Step right up and enjoy the September 11th festivities; has it been only 17 years? I’ll start with this wonderful “meta-” piece by Brother Dmitry, who asks, among other things, “what is truth?”, a peculiarly relevant question concerning the events of September 11th where, for example, we are asked to believe that three skyscrapers were brought down by the crash of two airliners, among numerous other “curiosities” (my favorite still being the recovery of an intact highjacker’s passport on the ground after a crash supposedly so hot that it melted an aircraft’s black box and steel beams supporting a building of 110 stories causing it to implode). Many such “curiosities” made their way into my hypothetical rant of Zaccarias Moussaoui (who? you don’t remember “the 20th highjacker”?)
Interestingly, it is the Jewish Holiday of Rosh Hashanah now, the celebration of the new year, which also marked the first post on this blog 17 years ago (which was a week after Sept. 11th); the cycle of time, the circular nature of our year, coupled with the fact that we age and die and do not get an infinite number of them, always seem to loom over us. Although we have created the myth of “Homeland Security” (not to mention a massive and obscenely expensive bureaucracy called the Department of that), none of us are, or will ever be, “safe” from this fact. We can, of course, make ourselves less safe, as we have been doing consistently since, creating the sort of metaphysical angst that leads to an actual decline in life expectancy at least in some demographics. So much for the myth of progress… on to other myths!
I don’t mean to open a debate about what numerous people who were not there that day, unlike me insist actually happened (it is undisputed that large structures were destroyed, aircraft crashed and nearly 3,000 people dead), so much as the certainty in events led to a certainty in assigning blame for it and supposedly in how to thwart future similar events that have led to our longest running war (yes, 17 years on, we are still officially at war in Afghanistan, if for no other purpose, to justify holding (currently) 40 men at Guantanamo Bay, including Candace’s client, an Algerian named Saeed Bakhouche, who had the misfortune of staying in the wrong guesthouse and nothing else). And to justify a surveillance state that would have made George Orwell gag. And to justify Cold War levels of military spending (including maintaining garrisons in well over 100, maybe over 150 foreign countries). And so many other aspects of modern life. BTW… for a brilliant meta-take, this from Foreign Polcy, titled simply (and accurately), Al Qaeda Won.
An entire generation has now grown up in the “post-9-11 world,” taking completely for granted “the new normal” that seems so dissonant to many of us whose formative years were earlier. This generation includes the Loquacious Pup, who was not quite two years old as of 9-11. It is difficult to tell them that there was a time when you did not have to take your shoes off at airports (or risk cancer from the full-body scanner), or that there was a time when you would not expect all of your internet or telephone communications to be monitored, or have military aircraft fly over football half-time shows (or indeed, have faux patriotism be such a big thing).
Of course, the irony of it all is that it was the pre-9-11 generation who decided to vote for an orange colored Neanderthal to bring us through the logical culmination of where the post-9-11 world was taking us. As George W. Bush determined that international institutions were not going to tell the United States what it was going to do, and got us into the aforementioned war in Afghanistan, and a much bigger one in Iraq, so it seems that a big enough plurality of Americans believed a Russian-sponsored career criminal who promised to “make America great again” and to “put America first.” Or at least they hated Hillary Clinton (and Barack Obama) enough not to give a crap about the consequences of same.
Anyway, here we go again.
The Judge who wrote the decision permanently condemning Candace’s client is now up for the Supreme Court himself (neither Candace nor I am pleased about that). The Orange Poseur has tossed around the term “fake news” to refer to any news coverage that he believes is insufficiently favorable to himself, but he is on to something nonetheless: how rigorously to treat and assess information to accept into our consciousness is, of course, based on the degree the information supports (or does not support) the story that we have been programmed to believe is “reality.” What has happened in the last 30, 40, 50 years or so is that we no longer need to have top-notch, cutting age American workers; machines now do most of the heavy lifting in our economy, our society and in our individual lives (detecting the effects of Alzheimers disease might be harder as the use of GPS devices, for example, prevents people from “forgetting directions,” once a sure-fire sign that something was wrong). And so, what is left for our aging population is to “manage it”. Technical work could be handled by foreign imports, or mostly by the machines themselves, and actual work… well, there’s less of it relative to the population as reflected in labor force participation.
Let me cut to the chase: as a people, we are stupider, and more easily fed bullshit which we more easily digest. Donald Trump is an obvious manifestation of that, to be sure. But then, so is the fact that 17 years on we still treat September 11th as if it were a religious holiday, rather than a still not understood national tragedy that was promptly used to bring on still greater tragedies (which have not finished playing out, even as war on terror still seems to seek out new venues to trot out new excuses to bring American drones, troops and violence). Not to mention violence brought by others in places American action (in the name of “fighting terrorism”) has already destabilized. But as I said, a stupider population will be willing to put up with it (especially as fewer and fewer of its actual members will bear the heavy lifting of being the tip of the spear, as it were).
As individuals, all I can suggest is to try to maximize your acts of gratuitous kindness. If enough of us do this, perhaps the overall ethos of nastiness will change, and the powerful might start responding to things differently. I have no particular expectation that this will not be a long and painful thing to develop, but it’s all I got. September 11th is as good a time as any to think about this, and bring about the world we would like to have, rather than the one we apparently have.
tdog
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