PDX. Sunday morning. Coffee. Slightly hungover.
posted by jeremy on September 11, 2002
I remember the morning of 9/11 almost ridiculously clearly. I suppose maybe nearly everyone does. I arrived at the Grind completely clueless, hoping only for coffee, expecting only eight tedious hours of tofu distribution. What I found was a madness, a rarely seen form of nation-wide shock & grief. Everyone was rushing to and from the office where a small television was showing the same footage over and over, the newscasters almost in hysterics compared to the normal monotone with which the world's tragedys are usually delivered.
Two tiny towers were burning within that 4-in screen & eventually those towers collapsed. I must have muttered " .... holy fucking shit.." close to 5000 times that first hour as we sat there watching & consorting with the equally dazed customers. Thinking back, I find it sadly beautiful that some of us were crying. The thought of human sympathy; Of the empathy for what arose. My friend Virginia confessed to me much later that she had wept that morning, wept for strangers dying 3000 miles away on the shores of a different ocean. I felt it myself, not as a simple nationalism, but a form of geographical coherence. An inteconnection born of friendship & travel:
I have friends in NYC. That's the only way I can explain it. People care for their own.
& it felt, correctly I still believe, like the end of a certain comfortable world and the beginning of a far more dangerous one. Someone had finally dared to attack america on its own soil. This was an event 200 years in the making.
The worst thing, I think, were the images of people falling...jumping... from the towers. To have made that choice, asphyxiate & burn or leap still staggers me. To die like that, the pure god-fucking horror of it. The thought of the passengers on those planes. The thought of stewardesses being slashed open, one after the other with fucking boxcutters, till the pilots opened the cabin doors. The thought of those possessed fuckers actually flying those immense fuel-loaded beast right into two of the tallest buildings on the planet...
Like I said, it staggers...
& as for the news of the Pentagon, I cant say that I cared. At all. In fact, I remember expressing some disappointment that the White House wasnt reduced to a smoldering pile of dirty white rubble.....
But....
I did find out later that my brother had been in the hit part of the Pentagon the day before the attacks. He works for Ross Perot's company, EDS & at the time, he was in charge of setting up the Navy's new computer systems. ( Understand, we dont talk much. Maybe once in the last 5 years. Hes twenty years older than me & lives in a vastly different world....) Anyway, he was supposed to be there, in the exact section hit on that day, but he wasnt. He suddenly decided that he was needed at home & flew West only a few hours before the attack. Two of his underlings were badly hurt in the explosion.....
Sometimes I wonder if my brother is haunted by It. It being the sheer weird mystery of all such coincedence. Being there and not being there. It haunts me, thinking of my stranger of a brother being so close to such a massive historical event.
I remember that I felt great sorrow for the passengers of those doomed planes. Those poor screaming bastards slamming into the Pentagon at a velocity of 500 mph; And I remember, as I have already said, that I felt no sorrow for the workers, the busy warrior-bureacrats who perished in the Pentagon. In my admittedly cynical view, if one works for the military, in any function, then one should be prepared to die. The nature of the military entails death. Death for somebody. You. Us. Them. Someone. If you are going to serve the devil then you had better expect what? Fire? Brimstone? I think you had better expect death. Just that: Death.
The World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, & apparently, possibly, the White House were statement-specific targets. There was a rhyme and there was a reason to those attacks, of a sentiment that I nearly, in theory, can understand. Whoever planned those attacks did not do so because they "... hate freedom." as our Rhesus Monkey of a president so eloquently explained it. However misguided & murderous, I think they did it because they thought they were fighting for freedom. The freedom of their own people; Their own culture.
America is Empire. America is queen bitch of the universe and our government is playing the part quite wonderfully. There is hardly a nation on the planet whose politics we havent meddled with in hopes of generating an outcome more to our economic advantage. Our military's sole purpose, as nearly as I can tell, is to protect our business interest abroad. Even a cursory glance at our foreign policies over the last 200 years reveals blatant machivellian maneuverings to advance our control over the world market, if not the physical territory of the planet. Rarely have we actually promoted democracy and freedom in the manner which is so touted by our media and by our government. Usually, according to the historical evidence, just the opposite is true.
Just prior to 9/11, the United States was voted off the United Nations Human Rights Commission as well as the Drug Policy Commission. We were also in the process of violating the Chemical and Biological Weapons Treaty and the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty. We also were, and still are, trying to back out of the kyoto protocol.
We are the largest manufacturer of weapons in the world. Only France comes close though we still out-produce them by a ratio of six to one. By these standards we are almost single-handedly providing the armaments for probably 50% of the 40-odd civil wars raging thru-out the world right at the moment.
& we still refuse to sign the fucking Landmine Production Ban put forth long ago by the United Nations.
It seems, my fellow Americans, that our government is, basically, an unholy coalition of ruthless businessmen.
That we were attacked is of no suprise. Only the fact that it didnt happen sooner is suprising. That civilians died is tragic, as it is always horribly tragic. That they were Americans is, ultimately, of no consequence to me. Maybe that we have finally been brought into the fray that the rest of the world calls home, is of consequence. I would like to think that these last 12 months would have been a time of serious introspection and doubt for our populace. A time to consider what our role as empire means for our future & for the future of the rest of humanity but extremely unsuprisingly..... It was not. With our president throwing out at-once patriotic, meaningless and insulting sound bites every three minutes and with the consistent bombing of multiple third & fourth world nations in the cause of terrorizing terror, I think we have only managed to confirm the world's opinion of us: That we need to be punished. That someone must hurt us. That we must be stopped even, as some have decided, if its at the cost of their own lives.
