Obama's "Historic" Triumph: Did He Win or Was it a GO George - Get Out George W. Victory by Default? by Gil Troy

The following blog was written by Gil Troy for the History News Network. Thought it was an interesting place to go with students and a good example of what "real" history is all about. You can find the original text here: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/56983.html

Obama's "Historic" Triumph: Did He Win or Was it a GO George – Get Out George W. Victory by Default?

Historians have to navigate carefully when entering the strange, alluring world of media commentary. To maintain our integrity, we need boundaries. Presumably, those of us who comment believe that offering historical perspective even as history unfolds can elevate public debate, using current events as "teachable moments." But most of the time journalists want us – especially on television – to do things we should not do, namely predict the future or determine the historical meaning of fleeting events as they unfold. Even on the air, historians should dodge certain questions. We should never predict. And we should sidestep premature queries such as "Is George W. Bush the worst president ever," halfway through his term. Anyone who survived oral exams should be able to handle it. During last week's remarkable redemptive moment as Barack Obama won the presidency, it seemed that most of the media wanted to trot out historians to certify that this election was indeed "historic."

Of course, it does not take a Ph.D. in history to note that the first elevation of a black man to the White House in a country with America’s racist past was momentous. Moreover, every presidential election is historic given the attention we pay to voting and the job's significance. But this question of "was this election historic" was fishing in deeper waters. Reporters wanted historians to label 2008 as significant as 1980 when Ronald Reagan launched his revolution or 1960 when John Kennedy inspired a generation or 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt tackled the Great Depression. And historians can safely say that there never had been such a cataclysmic domestic event during a general election campaign as this Crash of 2008. But we all know that it is too early to know whether Barack Obama's presidency will be as transformative as he hopes. He could be the next Franklin D. Roosevelt – or Jimmy Carter redux.

As we wait to watch, and assess the historical impact of Barack Obama's administration, we should start debating just what caused his victory. Here we have a legitimate "teachable" moment – showing how historians start thinking about a problem, start solving an historical mystery. One debate I have started with my students is whether Barack Obama won this election, or John McCain and the Republican lost it?

In asking the question, we have to acknowledge its artificiality. The accurate answer is "yes," meaning it was a combination of factors. But the question gets students thinking about what were the most significant causes. My next step is suggesting that we construct a timeline of turning points, which helps answer the question and gets us to start weighing historical significance. I propose four turning points in this election:

-- The first is Obama's extraordinary 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. I believe historians will deem it more significant than William Jennings Bryan's 1896 speech because it launched Obama into the celebrity stratosphere and toward the presidency.

-- The second turning point is something that did not happen – or happened subsequently. Had Hillary Clinton run a war room as tough and efficient as her husband's, and had her campaign uncovered the Jeremiah Wright tapes in the winter of 2008 before the Iowa caucuses, I doubt Obama would have won Iowa. This is a mischievous turning point, which raises questions about how historians assess missed opportunities, and speculate about potential outcomes. It also helps raise the question that will emerge as we start debating George W. Bush's legacy – how do we assess something that did not happen, in his case, the fact that as of this writing there has been no catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil since 2001. How much credit can someone get for a bell that did not ring, a fear that was not realized. As for Hillary, how harshly do we judge a candidate or a campaign for overlooking what could have been a knockout blow?

-- The third turning point is the market implosion. Whatever momentum McCain enjoyed after the Soviets invaded Georgia during the summer and his energized convention (thanks to Sarah Palin's debut) vanished. As the fourth major disaster under George W. Bush's watch, following 9/11, Iraq and Katrina, the financial crisis made it all but impossible for a Republican to win.

-- Finally, I point to Obama's performance during the debates, especially the third debate. That the young, inexperienced upstart Democrat appeared to be the mature candidate against his older, more experienced rival, made Obama look presidential and helped allay many Americans' anxieties about this relative unknown.

This list is intended to trigger debate. Others would mention Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday strategy that ignored the causcuses, Sarah Palin's nomination, McCain's decision to suspend his campaign, Obama's opposition to the Iraq war. It is important also to go beyond this event-driven list and talk about Obama's extraordinary strategy, his effective use of the internet, and his brilliant ground game, organizing thousands of workers across the nation. And while the four turning points offer two affirmative actions of Obama's and two events beyond his control, I ultimately conclude that Obama was lucky to be blessed with two flawed opponents.

For all the skills Obama demonstrated and the forces he marshaled, I argue that Hillary Clinton, John McCain, George W. Bush, and the Republicans lost this election as much as Obama won. Just as Ronald Reagan won an ABC election in 1980 – anybody but Carter – Obama won a GO George – Get Out George W. Bush --election this year. This conclusion does not diminish from the dare I say it, historic nature of Obama's victory. Rather, it is an early attempt to plunge into the debate assessing the outcome of the wild, rollicking, unpredictable, and potentially transformative 2008 campaign.

The Letters of John and Abigail Adams and What it Means to Us

Reading “My Dearest Friend” has given me a particular insight into the lives of one of our Founding Fathers that one rarely comes across. John Adams served in Philadelphia and Europe at a time when letters could take weeks and months to reach their destination. They were separated on several occasions throughout John’s tenure for, in some cases, years at a time. In 1774, John’s daughter Abigail was 9 and his sons John, Charlie and Tommy were 7, 4 and 2. When he finally came home for good, They were adults who were either married with children or beginning their careers. The man missed an entire lifetime with his children and lamented about that continuously. However, he did what he did for the good of all of us - yep, I said “us”. He wrote about the generations that would come later, about his great grandchildren who would grow up in a country free from government oppression. He sacrificed because he understood that if he didn’t, then his children would have to – and that sacrifice may very well have been bigger. I think that we have forgotten that concept about making things better for our children. Sure, we go to war to fight for posterity, or to “maintain our freedom” but the fact of the matter is that our “freedom” comes from within us. It comes from the ordinary citizen making an effort to be informed and not preoccupied with their own financial bubble. Then it mandates action when something is amiss rather than the complacency that someone else will take care of it. Civic engagement is something that I believe we are all lacking in some respect, and have been for a while.

Staying engaged takes time, effort and perseverance – it isn’t easy and it isn’t something that one can do poolside for ½ hour on a Sunday afternoon – but it is so vitally important to this nation. What is happening now , with a president continuously overstepping his constitutional bounds and congress allowing him to do so, with a mass of people that are allowing their president to take them headlong into war on a continuous string of lies, one can only see that our “Democracy” faltering. It’s the PEOPLE in a Democracy that make the democracy, not the leaders and right now, the PEOPLE are anything but democratic because so many are not paying attention. Cynicism, corruption and “good ole boy” networking has literally crippled our government. So much can go on when people are ignorant of their own past and country and are not being vigilant because of it. You want to know why history is important? It gives us the knowledge base necessary to make judgements and spot infringements on the Constitution. Real knowledge, not the stuff you get from a 30 second attack ad. Right now our students are graduating without that real knowledge and the American people are anything but vigilant. Scares me to death.

Getting off "foreign" oil

Lately the question of off shore drilling has become front and center in response to the "crisis" American's are facing at the gas pump. I am really quite perplexed at the entire argument that "Drill, baby, drill" will help us. How is it that people actually believe that in the 102 years since Henry Ford patented the internal combustible engine, human beings have been unable to create anything better? If we had continued on the alternative energy quest in the 1970's, our world would be a cleaner, greener place by now and we would very likely not be facing the same climate crisis we are. Alternative energy fuels and technology have been suppressed by the very oil barons and giant companies we complain about because of their record wealth and profits. Our own president and many in his party have close ties to the oil industry which continually supplies lobbyists and others to block real energy reform which will hurt their profits.

So, in the ego-centric, most painless way possible humans always do things, we look to "solve" the problem by closing our eyes and minds to real solutions and drilling oil in the last pristine wilderness places we have left on the planet. Great Idea! Let's invite the possibility of more devastating oil spills, disturb the natural chain of life, destroy more land and seascapes and further endanger the very population of plant and wildlife that keeps humans fed and breathing. For what? So people can have another fix to their addiction of SUVs and Pickup Trucks? So people can have a dollar a gallon reprieve for about 5-10 years or so until our demand once again surpasses our supply? So people can continue to walk around with blinders on that as long as they are ok, the rest of the world is too? Then what? Watch our children struggle with the same problem our parents struggled with 30 years ago and failed to solve because it required too much motivation or because of want of convenience? God forbid we make the leap and suffer the growing pains a change in fuel will cost us so our children will grow up in a world where oil is no longer king. Let's not change our habits or put our energies into really solving problems instead of whining and finding band aids for a crisis that will overtake us, no matter how much more oil we find. Why is it so difficult for people to sacrifice some prestige or convenience in the name of sustaining life on this planet through cleaner ways of doing our daily business? Why do we find it impossible to take advantage of a financial crisis to find the motivation and courage to move forward and change the world?

The argument for opening up protected lands is a shallow, pathetic, near-sighted way of convincing ourselves that the human race is not really in trouble, that our planet is not really in a crisis - all we need to do is find more oil pockets and everything will fine ...at least until those pockets run out and we find ourselves in the "enviable" position of having no alternative fuels and a shortage of oil......for the third time in a generation. How many more warnings do we need and how can people be so blind to the big picture and long-term consequences of their actions? Now that gas prices have begun to fall, I will bet that the clamor for alternative fuels will subside along with them, as it is just enough of a reprieve to allow people to bury their heads back in the sand and shut out the rest of the world again. Fear not, folks, the prices will rise again!

In the issue of energy costs, Obama has stayed somewhat true to his own beliefs and continues to tout complete energy reform – a goal that is both holistic and long term next to McCain’s temporary, incomplete and self absorbed solution of off shore drilling. Can you say "campaign tactic"? The problem here is that the American voting public is just as self-absorbed and buys into the "win at all costs" mentality that will leave us with a broken planet that cannot provide the resources necessary to sustain a capitalist economy.

It is not about getting the US off foreign oil. Its about getting the US off oil. period.

Not the Experience We Need Right Now

It has been said over and over that John McCain has experience and Barack Obama does not. John McCain grew up in a privileged home and has been a senator for over 20 years - through the entire “Cold War” when the US and former Soviet Union repeatedly rattled their sabers and occasionally took each other to the brink of nuclear war. Barack Obama grew up in a not so privileged home and has spent his career thus far on city level committees that work with people at the grass-roots level. Many have said that this “lack” of experience means that John McCain is more suitable for the position of the Presidency. I think that it is this “lack” of experience that is exactly what we need. Let me explain.

The world that we live in is much different than the world in which John McCain has experience. This is not the cold war, there are no Soviets who supposedly want to destroy our way of life, aside from a few groups of terrorists who we have helped in recruiting new members by creating more anger and hate by our invasions. This is not the time for war hawk paranoia - we have seen what that kind of thinking gets us. John McCain’s experience has been how to be the bully in the sandbox - how to not let others play unless its by our rules, how to control all the toys and only give them to the friends that do what we tell them, and how to manipulate those friends into pushing others out of the sandbox altogether. McCain has demonstrated his manipulative strategies throughout his campaign - using pop culture icons in a political ad, pretending that an average Joe is what this nation needs to lead it out of trouble, jumping on silly comments taken out of context and using minimal connections to invite suspicion and fear. Suspicion and fear is what our current president used to manipulate public opinion into support for the war in Iraq. Suspicion and fear is what will push us into another cold war scenario where we are forced to dig deeper and deeper into our resources to maintain an illusion of control over other countries. McCain is indeed experienced, but it is not the kind of experience we need right now.

Barack Obama may not have privileged, senate experience, but that does not mean he is not a good leader. His experience lies with helping average people, with working his way through college, with raising a family. If anyone who has ever run for president truly knows what it is like to be an average American, Obama is it. He is not part of the Baby Boomer generation that has sacrificed the morals and values of the Greatest Generation to stay “on top”. Unlike McCain and many others of his generation, Obama can indeed see a scenario where the United States is not the world’s only superpower - where the US may just have to play fair with others in that sandbox and compromise just like everybody else. Obama knows that playing fair is not unpatriotic, it is human. In this world it is necessary to maintain a level of respect and moral superiority that, although US leaders have wasted no time in using to push their agendas, they have not banked a single bit of it in the last 20 years - ironically the time of McCain’s tenure. Keeping the United States in a position of power now requires fair dealing, negotiations and conservation - yes, I said the “C” word - not the brinkmanship, immobile, refuse to negotiate, “you are either with us or without us“, mentality that has permeated our foreign policy and has taken us to the lowest level of respect among other nations in recent memory. I, for one, am craving someone who is not part of that Washington, Cold War “experience” .

A recent mailing by the McCain campaign cites the fact that if Obama was a doctor, you would find a new one. On the contrary, I appreciate immensely the new knowledge and perspective my very young doctor has and I appreciate the talents and knowledge of younger generations, even if it means they don’t know how to bully other people around.

Mark Naison: The McCain Palin Ticket Appeals to a Powerful Strain of Anti-Intellectualism in American Society

Thought this was interesting, from the History News network. I have experienced these exact sentiments in my own family and elsewhere, but never understood that it was part of a broader way of thinking, according to Naison. What do you think? The frenzy over Palin is overwhelming and to be honest, a bit nauseating when they use a common statement Obama made to try to distract voters from the real task at hand. Our country is in the worst global position in recent memory and our economy and sense of personal responsibility is not all that great, either. Are offhanded phrases really the issue here? Please!

Source: Special to HNN (9-6-08) http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/54182.html

"The McCain Palin ticket, if elected, would be a disaster for the country. Their propensity to invoke God's will as a justification for government policies, their contempt for science and intellect, their extaordinary lack of knowledge about the culture and history of the major nations of the world,, and their shameless defense of an oil centered energy policy that has produced economic and ecological disaster for the nation, poorly prepares them to lead a nation whose reputation has been damged by an ill considered war and whose position in the global economy has been steadily weakening., However, the very things that make McCain and Palin feared in most of the world gives them an excellent chance of winning the presidency. Their proud anti-intellectualism, reflected in their personal histories as well as their rhetoric, touches a powerful chord with many working class and middle class Americans. There is a long tradition in this country of mistrusting people who have advanced academic training, which the McCain/Pallin ticket has used to great effect in holding Barack Obama up to ridicule. While some Americans might admire Barack Obama for working as a community organizer before attending Harvard Law School, and for teach[ing] law before running for public office, Republicans have used these features of Obama's biography to say that he doesn't understand how "real folks" live. Is this strategy going to work? Unfortunately, it could. Pitting the election as a contest between a "Good Old Boy" and his "Good Old Girl" sidekick against a "Professor" and "Community Organizer" is going to play well in large portions of working class and middle class America. McCain and Pallin are recognizable figures,, people you'd run into on the ballfield and or the local bar, while Barack Obama seems like a talented and exotic outsider who somehow married into your family or moved onto your block. McCain and Pallin are candidates of a party whose policies have brought hardship and pain to untold numbers of Americans, whose jobs and homes are in jeopardy, and who are saddle with personal debt. But they speak a languge ordinary people can understand and they don't make them feel guilty about their pickups and SUV's, their snomobiles or their guns...By contrast, they don't really know Barack Obama, and mistrust his sophistication, his calm demeanor and, and his easy facility with complex policy questions a president must face.

The discomfort, and the confusion, many working class and middle class Americans feel about intellectuls is something I experienced first hand during my fifteen years coching sandlot baseball and Catholic Youth Organization basketbll in Brooklyn in the 1980's and 1990's. The teams I coached, though their homebase was Park Slope, played many of their games in white working class neighborhoods like Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst, Marine Park, Canarsie and Bergen Beach. The majority of the people I coached against were cops, firemen, construction workers, civil servants,and people who owned small businesses and I really enjoyed spending time with them. They were tough, generous,competitive and far less racist than most people would be led to expect. Though their neighborhoods were still overwhelmingly white,they were scrupulously fair to the Black and Latino kids who played on visiting teams, and tolerated no racist language and behavior from their players or fans .I liked competing against their teams, working with them to set up games and tournaments, and occasionally going out with them for a meal or a drink. For many years, they had no idea what I did for a living. They saw a big, loud, intense, man prowling the sidelines, someone who pushed his teams hard and never backed down from a physical confrontation, and figured I was one of them, a cop, a sanitation worker, maybe a construction foreman.When they found out I was a college teacher, they were utterly astonished and extremely confused. It was as though they just found out I had come from outer space "A professor, that's insne" someone told one of my fellow coaches" I thought he was just another Brooklyn redneck,". At the Bergen Beach baseball complex, located in a tough Italian enclave near the Belt Parkway, my name was no longer Mark, it was " Professor.", That is how people began referring to me at games and at meetings. That's how they refer to me today if they run into me in a store or on the golf course. Their teasing wasn't mean spirited, but it defrinitely had an edge. These tough, hard working white guys saw professors as people who looked down on folks like them and were quick to write them off. They had felt comfortable with me because of how I acted on and off the field ,but now they wondered wh ether I secretly held them in contempt. No one said,"wow it's great that a guy who grew up on the streets of Brooklyn went out and got a Phd." Although they never said so in so many words, it seemed as though they feared that the very act of getting a Phd meant that I thought I was better than them.

After listening to the speeches at the Republican Convention, I am convinced that appealing to such fears and suspicions is at the core of the McCain Pallin strategy. None of this is new. From George Wallace, to Spiro Agnew to Rush Limbaugh, the right has used anti-intellectualism, especially directed at Professors, as one of its major rallying cries. But to do so at this historic moment, when the American economy is in deep disarray and so many of its foreign policy initiatives have come to grief, is particularly worrisome. Will working class and middle class Americans see through this desparate charade and vote for someone with the temperment, traininng and intellect to actually solve some of the nation's problems, or will they let their own fears and prejudices wed them to the status quo. Time will tell, but based on my own personal experience in white middle class and working class America, I am not hopeful."

“Let’s Talk Sense to the American People:” Adlai Stevenson’s Memorable 1952 Acceptance Speech

"...What does concern me, in common with thinking partisans of both parties, is not just winning this election but how it is won, how well we can take advantage of this great quadrennial opportunity to debate issues sensibly and soberly. I hope and pray that we Democrats, win or lose, can campaign not as a crusade to exterminate the opposing party, as our opponents seem to prefer, but as a great opportunity to educated and elevate a people whose destiny is leadership, not alone of a rich and prosperous, contented country, as in the past, but of a world in ferment.

And, my friends even more important than winning the election is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party, the acid, final test. When the tumult and the shouting die, when the bands are gone and the lights are dimmed, there is the stark reality of responsibility in an hour of history haunted with those gaunt, grim specters of strife, dissension, and materialism at home and ruthless, inscrutable, and hostile power abroad..."

The Sad State of Presidential Campaigns in America

I must write in response to the recent presidential campaign ads for Senator John McCain.

In recent ads, the Mc Cain campaign has portrayed Senator Barack Obama as a rock star elitist who is responsible for high gas prices and is the equivalent of a fly-by-night pop celebrity. Par for the campaign course you say? I would argue no.

There is something about the McCain ads that are different. Never before do I recall such a blatant mockery of the political process by way of the assumption that the American people are dim enough to base their choice for president on celebrity comparisons. I am amazed that it has gotten to the point that the only way to get our attention is to use images of Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears. Does he really expect people to believe that Barack Obama is in the same category of these women just because he generates enthusiasm at his popular rallies? The fact that he is to be criticized because he has earned the confidence of millions of Americans and Europeans is absolutely sickening. Even worse, there are people out there who are convinced by this nauseating spectacle and suddenly believe that the zeal of millions for their country is something to be feared and avoided.

So far, the Obama campaign has thankfully stayed on the path of presenting his views on issues and not resorting to such ridiculous imagery.

Are American voters really that uneducated and simplistic? I shudder at the thought and want to believe with all my heart that they are not. This election is one that will be a turning point in this nation’s history. Not because an African American is running, nor because a large percent of young and minority voters will turn out, but because it can prove that Americans are not skittish, irrational, uninterested, self absorbed pop-culture addicts. It can prove that we are still a nation of civically engaged, intelligent, self aware folks who appreciate what we have been entrusted with. I will be watching, waiting and hoping for proof that we are not what John McCain thinks we are.

Living Through the Age of Denial in America

I found the following article and edited it down to a somewhat reasonable size. It is from Tom Englehart and the full text can be seen here:http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/52924.html

"I was born, after all, just a year and a few weeks before the United States atomically incinerated Hiroshima and then followed up by atomically obliterating the city of Nagasaki, and World War II ended. Victory arrived, but amid scenes of planetary carnage, genocide, and devastation on a scale and over an expanse previously unimaginable...

The logic of war's developing machinery seemedto be leading inexorably in just that direction. Otherwise, how do you explain the way the United States and the Soviet Union, long after both superpowers had the ability to destroy all human life on Planet Earth, simply could not stop upgrading and adding to their nuclear arsenals...

It was as if the two powers were preparing for the destruction of many planets. Such a war would have given the fullest meaning to "world" and no ocean, no line of defenses, would have left any continent, any place, out of the mix. This is what World War III, whose name would have had to be given prospectively, might have meant (and, ofcourse, could still mean)...It was, of course, this world of war from which, in 1945, the United States emerged triumphant...On a planet many of whose great cities were now largely rubble, a world of refugee camps and privation, a world destroyed.. the U.S. was untouched...

The world war had, in fact, leveled all its rivals and made the U.S. a powerhouse of economic expansion. That war and the atomic bomb had somehow ushered in a golden age of abundanceand consumerism. All the deferred dreams and desires of depression and wartime America -- the washing machine, the TV set, the toaster, the automobile, the suburban house, you name it -- were suddenly available to significant numbers ofAmericans. The U.S. military began to demobilize and the former troops returned not to rubble, but to new tract homes and G.I. Bill educations...The taste of ashes may have been in global mouths, but the taste of nectar (or, at least, Coca Cola) was in American ones. And yet all of this was shadowed by our own "victory weapon," by the dark train of thought that led quickly to scenarios of our own destruction in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, in movies, and on TV (think, "The TwilightZone")...The young, with their own pocket money to spend just as they pleased for the first time in history -- teens on the verge of becoming "trendsetters" -- found themselves plunged into a mordant, yet strangely thrilling world... "Triumphialist despair"...

At the economic and governmental level, the 24/7 world of sunny consumerism increasingly merged with the 24/7world of dark atomic alerts, of ever vigilant armadas of nuclear-armed planes ready to take off on a moment's notice to obliterate the Soviets. ["99 Red Balloons"] After all, the peaceable giants of consumer production now doubled as the militarized giants of weapons production. A military Keynesianism drove theU.S. economy toward a form of consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and atomic submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The companies -- General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others -- producing the icons of the American home were also major contractors developing the weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance...

Think of all this as the beginning not so much of the American (half) Century, but of an American Age of Denial that lasted until… well, I think we can actually date it… until September 11, 2001, the day that "changed everything." ...by now, it's far clearer just what the attacks of that day, the collapse of those towers, the murder of thousands, did change -- and of just how terrible, how craven but, given our previous history, how unsurprising the response to it actually was...

Those dates -- 1945-2001 -- 56 years in which life was organized, to a significant degree, to safeguard Americans from an "atomic Pearl Harbor," from the thought that two great oceans were no longer protection enough for this continent, that the United States was now part of a world capable of being laid low. In those years, the sun of good fortune shone steadily on the U.S. of A., even as American newspapers, just weeks after Hiroshima, began drawing concentric circles of destruction around American cities and imagining their future in ruins. Think of this as the shadow story of that era, the gnawing anxiety at the edge of abundance..

At the very moment when, without the Soviet Union, the U.S. might have accepted its own long-term vulnerability and begun working toward a world in which destruction was less obviously on the agenda, the U.S. government instead embarked, like the Greatest of Great Powers..on a series of neocolonial wars on the peripheries. It began building up a constellation of new military bases in and around the oil heartlands of theplanet, while reinforcing a military and technological might meant to brook no future opponents. Orwell's famous phrase from his novel 1984, "war is peace," was operative well before the second Bush administration entered office...

Call this a Mr. Spock moment, one where you just wanted to say "illogical." With only one superpower left, the American Age of Denial didn't dissipate. It only deepened and any serious assessment of the real planet we were all living on was carefully avoided...

And Americans? Don't think that George W. Bush was the first to urge us to "sacrifice" by spending our money and visiting Disney World. That was the story of the 1990s and it represented the deepestof all denials, a complete shading of the eyes from any reasonably possible future. If the world was flat, then why shouldn't we drive blissfully right offits edge? The SUV, the subprime mortgage, the McMansion in the distant suburb, the 100-mile commute to work… you name it, we did it...And while we were burning oil and spending money we often didn't have, and at prodigious rates, "globalization" was slowly making its way to the impoverished backlands of Afghanistan...

This, of course, brings us almost to our own moment. To the neocons, putting on their pith helmets and planning their Project for a New American Century (meant to be just like the old nineteenth century, only larger, better, and all-American), the only force that really mattered in the world was the American military, which would rule the day, and the Bush administration, initially made up of so many of them, unsurprisingly agreed. This would prove to be one of the great misreadings of the nature of power in our world...

On September 11, 2001, the Age of Denial endedin the "mushroom cloud" of the World Trade Center. It was no mistake that, within 24 hours, the site where the towers had gone down was declared to be "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for an atomic explosion. Of course, nosuch explosion had happened, nor had an apocalypse of destruction actually occurred. No city, continent, or planet had been vaporized, but for Americans, secretly waiting all those decades for their "victory weapon" to come home, itbriefly looked that way...

The shock of discovering for the first time and in a gut way that the continental United States, too, could be at some planetary epicenter of destruction was indeed immense. In the media, apocalypticmoments -- anthrax, plagues, dirty bombs -- only multiplied and most Americans, still safe in theirhomes, hunkered down in fear to await various doom-laden scenarios that would never happen. In the meantime, other encroaching but unpalatable globalizing realities, ranging from America's "oil addiction" to climate change, would continue to be assiduously ignored. In the U.S., this was, you might say, the real "inconvenient truth" of these years...

The response to 9/11 was, to say the least, striking -- and craven in the extreme. Although the Bushadministration's Global War on Terror (aka World War IV) has been pictured many ways, it has never, I suspect, been seen for what it most truly may have been: a desperate and fierce rearguard action to extend the American Age of Denial. We would, as the President urged right after 9/11, show our confidence in the American system by acting as though nothing had happened and, of course, paying that visit to Disney World. In the meantime, as "commander-in-chief" he wouldwall us in and fight a "global war" to stave off the forces threatening us. Better yet, that war would once again be on their soil, not ours, forever andever, amen...

The message of 9/11 was, in truth, clear enough -- quite outside the issue of who was delivering it for what purpose. It was: Here is the future of the United States; try as you might, like it or not, you are about to become part of the painful, modern history of this planet...And the irony that went with it was this: The fiercer the response, the more we tried to force the cost of denial of this central reality on others, the faster history -- that grim shadow story of the Cold War era -- seemed to approach...

if I were to boil all this down to postcard size, I might write:

Here's our hope: History surprised us and we got through. Somehow. In that worst of all centuries, the last one, the worst didn't happen, not by a longshot.

Here's the problem: It still could happen -- and, 64 years later, in more ways than anyone once imagined.

Here's a provisional conclusion:And it will happen, somehow or other, unless history surprises us again, unless, somehow or other, we surprise ourselves and the United States ends its age of denial.

And a little p.s.: It's not too late. We -- we Americans -- could still do something that mattered when it comes to the fate of the Earth.

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