Bill Kauffman: I laughed. And I was ashamed

Like most Americans, I spent Tuesday morning sitting with slack jaw and moist eyes in front of our TV set, stupefied by the enormity of it all and fantasising revenge upon the Mohammedans responsible. But the corporate media are expert at wringing bathos out of tragedy, and of making risible the ineffably sad, so by noontime we had switched off the idiot box. The blandly handsome anchormen and pert anchorwomen were so histrionic and moronic that my wife and I found ourselves laughing, and felt ashamed.

We live at the rural western end of New York State, 400 miles and several cultures distant from New York City. I am sceptical of vicarious grief, of the distressing modern practice of sobbing for strangers who die on the television while one's neighbours pass away unnoticed, but this is that rare time when the usually factitious "national community" of TV watchers has substance. People remain mesmerised by the admixture of sheer evil and staggering woe; at intervals, they issue from their homes to condole with one another.

The corporate media speak to, but never for, Middle America. The fatuous ABC host Charlie Gibson claims that Americans are enraged because "a symbol of America has been defiled", even though most Americans outside the New York City area had never heard of the World Trade Centre, let alone venerated this symbol of global capitalism.

What enrages them is mass murder. The NBC newsreader Tom Brokaw, glib peddler of Second World War nostalgia, declared that the attack demonstrated the folly of "Fortress America isolation"; in fact it did the opposite. If US foreign policy had reflected traditional Middle American indifference to the Middle East, our troops would be home, Israel would be on its own, Muslims would not hate us, and uncounted thousands of unfortunate New Yorkers would still be alive. Such truths are unsayable in time of war, but there you are.

In his farewell address, which is the American version of the Ten Commandments – a sacred injunction serially violated – George Washington advised posterity to respect our "detached and distant situation" and to avoid foreign entanglements. This pacific counsel is today derided as "isolationism", fit only for indurated knuckle-draggers. American isolationists – who oppose killing foreigners – are tagged xenophobes, while those ordering the missile launches and inviting suicide attacks are the humane internationalists. Go figure.

The real lesson of this unspeakably awful Tuesday is that empire has a cost. It's not worth it, not by a long shot. But we the people will continue to pay the taxes and supply the corpses to the American Empire, never really sure just why in hell we're Over There.

The world is shrinking, and nothing will ever be the same, pundits insist in phrases trite and repellent. In the days after the carnage, we bought the first cider of the season, tossed around the football, and hunted new-fallen chestnuts. In the margins of empire, the world is as wondrously large as it ever was. I pray that it remains so.

Bill Kauffman's books include 'America First!' and 'Every Man a King', a novel