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Now
There was one positive side-effect of
9/11/01, and it was that people in New York actually talked to
one another, and not just about pain and suffering. Those were
sharp, but the whole grief machine has been grossly overplayed.
This last anniversary of 9/11 there were almost no New Yorkers
at the ritual sob-fest at Ground Zero beyond families and friends
of the dead, security forces and conspiracy peddlers, conspicuous
in black T-shirts emblazoned, "Investigate 911". There
were some curiosity seekers, like me, and a lot of tourists consulting
their maps of Manhattan. Otherwise the day's commemoration was
a sideshow for New York, demanding little or no comment.
After that first September
11, though, New Yorkers did talk, and they talked about US foreign
policy, and the place of America in the world across the past
50 years, and Israel-Palestine, and why the hell people "hate
us" so much. These were raucous conversations -- in Union
Square, in Washington Square, in local bars and coffee shops.
I got into more passionate discussions, and edgy discussions,
amid the stink and the smoke than I ever have in this city and
than I fear I ever will.
Five years on, what was the
rump of discussion? Not US foreign policy, not America's role
in the world, not capitalism, not even oil, which always was
too easy, and surely not Palestine. It was NORAD and Building
7 and "scrambling" and demolition charges. The only
oppositional presence at Ground Zero were the people in the black
T-shirts. And you have to hand it to them; they did organize.
But their presence in the absence of anything else spelled just
how far we've fallen. The peace movement, nowhere. The justice
movement, nowhere. Any tendency toward a humanistic, liberated
future, nowhere. There was one frowning woman carrying a rainbow
flag with the tedious slogan, cobbled up by UFPJ for the 2004
Republican Convention -- along the lines of "We say no to
the Bush agenda" -- and a monk or two. Meanwhile, the people
in black T- shirts were busy handing out fliers, handing out
DVDs, urging people to go to their computers, to "Do the
research yourselves..."
Here was the ultimate failure
of politics, translated, Go to your room, alone, immerse yourself
in ephemera, alone, meet others just like yourselves so you can
talk endlessly about this or that loose end lately discovered
in your hours of isolation in front of the screen.
Scratch some of these people
and out pours the kind of conversation that was possible in 2001,
but it's quickly subsumed because this is "the most important
thing": that Bush et al. organized 9/11, are the very embodiment
of evil, have lied about what happened that day, which is the
most important lie on the most important day in American history.
As Alexander Cockburn has pointed out, they have absolute faith
in the military capability of the United States, despite the
evidence of Iraq. They have absolute confidence in the machinery
of state to do WHAT IT MUST DO to protect "us". I haven't
heard such paeans to the power of NORAD since I talked to military
flaks for Space Command while researching the technological absurdity
that is missile defense.
The people in black T-shirts
have a TV-watcher's misapprehension of time. Again and again
they would say, with touching conviction, that the military-government
machinery had as much as thirty minutes to an hour and fifty
minutes -- between 8:14 am, when Flight 11's transponder was
switched off, and 8:46 when the South Tower was hit, 9:03 when
the North Tower was hit, 9:37 when the Pentagon was hit and 10:03
when Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania -- to get other commercial
planes out of the air, give the Air Force the order, find the
errant planes, shoot them down and save the day, or at least
some of it. I mentioned to one young kid that it sounded as if
he'd watched too many episodes of "24", to which he
responded tetchily that he'd never heard of "24" --
one of the most popular shows on television the last four years
-- and didn't own a TV.
Maybe so, but then "24"
is in the air conditioning system of the culture, and this kid
and the others have breathed deep because their imagining of
what it takes to actually move something in a bureaucracy is
totally shaped by it. Each episode Jack Bauer has exactly an
hour (counting commercials) to extract some information, follow
a hazy lead, handle some personal business and either save the
day or at least kill or torture someone which will make saving
the day that much easier in next week's show. And he does it
alone, with his girlfriend on the end of a cell phone and another
woman friend with a laptop and sometimes the help of a SWAT team.
It's very exciting TV and absolutely remote from reality. But
the people in the black T- shirts all spoke about how much time
the bureaucrats had to act, "and they didn't!! Why?"
Because government is slow,
because the military is slow, because shit doesn't work? They
just laughed at me, shook their head at such naivete: "Just
promise me this, do the research..."
Some of the black T-shirts
told me they believed that if only Americans did the research
there would be a mass uprising in this country and all the other
things I was talking about would suddenly be on the table. But
about a third of Americans already believes 9/11 was an inside
job. I asked if they really thought "Do the Research"
was a galvanizing slogan, to which I was corrected that the more
popular slogan was "Ask Questions, Demand Answers".
To which the neophyte might ask, What questions? And then be
answered with a barrage of details about NORAD and the burning
point of steel and what Larry Silverstein said about Building
7 and what a firefighter said he'd heard at what hour and how
there'd been "repairmen" working on a World Trade Center
elevator in the weeks or days before the attack. At this point
the neophyte walks off, with literature and a DVD, never to be
heard from again. One of the people in the black T-shirts agreed
that it was a complex message to lay on people, but the fault
lay, naturally, with the people. "It's not a sound bite,
and people have been conditioned to hear only sound bites."
Maybe this is all a distraction?
A South Asian chap joined me in this line of argument. "A
distraction from what?" the black T-shirt asked. "From
US foreign policy", the fellow replied. He too was verbally
pummeled with data from Professor Griffin, and assurances that
once people really tapped into this they'd "see" how
this is just one lie, the biggest lie, on top of a whole lot
of other lies that constitute US foreign policy. Why not just
start with US foreign policy? Because this is the biggest lie.
This is what crystallizes everything. Round and round we go.
How do you explain such perfect
discipline and silence in the face of horror? "Look at the
Manhattan Project; that was a really well kept secret that involved
many, many people."
Apart from the fact that the
Manhattan Project seems to have been kind of an open secret in
international physics circles, and the secrets did get out, courtesy
of spies who thought the US should not be the only nation on
earth to have the Bomb, there is the matter of remorse. Most
people don't like living with the memory that they have blood
on their hands. Oppenheimer didn't. I'm sure scores of lower
level scientists didn't once the Bomb wasn't a theoretical problem
or a test in the desert but the consuming fire of Hiroshima and,
especially, Nagasaki.
It's inconceivable that five
years after September 11 no one involved in the incineration
of thousands of people would have regrets, second thoughts --
or even towering self-interest. Imagine the book deal, the movie
deal waiting for that whistle blower.
What happened to Flight 77,
the one that, according to the conspiracy theory, didn't hit
the Pentagon because a missile made that hole? Were all those
people just taken somewhere and murdered? "Probably. Maybe,
but that's not for us to answer, that's for them to answer."
Why use planes at all if you'd
gone through all the trouble to place charges throughout the
buildings? "They needed scapegoats. No one would have believed
it was a terrorist attack."
But everyone believed the 1993
World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack. You think
if the buildings had come down in a huge explosion people wouldn't
think, 'terror'? "Not in the same way. They needed the spectacle."
Why is it so hard to believe
that when you kick people around for so long, destroy their countries
and kill their children, eventually someone will kick back? "Sure
they'll want to, but they couldn't have done this. You've just
got to do the research." There were lots of references to
"people in caves" who couldn't possibly have pulled
something like this off. Only America, only the most powerful
nation on earth, could do something so big.
It was like religion, and profoundly
sad. At one point one of the black T-shirts confessed that there's
nothing people can do in the face of such evil, because they
killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and they'll have no compunction
to kill their critics if they need to. What a starting point
for politics, and the best argument for why people might as well
go to their computer screens and just stay there. But the truth!
We need to know the truth! It's a truth of fools, simple in the
extreme, requiring no more than the memorization of the "unexplained"
events of that day, the eye-witness anecdotes and quick-fire
repetition of same to others. It's also the politics of the schoolroom,
akin to the argument that if every American just sent in a dollar,
we'd have $350 million to fight poverty. If every American just
does the research, just demands the truth, the truth will come
out, the columns will tremble, the temples fall.
I don't believe the temples
were going to fall because of those conversations in Union Square
on that first September 11. But they were at least a logical
starting point. At least they held possibilities. And I don't
believe that the woman in front of me at the bagel shop at the
start of the bombing of Afghanistan (crying over a cover of the
Times with the picture of smoke billowing from the Red Cross
building that was eerily reminiscent, in smaller scale, of the
pictures of the towers) was representative of everyone in New
York. But there was a time when the simplest message of a lot
of talk in the city was, "We don't want this to happen ever
again, not here, not anywhere."
After the towers fell a guy
in a building on Cedar Street, a neighbor of my hand therapist
with windows facing the wreckage, painted a huge black and white
peace sign in one window and in the window beside it a simple
counter to all the flags and nationalist hoo-ha that was sprouting
around him to his disgust. "Dissent Is Patriotic",
he wrote. Both those messages are still there, still looming
above "hallowed ground", still easy to capture by chance
in tourists' cameras. But they meant something in 2001 that is
different from what they could be imagined to mean on the fifth
anniversary when the only dissenters were the black T-shirts.
He never intended his peace sign as an accompaniment to arguments
that theUS military is all-powerful and was just forced to stand
down. He never intended "dissent" to be confined to
a pissing match about the details of one day. There was something
bigger and more encompassing, something about the whole long
grim drama that brought us to 9/11 and the hope of reversing
that, of imagining a different world.
Maybe there is some energy
in the meetings of the conspiracy buyers and sellers, but if
that's true it's all the sadder, because what a waste. At Union
Square this September 11 there was no passionate discussion.
The city held musical concerts all over New York; "a celebration"
one of the bagpipers said. Odd word. So, mutely, people sunned
themselves and listened. At Washington Square the only political
message I noticed were huge chalked messages on the ground, "Save
Darfur". Maybe we can get NORAD on the case.
A week later, September 19,
George Bush came to town for the UN meeting and UFPJ called a
little protest, but its emotion was unequal to the moment. At
the end, after Jesse Jackson asked everyone to "Stop the
War. Save the Children", and the crowd, having repeated
the sing-song jingle without much conviction, was departing,
the chant rose up, "9/11 was an inside job! 9/11 was an
inside job!" There weren't as many black T-shirts as had
congregated by the hole the previous week. I saw a clutch of
the same people I'd seen there, only now most were wearing more
universal antiwar shirts. But even their passion was puny beside
that of the followers of Maryam Rajavi and the People's Mojahedin
of Iran. I've never seen the comely Maryam and her husband, I
presume, Mohammed, but their portraits were held aloft by throngs
of peppy Iranians, who had smiles and recorded music and a banging
drum with cymbals. When they moved, it was with purposeful excitement.
Their flags flapped gayly, and they'd decorated their podium
with gold papier mache lions and buckets of sunflowers. An enthusiastic
bunch, so different from the sadsacks on the antiwar side of
the street.
Soon after the Iranian rally
kicked off, a parade of men started up 47th Street from 2nd Avenue
toward 1st, arms raised, flags aloft, American and Pakistani
ones this time, as well as bobbing portraits of their hero, Musharraf.
The joy of the dictator's devotees was matched by that of his
opponents, who pressed hard against a barricade on 1st Avenue
with their own Pakistani flags, portraits of Benazir and Jinnah
and signs denouncing Musharraf and all he stood for. Near them
were Thais in yellow T-shirts, more beaming faces and flags flying,
more bouyant cries against Thaksin ("Thugs-in" on their
handmade signs) who that morning was deposed, and next to them
the Musharraf brigade.
Whatever one makes of their
politics, weighed against the dominant home-grown American images
of the morning -- policemen, police dogs, police vehicles, secret
service, rooftop sharpshooters, SWAT teams, men in suits riding
shotgun in SUVs with carbines, underdogged peace activists, black
T-shirts -- the foreign delegations of celebration or resistance
conveyed one message: We're swinging now. America is finished.
CounterPunch
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CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
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