The Hundred Days

The fire at ground zero burned for exactly 100 days, finally going out on Dec. 19. But not before it forged a new America. The old America made its final appearance just hours before the planes hit, when the Sept. 11 New York Times featured a rather wistful portrait of American terrorist Bill Ayers. A former member of the Weather Underground who claimed credit for a string of bombings (including the Pentagon in 1972), Ayers was reminiscing with the Times reporter about the various romances of his revolutionary days, especially his "love affair with explosives." "Even today," wrote the Times, "he finds 'a certain eloquence to bombs.'"

It was an unfortunate piece of journalism. By midday, lower Manhattan was a smoking ruin, bombing the Pentagon had a new meaning, and revolutionary violence was no longer the subject of nostalgia. Our holiday from history, from seriousness of thought and purpose, was over.

The holiday had lasted a decade, the decade of O.J. and Chandra, of an Oval Office adolescent, of three presidential elections without a whiff of interest in foreign policy and the outside world. Osama bin Laden neither reads the New York Times nor tracks presidential debates. But he did see America flee Somalia under fire and refuse for a decade to respond seriously to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the destruction of two American embassies in Africa and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. He saw an American battleship attacked--an act of war--and the U.S. government declare it a crime scene. He concluded that the enemy was a "paper tiger," feckless, self-absorbed, decadent.

Big mistake. Same mistake the Japanese made on Dec. 7, 1941. They too thought an America grown fat could never mobilize for mortal combat. Only Admiral Yamamoto knew, saying of Pearl Harbor, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."

We had indeed been on a holiday from history. And a well-deserved one. For 50 years (December 1941 to December 1991), America had been locked in titanic, existential struggle with fascism, Nazism and then communism. We won, but half a century of mobilization can be psychologically exhausting. We needed a rest. In the '90s, we took it. What bin Laden did not understand, however, is that, while on vacation, America remained on call. His mistake was to place the call.

We awoke with a jolt. Overnight, this land of "bowling alone," of Internet introversion, of fractious multiculturalism developed an extraordinary solidarity--a vast outpouring of charity and volunteering; a suppression of partisanship and ethnic division; a coalescing behind resolute national leadership anchored by a new, untested President who rose extraordinarily to the occasion.

It turned out that the decadence and the flabbiness were just summer wear, thrown off immediately in the rescue at the World Trade Center, the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93 (who took their murderers to their death and probably saved the White House), the rapid national acceptance of the need for a difficult new world war. In an instant, the yellow ribbons--emblems of America held hostage, of plea bargaining with evil--gave way to star-spangled flags.