Cathy Horyn on all things fashion.
February 7, 2007
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- Suspension Training
Thomas McDonald for The New York TimesA GOOD WORKOUT At gyms across the country suspension training is gaining. Above, a class with TRX straps at Crunch in San Francisco.
Darcy Padilla for The New York TimesKurt Dasbach, the creator of Inkaflexx straps, with Kathy Lee Bickham at Equinox in Darien, Conn.
Suspension Training: How Risky Is It?
NAVY Seals are legendary for their tiptop physical condition, but have you ever wondered how they stay fighting fit out in the field?
Aaron Baldwin, 43, who retired in December as a master chief in the Seals, used to make barbells out of nothing more than plastic milk jugs, fresh concrete and a sturdy tree branch.
“We’d make one weight and use it until we had to move and start over,” Mr. Baldwin said.
Things changed in 2002, when a Navy Seal turned entrepreneur sent Mr. Baldwin a test model of the TRX system, a suspension gadget made of a pair of straps with handles joined by a metal clasp ring. To set it up, he only had to wrap the straps around a freestanding pole or over a thick branch. Strength training became as simple as placing his feet in stirrups to suspend them off the ground, then performing dozens of exercises like knee tucks or pushups.
After 45 minutes of so-called suspension training, Mr. Baldwin exhausted his body from shoulders to calves using just the 170 pounds of his weight. Better yet, the two-pound straps rolled up to the size of a military bag lunch.
In the last year suspension training has entered the mainstream after two kinds of straps landed on the market: TRX and Inkaflexx. They have attracted the attention of personal trainers and group fitness directors as strengthening tools that also improve balance and flexibility. Suspension workouts consist of either hanging the legs or leaning back while gripping the straps and then performing a variety of moves.
The beauty of suspension training, its advocates say, is that you can’t help engaging your core to steady yourself. On the other hand, critics warn that the instability of suspension straps can result in injury, especially if you have a history of joint or back injuries, or inadequate core strength.
Personal trainers use TRX equipment at over 1,000 gyms nationwide, according to Fitness Anywhere, its maker. Roughly 10,000 $150 sets of straps have been shipped.
Group classes for suspension devotees have begun to crop up nationwide. At Crunch, a class called BodyWeb With TRX is in full swing at two San Francisco outposts, and so is a pilot class featuring Inkaflexx equipment at Equinox in Darien, Conn. By mid-March, Equinox plans to offer TRX or Inkaflexx classes in Boston, Los Angeles and a new Manhattan club on Park Avenue. This summer, Life Time Fitness will add suspension training classes at a handful of its 60 locations in 16 states.
“It’s like yoga on ropes because it takes a lot of balance,” said Mark Undercoffler, 32, a public relations executive in San Francisco, who has attended the Crunch BodyWeb class for three months. “The TRX works every part of your body in 50 minutes, especially your core. It’s the quickest way to get a cardio and muscle workout in less than an hour. I sweat as much in BodyWeb as I do in spin class.”
The BodyWeb With TRX class — which involves lunges, chest presses and one-legged squats to high-energy dance music — is so fast paced that some say it amounts to a cardiovascular workout. At Equinox a mellower class called Inka focuses more on flexibility. To Andean flute music, participants are led through a series of stretches and a handful of strength-training moves.
Suspension training is having a moment partly because some trainers and clients are bored with the ubiquitous balance equipment like stability balls. Interest in suspension straps is also high because a theory called functional training has been making slow but steady inroads in the fitness business. It advocates strengthening muscles synergistically, rather than in isolation.
“With so much emphasis put on core and functional training, the timing is right” for suspension training, said Kathie Davis, the executive director of IDEA Health and Fitness Association, a trade group. “It has staying power because it has good education and programming behind it. Usually the trends that come and go are the ones that don’t have good educators putting together interesting programs to go with the equipment.”
Randy Hetrick, the inventor of TRX straps, and his company, Fitness Anywhere, have developed over 300 exercises and taught 200 personal trainers and instructors in daylong seminars. After taking one, Susane Pata, a group fitness director at Crunch, designed the BodyWeb class.
Not everyone agrees that suspension training is appropriate for the masses.
Fabio Comana, a research scientist at the nonprofit American Council on Exercise, said that it might be valuable for well-conditioned athletes and gymgoers who regularly train their core, the muscles closest to their spine. But at best it is inappropriate for people who haven’t built up their core and at worst is potentially dangerous for them. “A segment of the population doesn’t have joint integrity and the ability to stabilize their entire body,” he said. So instead of using their core, they use the wrong muscles, aggravating their risk for injury.
Mr. Comana, who has a master’s degree in exercise physiology, added, “I don’t mean to doubt it, because I do like it, and I’ve been using it for the last year.” But he counts himself among the experienced athletes who stand to benefit from the straps.
Walter Thompson, a professor of kinesiology at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who reviewed instructional videos of TRX exercises, sees benefits but also risk. “My impression is that this would be effective for a small group of highly fit men and women,” Dr. Thompson said. “But I see potential for muscular, skeletal and joint injuries. Particularly hyperextension of wrists, elbows, shoulders, ankles and knees.”
Fraser Quelch, the director of education at Fitness Anywhere, disagreed. To avoid injury, he suggested that deconditioned users perform moves with one leg behind the other, reducing instability.
Advocates of suspension training also say that adjusting body position can make movements easier. For example, standing at 90 degrees and holding TRX straps keeps upper-body exercises manageable.
Mr. Baldwin, who spent five years in the service teaching recruits conditioning and combat skills, said, “It’s easy to do a pushup with your hands against a wall, and it’s a lot harder to do one on the ground.” Suspension training, he added, “allows you to do exercises at every angle between the two.”
Kurt Dasbach, the creator of Inkaflexx, argues that its trapezelike design — straps hanging from a wall joined by a bar — makes it inherently a bit more stable. “Inkaflexx is secured to the wall or ceiling by two anchors, so you’re not countering instability in every direction,” said Mr. Dasbach, a personal trainer at Equinox. “As a result, it makes a lot of the movements accessible for many people because it offers more stability than the TRX.”
In a decade of working with Michael Carson, a personal trainer at Pro Gym in Brentwood, Calif., Jennifer Roth has tried dozens of new new things like stability balls and resistance cords. But Ms. Roth, 42, a carpet designer, said she likes the suspension strap best. “There’s always something new and more advanced you can bring to it, whether that is trying a new move or simply making it more difficult by changing your body angle,” said Ms. Roth, a college gymnast and swimmer. She has used TRX twice a week since July and credits it for leaner muscles and increased strength in her obliques.
The two systems on the market differ in design, not least because they are products of starkly different hothouses. Mr. Hetrick was a Navy Seal squadron commander in the late 1990s, when he created the first prototype of TRX out of parachute webbing and a carabiner ring.
“We were deploying throughout Bosnia and Southeast Asia in submarines, ships, warehouses and safe houses, all of these space-constrained environments where it’s hard to do well-rounded training,” he said.
In 2005, four years after he left the service, Mr. Hetrick began marketing his product to the fitness business. Coincidentally, Mr. Dasbach created a similar apparatus inspired by his years as a professional soccer player in Chile, where a coach tied ropes to a wall to help players stretch.
Marke Rubenstein, 53, an advertising executive in Stamford, Conn., was intimidated when she first saw the Inkaflexx straps. “I’m not very athletic and I’m not great in various difficult yoga poses, but I feel very comfortable with this,” she said after six visits to Mr. Dasbach’s class. “It’s challenging but not too difficult, and I can always modify the straps to make them work for me.”
- Citizen Anna Wintour
Hope Gangloff
Diane Bondareff/Associated PressPOWER CENTER Anna Wintour watching the proceedings of Fashion Week in New York.
Citizen Anna
New Blog: On the RunwayIF there is one thing that no one doubts about Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, it is her power. To many she is the dominant figure in the fashion world, her influence greater than any contemporary editor and running close to a press baron, because she has sought through her magazine and its spinoffs to set the agenda for an industry and through her civic causes, like the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to influence the cultural life of New York.
And to millions of people to whom her power is less real (who know her only in connection with “The Devil Wears Prada”) she is also a symbol: the small cross-armed woman in the front row, inscrutable behind her dark glasses and self-protecting English bob, her effect equal parts terrifying and calm, like the center of the storm she has dominated for 19 years.
For as much as Ms. Wintour, 57, is scrutinized, her deal-making within the fashion industry is one activity that has received scant attention. In recent years she has gone beyond the editorial domain and involved herself in the placement of designers at fashion houses. Her efforts fall across a spectrum of involvement, from outright pitching the name of a person she likes to a chief executive, to putting her weight behind a pending decision, to effectively make a marriage.
She instigated the deal last year between the men’s designer Thom Browne and Brooks Brothers, cultivating in a virtually unknown talent the idea of a larger audience and then urging the company’s chief executive, Claudio Del Vecchio, to give him a chance. “She put a lot of pressure on me,” Mr. Del Vecchio said. “She’d say, ‘I think there’s something here. Please keep talking.’ ”
This fall, Mr. Browne’s designs will be in 90 Brooks Brothers stores — and, presumably, of course, in Vogue.
Ms. Wintour has also been busy trying to find a new employer for Phoebe Philo, the English star who left Chloé in 2005. Last May, Ms. Wintour invited Ms. Philo to a lunch in New York with François-Henri Pinault, the chief executive of PPR, the French luxury-goods group that owns brands like Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga.
“It was quite simple,” Mr. Pinault said of the lunch. “She thought it would be interesting for me to meet Phoebe.” He made it clear that PPR had no vacancies and no plans to start new labels. Nonetheless, Ms. Wintour pressed Ms. Philo’s case in a later conversation, and Mr. Pinault said he expects her to do the same this week, when they meet in New York, to discuss the spring Costume Institute gala, of which Balenciaga is a sponsor.
“She’s not too pushy,” Mr. Pinault said. “From my point of view, it’s a very positive way of demonstrating her power. She lets you know it’s not a problem if you can’t do something she wants. But she makes you understand that if you could, she would be very supportive with her magazine. She really makes you understand that.”
Since the days of Diana Vreeland and John Fairchild, the former publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, fashion editors have been regarded not only as journalists but as boosters for the industry. Without actually knowing whether an editor was advising a designer or telling the buyer at Macy’s to order more blue shirts, readers assumed they were.
Then, in the buying frenzy of the 1990s, when nearly every big Paris house changed hands, editors like Ms. Wintour and Patrick McCarthy, Mr. Fairchild’s successor, found themselves with even more influence over the industry. The new corporate owners, like Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, had come from the worlds of real estate, finance and timber. Important editors found themselves consulting about everything from the meaning of grunge to the importance of individual designers. “I think Arnault asked a lot of people about Marc,” Mr. McCarthy said, referring to the designer Marc Jacobs, now at Louis Vuitton. “I don’t think he knew his reputation.”
MS. Wintour, though, has used her influence more purposefully than anyone else: as a dealmaker. She seemed, in fact, to grasp that the arrival of the luxury moguls was an opportunity to scrape years of French dust off fashion, and make them pay for exciting new talent.
In the mid ’90s, she got an executive at Paine Webber to help John Galliano, propelling him permanently onto the Paris stage. She helped Mr. Jacobs early in his career, getting Donald Trump to lend him a ballroom at the Plaza Hotel when Mr. Jacobs and his partner, Robert Duffy, had no money for a show. During the Vuitton negotiations she continually pressed Mr. Jacobs’s case with Mr. Arnault. “She would say, ‘What do you need me to do.’ ” Mr. Duffy said. “I would say, ‘When your have lunch with Mr. Arnault, will you put in a good word.’ I don’t know what Anna said or did not say.”
Ms. Wintour, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is a woman of seemingly limitless energy and a famously short attention span, who prefers to have her threats delivered by a lieutenant. (“Do you want me to go to Anna with this?” is a typical line, according to fashion publicists.)
In more recent years she has made young designers her mission. This could be her legacy as an editor, though it may be a mixed one. She helped lay the groundwork for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, which, after years of industry lip service, provides the first practical support for young talent. But many fashion insiders and critics feel that by promoting labels of dubious design merit but with an obvious social or power connection, like Georgina Chapman of Marchesa, whose companion is the producer Harvey Weinstein, she leaves herself open to the complaint that her magazine promotes a kind of a pedantry.
This becomes a danger when she attempts to make a match. The chief executive of a top European house, who recently had a spot to fill, said he was surprised by the names she proposed, characterizing one as a socialite. “The woman had designed maybe 10 dresses in her life,” said the executive, who, like a number of the nearly two dozen people interviewed for this article, requested anonymity because of his relationship with Ms. Wintour.
How much one objects to this kind of influence depends on how much one is able to grasp the totality of Ms. Wintour’s activities. Her efforts are widely seen as being for the general good of the industry. People who know her well say her motives are selfless and that her power is really concentrated on her magazines.
“Anna is not Machiavellian,” said Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair. Mr. Lagerfeld agreed: “She’s honest. She tells you what she thinks. Yes is yes and no is no.”
In spite of the bitterness she felt at seeing her friend Tom Ford leave Gucci, and in spite of telling Mr. Pinault that he was making a terrible mistake to let him go, Mr. Pinault said she remained supportive of Gucci.
But you don’t have to doubt Ms. Wintour’s integrity to see the danger of too much influence. You just have to look at the magazine and its three spinoffs (Teen Vogue, Men’s Vogue, Vogue Living), at the tendency to feature the same socialites and pretty dresses, in the same perfect settings, and then imagine what the implications would be if she could also determine where designers worked.
Candy Pratts Price, the executive fashion director of Style.com, the Web site for Vogue and W, said Vogue’s editors now attempt to “place” clothes on socialites and other prominent women year-round, not just for the Costume Institute gala. That is, they arrange favored designers to lend dresses for public appearances. The pictures will run in Vogue, as well as in other magazines, reinforcing the importance of those designers. Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys, says she thinks women are more influenced today by party pictures than by editorial spreads of models. “It’s the People magazine-US Weekly syndrome,” she said.
“Everyone wants to see what people are wearing.” Ms. Price said, “You can look at it as a good thing or a bad thing, but Anna has her finger in it.” From the magazine’s perspective, she said, a virtue of placement is that you can control how the clothes will be exposed. “The end result is that Anna can control it all the way to the selling floor,” Ms. Price said.
In its use of franchising and product placement and its glamorous, if predictable, formula, Vogue resembles the Hollywood blockbuster. “Nobody else is doing that, and I don’t think anyone has done that in the history of fashion magazines,” Mr. McCarthy said of the clothes placement. He added, “I don’t think Vreeland had that kind of concentration. She wouldn’t have dressed Babe Paley. Nor would Babe Paley have let her.”
The truth is, for good or bad, Ms. Wintour has identified the prime cultural coordinates — the compliant, publicity-seeking socialite, the obsession with money, the struggling young designer, the deterioration of old aesthetics and the rise of the luxury-goods tycoon — and aimed Vogue straight at them. “I believe that Anna opened her arms to the big global picture before anyone else did,” said Stan Herman, the former president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America.
At the same time, she has the readiness of an old-fashioned ward boss. She puts people in her due by making herself and the services of her magazine available to them.
Yet, according to any number of chief executives and designers, she does not extract advertising for editorial favors and, unlike a number of her counterparts in Europe, she does not run a side business as a consultant to fashion houses. Long before “The Devil Wears Prada,” her office (which has three executive assistants) was famous for its exotic efficiency. It comes as a surprise to people to have their phone calls returned immediately, to receive dossiers on the latest actresses (as she did for the designer Stefano Pilati) or to hear a rather shy but crisp English voice say, hurriedly, “What can I do to help?”
IF it sometimes seems that the runways in New York — and, by extension, the fashion pages of American Vogue — reflect a homogeneous, vaguely timid point of view, it’s understandable.
“No one says no to her,” Mr. Roberts said. “And, in a weird way, it’s not her fault.”
Lacking mortal patience, Ms. Wintour is unlikely to help people who feel intimated by her, but at least by her efforts she can show them worlds that might have been unavailable to them, and maybe, in the process, allow them to see her as Shelley plain. “I don’t understand what people are scared of,” Ms. Price said. “That they’re going to have a lesser relationship with Anna? I think they want to be closer, but they don’t know how.”
Many talented American designers, notably Isabel Toledo and Alice Roi, have tended to keep themselves apart from Vogue, with no loss to their reputations, while others, like Derek Lam, imagined they needed some kind of school pass. “I was waiting for the call to be summoned to her office,” Mr. Lam said with a laugh. “I thought it was so pretentious to call Anna.”
Next week, Ms. Toledo will present her first collection for Anne Klein during Fashion Week, and Mr. Lam, in addition to having his own label, is now creative director of Tod’s, the Italian leather-goods house. Ms. Price believes that exposure from the Fashion Fund brought them these opportunities.
And Ms. Wintour thinks that Tod’s is right for Mr. Lam, too. But initially she wasn’t sure he was ready for the position. “I got the blank look,” said Ms. Price when she told Ms. Wintour that Diego Della Valle, the owner of Tod’s, wanted to work with Mr. Lam. “I think Anna believed that Derek hadn’t yet achieved a signature look in his own line.”
Indeed, as Mr. Lam acknowledged, this was her criticism during a Fashion Fund interview. “She said: ‘I don’t know what Derek Lam is about. Tell me what your focus is,’ ” he recalled. “Her advice was very concrete.”
It turns out that Ms. Wintour can say no. Maybe because corporate executives tend to know that the real power in fashion rests with the people who control the money, they don’t see a downside to her influence. “I don’t feel I owe her anything, or that she owes me anything,” Mr. Del Vecchio of Brooks Brothers said, adding: “It’s the passion that motivates her.
- The Shelf Life of Socialites
Todd Williamson/FilmMagic.comSEE AND BE SEEN Sitting pretty and seated prominently at a fashion show last week are, from left, Annelise Peterson, Byrdie Bell and Olivia Palermo.
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The Shelf Life of Socialites: For Some, Shorter Than a Mini
Shockingly, there was a fashion show this week to which Tinsley Mortimer was not invited. To be honest, there were a few.
“She’s past the point!” declared Kristian Laliberte, a fashion publicist and self-appointed arbiter of New York socialites, as he finalized the guest list for the show of Yigal Azrouël, a designer attempting to woo the socialite in-crowd. “She’s becoming Paris Hilton!”
Oh, dear. Not invited.
In previous Fashion Weeks, Ms. Mortimer, she of the dangling Goldilocks ringlets, was the cat’s meow of the latest generation of young women to become celebrities of New York society. But the makeup of the front rows seems to be changing with the seasons, with a turnover so fast as to suggest that modern It Girls, following the classic model of Edie Sedgwick, are suddenly as replaceable as factory parts.
As Ms. Mortimer must know by her press clippings or from the snide remarks about her on Web sites dedicated to her lot, the job of socialite today requires a thick skin and a careful attention to the risks of overexposure. Over the weekend, as was gleefully noted on one blog, a photographer misidentified Ms. Mortimer as Tatum O’Neal. Ouch. The cats in the second row have their claws out.
“I try not to read that,” Ms. Mortimer said on her way into the Oscar de la Renta show, where the ring of photographers around her suggested that her stock has hardly fallen to junk status. “Sometimes they can be a little hurtful. People who write about us try to make it seem like we’re all fighting, like it’s high school, but it’s not that way.”
Nevertheless, as the traditional barriers to becoming a socialite — a pedigree, say — disappear, anyone who can wear a designer dress well enough to attract the attention of Patrick McMullan can become one. This happened to Olivia Palermo, 20, who is a junior at the New School. Through family friends, she was invited last April to a Sotheby’s auction, where Mr. McMullan, the ubiquitous party photographer, took her snapshot, which he posted online; she was then invited to more parties, had more pictures taken, and last month she was hired to appear in advertisements for a dress collection called Hollywould. So Ms. Palermo had been invited to make the Fashion Week rounds: Anait Bian, Linda Loudermilk, Ruffian, Jackie Rogers and more.
Despite Ms. Palermo’s ubiquity this season, Michael Kors, an expert on socialites, said he had not heard of her. Not invited.
“It’s the same as an actor,” Mr. Kors said. “You don’t want to come out with six movies in a year. You pick and choose what’s important.”
And now that many socialites have products to promote, or appear to be promoting themselves, something of a backlash has arisen. Socialites of the classic mold play a more important role when acting as clients of designers — meaning paying for their clothes — rather than as commercials. They are objective.
“They are the best barometer of whether or not something is really fabulous,” said Mr. Kors, who is expecting a mix at his show today that includes Ms. Mortimer, Jamee Gregory and Cece Cord. “Quite honestly, they’ve worn a lot of things. It’s fun to get the feedback from those women. Now you have everything from a socialite-slash-doctor to a socialite-slash-business person.”
Anyway, it is becoming difficult to determine just which ones belong to which designer, who’s in, who’s out, who cares. On Monday, the Daily, which is kind of a yearbook of Fashion Week, offered a field guide for recognizing the next wave, which includes the children of magazine editors and fashion executives, as well as a daughter of the French prime minister — a lot of women with long wavy hair to keep straight.
“In the relevancy of everything, socialites are the lowest in priority,” said the designer Phillip Lim, who invited only one to his show on Sunday night, Amanda Brooks, whom he likened to the other socialite Edie, the one from “Grey Gardens.” (She has “pedigree without prudence,” he said.) “They go against what I do as a designer,” he said. “In an ideal world, I’d say, ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ But we can’t.”
At Mr. Azrouël’s show on Friday, there in one row was Fabiola Beracasa, a jewelry executive-slash-socialite; Derek Blasberg, a freelance writer-slash-socialite; Annelise Peterson, a publicist-slash-socialite; Byrdie Bell, an actress-slash-socialite; Ms. Palermo, the college student-slash-socialite; and Luigi Tadini, also a jewelry executive-slash-socialite whose trademark is an artfully wrapped scarf. One moved seats to be closer to the cameras. Another was displeased. “She’s dead to me,” that one said.
“Suddenly, there is a boom of interest in what is this creature, the social girl,” Ms. Beracasa said later that afternoon at the BCBG show, where she was joined by Ms. Bell, Ms. Palermo and Bettina Zilkha, an author-slash-socialite.
Ms. Beracasa is writing a blog about going to the shows for New York magazine, which partly explains her omnipresence, although she did not mind announcing that she had not been invited to the Marc Jacobs show and would have liked to have been. The new socialites, unlike the old socialites, are more like dress deposit boxes in the bank of designer publicity; Mr. Jacobs doesn’t need it.
By the time Ms. Beracasa arrived at Diane Von Furstenberg’s show on Sunday, she had been to several more shows, Bungalow 8 and elsewhere. She was wearing a black leather wrap dress by the designer and big heavy sunglasses to hide her eyes. “I wish they were bigger,” she said. Wasn’t Ms. Beracasa worried that someone might disparage her?
“It comes with the territory,” she said. “A lot of people are misrepresented all over the world. There’s a way to avoid that. Don’t go out.”
- Federal Holidays 2007
Monday, January 1
New Year’s Day
Monday, January 15
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Monday, February 19*
Washington’s Birthday
Monday, May 28
Memorial Day
Wednesday, July 4
Independence Day
Monday, September 3
Labor Day
Monday, October 8
Columbus Day
Monday, November 12**
Veterans Day
Thursday, November 22
Thanksgiving Day
Tuesday, December 25
Christmas Day
COMMENTLOST LOVEIssue of 2006-09-11
Posted 2006-09-04After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001—five short years ago, five long years ago—a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity. Here in New York, and in similarly bereaved Washington, that solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance. In certain regions of the country, New York had been regarded (and resented) as somehow not quite part of America; that conceit, not shared by the terrorists, vanished in the fire and dust of the Twin Towers. The reconciliation was mutual. In SoHo and the Upper West Side, in the Village and the Bronx, sidewalk crowds cheered every flag-bedecked fire engine, and the Stars and Stripes sprouted from apartment windows all over town. New York, always suspect as the nation’s polyglot-plutocratic portal, was now its battered, bloody shield.
The wider counterpart to our traumatized togetherness at home was an astonishing burst abroad of what can only be called pro-Americanism. Messages of solidarity and indignation came from Libya and Syria as well as from Germany and Israel; flowers and funeral wreaths piled up in front of American Embassies from London to Beijing; flags flew at half-staff across Europe; in Iran, a candlelight vigil expressed sympathy. “Any remnants of neutrality thinking, of our traditional balancing act, have gone out of the window now,” a Swedish political scientist told Reuters. “There has not been the faintest shadow of doubt, not a trace of hesitation of where we stand, nowhere in Sweden.” Le Monde’s front-page editorial was headlined NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS, and Italy’s Corriere della Sera echoed, “We are all Americans. The distance from the United States no longer exists because we, our values, are also in the crosshairs of evil minds.” In Brussels, the ambassadors of the nineteen members of NATO invoked, for the first time in the alliance’s fifty-two-year history, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, affirming that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and pledging action, “including the use of armed force.”
No one realistically expected that the mood of fellow-feeling and coöperation would long persist in the extraordinarily powerful form it took in the immediate wake of September 11th. The normal divisions of American politics and society were bound to make themselves felt again, and whatever the United States did in response to the attacks would provoke the tensions and misunderstandings that inevitably accompany the actions of a superpower in distress, no matter how deft its diplomacy or thorough its consultations. But it was natural to hope that domestic divisions would prove less rancorous in the face of the common danger, and that international frictions could be minimized in a struggle against what almost every responsible leader in the world recognized, or claimed to recognize, as an assault on civilization itself.
What few expected was how comprehensively that initial spirit would be ruined by the policies and the behavior of our government, culminating in, though hardly limited to, the disastrous occupation of Iraq. This shouldn’t have been so surprising. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” one who recognized that government was not the enemy, praised bipartisanship, proclaimed his intention to “change the tone in Washington,” and advocated a foreign policy of humility and respect. None of that happened. Nine months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring the budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the demands of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by contempt for international instruments (the Kyoto protocol, the anti-ballistic-missile treaty) and the abandonment of diplomatic responsibilities (the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear activities, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate) had pushed Bush’s job ratings lower than those of any of his predecessors at a like point in their tenures. September 11th offered him a chance for a new beginning, and at first he seemed willing to seize it. Although the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was not as widely backed at first as is often assumed (particularly among many on the European left and some on the American), it is now almost universally supported in the Western world, with some forty countries involved and NATO troops carrying an increasing share of the military burden. But then came a reversion to form, and Iraq.
In “America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked,” based on ninety-one thousand interviews conducted in fifty nations from 2002 to 2005 by the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes write that while “the first hints that the world was becoming troubled by America came soon after the election of George W. Bush,” and that “whatever global goodwill the United States had in the wake of the September 11 attacks appears to have quickly dissipated,” after the Iraq invasion “favorable opinions had more than slipped. They had plummeted.” It’s grown worse since May, when the book was published. The most recent Pew findings show that “favorable opinions of the U.S.” have gone from eighty-three per cent in 2000 to fifty-six per cent in 2006 in Britain, seventy-eight to thirty-seven in Germany, and sixty-two to thirty-nine in France. The majorities saying that the Iraq war has made the world more dangerous are equally impressive: sixty per cent in Britain, sixty-six in Germany, and seventy-six in France. On this point, the United States is catching up. The most recent CNN poll, taken in late August, found fifty-five per cent of Americans saying that the Iraq war has made them less safe from terrorism.
Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war’s opponents (a category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed, sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism. President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign, granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men, shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.” Bush’s reply:
Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.
And so we have. Not by paying “a lot of taxes,” of course; we pay less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. “The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,” John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a couple of days after Bush’s interview. “This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.” That’s a sacrifice. And here’s another: our country’s reputation.
