In one of our first issues of the century, Dissent, Winter 2000, we bade Simone goodbye. But it was too short, a restless farewell: we were so busy. (I am focusing on this issue, but I could have selected any number of others.) We printed not one but two symposia: a black-comic riff on the presence and/or absence of "critical culture" in America today and an agonized trip through the ambiguities of the abortion issue for Catholics, feminists and Democrats. Some of our contributors were usual suspects, others were specials: Jules Feiffer's marvelous cartoon on "Jaytalking" inspired our "critical culture" talk. It was striking how many people, in and out of our symposia, had a lot to say. Boris Kaputsin explored "Russia as a Post-Modern Society" and viewed both the growth and the crash of Soviet communism in the light of structural crises in modern life. Susan George, in a penetrating critique of the World Trade Organization, imagined many forms of globalism and argued that we didn't have to settle for the worst. Harold Meyerson showed how John Sweeney's AFL-CIO was helping to invent a larger, republican form of liberalism. Gabrielle Banks got down with Salvadoran teenagers talking sex, drugs, gangs, and capital. Ken Conca reflected on the environmental movement's inner contradictions and current troubles. There were about ten more fascinating, unpredictable pieces on everything under the sun.
Our twenty-first-century authors sounded very different from the folks who had yelled at each other for years in Simone's living room. In fact, most of the communication between us and them was online. They came from many occupations, ethnicities, and parts of the world. They wrote in fairly clear English (often clearer than ours), but shared no communal idiom or style. They were all on the left, but the amazing diversity of their voices showed how wide the democratic socialist horizon had become. One of the great ideas of the twentieth century was Ferdinand Toennies's distinction between two forms of human association: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The bonds of Gemeinschaft were narrow and exclusive, but emotionally, familially intense; those of Gesellschaft were less passionate and more reflective, less enveloping but potentially universal. You could say Simone's death buried our Gemeinschaft forever; but in our first few issues without her, we were learning to live again as a Gesellschaft. It meant recognizing we would never again be so "at home"; but there were other ways to be in a world that turned out to be a lot bigger and richer than we had thought.
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, in less than an hour, threw us back into death and mourning. It forced us to see how little we really knew of the world we hoped to be in. At our first editorial board meeting after the attacks, Ground Zero was still smoking less than a mile away. A few people said, "Don't you see we're at war!" No one could say with any confidence that we weren't, but most of us wanted to know, "With what or who?" My own contribution was a wisecrack: "It's like a mix of Pearl Harbor with Waiting for Godot." We reached no consensus, except that there was an awful lot we needed to learn fast. But the way it went, the chances of anybody's learning anything were buried in rubble.
What came next was the great military buildup of 2002-2003, leading to the preemptive invasion of Iraq last spring. The horrible deaths that had happened in our home town just now were exploited as pretexts for a global war that was planned more than a decade ago. Overnight, it seemed, our war machine metastasized and our mass media militarized. One striking feature of this military buildup was that the military was against it. From Colin Powell on down, virtually all our generals and officers, who had spent real time under fire and seen real people die, were sure the occupation of Iraq would be a disaster-and indeed it has been. Militarism, one of the tectonic plates in our political culture, has made a huge shift in a short time. The United States has turned into the type of nation described in Alfred Vagts's classic History of Militarism, where power lies with "the militarism of the civilians," and where civilian zealots and megalomaniacs drag conservative generals into wars. Now there's something we've learned!
Nobody knows what the long-term results of 9/11 will be. So far, though, it has raised the scale of violence and chaos erupting from what was already the most violent and chaotic part of the world. And it has lowered the level of discourse and action close to home. Two years later, our White House orchestrates aggressive brutality, not only toward despotisms in the Middle East but toward democracies in "the old Europe," toward the United Nations, and toward large parts of our own population. For months, our mass media acted like groupies cheering the president on, while our political leaders devolved into living dead. Lately, though, as troubles have escalated and approval ratings dropped, a few have begun to stir. Can these bones live?
I HAVE TALKED more than I meant to about death. Thinking about the death I started with, Simone's, carried me back to a great American song, "On the Banks of the Wabash," a sheet-music best-seller a century ago. It starts with one of the most heart-rending lines in history: I can see my mother standing in the doorway. I wept, as I always do when I sing this song. Then I remembered that the first line had a story of its own. The song was composed by Paul Dresser, one of the great American songwriters in the generation before Gershwin and Berlin. But the first line, only that line, was written by Dresser's younger brother, the young Theodore Dreiser. The line may have released something inside him. Just after this he began, by some inner magic no one has ever explained, to turn himself into the great radical urban realist writer we know and love. Maybe our own trajectory will move this way. Dissent in the twenty-first century will probably have many offices; none will ever be "home" to us, as Simone's home once was. But if that home nourished us as we believe it did, our vision of Simone in the doorway can help us remember where we came from, and our memory can bring us new powers: power to see through doors that hold modern men and women back, power to help break big doors down.
In 1989, at the end of the cold war, in the twentieth century's home stretch-it seems so long ago now-the poet Seamus Heaney had just the words for that lovely time: he said, "Hope and history rhyme." Many intellectuals then imagined we would be free to live John Lennon's song, "Imagine": imagine how to share America's wealth with the world, imagine how to create a happier and better life. Instead, we have been forced to worry about the rubble: how to keep morality and culture from crumbling the way bombed buildings crumble; what we can construct out of the wreck that won't make us feel worse. The best thing I can think of to say about today's history is that it rhymes with "mystery": we don't much understand where it came from, we know even less where it will go. But we still have the power to hope and to imagine. And the twenty-first century is still young.
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