Jensen: Two Cataclysms, One Pet Cause

Sorry for the lateness of this post. Got a late start on it last night and then Blogger chewed it up and spit it out when I tried posting it around lunch.

On the Cognitive Needs Filled by Anniversaries

When I was young and foolish, I used to scoff at the practice of making resolutions on New Year's Day. "If one is living one's life properly," I would say, "then there is no need to make a resolution. If not, then why wait until New Year's Day?"

That line of reasoning might sound okay until one realizes that it's purely deductive and so fails to account for the nature of man's consciousness. We cannot stay focused on everything at all times. Our life demands many things from us, and not always at the most opportune times or in the most orderly fashion. Consequently, we can slowly become inattentive to long-range goals over time as shorter range concerns crowd them out. The practice of occasionally stepping back to regain perspective thus fills this cognitive need.

With the end of one year it is thus natural to renew one's commitment to old goals. And with the arrival of a new year, we are reminded that we have some control over our own lives, so we also set new goals for ourselves. As with the arrival of the new year, anniversaries of any kind can serve a similar purpose.

Even the anniversaries of horrific events can have a similar importance, as I was reminded today, September 11, 2005. While I do not need to tell anyone what happened four years ago, I will anyway since the event all too often goes half-forgotten by its most common appellation, "9/11", and its full context obscured by the unforgivably sloppy practice of so many to call it a "tragedy." It is, above all, important to remember the exact nature of what happened that day.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the unprovoked mass executions of thousands of human beings. These brutal murders were performed by Moslems in the name of what they regarded as holy. Furthermore, unlike the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina's massive destruction, the events of September 11, 2001 were in one important sense that some would have us forget, far worse: They were atrocities. That is, human beings acted of their own free will to visit suffering and death upon others.

I had not planned to spend as much time today thinking about that terrible day as I ended up doing. This anniversary has already come and gone twice. But this time, for whatever reason, I found myself watching several television documentaries about that day. I watched them, as hard as that sometimes was to do, and I am glad I did. (In particular, I would recommend The Flight that Fought Back, about the valiant passengers of United Airlines Flight 93.)

Where I Was When I Got the News

Part of what I got from my unplanned commemoration of this date comes from my recollection of it. I am sure that most remember what they were doing when they learned of the attacks. I was still in graduate school then. The day was gorgeous and, unusually for Houston, on the cool and dry side. I remember looking up a beautiful blue sky as I walked across campus from the parking lot at the football stadium to the building that housed my lab. I climbed the stairs and got my keys out to open the door, which was right across from the landing.

I was interrupted, as I frequently was, by our department's vivarian, with whom I often spoke. "A plane hit the Pentagon."

"What?"

"A plane hit the Pentagon, and another one hit the World Trade Center."

"Are you kidding?"

"I'm serious."

I don't remember exactly what he said after that, but even after he told me about the two strikes, it must have been clear to him that I still didn't realize how dire the situation was. In fact, I recall thinking of small commercial aircraft rather than jetliners at first. Whatever he said after my initial confusion, when he was through, I was quite alarmed.

"This is serious. We've got to do something about this." From that point on, I knew we were at war. I put my things away, locked up the lab, and went to the building across the street, where the vivarian had told me the news was being shown. As soon as I got there, I saw one of the WTC towers collapse. The horrifying images from that day constitute a tangled heap in my memory, all tied together by what remains to me the most memorable thing said that day. On a replay of the impact of the second plane at the WTC, I remember a newscaster, who I believe had been speculating on what had happened, say, "This is deliberate."

That reporter named the essence of the events of that day.

This was deliberate.

One thing I noticed from my review of the events of that day and leading up to it is that a great deal of anger welled up, so much so that it surprised me, who am wont to say that America is not (and never was) angry enough about these attacks. If one of the purposes of my writing is to hold Bush's feet to the fire, it is important for me to remember what is at stake here. This is what I think I gained today. I hope this occurred for others, though I fear it did not.

On the Nature of the Enemy

Today, four years after the fact, we are fighting a war. While some, myself included, think our country should be far more aggressive in its prosecution of that war, others would have us not fight it at all. They would much rather we fight each other instead. One of these people is Robert Jensen, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.

Today, on the fourth anniversary of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, he again chooses to write an insulting and disingenuous column. This is the same person who wrote, in response to those attacks, that they were "no more despicable as [sic] the massive acts of terrorism ... that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime."

Has Jensen, consistent with his professed "anger ... at the leaders of this country and ... fear ... for the safety of Americans ...[and] innocents [sic] civilians in other countries," written a damning broadside against our government's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where many American soldiers and foreign civilians have undeniably died? No. Has he, upon further reflection of what might best serve our national interests, written a retraction of the article I just cited? No. We must conclude, then, that he still professes a concern for everyone's safety. Obviously, something far more important weighs on the mind of our savior and protector, Robert Jensen, professor of journalism.

And, on a day that, four years ago, shattered the illusions that we were safe at home from Moslem fanatics, and that we could afford not to wage a war to put a stop to their machinations, what else could have possibly merited the attention of a mind so obviously moved by the events of that day? What occupied Robert Jensen's great and incisive mind on this anniversary? What?

Robert Jensen indeed had bigger fish to fry today: He had to ... join in the post-Katrina orgy of race-baiting. Yes. Today, on September 11, 2005, Robert Jensen wrote an essay called, "The new White People's Burden: Take a hard look in the mirror." Don't worry. If you're slapping your head, wondering how you could have failed to think of that one on September 11, of all times, I'm slapping myself silly right with you.

Although I was tempted to fisk this column, I think it is more important to ask why he wrote it at all, especially given the nature of this anniversary and the notoriety he achieved with his September 14, 2001 column, which eventually compelled even the UT President to address it: "Jensen is not only misguided, but has become a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy."

While Jensen appears to have focused on two entirely different subjects in these columns, he really does the same thing: He attempts to undermine America's war effort in each.

Why do I say this? During a war, there are three ways to support a side: (1) One can engage in or directly support combat. (2) One can work to foster the resolve of the side one supports. (3) One can work to demoralize the enemy side. Jensen's first column plainly did neither of the first two -- if we make the ridiculously generous assumption that he would ever support the American side. Indeed, he openly calls America a terrorist nation and points out that innocent civilians will die if we do anything militarily about the attacks. (This moral calculus evades the fact that all civilian deaths caused by a nation forced to defend itself are the moral responsibility of the aggressor.) This was not simply disagreement about whether our nation's best interests would be served by going to war: It was an unambiguous declaration that our nation did not deserve support in a war.

Jensen plainly stated that, "The acts of terrorism that killed civilians in New York and Washington were reprehensible and indefensible; to try to defend them would be to abandon one's humanity." It thus stands to reason that he thinks the same thing about defending America. He thus chose option (3) to undermine the war effort of America, which he has decided is the greater evil.

Jensen wished to demoralize the Great Satan in 2001 and he wishes to do so now in 2005. In The Flight that Fought Back, the viewer is introduced to every single passenger of the ill-fated United Flight 93. You see them as fellow human beings. It would be irrelevant but for the prattling of a few race-baiters like Jensen out there, but the people who were killed on that flight weren't all white. Nor were the people they communicated with on the ground. Indeed, there is even a touching scene in which a black woman on the ground prays over the phone with a white man on the doomed flight. I saw one human being helping the other confront what was almost surely the end of his life. Race was visual clutter -- unless you were Robert Jensen. God only knows what he would have gotten out of this if he had bothered to watch it at all.

But in today's column, Jensen asks, "What do white 'Americans' do with those who share the country but are not white?" See them as human beings, perhaps? Like what happened in the scene I just described? Like what is being done all over the place now in the relief efforts of Hurricane Katrina? The documentary also recounted several very sad final messages relayed by phone between some of the passengers and their families. I found all of them heartbreaking, even -- and I have to say this for Jensen's benefit -- the ones left by passengers whose skin color wasn't a perfect match for mine.

And on a more positive note, the passengers fought together to take control of the plane. All voted and each contributed, some lending skills from their occupations. If Americans of all races were in that terrible situation together, they fought to regain control of their lives together as well. In fact, it would be absurd to prattle about how many members of each race were on that flight. These were all human beings at their best struggling to regain control of their own destiny. This is what is important. This is also what race-baiters like Robert Jensen are trying to cause America to forget.

Many who read Jensen's column will summarily dismiss it as poppycock. "I am not a bigot and I will not let this idiot tell me I am," a white reader might say. But if the column is so patently ridiculous, why did Jensen bother to write it? His goal is to foment racial discord. How does he accomplish this? By bringing up grievances (past and present, real and imagined) against whites (as a race, as if this is the basis for one's moral status) that are used so often by the left to demand government favors for minorities. This pulling off of scabs is designed to arouse the ire of nonwhites against whites, while at the same time making whites very indignant. In other words, Jensen hopes to make rightly indignant whites look like bigots when they refuse to accept their standard helping of liberal guilt.

Rather than weaving together our national fabric as he professes to want to do, Jensen's goal is to rip it apart. He wants us to forget that we are individuals in a great country who must fight together to win a war, and think of ourselves instead as members of warring races. He wants to divide a great people so that a spiritually impoverished and pathetically weak foe can conquer us. This is because he is the real enemy.

And that is what is so damning about Jensen's column today. As a nation, we are, figuratively, on a flight like Flight 93. We have a better chance of landing safely, but we must work together as a nation to get there. It is bad enough that short-sighted politicians are trying to score political capital by race-baiting. Most people see that for what it is. But for someone who should know better to stir the pot on a day when we should remember that we are nation facing a common enemy is utterly reprehensible. If Jensen is caught in a lie as a promoter of racial tolerance, then so he is as one who is concerned for the safety of Americans, who will only be attacked again if we do not fight in the war we are in regardless of our wishes.

And so in remembering the anniversary of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, I am reminded anew of the threat we face, not just from the terrorists themselves, but from those who would weaken our resolve to fight them: The tenured, anti-American leftists of academia. I guess idiots like Jensen can be useful from time to time.

Thanks for the reminder, Robert Jensen.

-- CAV

Updates

9-12-05: Removed the fisking, which contained a major error on my part. (On day of actual posting.)