Frank Rich on the Bush presidency since 9/11

Though Americans were fond of saying that they valued authenticity in their politicians above all else, they didn’t really mean it. Condit’s sleaziness was authentic; what they wanted from him was fake contrition. In 1961, the year after John F. Kennedy won a crucial campaign debate with the charisma challenged Richard Nixon because of his telegenic charm rather than the substance of what he said, the historian Daniel Boorstin canonized this sea change in American public life with his classic book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. Four decades later this cultural strain had metastasized. As Condit learned the hard way, the performance of a politician, the image, was sometimes the only thing that mattered.

Along with Condit, another heavily hyped product from California provided escapist entertainment for a bored country in a sleepy summer — Pearl Harbor, a Jerry Bruckheimer extravaganza from Disney. With a 95 percent awareness factor (according to Hollywood tracking polls), Pearl Harbor, the movie, was better known to most Americans than Pearl Harbor, the historical event. The peacetime navy had cooperated with the making of the film, and it donated the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis as a stage for revelers at the gala premiere in Hawaii. That night the movie’s star, Ben Affleck, told reporters that the film’s “message is not one about the United States or Japan or the Second World War, right or wrong” but just about how “terrible” war is in general. To have raised matters of right and wrong might have depressed ticket sales in Tokyo. Pearl Harbor is so scrupulously nonpartisan that it never explains Japan’s motives for its attack —  or, for that matter, why anyone fought in Asia or Europe during World War II.

The vapid Pearl Harbor was an essential historical artifact anyway — not of its ostensible subject but of the tranquil American summer of 2001. The forty-minute bombing sequence looked like a state-of-the-art digital video game, with even the bloodshed sanitized to preserve the financially desirable PG-13 rating. The flyboy fashions, complete with product placements for Ray-Ban, were as pristine as those in the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. The war itself was transformed into a content-free but vaguely uplifting exercise in team gamesmanship whose main purpose was to put randy pilots in proximity to bodacious nurses. America is invincible; any and every battle can be won without working up a sweat. Even medical miracles are effortlessly within reach: in one scene of high drama, FDR, trying to rally his Cabinet, miraculously rises from his wheelchair to stand on his own two feet, polio be damned. Pearl Harbor was at once the peak and the reductio ad absurdum of the World War II nostalgia boom that had preoccupied America for several years.

That craze had produced so many movies, books, and TV series that the greatest generation was less an idea than a brand, useful for selling anything. (Amazon opened up a Pearl Harbor Store in tandem with Disney’s film.) What was it all about? Tom Brokaw, whose best-selling book had helped kick off the phenomenon, noted that only a decade earlier the fiftieth-anniversary ceremonies at Pearl Harbor received scant attention; he was the only TV anchor on hand. But that was in 1991, when a World War II vet was still president. Now the boomers had ascended to power. Just as Pearl Harbor was more about the present than the past, so the overall World War II obsession said more about the generation born after the war than the generation who fought the war. After all, it was mainly boomers — and others too young to remember Pearl Harbor firsthand — who created the idea of the greatest generation and its sundry product lines, not the reticent and dwindling ranks of World War II veterans.

The motivation, in part, was overcompensation for what was missing in our national life: some cause larger than ourselves, whatever it might be. So debased was the notion of sacrifice by the summer of 2001 that when the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, was asked if Americans should think about altering their lifestyles to conserve energy, he declared that the president believed that the current gas-guzzling lifestyle was “the American way of life” and that “it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life — the American way of life is a blessed one.” The Democrats’ idea of sacrifice was scarcely different. The opposition party’s leadership had unveiled a so-called alternative energy plan that also swore off “reductions in our standard of living” and featured on its cover a photo of a family polishing its SUV.

For all the differences between the Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney administrations, together they formed a boomer continuum. Each was ruled by narcissists who wanted what they wanted when they wanted it and were convinced of their own righteousness. Clinton and Bush were masters at using the sweet-talking language of “compassion,” “feeling your pain,” and “faith” as a rhetorical substitute for, say, expending political capital to bring medical insurance to poor children. If the Republicans offered greater tax cuts instead of more New Deal–Great Society entitlement programs, neither political party wanted voters to give up anything for any common good larger than feathering their own immediate nests. “Both parties have reversed J.F.K. Their mantra is ‘Ask not what you can do for your country, but rather what your country can do for your stock portfolio/benefit package,’” said Marshall Wittmann, then of Washington’s conservative Hudson Institute.

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