9/11. Again a means to someone's ends

No, it's not a Monday Rerun.  But in it I commemorate, angrily, the base exploitation of this date by politicians of all stripes, largely the jingoistic, fear-mongering party in power.

I can only add that what I said in 2006 goes double now.  A shame.  Truly shameful.

Meanwhile, let me be the first to invite you to celebrate Terrorist Day.  It's the old 9/11, but now we're giving credit to the Terrorists for winning, thanks to the cynicism, manipulation and of course the downright ineptitude of the Bush administration.  This holiday does provide a retail boost between back-to-school and halloween...new card-giving occasions...even the chance to sample exotic new ethnic cuisines. 

September 11, 2006

Sick of 9/11

It's been five years.  The day dawned a lot like this one, crystal-clear. Coda of a perfect summer, a time of pleasure and light-heartedness. 

I live in Midtown now, looking west at the towers of corporate America.  The Citigroup building is a couple of avenues away; it is perennially said to be a target.  When elections are near, the armed police presence around that block becomes oppressive. 

The news media love to replay the terrible footage -- the plane crashing into the second tower, the crowds running from the tempest of dust and smoke.  Then the followup stories featuring the dead voices of young widows, and endless tales of the government's failure to help, explain, compensate. 

Politicians love to invoke "security" and "threats" and "freedom" and now "islamo-fascism."  Every year on this date we are subjected to the manipulative sentimentality about "heroes" (the cheapest word in America).  We are told to be frightened -- of flying, of getting on the subway, of taking a train, of someone different who happens to sell hot dogs from a cart or drive a taxi.  Of everything.

I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, then.  I stood on a pier in Brooklyn and saw the towers burn and collapse not two miles from me.  All of lower Manhattan disappeared in the toxic cloud, the roar followed across the harbor.  The water was glassy in its calm, the sky bright and clean when you turned away.  All traffic had stopped.  People had got out of their cars on the Beltway and stared.  Cell phones didn't work.  The radioes spread rumors, some of them true.  We waited for more blasts. 

The thousands of people around me wondered where their daughter, their son, their husband, their friend was.  Eventually, in small knots they left together, sick of the monotony of destruction, wanting to save their open terror and tears for their own four walls.

All the airports grew silent.  Silence in the skies, a new thing.  I could see Newark airport from the pier.  No movement. 

Then fighter jets and black government helicopters appeared suddenly, filling the sky with their anxiety.  Cops and checkpoints appeared almost as suddenly in that heavily Arab neighborhood. People later said they saw Arab kids dancing ecstatically on Third Avenue, but no Arabs were on the 69th Street pier that morning.  Somehow they all managed to stay home on a Tuesday.

I'm sick of 9/11, of the manipulations and the outrages committed in its name.  I'm sick of the sentimental bullshit about "heroes" and the image-building that incompetent politicians did at the expense of the dead, and at the greater expense of the surviving.  And I'm sick of the schadenfreude that the rest of America gorges itself on every year, in New York's name.  For one day.

I knew everything had changed for ever in this country.  I had no idea how far we'd fall or how deeply we would come to resemble our enemy.

It's been five years.  The day dawned a lot like this one, crystal-clear. Coda of a perfect summer, a time of pleasure and light-heartedness. 

I live in Midtown now, looking west at the towers of corporate America.  The Citigroup building is a couple of avenues away; it is perennially said to be a target.  When elections are near, the armed police presence around that block becomes oppressive. 

The news media love to replay the terrible footage -- the plane crashing into the second tower, the crowds running from the tempest of dust and smoke.  Then the followup stories featuring the dead voices of young widows, and endless tales of the government's failure to help, explain, compensate. 

Politicians love to invoke "security" and "threats" and "freedom" and now "islamo-fascism."  Every year on this date we are subjected to the manipulative sentimentality about "heroes" (the cheapest word in America).  We are told to be frightened -- of flying, of getting on the subway, of taking a train, of someone different who happens to sell hot dogs from a cart or drive a taxi.  Of everything.

I lived in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, then.  I stood on a pier in Brooklyn and saw the towers burn and collapse not two miles from me.  All of lower Manhattan disappeared in the toxic cloud, the roar followed across the harbor.  The water was glassy in its calm, the sky bright and clean when you turned away.  All traffic had stopped.  People had got out of their cars on the Beltway and stared.  Cell phones didn't work.  The radioes spread rumors, some of them true.  We waited for more blasts. 

The thousands of people around me wondered where their daughter, their son, their husband, their friend was.  Eventually, in small knots they left together, sick of the monotony of destruction, wanting to save their open terror and tears for their own four walls.

All the airports grew silent.  Silence in the skies, a new thing.  I could see Newark airport from the pier.  No movement. 

Then fighter jets and black government helicopters appeared suddenly, filling the sky with their anxiety.  Cops and checkpoints appeared almost as suddenly in that heavily Arab neighborhood. People later said they saw Arab kids dancing ecstatically on Third Avenue, but no Arabs were on the 69th Street pier that morning.  Somehow they all managed to stay home on a Tuesday.

I'm sick of 9/11, of the manipulations and the outrages committed in its name.  I'm sick of the sentimental bullshit about "heroes" and the image-building that incompetent politicians did at the expense of the dead, and at the greater expense of the surviving.  And I'm sick of the schadenfreude that the rest of America gorges itself on every year, in New York's name.  For one day.

I knew everything had changed for ever in this country.  I had no idea how far we'd fall or how deeply we would come to resemble our enemy.

Comments

[Ronald]

T,
nice writing this time, mi piace molto!

[Strappo]

Prego, R. Ma cos'e' "this time"?? Mi ferisci.

[Danny]

Pace e benedicte tutti

[Ronald]

Oh T,
sometimes reading too much blogs that talks over and over again about wine bores me to 'death'..
stuff like this spice up my day, made me question my own existence and my own definition who's good and who's bad in this world...

[Strappo]

Thanks Ronald, I appreciate that!

I've been thinking a lot about the degree to which I've been off topic lately -- off the wine topic, of course -- and I've concluded that if someone doesn't like it, too bad. Sometimes even wine, my favorite subject, has to take a back seat to trivial things like, oh, the direction and fate of one's country.