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Essay

U.S.'s 'lost decade' since 9/11

By Benjamin Woodward

The recent commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives in New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, was the occasion for heartfelt remembrance and musing on the tragic event's significance. In the flood of commentary, a recurring motif was that these past 10 years have been — in a term all too familiar to the Japanese — a "lost decade."

Certainly it has been a tumultuous post-9/11 decade for the United States, one that has ended with its economy in tatters, its government with little credibility, and its dominance in world affairs threatened by China and India. But this idea of a "lost decade" is problematic. It assumes the diverse events of 10 years — itself an arbitrary division of time — can be neatly compacted into a grim national narrative of cause and effect. Frequently, too, this narrative takes a moral dimension: Greed and hubris are blamed, villains singled out, and history portrayed as if it were a morality tale or melodrama.

Portrayals of the decade have focused on how the government co-opted the Sept. 11 attacks in order to drag the nation from relative peace and prosperity into two protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, while breathtaking avarice and irresponsibility precipitated the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Along the way: the humanitarian disaster after Hurricane Katrina, the human rights aberrations at Guantanamo, and a mounting tide of Islamophobia and hysteria about China.

Now, as politicians remain locked in petty squabbling and bankers pocket fat bonuses, one in six Americans (over 46 million people) lives in poverty, and the U.S. monthly death toll in Afghanistan in August was at a 10-year high. It may have been extreme to call 9/11 an "occasion for shame" as economist Paul Krugman did based on all that has happened since 2001, but it is little wonder that many Americans are asking: How did we come to this?

The neatness of the "lost decade" narrative is, of course, appealing. It satisfies a very human need to understand, to assign order and responsibility, to render the worst atypical, and to want to see justice (or justification) done — a feeling which may have informed the queasy triumphalism over the death of Osama Bin Laden. There is, too, in the idea of a "lost decade" the implication of future recovery.

It also keys into fears of America's decline in the world as domestic woes coincide with an (often dangerously exaggerated) shift in the balance of power toward Asia. The 10th anniversary of 9/11 exacerbated those fears and, for many, placed the morality of that narrative of decline in sharp relief. Memories of the still-astonishing self-sacrifice and heroism displayed on that day were evoked, as was the unusual national and political unity in its aftermath. And in comparison, the America of today, the America of Washington and Wall Street, is found wanting.


Shukan ST: September 30, 2011

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