About the 'soft socialism' of Big Defense Spending

Some of my conservative friends have taken issue with my use of the term "soft socialism" to describe how defense spending is used not just for defense purposes, but to prop up the economy and provide jobs. Defense, they point out, is an enumerated power of the government under the Constitution. And so it is! But so is the establishment of post offices. And I doubt very much that my conservative friends would describe that as a capitalist enterprise: Just because the Founders thought of something doesn't mean it was market-oriented. In any case, defense is an enumerated power—but the military we have today, with bases and ships around the world, is also light years away from what the Founders conceived. That never comes up.

Max Boot sounds just like Paul Krugman

Conservative military analyst Max Boot has never met a defense spending cut he likes, but his latest argument against cuts is ... interesting:

The defense secretary estimates trimming $1 trillion from the defense budget during the next decade–as could occur this fall–would add one percent to the unemployment rate. Given that unemployment is now at 9.1 percent, that’s a further hit that our economy simply can’t afford.

Now, Boot doesn't really write or advocate on economics. But it's interesting that his argument here very like Paul Krugman: We shouldn't be cutting big chunks from government right now because that austerity withdraws money from the economy and thus deepens the Great Recession.

But of course, mainstream conservative Republicans—whatever their fiscal rhetoric—have long favored the soft socialism of big defense spending. It's masked because the money goes to private defense contractors, so the guy in Wichita who makes a widget that goes on a helicopter doesn't really see himself as being on the government dole. The idea of using the government to prop up economic demand works when it comes to the defense sector, apparently, but for everybody else it's free markets, Ayn Rand, and gruel.

Muncie, Indiana speaks: Joel Mathis is hardheaded and ignorant!

Muncie's Aldon Veach has written a letter to the editor, objecting to my tone in last week's Scripps Howard column. Veach writes:

I often read the RedBlueAmerica columnists. I don't always disagree with all Joel Mathis writes, but the Sept. 6 article showed his hardheadedness as well as his ignorance. His nasty remarks about the Iowa poll voters was not necessary. The 65 percent who do not believe in evolution are smart enough to know it is not a proven science, but rather a myth that should not be taught in our schools without creationism being taught. The 79 percent he claims don't believe in climate change just don't agree with the theory of Al Gore and the far left that want to cost us taxpayers. The 68 percent who question Obama's birth place are probably right too, if we could get the truth. How unkind of Mathis to call these folks "Know Nothing" voters. We conservatives are not anti-science just because we believe in God, the Father, Jesus Christ, the Son and the Holy Spirit. We want our nation to survive and go back to the basics. It is the liberals, including our liberal president, who are destroying our blessed country.

Since Veach apparently embraces "birtherism," I'm going to go ahead and stick to my guns on the Republican repudiation of truth and empirical knowledge.

Ford didn't take auto bailout money. But Ford supported the car industry bailout.

Ford's new advertising campaign mocks the car-industry bailout:

What the ad conveniently omits is that Ford supported the bailout for its competitors, and sought access to a multibillion-dollar line of credit guaranteed by the government ... you know, just in case. Here are some excerpts from a "Ford Motor Company Business Plan" (PDF) submitted to the Senate Banking Committee in December 2008.

We are acutely aware that our domestic competitors are, by their own reporting, at risk of running out of cash in a matter of weeks or months. Our industry is an interdependent one. We have 80 percent overlap in supplier networks. Nearly 25 percent of Ford’s top dealers also own GM and Chrysler franchises. That is why the collapse of one or both of our domestic competitors would also threaten Ford.

For Ford, the availability of a government line of credit would serve as a critical backstop or safeguard against these conditions as we drive transformational change in our Company. Accordingly, given the significant economic and market risks that exist, Ford respectfully requests that government funding be made available to us, in the form of a “stand-by” line of credit, in the amount of up to $9 billion. This line of credit would be a back-stop to be used only if conditions worsen further and only to the extent needed.

It is in the face of the deepening economic and credit crisis that Ford is asking the Government to make assistance available to the domestic automotive industry even though we have a Plan for our future which, with exception to Department of Energy funding under Section 136, does not assume government assistance. We do so for at least four reasons.

First, we are acutely aware that our supply base, our labor structure, and our dealer network, among other factors, are sized for an industry and a market share that the domestic companies can no longer support. The current crisis has generated considerable debate about the perceived need to restructure our industry in the national interest. As the nation’s oldest automotive company, Ford Motor Company is a vital participant in that debate.

Second, we are aware that our domestic competitors are, by their own reporting, at risk of running out of cash in a matter of weeks or months. Because our industry is an interdependent one, with broad overlap in supplier and dealer networks, the collapse of one or both of our domestic competitors would threaten Ford as well. It is in our own self-interest, as well as the nation’s, to seek support for the industry at a time of great peril to this important manufacturing sector of our economy.

So Ford supported the bailout. It lobbied Congress for the bailout. Why? Because Ford Motor Company wouldn't have survived if the government didn't bail out its competitors!

Now the company is strutting its stuff like it alone embraces free market values—but that's a stance that depends on people forgetting what really happened, and why. And by its own estimate, Ford might not even be around to strut its stuff if the government hadn't intervened. Advertising isn't ever really about the truth, I understand, but this is particularly hypocritical. With this ad, Ford takes advantage of the bailout, twice.

That should put him over the top

Ridge to Endorse Huntsman - By Katrina Trinko - The Corner - National Review Online: "Tom Ridge, former head of the Department of Homeland Security and Pennsylvania governor, will endorse Jon Huntsman today, reports the New Hampshire Union Leader."

'via Blog this'

Federalism is for chumps

That's the case I make in this week's Scripps Howard column, written in the wake of the Pennsylvania GOP's proposal to change the way the state casts its electoral votes:

When it comes to presidential voting, anybody with a democratic bone in his body knows that the Electoral College is a patently unfair way of electing a president. Eleven years later, the elevation of George W. Bush to the presidency -- even though he lost the popular vote -- rankles mightily.

A pure popular vote would be great, but is unlikely. The Congressional district scheme proposed by Pennsylvania Republicans might actually be the next best thing -- though, oddly, experts calculate it would've given Bush a wider margin of Electoral College victory in 2000 had it been used nationally -- since it somewhat mitigates the abilities of big states to dominate voting: Each district has roughly the same amount of voters, and just the one electoral vote.

But presidential voting rules should be uniform, the same law adopted by all 50 states. That won't happen. Each state gets to decide how it casts its Electoral College votes -- and now we see, thanks to Pennsylvania, that the system lets politicians game the presidential campaign system in favor of their party. The motive here is transparent political hackery.

And it reveals federalism to be a chump's game. To some extent, federalism -- with its emphasis on the states as a counterpart to the national government -- treats the states like quasi-independent nations who govern themselves and just happened to be in alliance, like NATO or the United Nations. That hasn't been functionally true since at least the Civil War. The president is the chief executive of a single big country, not 50 little nations. There's no reason a candidate should face 50 different sets of rules in order to be elected.

We are one country. We have one president. We should have one clear, democratic set of rules for electing that president. We don't. That makes the system vulnerable to corruption and the un-democratic desires of party elites. It's a lousy way to run a country.

Ben starts his take: "On this question, the Constitution is clear: With certain specified exceptions, the states get to say how they run their elections." And that's factually true. But on this question, the Constitution is incorrect to do so.

Joe McGinniss sexually demeans Sarah Palin. Again.

Joe McGinniss is back in the news now that his long-promised book about Sarah Palin is coming out. It apparently contains a revelation—which I'm not linking to—involving Palin's pre-marital sex life, from all the way back in 1987. It's unnecessary and disgusting.

 This, of course, is in keeping with McGinniss' overall leering tone about Palin. It seems he takes every opportunity to cast her in a purely sexual light, a literary-political form of slut-shaming that really has no bearing on our political discourse. I can hear people right now responding with shouts of "hypocrisy!" Since Palin has staked her public persona as being a righteous pro-life Christian, it's only fair to point out that she's got a thing for black guys, right? (Don't think that race isn't part of the titilation here.) I don't think so. There's lots of stuff I did—or didn't do—when I was an unmarried 23-year-old that I wouldn't really want to use in shaping public policy debates. People are complicated, and it's a rare person who always acts in accordance with their publicly stated values. And the truth is, we only rarely hear about the pre-marriage, pre-politics randiness of male politicians—and let's be honest, lots of them were dogs. But Sarah Palin is deserving of more salacious treatment ... why?

 I don't like Sarah Palin. I don't like her politics. But as I've said before: Sarah Palin isn't bad for America because she's a woman or because she's an attractive woman—or even because she was once a sexually active woman. Demeaning her on those counts isn't just sexist and mean-spirited, it also misses the point.

Say, who is backing Yemen's government?

A United Nations report published Tuesday says the Yemeni government has used excessive and deadly force against peaceful demonstrators, killing hundreds and wounding thousands since the beginning of the year.

The report, published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, urged immediate international action to alleviate a humanitarian crisis and prevent the country from falling into further chaos.

A delegation sent by the office visited Yemen’s three main cities at the end of June, according to the report, and found “an overall situation where many Yemenis peacefully calling for greater freedoms, an end to corruption and respect for rule of law were met with excessive and disproportionate use of lethal force by the state.”

via nytimes.com

The Times goes on to note: "Initially peaceful protests against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is in Saudi Arabia recovering from injuries he sustained in a bombing of his palace, have been overtaken by an increasingly violent power struggle among government forces, tribal militias and other armed groups, including Islamic militants affiliated with Al Qaeda. The government had lost effective control of sizable areas of the country, including parts of major cities, the United Nations report said."

What the Times doesn't note is that the Yemeni government has had major support from the United States in its battle with the rivals. I don't know that there's direct link between US support and the civilian deaths, but America—in the name of fighting terrorism—is helping prop up a regime that kills civilians. That, of course, is the kind of thing that...creates terrorists.

Whatever you do, do NOT raise taxes on the wealthy

Another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.

And in new signs of distress among the middle class, median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997.

Economists pointed to a telling statistic: It was the first time since the Great Depression that median household income, adjusted for inflation, had not risen over such a long period, said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard.

“This is truly a lost decade,” Mr. Katz said. “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we’re looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s.”

via nytimes.com

I'm not sure Pennsylvania is a swing state

After all, we haven't actually given our electoral votes to a Republican since 1988. And that was to George HW Bush—who, everybody knows, wasn't really a Republican. If we really were a swing state, I'm pretty sure the state GOP wouldn't be pushing this plan: 

In 2012, after redistricting, Pennsylvania will have 20 electoral votes and 18 congressional districts. Under Pileggi's proposal, each of the districts would elect one presidential elector; the other two would be apportioned on the basis of the popular vote.

Only two other states allocate electoral votes by congressional district, Maine and Nebraska.

Pileggi and other GOP leaders in the legislature, all of whom are expressing support for the effort, argue the proposed new system will more closely reflect the popular will of voters.

And it would! And that's a good thing! Only problem is this is a transparent ploy by Republicans to take electoral votes away from Democrats and give them to Republicans. I can't imagine that the Republican Party in my home state of Kansas, say, would ever back a similar effort in a state that hasn't voted Dem since 1964. Why take the chance of losing one electoral vote for a Republican president?

So I like the idea—a more democratic, "small d" way of allocating electoral votes. But I don't like that it's just happening in Pennsylvania, in a manner designed to disempower Democrats. So do it. But do it nationally. Doing it or not doing it state-by-state is just political hackery under the guise of federalism.

That testosterone study

In Study, Fatherhood Leads to Drop in Testosterone - NYTimes.com: "Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops."

'via Blog this'

Well. Maybe for those other guys.

Afghanistan Quagmire Watch

Once again, I'll remind you that "winning" the war in Afghanistan requires a central government that serves and protects its people. Who said so? Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose 2009 memo pushed President Obama into doubling down on the war there. From the memo:

The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials,and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust GIRoA to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice, and basic services. This crisis of confidence, coupled with a distinct lack of economic and educational opportunity, has created fertile ground for the insurgency. 

...eventual success requires capable Afghan governance capabilities and security forces.

 How's that working out?

KABUL, Afghanistan — Local police forces trained and financed by the United States have killed and raped civilians, stolen land and carried out other abuses against the Afghan villagers they are charged with protecting, according to a report released on Monday by Human Rights Watch. 

The accusations of violence, theft and impunity raise new questions about whether the local police and government-supported militias in Afghanistan, which are meant to play a major role in defending small villages against the Taliban, are instead undermining security at a critical moment for the country and the NATO-led war effort.

We're not winning. This, in fact, is exactly what it means to be losing in Afghanistan. After 10 years, it seems reasonable to ask if it's possible to ever win, or if the cost is reasonable. On the last count, the answer sure seems to be "no."

National Review is for mandatory service—unless Obama is

At National Review today, Col. Kenneth Allard proposes that all young Americans be pressed into a form of national service—or else they lose the privileges of citizenship:

The draft worked well in the 20th century, but in the 21st we need to create a graduated system of national service. The education benefits now granted more or less freely could be tied to the completion of national service after age 18. Each young adult would be required to complete a year of service in return for enjoying the lifetime privileges of American citizenship. Completing that minimum requirement would also determine future eligibility for education benefits.

I do find it intriguing that a publication that editorializes against the health insurance mandate as an unconscionable infringement upon liberty and against the Constitution seems willing to entertain the idea that citizens should be forced to donate their bodies and labor to the government for a year. 

And I'm just old enough to remember when then-Senator Barack Obama proposed an expanded community service program in which young Americans would freely volunteer for 50 or more hours a year and get a $4,000 tax credit in return—nothing mandatory, but very enticing perhaps—NRO's John Derbyshire responded with this headline: Arbeit Macht Frei. That's a phrase best-associated with Nazi concentration camps, of course.

So: Incentives to volunteer? Reminiscent of Naziism. A year of forced labor as a requirement of citizenship? Consistent with liberty! Welcome to National Review's universe.

Rod Dreher on the free market

Makes sense to me:

As a conservative, my basic approach to economics is that of Pope John Paul II, who said that man was not made for the market, but the market was made for man. He meant that the free market is only moral if it serves the end of authentic human flourishing. If it undermines human flourishing, then the market must be reformed. The point is, the market is not an end, but a means to the proper end, which is the health of the community — especially, in Catholic teaching, the family.

Philadelphia newspapers move into the tablet age

This will be an interesting experiment: Philadelphia Media Network—owner of the Inquirer and the Daily News—starts a project today to distribute 5,000 discounted Android tablets pre-loaded to discounted digital editions of both newspapers. The Inky doesn't say what kind of Android tablet, but it's worth noting none of the Android tablets released so far have posed much of a challenge to Apple's iPad. So there's a bit of a "government cheese" feel to the project: If information can't be free, I'm not sure if it does your brand a huge amount of good to be associated with a (discounted!) second-tier product. On the other hand: Several other newspaper chains are considering a similar move, so perhaps desperate newspapers will popularize the Android tablet platform to an extent that Android couldn't do on its own.

The Inquirer, meanwhile, is launching its own "new multimedia Inquirer tablet app"for iPad. (Actually, it launched Aug. 26, but is just now being announced.) It's not that new—it's a single-branded version of the multi-newspaper PressReader app that the Inquirer was already promoting as its tablet app—and it's not that multimedia: Basically it's a PDF of the paper, and if you push a button a computer voice will read the stories to you.

You've got to applaud the Philadelphia Media Network for trying something bold with its tablet experiment. On the other hand, the replica edition that's available seems like weak tea. We'll see if it works.

UPDATE: Ad Week has more details. 

9/12: Why disunity is OK, and why it's not

In a slightly nihilistic moment last week, I bitterly lamented the loss of post-9/11 unity. " We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country," I wrote. "So much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to eventemporarily obscure them."

I still think that's true, but a couple of essays in the last few days have convinced me that the disunity hasn't been entirely bad—and that, in fact, it might even be a good thing. One was David Cole's piece at the New York Review of Books, which acknowledged the encroachment on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, but also celebrated the pushback by institutions and individuals that kept many of those encroachments from gaining ground permanently:

Yet despite the fact that no detainee has been released by court order, more than 600 of the 775 people once held at Guantánamo Bay have been released. Torture and inhumane treatment are no longer official US policy. The NSA spying program now has a statutory footing and is subject to judicial approval and oversight. Widespread preventive detention of Muslim and Arab immigrants in the United States has not been repeated. There have been no reports of rendition to torture in years. And the CIA’s black sites are closed. 

If these changes cannot be attributed to judicial enforcement or congressional mandates, what was the moving force? The answer is not to be found in the institutions of government, but in civil society—in the loosely coordinated political actions of concerned individuals and groups, here and abroad. Following September 11, many organizations took up the task of defending liberty—among them the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Most of these groups did not even exist in the McCarthy era, our nation’s last security crisis.

The other piece was my friend Steve Hayward's post at Power Line, pointing out that unity has always been fleeting in wartime:

Fred Siegel’s terrific and underappreciated book, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan, reminds us that “Wartime surveys taken by the Army revealed that troop morale was dangerously low.” The isolationist America Firsters did not go away, but, like 9/11 Truthers today, spread the word that FDR was complicit in a plot to bring about Pearl Harbor: “They were convinced that a devilishly clever Roosevelt had maneuvered the country into an unnecessary war against the wrong foe just as he had used his wiles at home to foist the alien measures of the New Deal’s ‘creeping socialism’ on an unsuspecting nation.” A number of Republicans complained openly they while we should of course fight Japan, why are we fighting in Europe? (Shades of the criticism of our war against Iraq a few years ago.)

Steve's invocation of Iraq, combined with Cole's celebration of the pushback against the Bush Administration's post-9/11 excesses, made me realize that the dissolution of the post-attack unity was probably a good and healthy thing. Really. Simply put, we had very real, very legitimate differences over how to proceed after 9/11. It would have been bizarre if those differences had never emerged.

After 9/11, some people thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it was good to use waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it that warrantless wiretapping, with no oversight, was justified in the name of national security. Some of us didn't. And after 9/11, some of us thought that the invocation of "war" against terrorism meant the president and the executive branch had carte blanche to ignore whatever laws and treaty obligations the United States had committed itself to over the previous few decades.

Some of us didn't.

I count myself largely in the "some of us didn't" group on all those counts, of course. But in my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that many people—many of our leaders—were so frightened of another attack and the effect it might have on the national well-being that they were willing to take almost any step to prevent a repeat of that horrible, awful day in New York, Washington, and Shanksville. In my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that men—and they were overwhelmingly men—who made the decisions that I criticize were very often acting in what they thought were the best interests of the country, and of keeping it safe.

In my less generous moments, I get a bit cynical when reading all the way to the end of Steve's post:

Next time you hear some lefty say something along the lines of “it’s our fault” or “we had it coming on 9/11,” just say, “Yeah—just like the Japanese at Hiroshima,” and sit back and watch the reaction. Because as we all know you can only use that argument on America.

Now, there are surely some "America had it coming" folks on the left. (And in the GOP presidential primary field!) But as a general rule, most of us who were in the "some of us didn't" group didn't see it that way. We thought, and think, we were challenging America to be true to itself—to the rule of law, to the Bill of Rights, to checks and balances. We found ourselves labeled "objectively pro-terrorist" as a result. And we saw folks like Karl Rove push such nasty ideas—exploit and exacerbate those differences—as a means of consolidating political power for Republicans.

It's OK that we didn't maintain our unity after 9/11, because I suspect a healthy country needs both people who vigorously advocate for security and people who vigorously advocate for liberties. To the degree I'm angry and cynical about the dissolution of that unity, it's not for unity's sake—but because some people used those differing ideas to paint the rest of us as un-American, and un-worthy of the freedoms we were trying to exercise. In such cases, continued "unity" would've meant hopping on a bandwagon to hell. Good riddance to that.

Glenn Greenwald is wrong about Osama bin Laden

Lots of my conservative friends like to accuse Salon's Glenn Greenwald of "moral equivalency," but I generally am glad that there's somebody with a halfway prominent media voice who brings a quality of hard-nosed empathy to our political debates. We Americans can become overly enamored of our own righteousness, to the point that we assume other people see us as we see ourselves—a sometimes fatal blinkeredness. Greenwald has repeatedly asked this question: If you were a run-of-the-mill Muslim family in the Middle East and your child died in an accidental NATO bombing, how would you react? It's not a bad question, and it's even strategically useful, but it makes lots of people mad that he keeps doing that.

Nonetheless, I think Greenwald takes his tendency a little too far with his reaction to the GOP audience that cheered Texas' 234 executions at the Republican debate the other night.

This morning's orgy of progressive condemnation made me think of very similar death-celebrations that erupted at the news that the U.S. military had pumped bullets into Osama bin Laden's skull and then dumped his corpse into the ocean. Those of us back then whoexpressed serious reservations about the boisterous public chanting and celebratory cheering of executions were accused by Good Democrats of all manner of deficiencies. 

Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by their own confession) committed. In all cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.

Perhaps I'm overly parsing here, but I see a real difference. I thought the GOP reaction was a bit repugnant because it cheered government-sponsored death generally, and in the context of questioning a governor who seems to have overseen the execution of an innocent man and blocked any real investigation into the possibility of both the man's innocence and the governor's indifference to it.

I didn't participate in the "giddy dancing" over bin Laden's death—in part because I'd had major emergency surgery a few hours earlier, but also because I'm temperamentally inclined to believe that even on the rare occasions when government-sponsored death  is necessary and right, it's still an awful and grim business. But I don't blame people for celebrating, either. They weren't—like the GOP crowd—celebrating death. They were happy that a rough justice had been served upon a specific man—a villain, actually—responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11 and a decade of misery and quagmire that has followed. There was bound to be an extremely emotional reaction to bin Laden's death or capture. That reaction was an instinct; the GOP audience, meanwhile, was cheering on possibly mistaken executions as a matter of thoroughly considered ideology.

Like I said, I find much of Greenwald's work useful. But not all government-sponsored death is equivalent, or equivalently bad. (If it was, we could never allow our police to shoot at Columbine or Virginia Tech gunmen.) In this matter, he's simply wrong.

Post-9/11 unity isn't coming back

I may be feeling particularly nihilistic this morning, but I don't see the point of spending much energy lamenting the loss of our post-9/11 "unity," as President Obama does in an op-ed for USA Today:

Firefighters, police and first responders rushed into danger to save others. Americans came together in candlelight vigils, in our houses of worship and on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Volunteers lined up to give blood and drove across the country to lend a hand. Schoolchildren donated their savings. Communities, faith groups and businesses collected food and clothing. We were united, as Americans. 

This is the true spirit of America we must reclaim this anniversary — the ordinary goodness and patriotism of the American people and the unity that we needed to move forward together, as one nation.

Ten years on, that unity seems like a mirage. We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country—so much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to even temporarily obscure them. Each side would suspect—and accuse—the other of exploiting the attack to further whatever agenda was already on their plate. And each side would probably be right. Instead of grief and anger, we'd just have anger.

There is no more good faith. We can't wish it back.

9/11 and Sylvester Stallone

In the movies, at least, it's the bad guys who torture.

Ben and I consider the legacy of 9/11 in our Scripps Howard column this week. Ben lumps Venezuela and China in with Al Qaeda, which perplexes me. And I conjure up a discussion that will surely keep me from ever truly entering the ranks of serious, respected, and well-known pundits: 

It was common in 2001 to hear that America had “lost its innocence.”

Certainly, the country did seem to lose some of its nobility. Look no further than the films of Sylvester Stallone.

Laugh, if you like. For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, though, Stallone’s B-movie blockbusters also served as morality tales — fantasies that illuminated the stakes of the Cold War against the Soviets. In “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” Communist evil was demonstrated when a Russian officer strapped Stallone to a metal stand and tortured him with electric shock.

The message was clear: Torture was for the bad guys. We were the good guys. That stance was affirmed in real life, when Ronald Reagan signed the U.N. Convention on Torture — in part to shame the Soviets — which prohibited the infliction of “pain or suffering” for the purposes of obtaining information.

We know now that America resorted to torture in the first years after 9/11, inflicting pain and suffering on terror suspects — some of them bad guys, yes, but some of them innocent — and almost never in a “ticking time bomb” scenario. At least three men were “waterboarded;” many others subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and worse. Some of them died.

None of this is disputed. But Americans seem mostly fine with it.

Nobody has ever been prosecuted.

Stallone’s latest hit, incidentally, was “The Expendables.” In that movie, the villains strap an innocent woman to a table and poor water on her face and down her throat — all but drowning her. It is a perfect demonstration of waterboarding. In some movies, at least, the bad guys are still torturers.

America is not the villain of 9/11: That distinction belongs to Al Qaida and the 19 men who hijacked planes that day. But are we the heroes of this decade? That’s tougher to say.

9/11/01

My workday began a little earlier than usual the morning of September 11, 2001. I was a young City Hall reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, used to covering night meetings, but a special committee in charge of crafting the town's tax abatement policy met at 8 am that day, and the topic was important enough that I was there.

The meeting was being run by Jim Henry, a member of the city commission. I didn't notice when he slipped out of the gathering—but suddenly he burst back in. The Twin Towers and Pentagon had been hit by suicide bombers, he said. There was terror in his voice. "It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel," I thought. The meeting was over. I went back to the office.

I spent most of the rest of the day in the newsroom, watching the tiny television as the first tower—and then the second—came down. The Journal-World put out an extra edition that afternoon; I spent my day vainly trying to get NYTimes.com and CNN.com to load.

It wasn't long before I had a realization: I had become a reporter because I wanted to see history with my own eyes. And history was being made half-a-continent away. One thing led to another, and in late October I found myself in my car, driving to Pennsylvania and New York to interview people and see the devastation with my own eyes.

Weeks had passed, but the devastation was still fresh—particularly in New York, where a facade of one of the towers still rose high above the street, higher than any building I knew in Kansas. A fire was still burning in the pit of Ground Zero, and the entire section of lower Manhattan smelled—as I think I wrote for the Journal-World at the time—like a giant, rancid barbecue pit.

The experience changed my life, profoundly, though it would take some time for the changes to make themselves apparent—and perhaps they still are. The changes were most noticeable in three areas of my life:

• I LOST MY FAITH: This, admittedly, was a process that had been going on a long time. For some years prior to 9/11, I had realized that I didn't believe that Christianity was the exclusive route to God—a hard realization, considering my upbringing and my Mennonite college education. Nonetheless, I continued to attend church, finding a happy home at a quite liberal Lawrence Mennonite congregation. I justified myself with the thought that while Christianity wasn't the only way to God, it was the language of faith I'd been given. The direction, pointed at God, was what mattered.

In the aftermath of 9/11—and as religious conflicts seemingly found their way into the news more and more often—that approach made less and less sense to me. It wasn't that Christianity and Islam were different languages trying to describe the same phenomenon; both languages, and multiple others, constantly asserted that they were the only true language. And I realized that without God making Godself visible to sort it out for us, there was no way to properly pick out the true approach; it would all be guesswork and gut feelings, at the end of the day. No way to know you're right, and a million ways to go wrong. I decided that if God existed, God would forgive me for refusing to play a game I couldn't possibly know how to win. And in the process, I'd remove myself from a grander battle of truth assertions that no human could ever really adjudicate. There were better ways to spend my time; the words of hymns and prayers started to taste like lies in my mouth.

About a year after 9/11, I called my pastor and told her I was leaving the church.

A key part of my Mennonite faith, incidentally was a very strict pacifism. Without that faith, my unbreakable nonviolence crumbled. I remain extremely dovish. But it doesn't bother me that Osama bin Laden is dead; it would've, a little, 10 years ago.

• I STARTED TO CARE ABOUT POLITICS: I'd always been interested in politics, but as the first phase of the Afghanistan War wound down and as the campaign for the Iraq Invasion began—and as hints emerged that the United States was torturing terrorist suspects—my cynicism and detachment dropped by the wayside. I got angry at all the ways the Bush Administration seemed to violate civil liberties, manipulate public opinion, and conduct war. I began to read more deeply than I ever had: the New York Times and Washington Post, every day. As many books as I could read—my devotion to novels suffered mightily in favor of research from Thomas Ricks and Jane Mayer and Seymour Hirsch and so on and so forth.

My anger made it more difficult to continue under the guise of an objective, neutral reporter. So when the opportunity arose in late 2007 to do opinion writing for Scripps Howard News Service, I jumped. I didn't turn back.

• MY WORLD GOT BIGGER: I had never been in New York before the trip that took me to the still-smoking Ground Zero. I spent the week making my way gradually, stopping at towns along the way to interview ordinary Americans about how their lives had changed. Along the way, I began to realize the country was much, much bigger than I'd ever contemplated.

It wasn't just the distance—although a 2,000-mile solo driving trip will give you plenty of time to contemplate. It was the experience. In New York, I was taken to the apartment of a Puerto Rican family to interview them about their experiences; they were excellent hosts, but my mind reeled at their living conditions—a well-appointed apartment, yes, but how could a family of four live in such a space? That's what single-family houses were for! It dawned on me in a visceral way that not everybody lived the way I had been raised in rural Kansas.

Which was obvious enough, even to me, but I'd never felt the difference before. And in the years after I left New York, I began to chafe. Not only did I read more widely, I wanted to travel more widely. (Which I did to the limited extent a reporter's salary would allow.) Before 9/11, my expectation was to have a career in Kansas newspapers. Maybe I'd even end up with a big regional newspaper in Kansas City or St. Louis. Somehow, I ended up in Philadelphia. Freelancing. It is nothing I ever would have anticipated, or even aimed for, until it happened.

Philadelphia is not better than Kansas. But it is certainly different, and different from my wife's Arkansas upbringing. We live with our son in a smaller apartment than the one I visited in New York, and we find it mostly satisfying. And I feel fairly certain I wouldn't be here without 9/11, and the reaction it produced in me.

It is, perhaps, narcissistic in the extreme to take a look at a key moment in our nation's recent history and reflect on what it means for me personally. But history doesn't exist merely in the broad sweep: It changes lives, dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people at a time. I am a different man today than I was on 9/11 because 10 years have passed, and because I am married and have a son now. But I am a different man, too, because 9/11 happened. Because of that, my son is living a different life than he would have. It's all normal, and it's all completely different.