September 11 2001 and September 11 2003

[chookie]

All of us will remember the intensity of emotions we felt that day two years ago -- our shock, our profound grief, our thunderous rage, our immense love of our country, our unity with all people who have lived to suffered heavily. But what I remember most vividly is how We the People rose to the terrible occasion with all the better angels of our American nature: on the day that we had been knocked to our collective knees, reeling in the fallen ashes of the Twin Towers, the innate heroism of ordinary people expressed itself mightily again and again-- in so many different forms. Witnessing the magnificence of the common response is the most significant experience of my life.

Our feelings were so raw, so urgent and agitated. Even professional writers and journalists were reduced to guttural stutterings, like stunned, wounded animals; miraculously there were some who rose to eloquence in words, or without words, as Mayor Giuliani response to a question about number of casualties as “more than we can bear” or Bill Clinton’s eloquently grave demeanor as he walked through the streets of the stricken city, where people buried their faces into his chest and wept out their torment and anguish.

For about a week, from within the enshrouding shock we felt, one could see that there was an authenticity to the reporting, which was spontaneously and reflexively factual as people reacted to the terrible events and attempted to understand them.

Then I noticed that it began to change. A second wave of shock was beginning: the spin that the government was putting on it. We all desired, all anticipated, a mighty justice that would be dealt out to avenge these horrific attacks, but something else was beginning to take shape before us. I remember CNN having a forum of “experts” like Woolsey and Wolfowitz: they were fairly drooling at the opportunity for war laid before them. For days I had managed to endure the awful images of that day that my television transmitted -- the falling bodies, the screaming people, the fire and collapse of the towers -- but it was the words of these men planning America’s response that got me to scream and run from the room. All of us keenly remember how Sept 11 unfolded -- unthinkable horrors, followed by more unthinkable horrors, and then more, and more -- to me, the response that these men were planning were yet a further horror. What they were proposing was not the mighty justice wielded by a powerful nation, but some kind of wacky scheme, which combined the worst of fundamentalist End Times visions with stupendously cynical profit opportunities. It had very little to do with the events of Sept 11. They were talking about something else -- as it turns out, what they were laying out was their vision of militant American world domination that they had been planning out for years, and which they were now going to enact.

Then, there was the president’s visit to Ground Zero, and his speech. Part of the process of coming out of our shock involved trying to come to grips with the immensity of the tragic events. We desperately needed a leader who could give voice to the magnitude these events had upon us all. But instead of a great leader at this terrible time, we had a small, venal man intoxicated with simple utter certainties but barren of wisdom and understanding, who offered us the comic book version, one that would fit in a Chick Tract. His explanation of these immense events was to say that they were the work of evil doers who hate freedom. How inadequate it was. The immense events and the magnitude of their effect on everyone of us was infantilized, reduced to bromides that one associates more with over-moussed evangelical preachers than leaders of great nations in times of trial. The religious quotations were clumsily chosen -- they were not chosen because their timeless wisdom served to illuminate events, but rather to cast events in the form of an abstract mythical confrontation between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, an upcoming Armageddon. His words would not address the magnitude of the events of that day or face up to them with meaningful thought and emotion, but served to diminish the events, to give them the “comic book” treatment.

That was two years ago. All that has followed has been disastrously inept at best. Instead of consulting learned minds and proven strategists to guide their decisions on how most wisely and prudently map the grave course that the events of Sept 11 demanded , our government consulted PR firms, who would “sell” their war to Americans, to create “needs” for them to feel violent and fearful, and “sell” American domination to the rest of the world.

Worse yet, we know that a terrible deception has been aggressively forced on us and the world. The war in Iraq, and much of the war in Afghanistan and the so-called War on Terror have nothing to do with Sept 11. Connections that are alluded to are either fabrications or fiction. Bush invokes the horror of that day to justify advancing plans the ideologues he surrounds himself with had long before that fateful date in our history. He has transformed this national day of horror into his personal sacred cow, behind which he can retreat with impunity from anyone who would question -- and thus expose -- his misdeeds and his failures.

The sacrifice of blood and treasure which exact a terrible price from our nation, which this president demands of us from behind the best mask of solemnity his practiced poker face can manage, is for a war that has nothing to do with the justice our nation must obtain for Sept 11. It is for an utterly unnecessary war he started, against the advice of our allies and despite the warnings of the most knowledgeable and experienced among us. It has become all the more expensive because the ideologues who have waged it in our name are utterly ignorant and utterly incompetent. Our soldiers die daily, our nation’s treasure is ruinously spent. American prestige and honor among the world’s nations have been jettisoned. For what? Nothing about it makes sense unless you examine the broader context of the Bush administration: it’s association with neoconservatives, the religious right and corporate pirates-- and then the war seems quite logical: waged for corporate opportunism, to stealthfully advance an extremist ideology and a radical agenda, in our own land and upon the world.

Two years after that dreadful day, I still shudder-- we have not only foreign terrorists to fear, but the consequences of policies of the American extremists who have hijacked our government and set us on this disastrous course.

Our country has fought in great wars. Our country has fought in meaningless wars. And now it fights in a war that will only make everything worse. We will suffer the consequences for many years to come, and, like all great moral disasters, it will scar our nation forever.

[cosmicdot]

1. amen

:kick:

[Clark Can WIN]

2. I thought I was prepared for today

But I was wrong.