As this column appears in print, on Thanksgiving eve, many of you will be preparing for the annual ritual of regression to infantile relational patterns fueled by massive intakes of “comfort foods,” bouts of neurotic aggression abetted by alcohol and football watching, potentially fatal truth telling as a side effect of turkey-borne tryptophan narcosis, and retrospective depression brought on by the whole thing.

Which leads me to free-associate: Whatever happened to “family values”? I speak not of values held by any individual family, of course, but of the canon of pro-“traditional-” (that is, patriarchal) marriage, anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-science evangelical Christianity that rose to power in the last decades of the 20th century.

Time was a pronouncement from Pat Robertson was front-page news. As late as 2004, pundits attributed Bush’s victory to the strength of “moral-values voters.”

But quick: Who’s the head of the Family Research Council now? What is the Family Research Council? Can you even dredge that up from your political memory, where it’s buried under bailouts and oil spills, terrorists and deficits?

Why haven’t we heard from the moral majority lately? I have a few theses:

(1) They are losing and they know it.
A 2009 study by Columbia University political scientist Jeffrey Lax finds that legalization of same-sex marriage is only a matter of time: “If policy were set by state-by-state majorities of those 65 or older, none would allow same-sex marriage. If policy were set by those under 30, only 12 states would not allow same-sex marriage,” he concluded.

Solid majorities of parents and students support comprehensive sex education and oppose abstinence-only.

The U.S. is enjoying a feminist renaissance. Even Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist.

Gays and lesbians are affiliating with every political constituency, including the GOP and the Tea Party.

Transgendered people, though still the objects of discrimination and violence, are visible enough in the mainstream media to win both sympathetic treatment and equal-opportunity parody. This May, the father of the crude sexist Glenn Quagmire on “Family Guy” came out as a woman trapped in a man’s body.

And opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage? So potentially alienating to independent voters are these positions that, with a few loudmouthed exceptions, 2010’s conservative candidates avoided mentioning them.

(2) They’ve already won.
Gay kids are killing themselves all over the place. “Don’t-ask-don’t-tell” looks as impervious to attack as a mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle.

“Comprehensive” sex education promotes abstinence.

Abortion is unavailable in most of the U.S., and the situation is about to get worse. Congress inaugurates an additional 44 anti-choice representatives (and eight fewer pro-choice ones) and six new anti-choice senators in 2011, strengthening anti-choice majorities in both chambers. Even if health care reform survives, its exclusion of abortion coverage from government-endorsed insurance plans will lead more companies to drop elective pregnancy termination from their policies, and it will become unaffordable to almost everyone, insured or uninsured.

Gays and lesbians are affiliating with every political constituency — and they’re telling the GOP and the Tea Party not to support gay rights. This fall, the fiscally conservative group GOProud implored candidates to stick to economics and shut up about “divisive” social issues like homosexuality.

Even Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist.

(3) They have become unnecessary (2, only worse).
Religiosity and cultural conservatism have so thoroughly infused American politics that “family values” are invisible and hegemonic, like whiteness. No national candidate of any stripe, and few local ones, can win an election without parading his or her “faith.”

Religious groups are quietly gaining political and economic rights. In 2005, the Internal Revenue Service gave the Christian Coalition tax-exempt status, even though the organization stated in its application that it would distribute voter guides in churches. Following the 2000 Supreme Court ruling in Mitchell v. Helms that tax-funded vouchers could be used for religious schools, many similar cases have been decided on the principle that denying faith-based organizations government money is a form of religious discrimination–turning  the First Amendment prohibition of the state establishment of religion on its head.

In an upcoming Supreme Court case challenging to the constitutionality of tax credits for donors to the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization, our Democratic president is siding with the Christians.

Americans increasingly equate God with country. In a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, almost six in 10 respondents agreed with the statement “God has granted America a special role in human history.”

The Right embraces families (Family Research Council). The Left embraces families (Working Families Party). Even the movement formerly known as Queer Liberation embraces families and that other family value, warmongering. What’s the gay agenda? Marriage and military service.

Indeed, the word “family” has supplanted all other positive appellations for citizens, Americans or people. The only word vying for its vaunted place in political discourse is “taxpayers.” And now that fiscal and moral conservatives have joined hands, the two are interchangeable.

What happens if family values triumph? The short answer: Families — and all other collections of persons or persons on their own — are fucked. Cut Social Security and other “intrusive” government programs?  Mom and Dad are moving in with you. Defund contraceptive services and outlaw abortion? Maternal death and teenage motherhood will climb. Replace public assistance with private charity? Here come hunger, child neglect, poorhouses — the possibilities are endless.

But, hey, I’ve just learned that Thanksgiving is the happiest day of the year. So, over the river and through the woods, my friends! And when you get there, refrain from instructing your sister on the proper way to discipline her insufferable children. Compliment your mother on those disgusting marshmallow-candied yams. Drag yourself away from the television and raise a glass with your family.

Treat them kindly. Because soon, they may be all you’ve got.

This column appeared originally in Seven Days.

The symptoms of her impending death were all there. She was too tired to open her eyes. She was subsisting on ice chips the size of a baby’s fingernail. Her extremities were cool, the traffic in her veins so lazy that the hospice nurses couldn’t find a pulse. Her breathing would cease for many seconds, then resume with a deep drag — until the next hiatus. She fiddled with the bedclothes and asked me what that dog was doing in the room. There was no dog.

“Do you know you’ve had two more strokes?” I asked her.

“No!”

I wasn’t surprised by her surprise. All year she’d expressed fresh astonishment each time she was informed of her condition — the first stroke that robbed her of memory and sight; the second and third that rendered her more demented, and incontinent; the fall that fractured her hip and propelled her further into frailty and confusion. “This is the first time anyone’s told me!” she’d declare.

My mother was a woman proud of being in charge. In fact, she could bear hardly a moment of not knowing what was coming next, of intellectual ambiguity or emotional irresolution.

This anxiety had practical outlets. At the various agencies she managed, she’d designed systems that were still in use decades later. Her closets were immaculate; a week’s worth of dinners were cooked and frozen each Sunday.

But her allergy to ambivalence also made her impulsive and controlling. Unsure how to live with my father as he descended into Alzheimer’s, she’d moved them from Manhattan to an assisted living facility in Ithaca and back three months later, $30,000 poorer. If you visited her summer house, she had every second accounted for and was perpetually pushing you on to the next activity: Finish breakfast so we can go for a hike. Hurry down the mountain so we can get back for lunch. Eat the soup, clear the table for pie …

Like everything else, dying and death were written into the agenda. She and my father signed living wills in their 50s and periodically renewed them, checking off the boxes to decline extraordinary — and in some cases ordinary — measures to prolong their days if there was little promise of a decent quality of life. Every few months she mailed me an updated sheet containing their Social Security numbers, insurance policies, bank account balances, and so on.

Then, six months before her 90th birthday, three blood clots migrated from her heart to her brain, and the woman who had walked two miles and practiced the piano daily, kept the books, distributed leaflets for peace, and organized a social life to rival Marie Antoinette’s could no longer make toast or remember her phone number. Her beau, unable to cope with her new needs, asked her to leave the apartment they’d shared for eight years.

Perched on the examining table a few weeks after returning from rehab, my mother wept to her gerontologist. “I have no say anymore,” she kept repeating. The crowning proof of her lost autonomy: She possessed neither the courage nor the cognitive ability to commit suicide.

Now, I didn’t want my mother to be the last to hear the momentous news — and I wanted her to have a say. “Mom,” I asked, “are you aware that you’re dying?”

Her face registered surprise again, then trouble. She shook her head, as if to deny not knowledge of the fact but the fact itself.

Technically, she had a point. My mother was performing every end-of-life act on schedule – except dying.

According to the death-and-dying websites I pored over while she dozed, today’s surge of energy and hunger was another typical end-of-life sign — or not. A friend’s husband had swung his legs over the side of the hospital bed, ordered breakfast, delivered a disquisition on the role of the Menscheviks in the Russian Revolution, and 12 hours later was on his way to that great soviet in the sky.

On the other hand, Mom’s nurse Jeff had a patient who’d asked for a pastrami on rye, gotten up, and lived another year.

This morning on the phone, Jeff concurred that Mom probably couldn’t down a pastrami sandwich; she coughed on a half-teaspoonful of water. He suggested we try applesauce, but wanted to check her swallowing first.

To tell the truth, I hoped he’d pronounce her unable. Mom and I had discussed the options for checking out. The only one that didn’t involve my committing a felony was for her to stop eating and drinking. But I knew she couldn’t do it. Food had become Mom’s only pleasure.

Now, at last, her body was taking on the job. Her appetite gone and her throat muscles compromised, she was on the way to fatal starvation and dehydration. Then this morning she’d said yes when her caregiver asked if she wanted something to eat.

Was this a habitual response? (In the last months, she never refused a snack.) Or was she actually hungry?

Did she desire just to eat — or to live?

It seemed the right moment to review the wishes she’d set down in her advanced directive. Feeding tube? No. Intravenous nutrition? No. Her answers were nearly inaudible, but emphatic.

Now came the part between the little boxes on the document — the part, it turns out, that covers much of dying. “So, OK,” I began. “You have a choice. We could keep giving you the ice chips whenever you want them, and keeping your mouth wet, and you would die — pretty soon.” I paused to let her take that in. “Or we could start feeding you again. You’d still die,” I said, “but more slowly.”

Moments passed. “Do you understand?” I prompted.

She nodded that she did, then turned her head to me: “What’s the prognosis?”

I wasn’t going to lie to her. “Well, Ma, I gotta say: It ain’t good. You’re half-paralyzed. You’ll never walk again. You’re not going to get your mind back, and your sight is only getting worse.”

Another long pause. Finally, she sighed: “Oy.”

I laughed at this astute summary of the situation.

Mom asked: “What’s your recommendation?”

This was turning into the most cogent conversation I’d had with my mother in six months.

“I’m sorry, Mom. But I can’t recommend. It’s your life.”

I felt her drifting. Was she thinking about it, too tired to think about it, unwilling to think about it? Then she spoke slowly, almost soundlessly, but with crystalline clarity: “To tell you the truth, I feel pretty ambivalent about the whole thing.”

To appropriate St. Augustine, my mother wanted to be dead, but not yet.

Jeff came an hour later. In the living room with my partner, Paul, and me, he confirmed that food would stall, but not forestall, Mom’s demise. Still, if she wanted to eat and could, we should let her eat. “Hospice isn’t about hastening anyone’s death,” he said. Then he excused himself to examine my mother and came back to tell us her throat muscles were too impaired to admit food or even water. The decision was made: keep on with the ice, and wait.

I was relieved, and not just about resolving the dilemma at hand. The last year had overtaken my life, demolished my ability to work, and roiled a fragile détente with my brother. Full-time care was draining my mother’s savings. I’d badgered her doctor to discontinue her meds and let nature takes its course. He said the drugs were bettering her quality of life. I countered that they were prolonging her death. I kept telling him she was ready to die — she kept telling me she was. We all knew I was ready for her to die.

Now that she was “actively dying,” however, it seemed she was up for prolonging her death with every ounce of life she had left. And why not? She was in no pain. Her caregivers were swaddling her in meticulous attention.

And she finally had what she’d wanted all my life: me. Her prickly daughter was at her side, doting with inexhaustible patience, anticipating her every need, acknowledging her every feeling — loving her. Paul and I joked that just to get even, she would live forever. My mother had been giving advance directives all her life. The living will was just the ultimate one.

But here’s the thing: Plan all you like, you can’t know the territory of dying until you arrive. And then there is nothing like the glint off the Grim Reaper’s scythe to blind you to the path you thought you’d mapped.

My mother was desperate to get there, then wasn’t so sure. She hung on for what to her must have been an interminable period of indecision — living an entire month on nothing but ice chips.

On day 30, I again asked if she knew she was dying.

This time she nodded her head yes.

“Are you ready? Is it OK, Mom?”

Her face was calm, her voice less than a whisper. Yes, she said. She was ready.

Originally published in Salon.com

I have recently been walloped by human need, its depth and constancy. For the better part of the past three months I have been caring for my mother. At nearly 90, Mom was taking care of her own business. Retired after 45 years’ work in nonprofit organizations, she managed her finances, walked two miles a day, read two books a week, volunteered at a public garden, handed out leaflets for peace, practiced the piano and pursued a social life that would exhaust Paris Hilton.

Then, at about 4 a.m. one Sunday in March, three blood clots traveled from her heart to her brain. The stroke knocked out her short-term memory, most of her sight and her ability to reason reliably. Since then, my mother has been unable to read or play the piano. She cannot remember her grandson’s name, make a piece of toast or leave the house alone. She needs full-time care.

The hour my mother went into the ER, my life was virtually supplanted by hers: first her hospitalization and rehab, then the oversight of her care, her money and her household, which has meant piecing together the details of a now only vaguely remembered existence, from medication schedules to email password. And all the while, I have carried my mother’s immense grief and distress at the radical transformation of her self.

In spite of the fact that she has had home health aides with her from the day she returned home, I have been almost unable to work; I can barely think. My partner, Paul, has assumed a huge part of the burden. But it is still not enough. If I am not to go broke or crazy, we will have to pay someone else to assume my mother’s care.

If she lives a few years, such professional assistance will devour every penny of her savings. After that, she will go on Medicaid, at which point the quality of her care may precipitously decline. Health insurance does not pay for chronic care.

Our family’s situation is ordinary. In 2004 there were an estimated 44 million family caregivers in the U.S. Some families supplement this work with paid home aides. The dedication, competence and kindness of many of these workers belie the paltriness of their pay: rarely more than $10 an hour, often for 24-hour shifts. But others are untrained and uninterested, and their wages are beyond the means of most families anyway. Those who can afford paid care are not off the hook. The fragile systems regularly break down, and with each crisis everyone’s health, sanity and money take a hit.

Disability rights activists call us sighted, hearing, mobile bipeds the “currently able.” What they know is that autonomy, the cornerstone of Western ethics and personhood, is a myth. Sooner or later we will all be in some way halt, in some way blind, and neither science nor the grace of God will prevent us from going where the currently disabled already are. In the meantime, we already are what they are: dependent, from our first breaths to our last.

Paradoxically, our dependence may be more acute in this age of Web-shopping, tax-resisting, single-person-householding consumer-citizenship than it was when we hunted in packs and dragged home a bison for the communal feast. Back then you didn’t survive long without the help of others. Today, you need the help of others because you survive so long. Modern medicine has all but defeated premature death from acute illness; we stay healthy for more years. The irony of this accomplishment is that we will be sicker later, and for longer. We can count on surviving seven, eight, even nine decades, but an American who reached the age of 65 in 1996 can also expect an average of more than five years of “dysfunction,” probably from a chronic illness, before she dies. “Much of the peculiar pathos of aging in American culture,” notes historian Thomas R. Cole in The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, “derives from the denial of this new fate.”

The new fate is the same as the old one. As University of Missouri sociologist Jaber Gubrium once told me, “Failure is a natural part of life.” So if we fail — when we fail — who is responsible for picking us up? Karen Buhler-Wilkerson, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing and a historian of home care, says there’s a loose consensus in America that the family should do it, with a little help from the state. But that’s as far as we’ve gotten after a century of irresolution. Charity and the profit motive, individualism and personal desperation, left and right continue to duke it out. What never happens is the establishment of an adequately funded, integrated system of care similar to those in almost every other developed country.

“In the absence of the requisite public will,” writes Buhler-Wilkerson, “our stance appears to be one of waiting for a complete breakdown of long-term care before definitive action will be taken in response to the needs of the present and growing aging and chronically ill population.”

Policymakers and advocates have recently taken a step. They’ve realized that home care is cheaper than institutionalization. That’s why many states, including Vermont, now allow Medicare payments to family members who care for the ill or aged at home. But those payments are few and small, and anyway the savings are based on a false economy. Yearly, family caregivers provide an estimated $257 billion in unpaid care.

Who are those family caregivers? Need you ask?

They’re the same people who provide free childcare and housework: wives, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, nieces and female domestic partners. Paul is an exception among men. Indeed, everywhere in the world, almost to a person, caregivers are female.

Americans imagine we will never become old, sick or dependent. But just in case we do, Mommy will kiss the boo-boo. These two fantasies strike me as related. Even as we figure ourselves self-made and self-reliant, we are, as social beings, infantile. Nowhere are we more attached to the delusion of our perpetual youth than where our bodies are concerned. Cosmetic surgery, Viagra, stem cells: These will keep us vital forever.

Small children do not understand death; they believe Grandma or the pet hamster is only sleeping. Adolescents think they’re unbreakable; they’ll take any drug or any dare. But growing old means recognizing your frailties. Growing up means facing your death.

There are many political, economic and bureaucratic obstacles to universal health care in the U.S. — powerful insurance lobbies, fee-for-service medicine, budget-cutting mania. But these are trifles compared to the real obstacle: our dumb faith in ourselves.

Americans are showing signs of readiness for health-care reform. A New York Times/CBS poll last week found overwhelming support for a public insurance option, as well as trust in the government to do it right. Two-thirds of respondents said covering everyone is more important than controlling costs. Will we actually do it? And will we as a nation ever assume responsibility for people like my mother, whose troubles are neither curable nor fatal? Desperation may finally get us there.

But as long as we cannot give up the fiction that we are invulnerable and autonomous, we will fail to provide ourselves collective security. As long as we deny our mortality, we will condemn ourselves to die alone. 

This column originally appeared in Seven Days.

The Palin family played their supporting roles with touching amateur humility, as stunned and pleased as the new American Idols they are (abstinence-only graduate Bristol and shotgun fiancé Levi Johnston also looked stunned, though probably for different reasons). Baby Trig slept in the arms of Cindy McCain, seated beside First Dude Todd. Her embalmed face provided a sort of bluescreen against which he glowed with working-class virility.

Halfway through the address, Palin uttered the words “Saudi Arabia” and “Venezuela,” which apparently put to rest all qualms about her foreign-policy credentials. As one delegate told The Christian Science Monitor, “I feel like she’s the type who would get in there and figure it out.”

Early polls had the speech bumping McCain’s “definite” voters up by double digits across party and gender.

Palin may have mentioned Venezuela, but her brand is an enduring one, reliable for selling everything from oil-guzzling pickup trucks to oatmeal cookies: rural, small-town America. But it is the unspoken backstory, at least as Palin and the Republican Party subtly tell it, that gives the brand its power. Much of the rural South is black and the rural Southwest brown, and it is the rare small town without its Asian residents. But “country” reads red, white and blue — with the emphasis on white.

Sarah Palin’s twangy voice sang the country-music lyrics: this “gal” and those “good ol’ boys” and — my favorite — “snow machine,” which any self-respecting Vermonter knows is the correct term for what city folk refer to as a snowmobile.

But behind the rhetorical banjo pickin’, both Palin and her warm-up act, Rudy Giuliani, tuned in to another channel and let it play faintly in the background: a DJ turning Soulja Boy, perhaps with a little Beethoven mixed in. Barack’s music: urban, brainy and, of course, black.

“We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity and dignity,” Palin quoted “a writer” praising President Harry Truman. Is it the paranoia of a born-and-bred city girl that infers another message: that our big cities grow bad people — duplicitous, cynical and immodest?

Rudy started the scary-city talk by evoking the young Obama cutting his teeth on “Chicago machine politics.” The former prosecutor and mayor cut his own teeth on New York Republican machine politics — and, needless to say, the guy’s got negative backcountry cred. But Rudy could distance his own urban-ness from that of the Democratic candidate. With the Chicago reference he implied entrenched corruption — but also, silently, entrenched black power.

The next bugaboo that crept onstage was the Intellectual, a.k.a. the Elitist. “Washington elite” (would that be her running mate?), spat Palin, the words coated in venom. That bitterness was matched only by her disdain for “reporters and commentators,” those pointy-headed piss-ants crawling over Alaska for clues — how dare they! — about who the vice-presidential candidate is. Rudy, who gargles venom every morning, dipped “Ivy League education” and “cosmopolitan” in poison, too.

And then there was the ridicule Rudy and Sarah heaped on Obama’s experience as a community organizer. Giuliani could barely say the words without dissolving in hilarity. I don’t know about you, but the term “community organizer” brings to mind an image of a black or brown person shaking her fist before an audience on folding chairs in a public housing common room — or, in Rudy’s case, thousands of them, outside City Hall. The former mayor’s laughter was a kind of esprit de l’escalier, a riposte to the organizers and the enraged masses they brought to the streets each time — and there were numerous times — his police department gunned down another unarmed person of color. Now he was talking to “his” people, and his relief came out in irrepressible glee.

Yes, the convention committee had scoured the continent for an African-American Republican to read the Pledge of Allegiance. Yes, Sarah Palin is married to a man who is part Yup’ik Eskimo. But the convention floor looked like a vast suburban country club circa 1956: Ninety-three percent of the delegates were white, with 5 percent Hispanic and 2 percent black. (Among the Democrats in Denver, 65 percent were white, 23 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic.)

While reviving the near-dead culture wars with Sarah Palin’s candidacy, the GOP was also bringing back a tactical chestnut: appealing to the whiteness, and racism, of its core.

It just might work. And then, it might not. Because that attack on community organizers also struck me as the one tone-deaf note in an otherwise pitch-perfect performance. Beyond racism, it revealed the true Republican heart — a heart that is hard to the plight, and dismissive of the collective power, of regular people.

The comment may also expose the party’s Achilles’ heel. Indeed, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe went right for it in an email to supporters the night of Palin’s speech. He referred to the speakers’ mockery of “Barack’s experience . . . on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.” Then Plouffe said: “Let’s clarify something for them right now. Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.”

The community organizer provides a neat metonym of all the Republican Party is antagonistic to. Community has no place in a nation whose only recognized institutions are the family, the corporation and the military. To a party (including John McCain) that cedes unprecedented power to the executive branch and trusts the chief executive officer more than the democratically elected government official, popular organizing is an annoyance, or a threat.

“Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek,” Plouffe continued, reeling off a few of the GOP’s chief victims. “And it’s happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.” Including, one might add, the church basements from which sprang the evangelist Sarah Palin, and where a community of anti-choice, creationist, library-book-censoring sisters and brothers will soon be trying to phone-bank her to the White House.

In Vermont, we know the reality of small-town life. With all its virtues, it is not always honest, sincere or dignified. It can be violent, especially if you are queer or black or come from a trailer park. Small-town government can be petty and self-serving, as was Palin’s Wasilla, Alaska, administration, according to some locals (see www.andrys.com/palin-kilkenny.html).

We also know that small towns and rural landscapes are disappearing, thanks in part to Republican policies, from Big Agriculture-favoring farm policy to free-market favors to sprawl-creating development. If you live in Alaska and your beaches are black with spilled oil or your village is stranded by melted ice, the destruction is dramatic (though not plain, it seems: The Alaskans were yelling loudest when the delegates burst out chanting, “Drill, baby, drill!”).

The country song is as much a eulogy to rural life as a celebration of it. Some lyrics explicitly lament the losses. Those are not the ones Bush-Cheney speechwriter Matthew Scully scripted for Sarah Palin.

Yet, if elected, Palin’s party will make its future ballads even sadder — both for the folks it exalts and the ones it demonizes. The sour notes lie deep in the folksy, feisty melody. And the beauty queen’s smile cannot hide the Barracuda’s white teeth.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.

But, notwithstanding shots of the pre-attack skyline, the dissolving buildings and roaring black clouds, and even of the Earth from a satellite, World Trade Center is anti-panoramic. Its focus is resolutely close-up, in both space and time. Indeed, except for a short TV clip of an impassive George W. Bush and one of a moved, and moving, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the single, interminable day and night the film chronicles might have transpired in Istanbul in 1999, Dresden in 1945 or Pompeii in 79 A.D.

World Trade Center is about two men and two families. Port Authority cops John McGloughlin and Will Jimeno rushed into Tower 1 just as it started to come down and were trapped beneath 20 feet of concrete and steel in a collapsed elevator shaft. While they waited for an improbable rescue, their wives, children and extended families waited, nearly as impotent, in their suburban homes for news — and for the worst.

Stone has been praised for leaving what Time’s Richard Schickel called his “sometimes loopy political opinions” on the cutting-room floor. New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote, admiringly, “In the Sept. 11 of World Trade Center, feeling transcends politics.”

But when the politics-and-history-obsessed Oliver Stone makes the first major film about the signal event in modern American political history and leaves out politics and history, he’s telling us something. Intentionally or not, Stone is clueing us in to the ways September 11 has been interpreted and reproduced — shot, edited and screened — for public consumption. Like American politics since Reagan, this most global of public events has been shrunk to a collection of family tragedies. And the feelings we are encouraged — even permitted — to have are private.

From the first hours, the Bushies have done their best to shape the 9/11 Experience into a collective emotion. They call it “patriotism.” But patriotism does not mean, to them, participation in the public forum of democracy or defense of the nation. It means keeping our heads down and our mouths shut while the police round up “suspects” (14,000 at last count). It means tending our own gardens while we trust a secretive, all-powerful cabal in the Oval Office to defend the “homeland” — and, of course, to “protect our children.”

The chief emotion necessary for this passive consent is terror, which is produced by the War on Terror in order to justify the means of defeating it. Terror of an enemy who is allegedly everywhere, though, is a strangely private feeling: You experience it, by yourself, while boarding a plane or watching TV at home. It’s also a feeling antagonistic to resistance or action, which, after all, would entail leaving our fortresses and going out into the street. Who would do that when suicide bombers are lurking in every public place?

Unauthorized emotions (or thoughts) that leak out are swiftly censured. The week after the attacks, Susan Sontag suggested in The New Yorker that our grief should not make us “stupid.” Precisely when they should be thinking self-critically about why the U.S. is despised by much of the world, she wrote, our public officials set themselves the opposite task: national “confidence-building and grief management.” Politics — “which entails disagreement, which promotes candor — has been replaced by psychotherapy.”

Perhaps psychotherapy was the wrong word. Sedation is more like it. Or civil commitment. Sontag was roundly denounced as a wingnut, even a terrorist sympathizer.

How were we to feel about the September 11 victims? We were not only to pity but to admire them. Within days they were “heroes,” within weeks nearly saints. The Times ran a series of mini-eulogies. Each subject was good, each beloved. The sexist brats on the trading floor were rewritten as fun-loving scamps; the boring accountants ran quiet and deep. Every Little League coach deserved to be admitted to the Hall of Parental Fame.

And what could we do to demonstrate our solidarity? Our leaders offered the most private, inward, “family-centered” of acts: Go shopping!

While citizenship was reduced to consumerism, loss would be translated to household economics. But if the Times was mourning each aborted life equally, the federal 9/11 Compensation Fund was calculating its value in potential future earnings. Stockbrokers were worth more than busboys, and only “real” families qualified. Not until 2003 did the fund approve a payment to the female partner of a woman killed at the Pentagon.

As things are going, we may be unable even to remember collectively. At Ground Zero, the monument is hopelessly tangled in the domestic squabbles of the 9/11 Families. Intended as a place of public remembrance, it will be a vast family cemetery plot.

And now comes World Trade Center the film, the first serious popular-culture eulogy. Should we be surprised that it is not about terrorism or even terror, but about specific, personal fear? Not about ideology or religion (though Jesus makes an appearance, looking like a large halogen bulb shining in the viewer’s eyes), nor about capitalism, militarism or patriotism? Not about the world, the United States or even, really, New York City?

Like the official story of 9/11, the film is about faith in family and fidelity in love, especially marital love. About to succumb to death, Officer McLoughlin is saved by a vision of his wife, floating above him, sexily nagging him to finish the kitchen renovation.

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I watched World Trade Center alone in an empty theater. I cringed each time the rubble rained down on the buried men, shook with frustration when the families were given false information, wept when they were reunited. Then I emerged into an empty lobby and onto the treeless Maple Tree Place mall. As if a neutron bomb had dropped, there was no trace of human life except for the chain stores and restaurants.

But I didn’t feel like shopping, or even talking to a waiter to give him my order. I had had a satisfying consumer experience. I had “felt” 9/11 — in private.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.