I Remember

I had hoped by this date to have reached the point of September 11, 2001 in the telling of my own story, but I haven't yet managed to set aside enough time for that project to make it happen. I'll save the untangling of that painful knot for a future date. For now I just want to join others in solemnly marking the day and the passage of another year.

In past years, I've looked without much success for 9/11 memorial services to attend in the Bay Area. Maybe we're just too far removed from the sites of the attacks out here. (Maybe, I often think, we're also too far removed from the reality of that day.) Last year I ended up spending the day alone in quiet remembrance, watching and reading as memorial posts unfolded across the “blogosphere” with which I had only recently become acquainted. In hindsight, I did attend a memorial service of sorts that year, with a far-flung extended family that shared my grief. I expect I'll be checking in again with many of the same folks as today wears on.

Yesterday I finished watching the remarkable two-part National Geographic documentary “Inside 9/11” that Bill Whittle mentioned in his recent essay and that has been waiting for me on the TiVo all week. It was difficult stuff to get through, to be sure, but a journey I had to take. We must remember and clearly understand what happened on that day and in the decade-plus of malicious planning that led up to it, and I think the creators of the National Geographic documentary have helped facilitate that by producing an exemplary piece of journalism — one that presents us with the known facts, and leaves us to weigh them.

My watching of “Inside 9/11” prompted many thoughts, but I will leave it at one for now. In our grief, we must not forget this was not merely a “tragedy” or misfortune (though it was certainly the former), but an act of war by violent extremists who mean to destroy us by dividing us against one another. I often fear they may be succeeding. If we care anything for our culture and way of life, we must not allow them to prevail.

UPDATE:

One of the most moving and memorable reflections I read this year was this 2003 article about the search for the identity of the famously photographed “Falling Man”. (Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the pointer!)

Also recommended: a 9/11 photo-essay at Pajamas Media.

Whittle's Return

Web-essayist extraordinaire Bill Whittle is back and in top form, with a new piece entitled “Tribes”!** Bill's is some of the best work I've had the pleasure and privilege of reading this past year (and quite possibly ever). If you haven't experienced a Bill Whittle tour de force before, I highly recommend you pay a visit to his site.

Bill's latest piece has left me reflecting on how fortunate I am to have lived most of my life within the artificial sanctuary of the flock. The attacks of 9/11 awakened the sleeping sheep dog in me, and I humbly hope to make myself useful in that capacity.

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* UPDATE 2009-09-08: Sadly, “Tribes” appears to have been a casualty of Bill's move to pajamasmedia.com. I've updated the above link to point to where the essay should be -- and, I hold out hope, will be someday -- but for now the text of it is missing in action, and can only be found in the Second (print) Edition of Bill's excellent “Silent America” essay collection (which I can't possibly recommend highly enough).

** UPDATE 2009-10-13: “Tribes” is back online!

Václav Klaus: View from a Post-Communist Country Situated in Predominantly Post-Democratic Europe

One more news item before I launch into my series:

Courtesy of Instapundit: Czech Republic President Václav Klaus delivered a remarkable address at a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Reykjavik last week. As a U.S. citizen of partly Czech ancestry who holds liberty dear, I can't help but feel a special affinity for the spirit of his stirring words.

Beginning with an exploration of the appeal that socialist thinking holds for intellectuals, and tracing his theme through to the development of socialism's contemporary derivative ideologies in Western Europe, Klaus ends up painting a clearer picture of the broad differences in thinking between Western European nations and their post-communist Eastern brethren than I think I have yet seen expressed.

There's an audio (.mp3) recording in the “Attachments” section following the Brussels Journal article, and a full transcript of Klaus' speech (which he abbreviated significantly in some places as he went). This is, without a doubt, one of those “read the whole thing” gems — so much so that choosing a brief passage to quote is difficult.

Fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become — under different names, e.g. the welfare state or the soziale Marktwirtschaft — the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization. It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.

...

Illiberal ideas are becoming to be formulated, spread and preached under the name of ideologies or “isms”, which have — at least formally and nominally — nothing in common with the old-styled, explicit socialism. These ideas are, however, in many respects similar to it. There is always a limiting (or constraining) of human freedom, there is always ambitious social engineering, there is always an immodest “enforcement of a good” by those who are anointed on others against their will, there is always the crowding out of standard democratic methods by alternative political procedures, and there is always the feeling of superiority of intellectuals and of their ambitions.

I have in mind environmentalism (with its Earth First, not Freedom First principle), radical humanrightism (based — as de Jasay precisely argues — on not distinguishing rights and rightism), ideology of “civic society” (or communitarism), which is nothing less than one version of post-Marxist collectivism which wants privileges for organized groups, and in consequence, a refeudalization of society. I also have in mind multiculturalism, feminism, apolitical technocratism (based on the resentment against politics and politicians), internationalism (and especially its European variant called Europeanism) and a rapidly growing phenomenon I call NGOism.

All of them represent substitute ideologies for socialism. All of them give intellectuals new possibilities, new space for their activities, new niches in the market of ideas.

(Klaus' inclusion of “feminism” in this last passage is a bit surprising to me. — Is the dominant form of feminism in Europe an illiberal one?)

Interestingly, Virginia Postrel asserts that Klaus has finally come around to seeing it her way, years after repudiating her assertion that socialism in its traditional form is no longer cause for significant concern.