Five Years On.. Tardy Reflections on 9/11

September 15, 2006

Events.. even those that result in terrible losses.. are inevitably taken up into language and converted into symbol. They wind up being a shorthand reference to an abstraction. In the case of 9/11 the event has been used so often to justify an ongoing and pointless war, along with hard-knuckle political tactics, that the pathos which ought to be stirred by reminders of 9/11 is absent for me, replaced by anger. Anger at what has become of the America I thought I knew. Of course "America" is just a word too.. but the shine on that word has done us plenty of good in the past.. building trust and hope. The shine is gone; it is leaving the temple.

Instead of engaging in a debate about what to do in the current mess.. and a mess it certainly is!! why not think about what could have easily happened in the space of five years. Most obviously we should have seen people prosecuted for their role in terrorist acts. A fair and public system should have been devised for their trials.. and only a minimum of concessions would have been necessary to get ALL Americans aboard. A fair and open process would have also allowed us to free the innocent people who are being held in places like Guantanamo (and the evidence is strong that there are innocents there). How different we would appear in the eyes of the world! How much less divided we would be as a nation! But that is just the point: the process of justice has been used as a political card.. as a way to divide us. Painting liberals as wimps and appealing to the darkest fears of Americans. Division is a political strategy for re-election.

The convenient thing about fighting terrorism is that it is a relatively inexpensive war to fight. Realistically we are fighting a few thousand hardcore Islamists worldwide who are willing to give their lives in the attempt to kill people. After we settled Afghanistan we had no outright wars to fight. We had only to tighten international agreements and work with our allies to control this deviant force. I don't mean to minimize that work, but it should not be man-power intensive in the way that invading a nation is. Above all we should not allow ourselves to be seduced into seeing the world through the prism of a war on another religion—i.e. the perverse religious prism of Osama bin Laden. Incredibly, five years on, we are bogged down in an insurgency and trying to frame the conflict in language that recalls the clash of civilizations.

As soon as one expresses these thoughts one can hear the I-know-better voice of our Vice President saying: "That is an opinion that reflects a pre-9/11 viewpoint." The demand that there be some kind of before-and-after break in history marked by 9/11 is silly. Yes, we must be vigilant, but our economic and cultural trends have been constant. We are not different than we were before 9/11, unless one counts a greater awareness of our global context. We are the same people who pursue the same lifestyle. But this whole "9/11 change" trope has been extremely useful for Cheney and co. since it functions as a fig leaf for the implementation of their own pre-9/11 goals. These are people who lamented the loss of presidential power in the 70s, and who looked for reasons to attack Saddam Hussein.. their pre-9/11 hopes are well documented.. so was it just coincidence that 9/11 proved to be a justification for these very things??

Since 9/11 is intimately connected with Bush's subsequent actions.. and is used to justify our aggressive and fearful stance toward the rest of the world.. I will politely refrain from taking part in the political memorials that surround the events of this date. That may be the best way to be true to a senseless tragedy.. staying away from the shitload of bogus meaning that has been piled onto this day. I will mourn equally the 40,000+ Iraqi civilians who are now dead. Most of whom would be alive today had Rumsfeld and our leaders bothered with a plan for the occupation. Or how about the innocent individuals around the world who have been caught up in the senseless net of our anti-terror efforts? (No innocents? try this article).