Opinion

Triumph of the normal

We are told that what President George W. Bush should have said in response to September 11 was something very like, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” As everyone knows, in the weeks following the attacks he instead urged Americans, “And for God’s sake, keep shopping.”

Except he didn’t say that (it was a snarky paraphrase by a Time magazine writer, who began his astonishingly tone-deaf article about Bush’s superb Sept. 20, 2001 speech to Congress with a crack about Bush pronouncing terror as “terra”).

Bush did, however, make a similar point. “I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy,” he said in that speech. He said, “I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children.” He said, “It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal. We’ll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good.”

A week later, he said, “Get on board,” by which he meant airplanes, not AmeriCorps. “Do your business around the country,” he added. “Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

Liberals have never forgiven Bush for letting this crisis go to waste. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama said, “A lot of you remember the tragedy of 9/11 and how all of the country was ready to come together and make enormous changes to make us not only safer, but to make us a better country and a more unified country. And President Bush did some smart things at the outset, but one of the opportunities that was missed was, when he spoke to the American people, he said, ‘Go out and shop.’ That wasn’t the kind of call to service that I think the American people were looking for.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman says that on 9/12 Bush should have announced a “Patriot Tax” of $1 per gallon of gas. In The New Yorker last week, George Packer said Bush’s call to continue living our lives was “unreality . . . Wasn’t there anything else? Should Americans enlist in the armed forces, join the foreign service, pay more taxes, do volunteer work, study foreign languages, travel to Muslim countries?” Packer calls Bush’s policies “a malignant persistence,” speaks favorably of a draft and calls for a solution to income inequality and (perhaps most of all) a balm for what he calls liberals’ feelings of being “marginalized, misrepresented, ridiculed, scapegoated and worst of all, ignored.”

In other words, liberals desire from 9/11 what they always desire: raising taxes. More citizens joyously marching off to serve the state. Spreading the wealth. Hitting energy companies. And the fuzzy internationalism that hustles to confront terrorist fanatics with the dewy undergraduate’s weapons of understanding and compassion — via vacations in Damascus and Berlitz lessons. As for joining the armed forces, Packer must have noticed while he was in Iraq that many Americans did exactly that, and not a few of them cited Bush as an inspiration.

Al Qaeda destroyed many American lives on 9/11, but also sought to leverage a day’s worth of spectacular evil. In that it succeeded. This is an organization built around slavish fealty that loathes American freedom. Its acts destroyed our liberties in countless ways great and small. All of us, particularly those of us in places like New York and Washington, get out of bed every morning in the cold shadow of fear.

On top of that loss of freedom, the liberals ask us to surrender even more. Economic freedom diminishes every time taxes are raised. Free time is lost when we volunteer. In 2003, a band of liberals in Congress actually introduced a bill to strip two years from all young Americans, who would be drafted either into the military or a civilian service corps. Should Mark Zuckerberg have been forced to spend ages 22-24 working at a dismal welfare office or mastering drill and ceremony at Fort Bragg? How much entrepreneurial, intellectual and social vitality — how much Americanness — would we have surrendered?

Liberals hoped, as Packer wrote, that 9/11 would bring “one of the great transformations in the country’s history.” This is a curious statement from someone who edited two books of Orwell essays. Maybe Packer thought we’d all be wearing National Service patches on our sleeves by now. He laments the lack of “consensus”: Americans continue, annoyingly, to hold a variety of political opinions and freely to debate them.

To some it is infuriating that Bush was right. In part because he declined to use his popularity (at a time when his approval ratings hit 92%) to make 9/11 a pretext for reforming America, life did go on mostly as normal.

Sometimes doing nothing constitutes a major accomplishment.

Kyle.Smith@nypost.com