(Originally posted September 11, 2010)
Nine-Eleven
On
November 22, 1963, I was on the playground for 10:00AM recess at my
elementary school when teachers called classes back inside prematurely.
After a few minutes, the school's public address system was broadcasting
the carrier for CBS' radio network, announcing the shooting of JFK in
Dallas and, ultimately, the audio portion of Walter Cronkite on CBS
television announcing the President's death.
Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot?
was a fixture in the cultural landscape for a large number of people
(now referred to by the younger set as 'Bloodsucking Useless Boomers')
for a long time, due to the magnitude of the event and because it was
shared in real-time by the cutting-edge media of the early 1960's.
So, September 11th, 2001:
Where were you on 9-11?
I had gotten up to go to work around 5:30AM PDST, and as usual turned
on KQED-FM's NPR news. After stepping out of the shower, I heard a
report that a plane appeared to have crashed into one of the World Trade
Center towers in New York -- I've been in Manhattan and had seen how
huge those buildings were. To me, "A plane" meant a Cessna, or similar
light aircraft.
I remembered seeing a 1945 film newsreel about a
B-25, flying through dense fog, directly into the Empire State Building. A similar incident at the WTC would be tragic, I thought; but it was an
accident,
for crying out loud, on the other side of the continent, distant. No
one in their right mind would deliberately kill themselves, I sighed,
and I shaved.
At some point the report was updated; I
heard the words "jet airliner", which moved the entire event in my mind
from 'Cessna-going-off-course' to the category of
Did-You-Call-The-Coast-Guard-About-This?-It-Was-No-Boating-Accident.
Turning
on CNN, I sat on the edge of an armchair, watching an image of the WTC
towers from CNN's Manhattan headquarters, and other shots from a
helicopter hovering over the Hudson. A few minutes after I sat down, I
watched as the second airliner slammed into the second WTC tower.
Images Like This, and Worse, Were Broadcast And Published
In Europe, But Not In America (Photo: UK Guardian, 2001)
No joke: Aside from
Holy Fuck, the only thing I recall thinking was,
This
is what standing at the curb in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, watching the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand being shot, must have been like. I knew
immediately that what I was seeing was another line in the sand being
crossed, an event with consequences that would be immense. The dice were
in motion in the Crapshoot that is our Universe, and what I was
watching was the proof.
It also seemed
unreal, a Hollywood special effect -- as if CNN would break for a
commercial at any moment; it would turn out
to be this generation's
War Of The Worlds broadcast.
I sat watching as the South and North towers collapsed (
Wikipedia's timeline of the events
puts that at 6:59 and 7:28 AM PDST, respectively), flipping back and
forth between networks for coverage of the airliner plowing into a wing
of the Pentagon. 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 -- as if it were just another Tuesday morning. No one
appeared stunned; there was
no conversation about what had just occurred.
Finally, I turned to a woman sitting opposite me, reading a folded copy of the (pre-Little Rupert)
Wall Street Journal,
and asked if she was aware of what had happened that morning.
"Yes," she replied, adding in a please-pass-the-salt voice, "There are
supposed to be more of them [i.e., airliners] in the air to hit other
targets."
Had anyone estimated how many? "No," the
woman shrugged, and went back to her WSJ. I don't know what surprised me
more, her matter-of-fact attitude, or her piece of news.
That
was September 11th -- a red line on the American calendar in so many
ways, the culmination of a large number of threads in our history, and
the pacts and choices successive administrations have made since America
decided to follow an Imperial course.
The attack on
the Trade Center towers could have been another kind of defining moment
for America. Our government and institutions could have taken it as an
opportunity to press for a solution of the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy;
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
I'm not suggesting it
coulda been a Kumbyah moment;
I am saying that it was a crossroads moment, and that 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. What else could we
have expected from the likes of Lil' Boots, President Cheney, Rice,
Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld? From the PNAC crowd, Fat Karl Rove, Little Tommy
DeLay, and Lard Boy?
(And remember, these geniuses had been
discussing how to invade Iraq just days after Lil' Boots first inauguration. September 11th was simply an excuse.
And,
they believed it would be simple, '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 the U.S. military of
multiple redeployments and 'stop-loss' denials of separation. They never
conceived of failure; therefore, it wouldn't happen.)
So
what followed from 9/11 shouldn't have been a surprise: 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 in the national media by
sociopathic egos 'journalists' like
Little Judy Miller, and pundits like
David Brooks and William Kristol, and
Little Tommy Friedman, to name but a few.
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. Some
$9 Billion in cash cannot be accounted for. And all the cool new powers used by that dry-drunk, Frat-Boy younger son of an
American ruling-class family; or all the power available to President Cheney.
There
was plenty of money to put in C530's and airlift it: 363 Tons of it.
There was plenty of money being made from the war, and tax breaks to the
wealthy, which reduced tax income to the government; but there was no
money and Lil' Boots wanted to cut health care, cut social programs that continue the ideas of the New Deal, and privatize
Social Security... because there's just no money to pay for it.
And there's Guantanamo, 'black airlines' flying suspected terrorists to
secret CIA 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 suggestions 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 prisons and a lack of due process for
terrorist suspects, but developing a matrix of information
[Note:
This was posted before Edward Snowden's revelations about the extent of
surveillance performed by America domestic and foreign intelligence
agencies] --
based on the unprecedented data-mining of domestic email and cellular
and telephone traffic, of banking records and public record databases;
the rise of a government/corporate State surveillance and intelligence apparatus that outstrips the wildest dreams of the Gestapo and the KGB.
Obligatory Cute Small Animal Being Interrogated At
Undisclosed Location By CIA In Middle Of Blog Rant
And,
very little seemed to be about defeating Al-Qaeda, capturing or killing Bin Laden
and Al-Zwahiri -- otherwise, we would have finished the job in the
mountains of Tora Bora in October of 2002, and Iraq would
never
have mattered. We would have kept Lil' Boots' promises to the Afghans
about rebuilding their country, instead of ignoring it -- at least half
the reason the Afghan Taliban were able to come roaring back, and are
now as strong as they were in 2001, if not stronger.
The
'Go-Go', Lil' Boots Bush years were about a larger Rightist agenda; it
was about deregulation, defense contractors, and higher profits; and it
was about Fat Karl's dream of rigging elections for permanent Republican
rule of the United States.
Victory, to these assclowns, had a very different meaning -- and little of it was military.
But
let's not forget, too, how dissent or criticism of what would become
that unnecessary war; of even more power given to people with poor
impulse control, was looked upon in the immediate aftermath of September
11th.
- Andrew Sullivan (9/16/01) -- The middle
part of the country--the great red zone that voted for Bush--is clearly
ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not
dead--and may well mount a fifth column.
- Robert Stacy McCain (9/27/01), columnist for the
All Perfect Great Father Moon Washington Times -- Why
are we sending aircraft carriers halfway around the world to look for
enemies, when our nation's worst enemies--communists proclaiming an
anti-American jihad--will be right there in front of the Washington
Monument on Saturday?
- Robert Horowitz (9/28/01), Los Angeles Times -- The blood
of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of
Americans is on the hands of the antiwar activists who prolonged [the Vietnam War] and gave victory to the communists... this country was too tolerant toward the treason of its enemies within.
Those who dissented, who believed the country was manifestly on a
wrong track, were smeared as 'helping the enemy', a 'fifth column' for
Islamic fundamentalism. "You are either with us, or with the terraists",
as Lil' Boots so bravely told other governments of the world after the
World Trade Center attack.
The chittering hatred all
sounds like standard Tea Party rhetoric, now. From their point of view,
to dissent and criticize is only permissible when you're
attacking the Left -- and that socialist, illegitimate ruler in the White
House; the dirty hippies; all those "in rebellion against god".
Our
economy continues to implode, and it has never been clearer who is
benefiting from the policies of the Right; but, then, it's been a long,
strange trip from September 11th, 2001. Few things should surprise us
any longer.
Another Lil' Boots quote:
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.
