Essay Excerpt: 9/11 Patriotism and Dissent

On September 11, 2001, the architectural embodiments of American capitalism and culture, The Twin Towers, two symmetrical exclamation points on New York City’s industrial skyline, were destroyed by enemies from abroad. In the weeks and months that followed, America’s guiding spirit of rowdy democracy and individual freedom too was severely damaged, not by the loosely knit group of jihadist who praised Allah and shouted death to America, but by the very government who proclaimed to fight for its protection. After September 11, George Bush, empowered by Christian righteousness and emboldened by American patriotism, began a campaign to extend America’s hegemonic power and redistribute its wealth into the hands of the very wealthiest. Gagging the dissenters with the flag and drowning out their voices with renditions of “America the Beautiful,” the Administration fought not for the protection of American democracy against the nation’s enemies, but for the protection of the nation’s plutocratic elite against the dangerous questions of American democracy.

The strength of American society depends less on the size of its guns, and more on the tenacity of its citizenry to speak up against injustice, to question the status quo, and to challenge the dictations of the government. Prohetic writer Lewis Lapham, in Gag Rule, writes “Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as its citizens can ask of their own stupidity and fear" (1). A healthy democracy is boisterous and loud; an effective dictatorship is quite and subdued.

A remarkable silence washed over post-September 11 America, where dissent became treasonous and momentary lapses into free thought became vices of the unpatriotic. Flag bumper stickers filled store shelves, the President was immediately and unanimously endowed by the Senate the power to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines panned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks,” and Americans were warned that, “they need to watch what they say, watch what they do” by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

In the months that followed, an obedient chorus of compliance from the Senate greeted attempts by the Administration to promote its political agenda: no substantial debate was engaged when the Administration petitioned for money for wealthy businesses (Dick Armey [Texas-R] pointed out that “This country is in the middle of a war. Now is not the time to provoke spending confrontations with our Commander-in-Chief”), no objections were mounted when the Administration asked to undermine personal freedom and privacy through the PATRIOT Act, and barely a word of disagreement was heard when it violated every moral truism and international precedent available to the civilized and not-so-civilized world by invading a defenseless country based on fabricated pretexts and person aggrandizement. “Told that the truth didn’t matter, that motive was irrelevant, and that the Bush administration was free to do as it pleased, the heirs and assigns of what was once a democratic republic greeted the announcement with an audible and respectful silence” (Lapham 40).

An educated citizenry is a bulwark of liberty and democracy; an ignorant and complacent electorate is easily trampled over and effortlessly misled. The brightly color textbooks of America’s sprawling corridors of educational mediocrity are so completely purged of controversy, scrubbed clean of seditions connotations, expunged of gruesome depictions of war, and free from unsettling concepts of reality, that citizens are allowed to wallow complacently in blissful ignorance. Moreover, the dull political dialogues between the media centers serving their business-class masters and the people provide for an elaborate fairy-tale of a preferred picture of the world. In short: democracy dies in ignorance, and tyranny flourishes within it.

As the smoke rose into the air from the rubble at ground zero, America was presented with a unique and important opportunity to question its role within the world and to engage in a public discourse on the price of freedom and the importance of national security. However, the nation’s collective reason was eclipsed by the nation’s collective patriotism, and the questions, quite simply, weren’t asked.