Twenty-Two

 Nine-Eleven

(Redux of a post originally published in September, 2010)

On November 22, 1963, I was outside for a 10:00AM break between classes at my Junior High School when it was announced the next class would begin prematurely. Immediately. We were told to sit quietly at our desks. When asked, our teacher told us nervously that President Kennedy had been shot.

After a few minutes, the school's public address system was broadcasting CBS' radio network, announcing the shooting of JFK in Dallas.  After a few minutes, someone -- probably the principal --  placed the PA system microphone next to the speaker of a television set; we heard what I now know to be the audio portion of Walter Cronkite on CBS television, announcing the President's death.

Where were you when JFK was shot? A standard question a large number of Americans (now discarded as 'Useless Boomers') have asked each other, due to the magnitude of the event and because it was shared in real-time by the primary media of the early 1960's -- radio and television.

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So, September 11th, 2001: Where were you on 9-11? I had gotten up to go to work around 5:30AM here in California, and turned on KQED-FM's NPR news. Getting out of the shower just before 6:00, I heard a report that a "plane" appeared to have crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

I lived briefly in Manhattan in the late 70's and had seen just how huge those buildings were -- and to me, "a plane" meant a small aircraft; a Cessna, or something similar. I remembered: sometime after WW2, a B-25 flying through dense fog over Manhattan had ploughed directly into the Empire State Building. A similar incident at the WTC would be tragic, I thought; but an accident, and on the other side of the continent. 

NPR suddenly updated its report, using the words "jet aircraft" -- which immediately moved the entire event from a tragically wayward Cessna into the category of Well-This-Was-No-Boating-Accident.

Turning on CNN, I sat watching an image of the WTC towers from the roof of CNN's Manhattan headquarters, roughly two miles away. Both towers looked like chimneys, topped by boiling clouds of grey-black smoke drifting away at an angle into a clear, morning sky. 

Aaron Brown was reporting, taking phone calls directed from witnesses in the vicinity -- only one of whom, the doorman at the World Trade Centers Marriott, was close enough to report on anything immediate and consequential. 

A CNN-affiliate local news helicopter, hovering over the Hudson, provided an extended telephoto shot of the façade of the Tower on fire; I looked at the pattern of the cladding of the building, a huge, black gash angled across it. 

Occasionally, I saw clouds of small white shapes fluttering in the smoke, like flocks of birds, swirling -- and realized they were sheets of paper, ream after ream of it, drifting out of the building's broken windows. 

Just as that thought registered, at the extreme right-hand edge of the screen, I saw a darker object drop quickly, straight down and out of frame. It took a second; less. I didn't know then, but I had just seen one of roughly two hundred people who fell or jumped that morning from the Towers' upper floors.

The Falling Man: Photograph By Richard Drew / AP

Images Like This Were Broadcast And Published

In Europe, But Not America (Photo: UK Telegraph, 2001)

By the time I had sit down, two airliners had slammed into the WTC towers. Aside from profane shock, the only thing I recall thinking was, This is what it had been like, standing at the curb in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, watching the Archduke Franz Ferdinand being shot. This is history. 

I've seen large explosions and been in crazy environments, but the scale of what I was watching made it all seem unreal; special effects. I sat in the armchair, watching, as first the South, then the North towers collapsed (Wikipedia's timeline of the events puts that at 6:59 and 7:28 AM PDST, respectively). News of a third plane crashing into the Pentagon was broadcast; I began flipping back and forth between networks for coverage. 

Finally, I left to make my way to work on mass transit. On a BART train, I was amazed at the languid attitudes of the crowd of commuters -- reading books and newspapers, a few tapping on laptops and Blackberries -- as if it were just another Tuesday morning. People were subdued; there was literally no conversation about what had just occurred.

Work closed down at Noon. At a friend's, we sat watching CNN -- clips of the second Tower being struck, and of each one collapsing, were replayed endlessly.  I made a few phone calls, primarily to The Last Of The Old Unit ("Fuckin' glad we're not eighteen right now," one observed). 

We were all expecting more information, something to provide a larger context to everything seen that day. We also knew we weren't going to get it -- the dice had been rolled, and we wouldn't find any clarification until they had bounced off the back of the craps table and come to rest. 

The dice are still bouncing. They haven't stopped yet. They never really will -- like Gavrilo Princip, shooting the Archduke, the dice which were rolled that day haven't stopped yet, either. That's how history works. 

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That was September 11th -- a red line on the American calendar, the culmination of so many threads in our history going back to 1898 and 1917, the choices successive administrations have made since deciding to follow an Imperial course.

I remembered another image from this same period, within a day or two of the attacks: video of an Iranian soccer pre-game event, where both teams playing sang 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. I've looked for the footage, but AI sucks and Google sucks. I still know what I saw.

A gesture like that would only have been allowed with permission of the Iranian Powers That Be, and it was only a gesture -- costs nothing for forty teenagers to sing a song. But gestures can lead to actual events.

The 9-11 attacks could have been another kind of defining moment for America. Our government and institutions could have seized the opportunity to press for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy; the long breach with Iran; our over-reliance on the House of Saud. We could have opened a dialog with others, rather than dictate to them.

Lil' Boots, 2004 Republican Convention: Feared And Bigger Than His Daddy, At Last

This photograph exudes more punk-ass cravenness than any I've ever seen.

It was a crossroads moment. Our choices mattered. But, the government was run by men who had no interest in anything except power (personal, partisan, and financial) and policies that meant the use of force in furthering that power.  

This is what America got for allowing the Scalia Court to appoint "Lil' Boots" Bush as President of the United States -- a man who surrounded himself with Project For A New American Century neo-imperialists. 

Within hours of Bush's inauguration on January 20, 2001, they were sitting in the White House, discussing how to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was a foregone conclusion. And, after 9-11, what else could we have expected from Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld? From Rove, DeLay, Limbaugh and the Murdochs?

September 11th: An Excuse

And, they believed it would be 'Roses All The Way', 'Greeted As Liberators' ... so, no one planned for occupation, or fighting an insurgency for seven years; or for the effect on individual soldiers of multiple redeployments and 'stop-loss' denials of separation. They never conceived of failure; therefore, it wouldn't happen. The arrogance behind this conceptualization is stunning.

It was an utterly unnecessary, even illegal invasion of Iraq, supported by intelligence about WMD's invented by right-wing operatives to create a causis beli, and pushed by sociopathic egos 'journalists' like Little Judy Miller, and pundits like David Brooks and William Kristol, and Little Tommy Friedman, to name only a few. How eagerly they jumped on the War bandwagon; so good for their careers.

Palettes Of $100 Bills, Baghdad, 2003 (Photo: UK Guardian)

And let's not forget the $12 Billion in cash (at least; no one really knows), piles of U.S. currency shrink-wrapped and paletted and airlifted to Iraq. 363 tons of it. Some $9 billion of that cash simply can't be accounted for.  But, there was plenty of money to be made from the war, and tax breaks to the wealthy. It was a good time to be part of the Carlyle Group -- a founder of which was George H. W. Bush, who gave the Group its intimate connection to the House of Saud.

But, Lil' Boots kept talking about cutting Medicare, privatizing Social Security; cut any social programs which made real the pact between government and citizens that was at the heart of FDR's New Deal... because, Bush claimed, there was just no money to pay for that. Because of the war, you see.

And there was Guantanamo, CIA 'black airlines' flying suspected terrorists to secret prisons, and the extra-legal, secret program of 'renditions'. Let's not forget Abu Ghirab. Let's not forget people like John Woo, whose written opinions created what he still claims is a "legal" basis for torture as national policy.

Civilian Casualty Of Baghdad Suicide Car Bomb, 2007

And what followed wasn't just secret prisons and a lack of due process for terrorist suspects, but a matrix of information based on unprecedented data-mining of domestic email and cellular telephone traffic, banking records and public record databases. It became a government/corporate State surveillance and intelligence apparatus that outstrips the wildest dreams of the Gestapo and the KGB.

And, if it was all about defeating Al-Qaeda, capturing or killing Bin Laden and Al-Zwahiri, then Iraq would never have mattered. We would have kept promises to the Afghans about rebuilding their country, instead of ignoring it -- at least half the reason the Taliban were able to come roaring back.

The 'Go-Go', Lil' Boots Bush years were about leveraging the war to enact a larger Rightist agenda. It was a cover for deregulation, defense contractors, profits. It was about Fat Karl's dream of rigging elections for permanent Republican rule.

Victory, to these assclowns, had a very different meaning. The military portion of it was just a backdrop banner for Bush and his cronies: Mission Accomplished. The cynicism in that perspective is an obscenity; Yeah, a lot of that going around.

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We had an economic collapse in 2008, then eight years of neoliberal nothing, followed by four years of proto-Fascism. After a three-year pandemic, an attempted coup -- roughly 37% of America's adult population claim to believe that 4chan posts by an anonymous fraudster are more real than mathematics, science, or common sense. That over 60% of those on the Right trust what Trump says over and above their own family members.

The blessed 37%  refuse to accept the vaccines for SARS-CoV2. They refuse to wear masks. They do this to "Own The Libs". They injected themselves with special magic pony blessed horse juice, or screech that the Blood Of The Jezus is all they need. 

And they died choking on their own phlegm in hospital ICU wards, wheezing that Covid was all a hoax. Incidentally -- if you want to gauge how likely it is a hot civil war will happen here, just remember that image: cult members, fanatics, behave that way. Not rational, normal people.

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Since September 11th, 2001, a quote by Bush (whom we are supposed to think well of, now; let the healing begin) comes back to me:

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: In history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause)

-- George W. Bush, Address To Joint Session Of Congress

Is that appropriate as an epitaph for those who wish to do America harm? Or, does it speak to how we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, and led; will it end up being our epitaph, a closing quote for the United States Of America?

There is no ‘populist’ version of a world where some few are born booted and spurred, and the many are born saddled, and ready to ride, and that's precisely the world which conservatism is trying to preserve.

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