9/11

Riding my new bike yesterday, an elderly driver decided that the exit ramp was no longer the place for her and suddenly swerved back into the road  without looking.  It just so happens that's exactly where I was.  I managed to avoid her at some risk of falling, but it happened so fast there was no question of using my horn and she simply continued on her way somewhere at ten under the limit. Why do I mention this?  Because it's 9/11 again, the day of self pity and choreographed mourning and as the fellow on the news this morning said, "I used to feel invincible but now I feel so vulnerable."

Do we need a better example of how erratically, erroneously and stupidly people assess risk?  If we were to make a statistically accurate list ranking the possibility of being harmed by a terrorist attack on any given day, would it be below a list of thousands of possibilities -- tens of thousands -- hundreds of thousands?  But I didn't look over my shoulder in fear and dread getting on the bike on a sunny Wednesday afternoon and I'm not expecting an airplane to crash into my house in rural Florida today either. The chances of getting hurt by some nice old lady just a mile or so from home is almost incalculably larger, yet still small enough that I don't tremble in my steel toe boots thinking about the danger stalking the roads.  Heart attacks, cancer, strokes, a fall in the bathroom, these are all things I legitimately worry about at my age and try to avoid.  Terrorist attacks? Really?  Isn't that an insult to people who wake up every morning in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon? 

But self pity and self absorption are so American.  Beheadings and the other horrors of the day don't count so much unless it's an American head rolling and thousands dead anywhere hardly count in comparison to one possibly unjust American death.

I don't know how much Cola and shoes and Toyotas the obsession of the day will sell on CNN and Fox, but it sells fear by the carload.  It sells so much fear that most of us still haven't noticed that we -- or our congress, that is, signed away the 4th amendment for the great majority of the country, that we began pumping up our police departments with heavy weaponry even in remote places like Wyoming in order to equip them for the hordes of Muslims falling from the sky over the Cheney ranch. It sold domestic surveillance, it sold countless quasi-military weapons. It sold the longest and  most expensive wars in our history. We went to war with an uninvolved country and created so much chaos and so big a power vacuum that Iraq became helpless to keep out Al Qaeda and now ISIS.

But we still feel not only sorry for ourselves, but guilty for not feeling sorry enough.  Eventually 9/11 will go the way of the Alamo, the Maine and Pearl Harbor, but not soon enough for me because as long as we weep and moan and fear to turn our heads lest a fearful beast pursues us, as long as we continue to conduct our petty civil wars,  we won't do a damned thing about the real world and its real troubles.

Never Forget?

It's hard to find a coherent picture of Barack Obama in the roar of inflamed rhetoric.  The rhetoric itself is incoherent, mixing accusations and metaphors with the most bizarre results -- and such is the passion for defamation it's probable that no consistent pattern will emerge for a generation.  He is what he is, somewhere behind the halo of  howling hate that surrounds him. 

Whatever you might think of him, it's tempting to plug other presidents of another party and another color into the equation just to test for mendacity and absurdity: such as perhaps to assume Reagan were president during an embassy bombing ( he was) or W.  ( he was) and it's tempting to reverse it by assuming it were president Obama not showing up at the dedication of the 9/11 Memorial Museum last week instead of the notably absent Bush whose 8 year career was floated on the attack and the subsequent War on Terror. 

George W. Bush deliberately stayed away for reasons, possibly good reasons, of his own and was in Arkansas attending a ceremony for Medal of  Honor recipients, but anyone with an unfoxed memory remembers how the Republicans jeered, howled and hooted about flag pins and the size of the flag on Obama's airplane and posted endless doctored photos and forged documents designed to attack his patriotism -- anyone with a sense of irony would wonder what those dancing devils would have done to Obama and snicker at what they certainly are not doing to Bush for staying away. It would have been a three ring, twin tower circus for weeks and months and years if not cause for impeachment.

And of course, I had to find out about this from the foreign press, the mis-titled Liberal American Media being far too concerned with other trumped-up Obama scandals, racist comments by team owners, Benghazi bullshit and other ridiculous attacks on Hillary Clinton, missing airplanes and the various and ever-changing apocalyptic horsemen wearing Obama masks.

Never-Forget George probably didn't forget and he's probably right not to make the dedication all about him, about his going to war with an uninvolved country and permanently giving up important civil rights in the process instead of being about the dead.  Still, it  makes one wonder at all the "never-forget" passion that was and is as transient as the all the "never-forget" events -- but then, forgetting, like false remembering is part of  the game and it is a game after all.  The only real goal of that game is winning.

Remember the Raisin!

The people who like to manipulate us by creating and preserving anger like to give us slogans.  Remember the Maine, Remember the Alamo, Remember Pearl Harbor, Remember the Raisin! Never Forget!! 
 
All these things are inevitably forgotten despite the slogan advertising campaigns and sooner or later we'll get tired of remembering 9/11. Sloganeers will get tired of milking the faded fear and self-pity and choreographed mourning. The people who were born too late to remember it will eventually need to be told to remember something else that some party needs to cultivate anger about, so as to pass some kind of horror like the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 or the Patriot Act.  9/11 will be forgotten by most everyone but historians and those who remember will remember it in context of the things we did and the laws we passed and the freedom we gave up while we were whipped into a passion.

Think calls to 'always remember'  are genuine and untainted by politics?  Wonder why we shouted Remember Hoover! in 1936 but nobody remembers to Remember Bush?  Remember Katrina and at least 1800 fatalities?  Why not?   We spent billions and billions on a the Largest government agency in history and abridged the Bill of Rights in 2001, but we didn't do a damned thing to improve reactions to natural disasters which you can be sure will occur more often than a repeat of 9/11.

I suspect that calls to remember are  calls to preserve a mental state in which we can be manipulated, tricked and sold some unsavory product. Stay angry, stay afraid and obey.

Somebody Needs to Read Him Some Montaigne and Read It Good

A few thoughts concerning the following article in HuffPo: 

Mark Wahlberg On 9/11 Plane: I Would Have Beat Terrorists, Landed It Safely

With regard to a certain celebrity's action-hero projections in the article referenced, I’d say the fellow is being just a bit insensitive toward those who died in the attacks. Anyone who would make such statements as "If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did" (he seems to be talking about the planes that flew into the World Trade Center) needs to read Montaigne's essay "On the Inconsistency of Our Actions." He needs to study a good grammar handbook, too, but I let that go.

The truth is surely that nobody really knows how he or she would face the prospect of certain or nearly certain sudden death. Being strong, bold, and active (and a movie star) isn't a guarantee that you'll go out like a hero, and being a wise philosopher isn't a guarantee that you'll go out with dignity, either, instead of curling up in a fetal position, sticking your thumb in your snout and whimpering for your long-departed mother. (Not that the latter would necessarily be such a wrong thing to do. Maybe that's what some people would need to do, and if I were sitting next to them, I'd like to think I wouldn't tell them to shut up and make my last interaction a mean-spirited, intolerant one.) You can hazard a guess how you might face an unexpected, violent death based on how you've lived your life, but you don't KNOW because it hasn't happened to you up to now or you wouldn’t be reading this.

As Oscar Wilde said a long time ago, "only the shallow know themselves." It’s worth keeping in mind.

Never Forget

This coming Sunday will be the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attack on Washington and New York and there's no way that anyone is going to forget it. After 10 years we're not only still mired in lachrymose and maudlin self-pity, but the incident has taken on a religious tone, complete with holy martyrs and holy relics. We still have cars with those plastic flag holders attached to the windows and we're reminded constantly that not only will we never forget, we'll never allow our grandchildren or their grandchildren to forget this dark day: the worst day in American history.

Of course I'll be condemned by some for hard heartedness, if not outright treason. I'm only arguing for a sense of proportion, but any balanced and reasonable viewpoint is so condemned in today's America. We're a radicalized, polarized nation choking and strangling on our own anger, yet cherishing it, nourishing it and hoping to preserve it in ritual, in perpetuity: a new anger for the ages. At least some powerful people hope that to be the case. Grieving people being so easy to manipulate and exploit, as some funeral directors know.


Some bits and pieces of the World Trade Center steel framework are being distributed to towns in my area. The Navy SEAL museum in Ft. Pierce now has a chunk and another arrived in my town a few days ago. The local paper printed photos of people kissing the rusty steel, touching their rosaries to it to make them extra holy and others simply hugging the metal, weeping.

The flag wrapped bits of steel arrived escorted by a motorcade over a quarter mile long. Military, law enforcement and veteran's motorcycle clubs accompanied it all the way south from the Georgia border like a funeral procession.

"Our objective is to eventually put this steel on every corner so that people never forget,"

said a retired New York homicide detective. That even includes my tiny, unincorporated crossroads town which has no other monuments of any kind. He expressed hope that one day there would be a holiday in every state honoring the policemen of New York. He promised never to forget.


Of course it wasn't all maudlin lamentation, there was plenty of anger still, even though bin Laden, most of his henchmen and all of those who perpetrated the attack are dead. Former detective Dennis McKenna promised that his son was soon going off to Afghanistan, where the perpetrators no longer dwell, to "whack one of them." Bagpipes were played, America the Beautiful was sung, Holy Water was poured on Holy Steel and then the bandwagon moved on.

"Let these pieces of steel remind us of the 2,973 men and woman who sacrificed their lives and, unknowingly, made our country and people become even stronger,"

said one Vietnam veteran. I wish it had done so, I wish all the other war memorials had made us more reluctant to make wars, but we're hardly stronger. We're far more divided, our economy has suffered from trillions of borrowed dollars turned to smoke. There is a bigger economic divide and the tear-shedders in their sackcloth and ashes want to sacrifice every bit of social progress since the 1860's, impoverishing the already debt-ridden majority while enriching the aristocracy.

Never forget that we're victims. Never remember how we victimized millions abroad in an uninvolved country. Always remember that "they" hate us and always complain when we attempt to make peace.

But how long will we actually remember and how long will we see this sad period in the same dim light? Surely half of our country no longer remembers 12/7/41 as the date that will live in infamy, nor the Battleship Maine on 2/15/98 or the burning and sacking of Washington DC on 8/24/14. People will forget. It won't be the worst thing that ever happened any more.

Some of those pre-teens who are too young to remember will absorb the tailored and fitted viewpoint they have thrust upon them at the moment, but their children will live in a vastly different world and one in which this country will not have the same status and those 3000 saints and martyrs won't really compare with the millions and millions dead in other places we wouldn't get involved in because "they hate us."

"I know that Osama bin Laden did the whole thing,"

said an 8 year old. Perhaps he'll remember that, perhaps not. Perhaps he will learn some more comprehensive history, perhaps not and it's more than likely there are events to come that will make the death of a few thousand seem insignificant in comparison. No, I'll never forget I won't forget going to the Red Cross office to donate blood and not being able to get there for the crowd. I won't forget the feeling of national unity that was so soon hijacked and exploited and used as a tool, and excuse to wage war at home and abroad. I won't forget the overwhelming, commercially distributed fear and xenophobia and lust for battle either, but I'm old and the world belongs to the young - or soon will and the myth of 9/11 will go where it goes, not where I predict it will go.