CounterPunch
Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
September
7, 2002
The Trouble
with Normal
by Jeffrey St. Clair
Standing on the gallows with my head
in a noose
Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed
"Things Have Changed"
Bob Dylan
It is the second plane that haunts the mind, curving
on a course that seems to descend right out of a waking nightmare.
Even before it struck that ugly steel and glass tower, there
was already a dreadful familiarity to it. Somehow we'd seen its
shape before. The Hindenburg in flames. JFK's head blooming open
on the Zapruder film. The Challenger space shuttle exploding
live before our eyes in the stratosphere on an impossibly sunny
Florida day. The Waco fire incinerating women and children in
those Texas winds. The events of 9/11 played out like a horrifying
novelty show, seared into the brainpan of the nation by thousands
of instant replays.
The media technique was that of a sporting
event, with time slowed down to scrutinize each frame, then flipped
into reverse action. It reminded me of the old opening of the
Wide World of Sports, with that poor, doomed ski-jumper sliding
inevitably off the giant ramp, time after time, week after week,
to the beat of the same martial music.
We are told that we are different. That
things have changed, changed irrevocably. That it's a strange,
new world now. And there's no going back. Some pundits even appropriated
the language of Stephen Jay Gould (though he would never have
done so), calling the leveling of the towers a kind of historical
punctuated equilibrium, a great leap forward in the evolution
of the nation.
It's a comforting thought. The notion
that we've somehow grown up. Laid the past behind. Taken the
transformative step that was promised but never realized with
the transit into a new millennium. The collapse of the towers
became a metaphor for the shedding of a tarnished exoskeleton,
a tale right out of Ovid directed by Roger Corman. In Jerry Falwell's
words, 9/11 was a preview of the Apocalypse, which expurgated
the Sixties, humanism, cultural tolerance, and all of that jazz.
Suddenly, everybody espoused an eschatology.
By and large, out here in Oregon, people
just wanted to get back to normal, slide back into a daily routine
of work, family and play. After all, Oregon's economy had bottomed
out prior to 9/11. There wasn't any time for extended periods
of cross-continental grief; and there wasn't money to "buy
a car to demonstrate our patriotism," even with Greenspan
quashing interest rates. But the media refused go along, they
force fed us patriotism through the cable lines as if we were
all hooked up to a collective IV. Even so, the ubiquitous American
flags didn't start going up in our little mill-town until two
or three weeks after the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon.
These raisings didn't seem like genuflections of patriotism so
much as symbols of surrender to the imprecations of Paula Zahn.
Once he settled his nerves after those
mysterious hours in that Omaha bunker, Bush placed the nation
on war footing, stoking paranoia to serve his frail political
agenda. Of course, Bush didn't say much. And no one really wanted
him to. He dusted off some hackneyed lines from an old western,
gave a thumbs up to the crews excavating the ruins of the twin
towers and stuck closely to a monosyllabic script written by
his handlers.
If 9/11 hadn't happened, there's the
creepy sense around here that Bush would have had to concoct
a micro-version of it, some kind of dramatic prelude to a war
designed to salvage his marooned presidency. Of course, this
is the mulch that nourishes the conspiracy theorist. But there's
a steaming mound of it. His presidency in August of 2001 was
listing from incompetence, a grinding recession and burgeoning
scandals that seemed ready to engulf Dick Cheney and the other
parental supervisors of his administration.
Into the spotlight stepped Donald Rumsfeld,
a grouchy leftover from Nixon time. It now turns out that Rummy
and his cohorts were poised to make some kind of war in the days
leading up to 9/11--most likely against Saddam Hussein, the captive
whipping boy of successive administrations. Newly released memos
show that Rummy was making war plans only moments after the planes
struck. Osama bin Laden was almost an afterthought, a footnote
to the real objective. Link it to Saddam, urged the Secretary
of Defense. "Go massive," the memo quote Rumsfeld as
saying. "Sweep it all Up. Things related and not."
Note that in Rumsfeld's perverse mind collateral damage wasn't
something to be tolerated so much as desired.
Rummy didn't have to worry about racking
up an impressive body count of civilians. What followed was a
remote control war on the poorest of the poor, featuring cruise-missiles
launched on thousand mile arcs from the Indian Ocean across the
Hindu Kush to pulverize mud huts in Kandahar and Khost. More
than 5,000 civilians perished. But the Taliban weren't defeated
so much as dispersed back into the tribal gangs from which they
were recruited during the CIA-orchestrated war against the Soviet
Union. Afghanistan wasn't bombed back to the Stone Age, just
back to feudalism. The nation's pistachio crops aren't doing
so well, but the opium fields are booming once again.
Many liberals pinned their hopes on Colin
Powell to restrain the ultra hawks in the administration. This
proved delusional from the start. Powell's bloodstained resumé
dates back to My Lai and the most gruesome atrocities of Vietnam.
At his best, Colin Powell was indecisive, pouty, powerless. At
his most malign, he served to hold together the shaky war coalition,
through the calculated use of arm-twisting and bribery.
It soon became clear that a little bit
of paranoia served as a natural defense mechanism. Not out of
fear that bin Laden might strike again, but of the likes of John
Ashcroft, who was itching to deploy a legion of snoops, from
truckers and cable guys to librarians and lap dancers. Ashcroft
is one of the more comically sinister characters to hit the DC
political scene since Ed Meese. But Meese was a political pit
bull, dangerous but predictable. Ashcroft is a deranged crusader,
as warped by his religious obsession as is bin Laden. But so
much more powerful. When Jefferson talked about separation of
church and state, he was warning against empowering the likes
of Ashcroft, not innocuous prayer in school.
The 3,000 victims at "ground zero",
especially the firemen and cops who rushed into the towers only
to have them collapse on top of them, were swiftly turned into
sacrificial heroes, national martyrs in the cause of the revenge
tragedy that is now being played out on a global scale. Bruce
Springsteen roused himself out of hibernation to sing the soundtrack,
for $20 a pop. Suddenly there were martyrs everywhere. From Mohammed
Atta to Todd Beamer, whose last words were trademarked by his
wife, Lisa-it's the American way. Is the thirst for virgins in
the afterlife so inexhaustible?
Every aspect of American society continues
to be drenched in this sticky and unrelenting patriotism. You
get the sense that even our serial killers are uniquely American.
Something to be proud about. And perhaps so it should be. Those
Special Forces troops who came back from the hunting grounds
of Afghanistan to kill their wives at Fr. Bragg are the most
pampered and "understood" killers since William Calley.
Looking back, it's hard to see any fundamental
change in the character of life in America. The events of 9/11
and their aftermath merely solidified the status quo. The economy
remains in a rut. Environmental laws are being peeled back day
by day. The Sharon war machine tramples Palestinians with impunity.
The unemployment rolls grow daily by the thousands. More and
more are going without food stamps or welfare checks. It's all
blotted out by the manufactured trauma of 9/11.
Of course, some things were clarified.
The fragility of the Constitution. The supine nature of the environmental
groups and big labor, which stood down as the Bush administration
cravenly pursued its post-9/11 domestic agenda. And, of course,
the complicit character of the Democratic Party, which green-lighted
Bush's war without debate and helped enact some of the most oppressive
domestic policing laws in the history of the Republic with only
two or three voices of dissent. Now one of those, Cynthia McKinney,
has been driven from the congress for her impertinence. And the
beat goes on.
I opened the paper this morning. More
indications of a double-dip recession. Boeing stiff-armed the
machinist union, again. The number of Americans ensnared by the
criminal justice system topped 6 million. The US-armed death
squads in Colombia slaughtered more peasants. More than 90 percent
of Native Americans live without access to adequate health care.
GE's Jack Welch got a severance package that pays him $17,000
a day. The spotted owl population has declined by 50 percent
in the last 10 years and seems headed inevitably toward the black
hole of extinction.
It all seems so familiar. Same direction,
faster pace. The trouble with normal, Bruce Cockburn sings, is
that it always gets worse.
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at: counterpunch@counterpunch.org
CounterPunch Special Report:
9/11 One Year After
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A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
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Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
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When
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Looking
Back on September 11
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers and 9/11
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
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September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
September
3, 2002
Nabil Amro
Leadership
& Legitimacy:
An Open Letter to Arafat
Robert Fisk
A Forgotten
Holocaust:
The British in Palestine
Uri Avnery
The Return
of the Dinosaurs
September
2, 2002
Francis Boyle
Flashback:
US War Crimes During the Gulf War
Lou Cohan
Confessions
of a Downloader
Philip Farruggio
Labor
Day Antidote to Apathy
William Blum
Cuban Political
Prisoners
in the US
September
1, 2002
Dave Marsh
No Surrender:
Springsteen's The Rising
August 31,
2002
Gavin Keeney
Return to the
Charterhouse of Parma
David Vest
Porkland:
Confronting Republicans & Police in Portland
Ralph Nader
The Highway
Lobby
M. Shahid
Alam
CNN Reporting
(poem)
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Subjugation Strategy
Dr. Susan
Block
The Gangbang
Asthete
The Sexual Life
of Catherine M.
Kurt Nimmo
Clueless
at the State Dept.
August 30,
2002
Alexander
Cockburn
American
Journal:
Hitchens, Kissinger, Springsteen, Haggard & Elvis
August 29,
2002
Chris Floyd
The Secret
Sharers:
The CIA and the Murder of Frank Olson
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Read
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Whiteout:
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|