ONWARD AND BACKWARD

Mark the week of February 4, 2002, in your calendar as the week that post 9 - 11 America officially declared itself ready to move on.

On the same day President Bush welcomed the Olympic Games to Salt Lake City during opening ceremonies that included a poignant tribute to the victims and heroes of 9 - 11, Arnold Schwarzenegger was hitting the talk show circuit in a frenzy of earnestness, peddling his latest moribund epic, "Collateral Damage." Although the film has no more than average amounts of explosive carnage, its original September release was delayed because the script included a terrorist attack on a skyscraper, with Arnold playing a firefighter whose family is blown to bits in front of him.. At the time some thought (wishfully, it turns out) that the film might be shelved permanently. Now, barely five months later, it's in full national release. As is Arnold, in interview after interview, excitedly touching on what he has clearly convinced himself is the film's sudden relevance ("I play a fireman, a guy who saves lives").

In a gesture as grand as it was transparent, Arnold kicked off his media blitz with a belated personal donation of one million dollars to one of the victim's funds. Grand, transparent, and, as it turns out, unnecessary. In post 9 - 11 America, Schwarzenegger is simply too trivial to be offensive, no matter how vigorously he panders.

Not so cartoonist Mike Masden. His editorial cartoon showing President Bush flying a plane called "Budget" into the twin towers of "Social" and "Security" drew fire from many corners. Paradoxically, this too is a sign that we are moving beyond 9 - 11. Unlike the tabloid non-stories of recent years (Monica, Jon Benet, O.J., Condit, et al), which quickly became long-running national punch lines, the searing images of 9 - 11 just as quickly transcended politics and pop culture. The visceral experience of national unity those images produced remains too sensitive for us to accept their use in partisan wrangling and point scoring. The horrific reality of the attacks is just too toxic to be recycled into "content."

A third and far less inspiring sign of our return to normal is the recent announcement by Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson that the administration, through his agency, has decided to increase its commitment to pre-natal care. This nation, prepared for sacrifice and concerned about its future, would cheer a real national commitment to provide better health care for mothers and children. Unfortunately, Secretary Thompson's interest in these issues is more semantic than substantive. No additional programs or dollars are being offered to the poor and pregnant. Instead, existing Medicare benefits are to be extended to embryos and fetuses by redefining them as "children". Not merely a cheap and meaningless political ploy, the rule change creates the specter of government-mandated lawsuits by fetuses against poor women (and whatever obstetricians would be left in the Medicare system in the face of that kind of risk). This is the promise of compassionate conservativism at its most hollow.

Lastly, along the same propagandistic lines (but with much more real world impact) come the President's 2003 budget proposals, just delivered to the Congress. More duplicitous than most, Bush's proposals are the most distorted in decades. Using the war on terrorism to justify every aspect of a radical re-prioritizing of the federal treasury, the budget threatens to leave large portions of the national infrastructure (and the populations they serve) permanently underfunded. The projected deficits are then wielded with Reagan-like glee to cut short important domestic policy debates before they even begin.

Nowhere is this clearer than with Social Security. Masden's poorly chosen imagery overshadowed an essentially accurate message. The fuzzy math behind Mr Bush's numbers will do just what Masden's cartoon implies: deliberately undermine the system's future in a way bound to injure (literally) thousands of Americans a generation from now.

The imprudent degree to which our political leaders are about to redirect the nation's public resources away from all other domestic needs and toward the Bush-Cheney vision of a national security state seems, for the moment at least, destined to become the most lasting and potentially ruinous legacy of the events of 9 -11.

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