have changed the subject from the war on terrorism. President George W. Bush’s attention, if not his rhetoric, shifted quickly to Iraq; government resources shifted away from the fight against Al Qaeda and the ideological competition with global jihadism. President Bush told Americans to go about their everyday lives–to remember September 11, but not to do anything about it. Tax cuts took priority over equipping troops and when asked about finding Osama bin Laden, President Bush said he was truly “not that concerned about him.”

And few Democratic leaders still regularly speak about the war on terrorism, either. Instead, they have followed President Bush into the rabbit hole of an obsession with Iraq that crowds out almost every other major issue. From this point of view, many Democrats have begun to see any political references to September 11 as nothing more than a cynical Republican campaign ploy. Linguistics Professor George Lakoff, feted as an apostle by some Democrats on Capitol Hill, has claimed that the war on terror is simply a “conservative catchphrase.” The rules of a 2006 State of the Union “drinking game” posted on the Daily Kos website had players take a sip every time President Bush mentioned September 11 during his address, as if the problem was that he was speaking about September 11 too much, instead of doing too little.

While some Democrats decry the selfish strain of modern conservatism that led President Bush to abandon the post-September 11 sense of national unity and purpose, they themselves have issued no call for action. Their only call for sacrifice is the pledge to roll back a tax cut they opposed in the first place, and their call for energy independence rings hollow when–under pressure from Michigan’s auto workers in 2005–only 28 Senate Democrats voted to raise fuel economy standards by 12 miles over 11 years.

Contrast this with what happened on the home front during World War II when all Americans were part of the wartime effort. Ordinary citizens became volunteer air raid wardens and were summoned to conserve resources during the conflict. Twenty million Americans planted “victory gardens.” One popular poster showed a sinking tanker ship engulfed in flames and asked “Should brave men die so you can drive “?” Another depicted a weary, muddy GI with the question, “Have you REALLY tried to save gas by getting into a car club?” It is a long way from that sense of national purpose to an America where the White House decries calls for conservation and sacrifice as inimical to the “American way of life.”

There is a real agenda to respond to September 11 that neither party has touched: demanding that Americans make sacrifices in a breakneck transition to energy independence; ending America’s game of footsie with anti-democratic Middle Eastern despots, and actively demonstrating to people around the world that democracy and economic opportunity can provide a better future; making the war on terrorism and homeland security a higher priority than either tax cuts or domestic spending programs; asking millions of Americans to volunteer part-time in modern-day civil defense force that would help watch over our vulnerable ports, borders, and chemical and nuclear plants; strengthening our democracy and addressing grave inequalities in opportunity at home to show the world how fair and just a free nation can be for all; and calling on hundreds of thousands of young people to serve in a military whose size must be greatly increased in order to effectively meet the threats we face.

I refuse to believe that today’s Americans are unwilling to make this type of sacrifice of time and money and lives. We simply cannot answer a call that has not come. More than 60 percent of Americans bought war bonds during World War II. Today, nobody is buying war bonds because nobody is selling them.

On CNN that September day in 2001, I peddled one of our nation’s favorite myths: that in every generation, Americans have risen to the challenge with which we were faced. The truth is that while we wish that this were so, it simply is not. After President Abraham Lincoln’s death and the end of the Civil War, America’s failure to meet the test of Reconstruction sent this country careening off into the tragedy of a century of racial subjugation. In the 1920s, the United States walked away from a complicated world, thereby allowing Hitler to rise and shaky European democracies to fall. Our greatest generations–the ones that met the challenges they were faced with–did not automatically swell up, fully formed. They were summoned forth by leaders who called Americans to the best angels of their nature. The United States did not have those leaders during Reconstruction or the Roaring Twenties. We have not had them yet in the war on terror. There is still time for them; for while it is certainly not “too soon,” it is also, hopefully, not too late.

TAGS: ,
Issue #1, Summer 2006
 
Post a Comment

Emily:

Great article- thanks for this site. I truly agree that action from America's citizens, action that requries sacrifice but also builds greatness, only comes when leaders inspire us to believe that the world is not as jaded as many of us young people today believe it is- specifically the world of politics. As a lover of history who finds promise for the future only from reading about leaders who have long ago left us, we need more political figures today who can create that same passion. Bush, Cheney, Rice, Kerry, even Senator Clinton sure don't seem to be doing it. They seem caught in a world of "hill politics" that rarely touches the outsiders- in other words their own constituents. As a moderate and wannabe believer in our leaders on the Hill, I hope the 2006 and 2008 elections can change this path.



P.S- Mr. Cherny- you participated in an event at American U in 2004 and was a big fan of your work and ability to have accomplished so much at a young age. Glad to see you are still working hard.

Jun 21, 2006, 10:56 AM
So this is an example of an "idea"?:

When reading this kind of piece, it is always informative to pay attention to the pronouns. The "we" and "our" and "us" that are supposed to be at issue. Here, that first-person plural is sometimes a particular "generation" (the Me Generation? the Pepsi Generation? Generation X?), and sometimes it's all of America, and sometimes it's all of America except for the ruling elites, and sometimes it's people who think like Mr. Cherny, and sometimes it's the audience demographic for United 93, and sometimes it's the discrepancy between the projected audience demographic and the actual audience. Sometimes it's the contemporary population of the United States and sometimes it's the historical population of the United States. Etc. Etc. With such a moving target, it isn't surprising that the article doesn't hit anything.



Given the dramatic changes in the way big-budget movies are developed, financed, produced and marketed between 1941 and 2006, is some sort of vague audience ambivalence a variable that can be meaningfully isolated, much less exclusively attributed with explanatory power in accounting for the different cinematic reactions to Pearl Harbor and 9/11? Does it occur to Mr. Cherny, for instance, that in 1941 "we" did not have television, and that this might help to explain why our movies at the time, which ran after newsreels giving audiences their only visual access to the war, were more rapidly produced and widely viewed? And supposing United 93 had been a cinematic phenomenon, breaking box office records. Could this not also have been "evidence" for the obtuseness of our "generation" and its inability to distinguish between reality and entertainment?



OK. So the article is impressionistic and ad hoc; Mr. Cherny isn't doing sociology, he's engaged in punditry. He's dealing in opinions, not ideas. He's searching for plausibility, not truth, and it is the case that I remember the gorgeous melodrama of "Casablanca" as a less ambiguous emotional experience than the messy mythologizing of "Apocalypse Now." The fact that the later film is visually much more complex and daring than the former, a reflection of the fact that the relation of directors to their films in Michael Curtiz's studio system Hollywood was quite different from that in Francis Ford Coppola's auteurist, agent system Hollywood, is a point Mr. Cherny cannot countenance without raising the possibility that a society producing "Apocalypse Now" may be, from a cultural point of view, in every way preferable to a society producing "Casablanca," however wonderful that movie may be, and however comforting its associations have since become. It's the first impression that counts here, the immediate recognition that "our" memory of films like "Casablanca" contain less evidence of social discord than our memory of films like "Apocalypse Now" or, if we saw it, "United 93."



But there is a risk to this approach, and this article demonstrates it. The agenda it proposes includes the following stirring description:



"There is a real agenda to respond to September 11 that neither party has touched: demanding that Americans make sacrifices in a breakneck transition to energy independence; ending America’s game of footsie with anti-democratic Middle Eastern despots, and actively demonstrating to people around the world that democracy and economic opportunity can provide a better future; making the war on terrorism and homeland security a higher priority than either tax cuts or domestic spending programs; asking millions of Americans to volunteer part-time in modern-day civil defense force that would help watch over our vulnerable ports, borders, and chemical and nuclear plants; strengthening our democracy and addressing grave inequalities in opportunity at home to show the world how fair and just a free nation can be for all; and calling on hundreds of thousands of young people to serve in a military whose size must be greatly increased in order to effectively meet the threats we face."



In the days when "Casablanca" was made, there were governments on earth advocating very similar agendas for very similar reasons - namely, to counteract a perceived erosion in social homogeneity of purpose and to restore a past greatness imperiled by the complexity of modernity. Anyone in the Los Angeles theater audience in January of 1943 would have recognized the rhetoric and the interests that promoted it. There is nothing in this litany of policy suggestions, from the call for subordination of energy resources to national sovereignty to the militarization of civilian populations to the self-congratulatory role of example among the nations that cannot be found in the platforms of the NSDAP. Does that mean that Mr. Cherny is a Nazi? Quite the contrary. Precisely because I'm sure he isn't, subjectively, a Nazi, I find the congruence unsettling. I doubt that Mr. Cherny is, morally speaking, all that different from myself. But when you begin with such unholy social categories as "generations," mix them with cinematic representations of national unity, and use them to position the present as a decadent falling-away from some prior solidarity of the fathers, you can't expect to land very far from where the last political movement that tried that landed. That's the thing about "ideas." Unlike "opinions," they're independent of the intentions with which they are propounded. Ideas lead us, not the other way around, and this "idea" leads Mr. Cherny to the same longing for a charismatic leader that afflicted so many of the generation of our grandfathers and fathers around the world. If this is just clumsy punditry, then we have enough of that already. If this really is an "idea," it's a very very bad one. In either case, the article doesn't bode well for a progressive response to the urgency of our (and here I mean everyone on the planet's) situation.

Jun 22, 2006, 10:02 AM
JI29:

The above comment seems to be suggesting that any kind of national solidarity or unifying civic-mindedness is somehow totalitarian in nature. I reject that premise whole-heartedly. I see nothing wrong with having a charismatic leader like FDR uniting the nation toward a common purpose. I think there are things we can agree on - that world hunger should be fought, that terrorism should be reduced, that health care should be improved, that the environment should be protected from permanent damage - and we should join together as a nation to address these problems.



Unfortunately, as the poster above's comments suggest, many people are just not ready or willing to make any kind of sacrifice for the greater good. Cherny says, "I refuse to believe that today’s Americans are unwilling to make this type of sacrifice of time and money and lives." I wish I could share his optimism, but I happen to see this current generation, raised on mindless TV and video games and instant gratification, as a lot less willing to bear the burden of the commonweal as was the one who banded together to survive the hardships of the Depression. And I'm not some bitter old coot saying that - I'm in my 20s, and my impression of most of my peers is that they're pretty apathetic and I don't see that changing.

Jun 26, 2006, 12:34 PM
Joseph Libson:


Mr Cherny's article is somewhat interesting. Comment #2 (and to a less extent #3) is much more so.



Cherny (and commenter #3) are pessimists. An easy and comfortable stance. Cherny yearns for someone to come along and lead Americans out of their funk. He believes that Americans "rallied" in WWII and wishes they would do so now. Rally against what?



What might be uncomfortable for the average progressive is the realization that in WWII we quickly decided that we had a horrible enemy and we were going to (excuse the language) kick the sh*t out fo them. And we were going to work hard and sacrifice to do that. Americans didn't fight for "energy independence" in WWII. They fought to kill what they saw as an existential threat.



I believe we have a horrible enemy again. Islam. We haven't agreed on that enemy. For THAT I will certainly fault our leaders. Mr. Bush is right to not care about Osama Bin Laden. He doesn't matter. The hundreds of millions of Muslims who view him as a hero DO matter. The Oresident has not made the battle lines clear. The Muslim world and the non-Muslim world are on opposing sides. This is not as hot a conflict as WWII, nor is it as cold as WWIII (the Cold War).



We do need a visionary leader to make it clear to Americans (and thus the world) what our enemy is. But if that leader did that, I am quite sure that Mr Cherny (and all progressives) would not like what that leader had to say.



Thanks,



Joe

Jul 2, 2006, 1:28 AM
Steve Roberts:

The article is excellent, and a very good analysis of the situation accompanied by a nearly spot on list of policy prescriptions that would help to reverse the course that we are on as a nation.



In answer to some of the comments by the #2, #3, and #4 posters, I would like to reinforce a couple of the concepts that I believe Mr. Cherny was exploring. First, the essential concept here is that we are in a war which started on 9/11 and that five years later we are embroiled in a half-hearted effort against the wrong enemy. Second, we should be focusing on the war against Al Qaeda. They are the threat to us, here or our own soil, and Osama bin Laden is their leader and the most visible symbol – which should make both the organization and its leader our top priority. Third, there is a whole array of things that America should be doing to deal with the immediate and longer term threat to our security, which the president and the Republican leadership simply ignore.



For those who criticized the concept that we could mobilize the American people around becoming energy independent, I would say that such an effort would be up to the demands of the television age, since it could demonstrably be tied to the overall effort. Historians have shown that much of the rationing during World War II was done for psychological impact, not military necessity. That type of effort would not hold up in the 24 hour news cycle today. However, it is universally understood that our entanglements in the Middle East are intimately tied to oil. By aggressively moving to reduce our national usage of fossil fuels we could generate many jobs (manufacturing new cars, converters, or whatever was ultimately needed), involve everyone, and move toward stripping the Middle Eastern dictatorships of their hold on international power politics.



Most of Mr. Cherny’s other goals are excellent as well, with the exception that I would not focus on building up our military manpower or continuing to attempt to democratize the Middle East – or any other part of the world – through military efforts. Under the Pottery Barn theory we own the problem in Iraq, and will ultimately need to find a way to settle those monumental issues. However, it seems to me that we now need to acknowledge that nation-building and democratizing experiments simply cannot be carried out in an environment that is overshadowed by military operations. In my view we should put aside the strategy of military incursion and focus on “strengthening our democracy and addressing grave inequalities in opportunity at home to show the world how fair and just a free nation can be for all”. Through our example we can lead far more effectively than through our arms.

Jul 28, 2006, 10:22 AM

Post a Comment

Name

Email

Comments (you may use HTML tags for style)

Verification

Note: Several minutes will pass while the system is processing and posting your comment. Do not resubmit during this time or your comment will post multiple times.