Shallow-American Feelings

Fareed,

Note to husbands everywhere and my own in particular: If you want to consolidate your consumer purchasing power, get out there and buy more stuff. FYI, fabric softener comes in liquid form that you mix into the washer. Don’t buy that. Get the sheets, which go in the dryer. Fantastic spray cleaner is good for kitchens but not strong enough for bathrooms. Get Lysol. Buccellati is nice for rings and things.

Reading about the services and the moments of silence commemorating Sept. 11 made me feel like a shallow, brownie-baking American who only cares about or understands her own life (you know what I mean: those people who are asked to pick England out on a map and they point to Trinidad). I stared at the picture on the front of the New York Times of the police officers kneeling in their pews in the parish of Mychal F. Judge (the fire department chaplain who died in the attacks). It seemed weird that I ever cried about Judge’s death, given that I didn’t know of him until he died. I read about Bush’s speech and thought how strange it is that the world has changed but my own little life is really back to a pre-Sept.-11 state. Weirdly, my life being back to normal seems more important than the op-ed pages and cover stories having changed (except for Krugman, a constant in a world of flux).

I, too, feel safe. But that is mainly because nothing terrible has happened here in New York after Sept. 11. Sure, these radical groups are small, as you point out, but their influence is far greater than their numbers. Because of Sept. 11, America is looking under every stone for these Islamic fundamentalists. Groups that were loosely affiliated and working on completely separate agendas have been elevated to one monolithic Muslim threat. This is bad for the radicals and it’s bad for us. People like “Indonesia’s Bin Laden” hate America more because we are interfering in their neck of the woods. At the same time, governments now use the language of terrorism to get the aid they want or the trade agreement they want. It’s almost in everybody’s interest to raise the level of the perceived threat. This just can’t be good for anyone’s safety. Using terms like “axis of evil” is a way of asking for (or is it taking?) carte blanche on the foreign-policy front. I know that you are the policy wonk in the family, and perhaps I just don’t understand what evil lurks in far off corners of the world, but wasn’t Saddam just as evil on Sept. 10 as he was on the 12?

I have some juicy gossip to report to you from the papers, but more on that later.