11 years later

I remember 11 years ago today, on a similarly beautiful, clear Tuesday morning, I received a wakeup call from a friend who told me the first inkling of the bad news — the towers had been hit. The previous night, Michael Jordan had hinted that he was returning to the NBA, so I thought my friend was calling to tell me this basketball news and I wondered why he had to tell me before 9am (which back then was pretty early for me). I turned on the TV. I called my parents to tell them what was happening. As they turned on the TV, there were images of smoke rising from the Pentagon, and they were confused why I was talking about the WTC. Later, I saw one tower collapse, called my parents again, and we watched together as the second tower collapsed, unsure if we were watching a replay or live feed of another event. The newscasters live on air were also unsure.

I walked to the department and hugged a fellow graduate student whom I barely knew. I stood on the roof of Pupin and looked south, trying to remember what the skyline used to look like. I went to the cathedral to donate blood, to feel like there was something for me to do. People on the streets all had the same dazed look on their faces. That day, and to a lesser extent that entire Fall, everyone in New York felt a sudden kinship with other New Yorkers. There were crazy rumors flying around that day, like that the Sears Tower had been hit, and that a truck filled with explosives had been found parked at the base of the George Washington Bridge. When the buildings collapsed, we initially thought that 50,000 lives had been lost.

The fires at the site of the towers apparently kept burning or smoldering for a long time after. Strangely, every Friday for the next four weeks or so, the winds would blow north and even 7 miles uptown at Columbia we would smell the caustic scent of burning... I don't know what.

I find it interesting to reflect on how that day affected our world in ways that it was impossible to foresee. At the time, I thought that it heralded a new era in which events like that would become relatively commonplace, eventually leading to people with the wrong ethnic background being rounded up in camps. Thankfully, we haven't reached such a dystopian extreme, but we (Americans) have become a bit more fearful and a bit more violent, and the phrase "September 11" has been used as often for the purpose of political gamesmanship as in the context of serious policy discussions, at least among the conversations I've heard.

I don't have a conclusion.

Maureen Dowd's dishonest take on Obama's DNC speech

Commentary on this column:
Playing Now: Hail to Us Chiefs 

First, I'm somewhat disappointed in Obama, too, but mostly about foreign policy issues like detention in Guantanamo and warrantless killing etc.

Did Obama screw up the debt ceiling negotiations in summer of 2011?  He probably didn't handle them optimally, but I don't know that even in an optimal negotiation he could have done better.  He's a president, not a king, and he's facing perhaps the most entrenched opposition party in our country's history — a party that is dedicated, in a weirdly successful game of prisoner's dilemma, to nothing but making his presidency a failure.  People, myself included, talk a lot about the "bully pulpit" but the data suggest that that stuff is largely overrated, and presidents have only a limited ability to educate and persuade.  Speeches generally do little to move public opinion, and the more speeches a president gives the less ability he has to persuade with each one, as voters (and news networks) start to tune him out.  Furthermore, Obama DID give numerous speeches, including some primetime speeches and Rose Garden press conferences, on major issues (e.g., healthcare and the debt ceiling).  The fact that people don't remember his doing this is testament to what I'm saying — that presidential speeches just don't do all that much to effect change.  The idea that a president can single-handedly shape people's hearts and minds is largely a fiction, or at least is true only in very limited circumstances.

Anyway, regardless of Obama's failings as president — and I certainly wanted more from him (I wanted him not to bargain away the public option before the debate even began, for instance; and I want him not to order extrajudicial targeted killings, for a couple examples) — regardless of his failings, my take is that Dowd's reading of Obama's speech is completely off the mark.  His message was a positive one — we the citizens (the voters) made change possible by participating in the process.  He graciously gives voters credit and then asks them not to stop trying to make a difference: "If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote; Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry, or control health care choices that women should make for themselves. Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen. Only you have the power to move us forward."

Turning this sentiment into Dowd's, um, paraphrase — "Because, after all, it's our fault" — seems to involve an intentional misunderstanding of Obama's words.  The suggestion that Obama was blaming Americans for anything is made up out of whole cloth.

I'd like to see her try stringing a few sentences together in an earnest attempt to educate, argue, and persuade, just once.  Not innuendo, not jokes, not comments about what someone else meant by his body language (really??), his tone, etc.  No, just once, let her try to make a real argument.  Present facts, glue them together with logic, and reach a conclusion.  Sure, that's not her style, but once in 15 years could she possible be bothered to do so instead of giving us nothing but snark and drivel?  This column takes Obama's rhetorical move of thanking his supporters for making the changes he has effected possible and asking them to vote for his second term, and dishonestly claims that Obama is blaming voters for his failings — and presents without explanation a list of failings that include his body language, the people he allows in his limousine, the thank you notes that he does or doesn't send, the cracks in the Capitol dome, the Greek columns, and the people he plays golf with.  In an 821-word column!  If, given just 821 words, she thinks the things listed two sentences back warrant mention among the President's failings, doesn't that suggest he is the most successful President of our time or any other?  I'm pretty sure that if Adlai Stevenson had been elected, even he would have made enough mistakes that an 800-word column criticizing his first term wouldn't have had to scrape the bottom of the barrel with allegations of poor body language.

Dowd seems to me to be an unfortunately influential example of what's wrong among our journalistic elite today.  Consider what she said when Joe Klein suggested that she report about something significant —

From http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh030507.shtml:

JERVEY (6/99): "Maureen is very talented," observes Joe Klein of The New Yorker. "But she is ground zero of what the press has come to be about in the nineties...I remember having a discussion with her in which I said, 'Maureen, why don't you go out and report about something significant, go out and see poor people, do something real?' And she said, 'You mean I should write about welfare reform?'"

Oh, the humanity!  What, Maureen Dowd roll up her sleeves and write about a real issue?  Heaven forbid!