• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, September 12, 2011

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 is a natural occasion for us to recall the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., memorialize their victims, and commiserate with the friends and families of those murdered by hate.

It is also an appropriate time to examine the impact of the attacks on America and the world from a critical perspective.

But we must also be on our guard, as the scope of these tasks and the nature of the events themselves make it all too inviting for writers and pundits to lapse into over-the-top histrionics, skewing our perspective as we struggle anew to understand the events and their aftermath.

Much of the exaggeration stems from an apparent psychological (or perhaps editorial) need to inflate 9/11 into, seemingly, the worst event in history. Even sober, level-headed news organizations have fallen prey to this sensationalistic, totalizing instinct.

The New York Times has a wonderful multimedia feature telling the story of 9/11 "moment by moment, and person by person," but bearing the unfortunate title "Witness to Apocalypse"; this sonorous phrase might grip readers, but the simple fact is 9/11 was not an apocalypse (let alone the religious Apocalypse, of which there will hopefully be just one).

Yes, it was unquestionably a horrendous tragedy, a disaster -- but not an apocalypse. After all, lower Manhattan, New York City, the United States of America, planet Earth, and the universe are all still here.

America's victimhood on 9/11 has also prompted a good deal of talk about lost "innocence," with a columnist in The Washington Post mourning the "end of American innocence," and Tina Brown remembering 9/11 as the "last moment of American innocence."

Some of the tendency to exaggerate here is probably simply due to the fact that contemporary Americans are (thankfully) mostly unused to devastating acts of violence at home. But it would be best not to overstate our collective naiveté about terror and loss in general: We are aware of the Civil War, World War I, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Iwo Jima, Vietnam, Teheran, Beirut, Lockerbie, Oklahoma City... and the list goes on.

And don't even get me started on the other meaning of "innocence," suggesting lack of culpability -- as if we've never restricted civil liberties or waded into morally ambiguous foreign wars before. By the same token, if none of these other terrible events were able to "end" American innocence entirely, why would we choose to give 9/11 that power?

The heroic response of passengers aboard Flight 93 and emergency personnel on 9/11, the earnest and heated debate over the balance between civil liberties and security in the aftermath of the attacks, and the (admittedly inconsistent and awkward) attempts to reach out to the Muslim world since then all suggest that American pragmatic idealism survived relatively unscathed.

Hyperbole also threatens to turn our enemies into incomprehensible demons -- a view we can't afford to embrace if we really seek to defeat them. For example, while the mindset of the 9/11 hijackers is certainly difficult to understand, the Los Angeles Times is off base in describing the terrorist attacks as "unfathomable." On the contrary, the events of 9/11 were no less fathomable than other acts of extravagant hatred, and I think we fathomed them pretty well by the end of the day.

We knew it was the work of Al Qaeda, directed by Osama bin Laden from his headquarters in Afghanistan, where he enjoyed the protection of the ultra-Islamist Taliban. We also understood the motives, as bin Laden had been very public about Al Qaeda's mission. We'd received periodic reminders that he was deadly serious, including the first attack on the World Trade Center, the bomb attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa.

No surprise -- many writers dishing hyperbole also have moral or political axes to grind. An op-ed in The Washington Post somehow blaming the (alleged) decline of political civility on the terrorist attacks asserts that "9/11 made America self-destruct." Funny, it looks like it's still here to me.

Now, I don't deny America may have made mistakes -- and it's certainly worth at least discussing this possibility -- but with less inflammatory rhetoric, please. Some examples of more evenhanded analysis include George Will's column (also in WaPO) titled "9/11's self-inflicted wounds," totting up the many successes, while lamenting that "wars of dubious choices" have eroded national unity.

Similarly, The Boston Globe opined that when easy global solutions to terrorism weren't forthcoming, Americans "decided to redirect that anger inward, at one another." A more forgiving editorial in The Washington Post argues that the "U.S. can be proud of post-9/11 decade," while acknowledging the blunders on the way. The lead essay in The Economist acknowledges that "America has made mistakes over the past decade," but warns "it cannot afford to drop its guard against al-Qaeda."

Some of the best opinion pieces address the more diffuse issue of memory itself, including our collective ability (and willingness) to remember the events, and how much they should weigh in our minds now. In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan cautions against trying to compartmentalize or "move on" from the tragedy of 9/11, pointing out that "We'll Never Get Over It, Nor Should We."

By contrast, in "The battles we're still fighting," The Dallas Morning News argues that "the telling of history demands emphasis on how emotionally undone the nation was" in the aftermath of the attacks.

Another New York Times editorial would like to see a return to what was widely perceived -- and remembered -- as the altruism and unity of the days and weeks immediately following the attacks: "As a nation, we must retrieve the compassion that surged after 9/11."

In a more stoic vein, the Chicago Tribune editorial board notes with satisfaction how the collective American psyche was toughened -- and our minds concentrated -- by the challenges of counterterrorism and security over the last decade: "Ten years out, we can say that a harder America has kept its focus. Good."

But even here, contemplation can all too easily give way into cliché.

The Wall Street Journal Web site also showcased an interactive feature which I call the "9/11 Cliché Generator" -- a box where visitors were invited to complete the sentence, "Our grief has turned to..." Some of the top entries Sunday morning included "fear," "determination," "strength," "normalcy," "prejudice," "anger," "resolve," "optimism," "enlightenment," and so on.

While this may be a clever way of soliciting user-generated content, it's pretty paltry from an intellectual perspective, as participants might as well be finishing a crossword puzzle -- and who says that grief has to (or even can) turn into something else?