Nostalgia of national unity
APPROACHING the fifth anniversary of 9/11, there seems to be something close to national unity in mourning the loss of national unity. A survey released last month by the nonprofit myGoodDeed.org concluded that 68 percent of Americans ``feel that the climate of national unity and compassion that existed after 9/11 has largely dissipated." Nearly as many agree that they ``now have a greater personal sense of national unity and patriotism as a result of 9/11."
Evidently, lots of us individually feel at one with the rest of the nation even though we don't think most other Americans share these feelings. ``It was the moment that was supposed to change everything," David Broder and Dan Balz recently reminisced in The
Nostalgia is built into invocations of national unity, since these invocations always call to mind a better time when unity prevailed, only to lapse into discord.
But what kind of post-Sept. 11 unity are we talking about when we bemoan its disappearance? In one of myGoodDeed's survey questions, national unity is linked with compassion. In another, it is linked with patriotism. Compassion and patriotism are not the same. Many Americans felt both compassionate and patriotic after Sept. 11, but it was possible to feel shock, sadness, and anger, to give money, donate blood or clothing, volunteer, or pray but not to feel an upsurge of national pride or fly an American flag. A week after the attacks, Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian-American poet, wrote from her kitchen window looking across the East River toward where the Twin Towers had stood:
I have never felt less american and more new Yorker -- particularly brooklyn, than these past days, the stars and stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent the dead as citizens first -- not family members, not lovers. Compassion and political consensus aren't identical either, even though the effort to fuse the two began almost immediately. ``Our unity is a kinship of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies," President Bush said at the National Cathedral on Sept. 14, 2001. But a kinship of grief is emotional rather than political, and to be united in sorrow is not the same as being united about how to respond geopolitically to such a calamity. Nor is it the same as remaining united once the messy implications of those responses are revealed.
By quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt on ``the warm courage of national unity" in his National Cathedral speech, Bush suggested a return to the spirit of World War II -- even though the phrase actually came from Roosevelt's first inaugural address to rally the public behind the New Deal. As a rhetorical gesture, the reference to World War II was both shrewd and obvious, especially in the context of the ``Greatest Generation" phenomenon in popular culture. As a historical analogy, however, it made much less sense.
The national unity of World War II was sustained by the widely shared sacrifices of a society mobilized for total war, by the unambiguous threats posed by readily identifiable enemies (``state actors," in current parlance), by clear geopolitical stakes, and by reasonable certainty about what would constitute victory. To ``get back" to World War II would mean to ``recover" at last from that most disunifying of American wars, Vietnam. But the conditions that kept up unity during World War II are no more present in the war on terror than they were in the Vietnam War.
For much of its first term, the administration skillfully and often ruthlessly conflated national unity with its own policies . National unity was as much an administration strategy as a spontaneous phenomenon -- a strategy not only to build support for the war in Afghanistan but also to demonize opponents of more dubious undertakings, especially the war in Iraq. At a December 2001 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the USA Patriot Act, Attorney General John Ashcroft addressed ``those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty." ``Your tactics only aid terrorists," Ashcroft said, ``for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends." But if the Republicans exploited unity to push a particular agenda, the Democrats never found a way to promote a robust debate about how to respond at a time of national crisis.
The rhetoric about squandered national unity invokes a fleeting moment of bipartisanship and 90 percent presidential approval ratings. This apolitical golden age was supposed to be part of 9/11's silver lining, along with the ``end of irony" and the more enduring images and stories of heroism at the World Trade Center and on Flight 93. But less unity of this kind might have spared us some of the rancor and recriminations that make us seem so divided now.
Steven Biel is the author of ``American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting" and the editor of ``American Disasters." 
