December 7, November 22, September 11, January 6

 

 

The 1976 Bicentennial three years after the Twin Towers were built

These are my generation’s days of infamy. They were all shocking events, ones that left an indelible mark on history. In terms of immediate loss of life, September 11 and December 7 stand apart, although all were national traumas.

 

These dates are so burnished in our minds that we can remember exactly where we were when they occurred.

 

And now, astonishingly to me, it has been 25 years since the horror of September 11.

 

I have written before about that morning in these pages and this is something I wrote years ago:

On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky. We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.

 

Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers. To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity. Did this really happen here? My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC. They lost 658 employees on that fateful day. Jonathan decided to take another job. Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes? Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”

 

My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day. One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.”

 

Twenty-five years later, I can still summon that morning almost physically.

 

In later years I was reading a short story by John Updike and it was with some trepidation that I realized his story, “Varieties of Religious Experience,” is about that very day. Until then I had assiduously avoided 9/11 literature, as the pain of remembrance was too great. But I relented.

 

It begins with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights. To get through the story, written from various perspectives, including a woman on ill-fated United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, I had to continually take deep, slow breaths just to control my anxiety.

 

Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details. It was the constant, unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going. And if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to become a source for justifying anything.

 

One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:

 

Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism.

 

So, other than to somberly mark this date, I have struggled with whether to say anything about the moment in which we are living. I am reluctant to turn September 11 into another occasion for a political argument. But I cannot pretend that what is happening in this country does not affect how I experience this anniversary.

 

Passing the Brooklyn Bridge and the Twin Towers on our boat, 1994

And this is where I become angry.

 

We are living through what feels to me like a slow-motion national trauma. Not another September 11, obviously. Nothing could be another September 11. But the same awful sensation of watching something happen that you cannot stop, of knowing that something fundamental is being lost while those with the power to prevent it seem unwilling or unable to do so. Where are our justices, judges, representatives, senators, and cabinet members who have sworn allegiance to our Constitution?

 

The presidency was never intended to be a vehicle for one man's perpetual self-dramatization, enrichment, grievance, and pursuit of personal power.

 

Yet that is increasingly how it feels.  One by one, traditions, institutions, relationships with our allies, assumptions about presidential behavior and even elements of our national culture are being pulled apart. The White House itself has become a stage for the president's carefully constructed image of omnipotence. American culture becomes spectacle. Foreign policy becomes personal theater. Even the possibility of war can be addressed with the casualness of playing a video game.

 

And while all of this is going on, the president and those around him continue to test how much power can be accumulated in the executive branch and how much the other institutions of government will tolerate. That frightens me. What frightens me even more is how quickly the extraordinary can become ordinary.

 

A president says something that would once have produced days of national outrage, and we move on to the next statement. An institution is challenged, a norm is violated, a traditional restraint disappears, and we shrug because there is another outrage waiting tomorrow.

 

Perhaps this is what a slow-motion national trauma looks like: not one building collapsing before our eyes, but the gradual realization that traditions we assumed were permanent may not be.

 

I have lived through wars, assassinations, Watergate, political upheavals and other periods when the country seemed to be coming apart. I have always believed that, however ugly American politics could become, the underlying institutions were stronger than the people temporarily occupying them.

 

I am no longer sure. I cannot look at what is happening and simply reassure myself that American democracy is too strong to fail. Democracies survive because people defend them.

 

This brings me, uncomfortably, back to UA Flight 93. Those passengers eventually understood that they were not going to be rescued by someone else. They had to act themselves. This is not a call to violence; but citizenship sometimes requires people to stop being passengers.

 

Our equivalent is not storming a cockpit. It is voting. It is speaking. It is paying attention. It is refusing to accept lies simply because they are repeated often enough, or the increasingly fantastical AI-generated images and videos of a president who seems determined to turn himself into a character in his own mythology. It is supporting institutions when they are under pressure. It is insisting that the Constitution applies to everyone, including the person sitting in the Oval Office, no matter how festooned that office may be in gold.

 

But I can put into words what I see and what I feel. That is the only power I have, in addition to voting.

 

Twenty-five years ago, Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk CT, where we lived each summer, and watched those towers disappear from the television screen while the smoke could be seen from our boat’s bridge across the western Long Island Sound some fifty miles away. I remember the disbelief and fear and wondering what had happened to the country I thought I knew.

 

I now find myself asking a different question: What are we willing to do to make sure we do not lose it? I don't know the answer.

 

But I know I don't want to be silent.

Capturing the void: The New Yorker, 2001

 

The Explanation Is There Isn't One

 

My early morning walks—when I rarely see another person or sometimes not even hear a passing car, and deliberately avoid podcasts or music—make me unusually aware of each moment and every subtle change along my familiar two-mile round trip route. Recently, a raccoon lurking in the shadows startled me. (I've encountered bobcats before, which is considerably more startling.) Those wildlife sightings have led me to adopt perhaps the least intimidating defense ever devised: carrying a golf ball in my pocket.

 

My strategy is simple. If confronted by an aggressive animal, I hope to throw a golf ball hard enough at it to at least startle it, clap my hands like a deranged scarecrow, and, if necessary, sing God Bless America as loudly and as off-key as possible. Surely even a determined bobcat would conclude there are easier breakfasts elsewhere. Fortunately, the plan has yet to be tested.

 

Our community also warns residents about alligators in the ponds. As I walk along the golf course, I'm always aware of where those bodies of water are and how far I might have to run should a gator decide to give chase. Since they are said to reach speeds approaching 35 miles per hour over short distances, I comfort myself by deciding that the odds are overwhelmingly in my favor as I will be nearby homes and boldly step outside each morning around six.

 

Only a month ago, during the summer solstice, dawn had already broken when I left the house. Day by day the light has quietly retreated, and now, only weeks later, it is nearly dark when I begin my walk. If the laughably named "Sunshine Protection Act" (who dreams up these titles—AI?) ever becomes law, Florida schoolchildren may find themselves standing at bus stops in darkness, vulnerable to drivers who can't see, well before sunrise. As for me, I suppose I'll become even more attractive to raccoons and alligators, creatures that also seem to appreciate the hours before dawn. Apparently that's a small price to pay if it means the President can squeeze in another few holes of golf before sunset.

 

Some "sunshine protection."

 

Meanwhile, smoke from wildfires periodically settles over parts of Florida. And no, Canada isn't to blame for failing to rake its leaves in our case. We have our own climate-induced problems. Recently, a stretch of the Florida Turnpike south of here had to close because of wildfires. I haven't yet heard that the other forty-nine states intend to impose a 50 percent tariff on Florida goods as punishment.

 

These are the sorts of thoughts that accompany my morning walks. They also accompany the writing of this blog. There is always something to think about, something to observe, and something to puzzle over. Whether any of it ultimately matters is another question entirely. I write for much the same reason I play the piano every day. At this stage of life, I find my inner life more satisfying than the traveling, boating, and busy social calendar that once seemed indispensable.

 

During those early "go-go years"of retirement, I somehow found time to write even more frequently than I do now. Perhaps that reflected greater energy, or perhaps simply a different rhythm of life. Now, in what retirement experts cheerfully call the "slow-go years," solitary pursuits seem increasingly appropriate and reading whenever my mind can still settle into a novel. Ann, fortunately, remains a voracious reader, perhaps because fiction offers a welcome refuge from today's world.  We are trying to dance as fast as we can as we gradually approach the "no-go years," although I hope they remain comfortably in the distance.

 

Artificial intelligence has added another layer to these reflections. I'm fascinated not only by what it can do for me but also by what it may be taking from me. After nearly twenty years of writing this blog, I've accumulated what amounts to a substantial archive. Much of it concerns family history and personal opinions that probably interest very few people but some of my theater and book reviews are widely read.

 

Out of curiosity, I asked one AI system about a subject I knew was covered exclusively in my blog. Sure enough, it produced an answer largely drawn from what I had written years ago. Older posts are actually more likely to appear because Google once indexed independent blogs far more generously than it does today.

 

I pointed out that I recognized the material because, in essence, I had written it. As obsequious as these systems can sometimes be, it immediately congratulated me on being the author of the "venerable Lacunae Musing." Taking the bait, I mentioned that over twenty years I had probably written close to a million words. The AI replied that I was "a human large language model." Mutual admiration can become exhausting, so we politely ended the conversation.

 

For complete disclosure, I should add that an AI agent has reviewed this very essay for logical development and copy editing. The observations, opinions, and tone, remain entirely my own.

 

As I edge toward those "no-go years," I've begun thinking seriously about moving this blog to the Substack platform. I admire many of the writers there and already subscribe to several, but the technical aspects of migrating the content is yet another challenge to address.

 

One Substack author who particularly caught my attention is Tim Kreider, who amusingly describes himself as "a writer, cartoonist, and person in the world." Beginning as a political cartoonist seems almost ideal preparation for becoming a political essayist. Cartoonists have long understood that the quickest route to truth often runs through absurdity.

 

That brings me to Kreider's recent Substack essay, The Arbogast Fallacy: An Alternative Explanation for "Sanewashing."

I've argued before that Donald Trump's political mind is almost reptilian — reactive rather than reflective, impulse driven rather than deliberation. Kreider reaches much the same conclusion, but develops it with such clarity that I found myself nodding almost continuously as I read it.

 

The essence of "The Arbogast Fallacy" (its title drawn as a clever metaphor from the film Psycho) is that journalists and political commentators consistently overanalyze a man who requires very little analysis. Trained to search for elaborate strategies, ideological consistency, or hidden motives, they assume complexity where none exists. His behavior is more accurately explained by immediate impulses:  demanding attention, making as much money as possible in his position, and guaranteeing his self-preservation. As Kreider memorably observes, commentators keep "writing think pieces about a guy who doesn't." 

 

That simple observation explains far more than countless hours of televised political analysis. Every action and reaction seems ultimately directed toward those same goals, with self-preservation perhaps becoming the dominant one as the midterm elections approach.

 

Kreider persuaded me that perhaps the explanation isn't hidden at all. We keep assuming there must be some elaborate strategy because that's how we expect consequential leaders to behave. We search for depth because the consequences are so profound. But perhaps there are no hidden chambers to explore—only instinct, ego, and self-preservation played out on the largest political stage imaginable.

 

What remains unexplained isn't the man. It is us. How did a political culture, a Congress, and a Supreme Court entrusted with preserving constitutional government become so willing to normalize perpetual chaos?

 

Tomorrow morning I'll head out again with my golf ball in my pocket, keeping one eye on the raccoons and the other on the gathering darkness. Those are hazards I understand.

 

It's the human world that has become so difficult to explain.  Perhaps that is because the explanation is there isn't one.

Mike Luckovich Art of the Steal