Six years on: The gutting of America

I was listening, on the Internet, to the contemporary-Christian station in New Orleans when the morning-show hostess relayed the news that an aircraft had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. It must have been some idiot in a Cessna, I recall thinking.

Soon enough, it became clear that it wasn't. I ran for the television set. Getting ready for work kept getting delayed. It was a jetliner. And another. It's terrorism. And another one -- this time, the bastards hit the Pentagon.

This was war. We weren't sure with whom yet, but this was war, all right.

I was watching coverage on CBS as the first tower fell. And then the other. We knew there were thousands dead; what we didn't know was how many thousands. Hurriedly, I dashed off an E-mail to a friend in New York -- are you OK?

At some point, I must have called into work to say I would be delayed. I was going to have to bring my wife into work hours early -- she worked the night shift at the local newspaper, and it was all hands on deck there.

BY THE TIME I got to my job as production director at the local Catholic radio station, it was locked up tight. I unlocked the front door, went into empty studios, set up my portable TV set to keep up with the news and went about not getting much work done.

Finally, the general manager showed back up and told me she'd sent everyone home to be with their families, because no one knew what would get hit next. I suggested that we get announcements on about where to give blood, what parishes would be having prayer services, how to donate to the Red Cross and other relief agencies . . . the usual Stuff You Need to Know.

She thought it was a good idea, and I set about putting that together and getting it on the air.

By that time, President Bush had made his way to the bunker at Strategic Command headquarters just south of Omaha, and the boss and I stepped outside to see whether there were fighter jets overhead or to maybe catch a glimpse of Air Force One. No fighter jets where we were, but we did see an AWACS plane circling.

Then things started to get weird.

And, no, I'm not talking about the surreal nature of the attack itself. Or the lines of panic-buying motorists at gas stations. I'm talking about the aftermath of that day.

I'M TALKING ABOUT, for instance, a Catholic priest on EWTN -- in his Mass homily Sept. 12 -- telling people, "So NOW you come to Mass. . . ."

I'm talking about going to a memorial Mass at our parish and being asked to sign archdiocesan "pledge cards" promising not to fold, spindle, mutilate or murder Muslims on the home front. I told my wife I'd sign one just as soon as they came out with pledge cards for the other nine commandments.

I'm talking about Catholic pontificators blathering on the Catholic airwaves about how thousands of American babies were murdered every single day and you never heard anything about it like you did the attacks on New York and Washington. True enough, but a wholly inappropriate, staggeringly cruel and stupid thing to say on the air at that time.

I'm talking about Catholic theologians who used to be Reformed theologians going on EWTN and speculating about whether America was under divine judgment. Again, maybe so or maybe not -- Who could say? -- but not exactly the time to run off at the mouth about it, being that the World Trade Center was still a smoking mountain of rubble and shell-shocked New Yorkers were wandering around Manhattan with their missing loved ones' pictures taped to handmade signs asking "Have you seen . . . ?"

I'm also talking about a president who went on television only to tell Americans that it was now their patriotic duty to buy stuff.

All of the above represented important clues to the mess we'd find ourselves in six years on from that awful day. It pointed to a Church riven between the Pharisees and the feckless, and a big nation led by small men who think much of economic stratagems but little of eternal things.

SIX YEARS ON from what seemed to be the start of a great campaign against Those Who Seek to End Us, we find ourselves instead engaged in partisan political skirmishes amid one faltering, ignored little war in Afghanistan and one full-blown catastrophic quagmire in Iraq.

And in damning testimony to just how small are the men who lead us -- and how criminally venal and malfeasant, too -- the full-blown catastrophe is one we had no cause to fight in a country having squat to do with 9/11. The faltering, unfinished little war, however. . . .

Even back home, catastrophe has become not something that madmen commit against us but what we do to ourselves through a failing nation's everyday oversights, indifference and incompetence.

IT WAS JUST TWO YEARS AGO that we watched an American city drown because the American government doesn't do flood-protection so well.

We sat glued to our television sets as New Orleanians sat baking in their attics or sat waiting on their roofs. Yet more sat starving around a convention center or stood baking -- and dying -- deposited by rescuers on Interstate ramps only to be abandoned by their government. All in and around The City FEMA Forgot.

Two years ago, I sat stunned, watching as people from my home state begged the camera for help -- begged for food, begged for water. I watched shocking scenes from Somalia played out in Louisiana. In America.

Old men, sick and dehydrated, falling out on the high ground of unbroken levees amid a fetid sea. Falling out in front of TV cameras as grizzled cops wept and asked the cameraman where the feds were. Where the Army was. Where help was.

Years ago in Somalia, the American government would spring into action, airlifting thousands of tons of emergency food to starving people. Now, in a poor state in a poor region of our own rich country, it seemed all the American government could deliver were long faces and empty promises.

You would think all this over the past six years would be enough to command our full attention. You would, but you'd be wrong.

NO, WE HAVE MORE important things to occupy us. We have the urgent matter of Paris Hilton to worry about. We have the travails of Nicole and Lindsay to obsess over, not to mention whatever will become of the love child of the late Anna Nicole Smith and Larry Whatshisname.

And there's the Kid Rock-Tommy Lee smackdown over on MTV, while Britney Spears slouches through a white-trash dance in a white-trash trance, leading the cognoscenti to speculate whether she was white-trash wasted.

We have to worry about how to pay for our McMansions -- the ones we bought while working-class kids -- many of them sold on the U.S. military as a way off a dead-end street -- got shipped off to Iraq to fight and die in a woebegone war. One --again -- with precious little to do with those towers that fell on that clear September day in 2001.

And there's the problem of how to fill up the big tanks on our big SUVs with gasoline from Big Oil that costs big money.

Then there's how to deal with the depression that overtakes us -- and our children -- when all the bounty of a materialistic globe-spanning empire no longer can sate a hungry heart.

WE'RE SIX YEARS ON from 9/11, the day Osama bin Laden delivered a shocking blow that nevertheless failed to bring clarity to the muddled American mind. We remain led by men and women who not only can't do anything right, they seem to not even try.

Six years on, heartbreak mounts across our land. Our hearts continue to harden toward our fellow countrymen (read the comments on just about any New Orleans story lately?), and the American soul is ever more troubled.

Six years into the War on Terror -- the first war ever waged against a noun instead of the malefactors behind it -- we're losing badly. We may even be coming to the end of us as any sort of world power.

And the thing is, none of that is the fault of Osama bin Laden and his band of Islamic nut jobs.

When whomever tosses the last shovelsful of dirt atop us gets ready to engrave America's tombstone, they'll probably reflect that we did it all to ourselves. And then they'll turn to a touching song by John Prine, a great American tunesmith, for a fitting epitaph:

Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios.