MARK STEYN: One Week After September 11, 2001

Mark Steyn writing in September 2001:

It was the accumulation of events that set the tone. One plane hit, then another, then the Pentagon was smoking, the White House was evacuated, the towers crumbled, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, there were other flights missing, there were bomb scares… For a few hours that Tuesday it felt like the Third World War, and so commentators fell into war mode. And by the time the networks had shuttled Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and the other empathetic glamour gals to the scene it was too late to revert to the banality of “healing” and “closure” and all the other guff of a soft-focus grief wallow.

Even on that first day they were saying “everything’s changed”. But what exactly? The main difference seemed to be tonal. These days, an army of grief counsellors can arrive at a high school shooting quicker than a SWAT team. But, when they showed up last week to ply their grisly trade, they found few takers.

you want a word for the mood of this immediate aftermath, try “primal”. In a feminised culture, guys were back – big burly firemen evoking Iwo Jima and raising the flag atop the ruins of the World Trade Center. Watching tanks rumble down the street, Manhattanites were amazed to discover that the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue really is an armoury, and not just, as it is to most New Yorkers these days, a heritage site you can rent for art and antique shows.

But even the ACLU isn’t dumb enough to launch church-and-state lawsuits when half of Lower Manhattan is filled with prayer vigils. Prayer, not grief counselling: the real thing, not its ersatz lo-cal substitute.

A neighbour of mine put up the biggest flag in town and demanded a massive military response. “But she’s a Democrat,” I said to a friend. “And a lesbian.” “Ah, yes,” he replied, “but she belongs to the hawkish wing of the lesbian movement.”

The perfect symbol of what Dave Kopel (in National Review) calls “the culture of passivity” is the airline cabin, the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. Massachusetts and California can only aspire to cloud cuckoo land, but up there where the air is rarefied a Federal regulatory authority can bring Utopia into being at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The commercial airliner is an Al Gore dream. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun control. You are by obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you’re rude to her, there’ll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification for all this is a familiar one - that in return for surrendering individual liberties, we’ll all be collectively better off. That was the deal: do as you’re told, and the Federal Aviation Administration will look after you.

Last Tuesday morning, the FAA failed spectacularly to honour their end of the bargain – as I’m sure the terrorists knew they would.

Could you or I do what they did? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which civilians – salesmen, waitresses, accountants, tourists – are in the front line. America will need more Todd Beamers and Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the air. The culture of passivity is spread very wide throughout the west - the belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty.
So the next time it happens, Americans have a choice: they can follow FAA guidelines – or they can say screw ’em and their worthless assurances, and rush forward to overpower the fanatics, even if the FAA has seen to it they’ve nothing to charge them with except the rubber chicken.
Read the complete story here: PRIMAL by Mark Steyn
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