Here on the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001, I thought I’d repost my thoughts from the occasion of the tenth anniversary.
With our cultural fixation on numerology, it seems especially obligatory to comment on the anniversary of 9/11 because it is the tenth.
I was every bit as shaken by the event as everyone else; struck by the juxtaposition of gratuitous destruction and peaceful cool, blue fall skies of that morning. After that, there was the chaotic nature in which information flowed in. The Internet was a little different then than it is today; not quite as opaque as it was in, say, 1995; but you still had to know where to go for quick information. I got a lot of my information from The Well; a bulletin board system of sorts with a lot of reliable posters from all around the country, primarily on the coasts.
The drive home was a little surreal. I confess I cried a little bit. I forget what all moved me that much – probably, it wasn’t the death of strangers. I’ve seen that on any number of news reports over the years and read about even greater numbers of deaths in history books without feeling the least bit emotionally involved. I think it was more a sense that things in this country were bound to change for the worse. But, I don’t know how much of that sense is actual memory and how much of that is memory colored by the fact that things did change for the worse. Aside from getting emotional, the rest of what I recall from the drive home was that the roads were pretty quiet — but, that’s not unusual in the back country roads from Lafayette to Monticello — and, before I got out of Lafayette, the Family Express on North 9th Street had jacked up its prices in response to the attacks.
When I got home, I was given a lesson in media consolidation. Every channel had coverage of the attacks; and, each channel would use the feed from its parent company’s news division. So, I found out that MTV and CBS were tied together, for example. Up and down the channel list, you would probably get one of five or six news broadcasts.
Shortly after the attacks, I also remember being uneasy about the number of people on the news programs saying some variant of “everything changed” on 9/11. Or, maybe, “irony died” on 9/11. Kind of weird stuff from, I suspected, people who wanted irony to die or everything to change and were projecting their desires on the event. But, aside from that, there was this incredible unity. I remember having hopes that we, as a country, would use the event to get behind something god almighty big and make our generation memorable. I don’t think I had anything specific in mind; but something on the scale of the moon landing was probably bouncing around in there.
I recall being extremely touched by the gift of 14 cattle by Kenyan Maasai herders. More than anything, that demonstrated that the World was almost entirely on our side following those attacks. I also recall being moved by Jon Stewart’s speech when the Daily Show came back on the air. We were starting to shake off the stunned reaction.
It’s hard telling what, if anything, might have been possible with Americans unified and the World in our corner; but I think it’s fair to say that we squandered the moment. We all wanted vengeance; but the just thing to do isn’t always the smart thing to do. In the end, our response to 9/11 hurt us far worse than the event itself did or than al Qaeda had the power to. Pearl Harbor represented the tip of Imperial Japan’s spear. 9/11 was al Qaeda going all-in and sucker punching us.
I supported the invasion of Afghanistan; though, in retrospect, that might not have been the height of wisdom. We’re still there. We wouldn’t be the first empire that went to Afghanistan to die. But, it was Iraq that was the height of monstrous stupidity. Without 9/11, you couldn’t sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people.
So, here we are, ten years later; economically spent and lacking optimism. It’s hard to remember how things were prior to 9/11. During the late 90s, the Internet boom made us feel like we were creating something phenomenal. Energy was high. Jobs were easy to come by. Infrastructure was not crumbling.
We can’t blame 9/11 for everything, of course. The dotcom buble was bursting; the housing bubble was still inflating, but the trajectory was pretty well set. Wall Street was stacking its house of cards higher and higher. Our industrial base was already being hollowed out. But, it seems to me, our reaction to 9/11 was a force multiplier. We increased our expenses enormously without bothering to budget for them. Government credibility, not at a high water mark anyway, was demolished. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and “War on Terra” became punchlines.
It’s entirely appropriate that we honor the first responders of 9/11 as brave and regard the deaths of the folks in the Pentagon and World Trade center as tragic. But, for me, the nobility of the people who acted that day and the solemnity of the occasion is tainted by all that followed.
I heard the news driving to work in Minnesota. It was a clear and warm early autumn day. My company let people leave work that wanted to donate blood. On the way home, people were already selling 9-11 t-shirts aside the road.
Back home in Indiana, the factory workers and farmers swarmed the gas stations, recalling, perhaps the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973.
Three weeks later I flew to DC for a HIPAA Law Seminar. There were armed troops in the Minneapolis Airport and Dulles. I heard people say they felt much safer with the military presence. I felt much less safe and sensed the irony.
Briefly, people rediscovered W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939.” Apparently no one reread Rudyard Kiplings poem “The Young British Soldier,” thus ignoring his advice to a dying soldier on the Afghan plain. The Great Game, which had ground down Britain and Russia in a fruitless struggle over dry plateaus and mountain passes of ambush, was on again. George Santayana said that “those that do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” Actually, those that do not remember the past reuse history as the instructions for the future.
I went to Ground Zero in the summer of 2003. It was dry, dusty and hot in the passes between mountainous buildings.That was the last time I really thought much about 9-11. I had already moved on to thinking about Iraq.
On 9/11, we traveled south to the Evansville area, passing at least one gas station which had jacked up the price of gas to astronomical levels. I remember them every time I get gas: pass them up.
It’s always interesting to see how our “leaders” respond to various crises. Instead of consulting people who have a little sense and wisdom, they often go for the primitive response, which does not end well. Instead of actually figuring things out and doing what was in the best interest of the country and the world, they pounded on Iraq which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. Like when you insult me, I pound on my kids. When they were first talking about going to war with Iraq, i sent letters to my congressmen, pleading for them not to do this, but who am I? And, of course, speaking of pounding on people, when you listen to G.W.’s speech to the public, he included all of the elements we find in the stuff that domestic abusers say to their spouses. Go for the stupid and twisted response.
I remember getting gas in rural Ohio and seeing a prepper type fill four 55 gallon drums in the back of his pick up with gasoline.
Following my previous comment, it reminds me of Donald Trump. During a recent Slate’s Trumpcast (Podcast), Josh Marshall (editor and publisher of Talking Points Memo) was discussing how we should expect Mr. Trump to respond to questions. He said that people tended to overanalyze the man’s remarks and that, instead, they should start applying the principle of “Trump’s Razor”, similar to Occam’s Razor. Instead of thinking deeply about the man’s complexity, motivations, etc., it is much more accurate and easier to simply consider the stupidest thing he could say, and that would be close. That is truly frightening. When the world is listening to every word and movement, being able to reliably predict that he will probably say the stupidest thing brings up a number of possible scary scenarios. It’s like he is the penultimate example of the bad decisions and awful comments we have heard in the past. We justifiably grieve the Twin Towers while we are faced with the possibility of electing a terrorist.