SENTIENT TIMES Feb/Mar 2002

The Trade Towers Without Tears

John Darling

We’ve buried the dead, talked 9/11 to death, liberated Afghanistan and almost certainly will blow Osama bin Laden away sometime in 2002. CNN/Fox are starting to run news on other extraneous, tedious topics, like education, the environment and health care. It’s ok to say bad things about Bush again.

It’s also time to remember who we are. We are not the people described in those bumper stickers: “United We Stand, God Bless America.” Yes, we are overwhelmingly behind the mission of defending ourselves against terrorist attacks and always will be. Sept. 11 assured that. We’ve also rolled back civil liberties a good bit and, for now, no one seems to mind much. But, about that bumper sticker, it’s time to come back to reality. We do not stand united about much of anything and never will. That’s what we’re all about. It’s a good thing and it’s called diversity, which is the right to think, speak and live differently than some imagined healthy, moral, ideal norm which should really oughtta fit everyone. Diversity: it’s kind of a new way of saying freedom.

And, excuse me, but God does not bless America any more than she blesses Upper Volta (or Iraq) and, in fact, the odds are probably better than even She’s not even aware of national boundaries. Just as probably, She’s giving extra blessings right now to one seriously wayward, needy soul hunkered down in a freezing cave somewhere near Tora Bora and starting to have some teensy second thoughts about his jihad.

As part of getting back to reality, this feels like a good time to stop thinking of the Trade Towers attack as the most amazing and awful thing that ever happened to anyone. “The day that changed every-thing,” we mutter, watching them drape more coffins as they scrape through the wreckage that took 2,900 lives. But it’s not the worst thing, and doesn’t even make the top 100 in the cavalcade of disasters. In reality, this sort of thing has been happening to people on a much bigger scale in almost all countries for a very long time—Dresden, Masada, Hiroshima, Cortez, on and on. It just hadn’t happened to us yet on our home soil—well, not since the British torching Washington, Sherman’s march and the Sand Creek massacre. We’ve come to think of ourselves as special. All those wars, plagues, bloody revolutions, tsunamis ‘n stuff happen to those more poor, ignorant and heathen countries, but God kinda likes us best. We’re the “City on the Hill,” to quote Ronald Reagan.

Where we do top the list is that we’ve made 9/11 the all-time most talked about, most broadcast, most analyzed, most trumpeted, most propagandized, most wept about event by far in the history of the world or at least since the Crucifixion. It’s the worst evil done by the “baddest” people against the “goodest” and most innocent people since the dawn of meanness. Bush summed it up with breathtaking simplicity: this is a battle of good vs. evil. Falling a good bit short of the philosophical grasp of Wilson, FDR and Kennedy, Bush has summoned the archetype of the Lord in combat with Lucifer. This is the sort of dualistic, fundamentalist thinking underlying jihad.

It can easily be argued that 9/11 has had such an impact because of advances in communications technology. Who’s ever seen 2,900 people vanish in an awesome, terrifying blip, while we sat sipping coffee in our living rooms? No one. It’s a first. And it caused the outrage it should have. If we’d had CNN/Fox, global communications satellites and the internet throughout all history, it would have changed everything. If CNN’s legions had been there with talk shows, polls and breaking news video about the first slave auction—the tears, the sound of the whip, the child ripped out of it’s mother’s arms—there would never have been slavery.

What’s new and positive here is that it’s all on tv now. On a community scale, a generation ago domestic violence, child molesting and drunk driving were accepted as your personal business. The shift couldn’t have happened without the likes of CNN and Oprah. On a global scale, a generation ago, tyrants, ethnic purges and apartheid “happened.” Today, we give them ruthless publicity, resulting in jail for Milosovic and the Nobel Prize for Arafat and de Clerk. Someday, the same publicity will force the U.S. to abandon capital punishment, Star Wars and, as resources and biodiversity dwindle, its manic consumerism.

Meanwhile, it’s time to get out of our denial about this freedom thing. Our governments are gnawing away at civil liberties in the name of the war on terrorism. Restricted freedoms are part of war and that’s fine. But this one is different: the enemy can be anyone—a nation, a cult, the person on the bus next to you. It could be you. And it will never really be over. As long as there are any terrorists left (there always will be), then the war, and the justification for loss of civil liberties, is open-ended. It goes on forever. Along with this comes the perpetual excuse for Cold War-style military and intelligence projects and spending on just about any scale. If the public wavers, they only have to run clips of 9/11, the faces of the fire fighters and police, the flag gently rippling in the CNN logo—and we’re there. United We Stand and of course, God blesses it. This is the dark side of CNN. We haven’t seen an awful lot of critical thinking yet from our cable journalists. Even the perspicacious Judy Woodruff, giving the death toll at WTC, added “… and that doesn’t include the terrorists, of course.”

However, more than three months after the attack, cable did finally show our first domestic detainee, held in U.S. jails without charges, evidence or probable cause, except possession of Arabic name and facial features. He’s been working in the U.S. for a decade, has a legal visa, is awaiting citizenship hearings, owns a home, has a job and family and pays taxes. There are hundreds more in the can. This violates several clauses of the Bill of Rights, but who cares? If we can get truthful about this, down deep we’ll find a lot of anger at all Islam wrapped around plain vanilla racism—hey, let ‘em rot.

Embarrassed by the most colossal intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, security folk lurch forward, often blundering over that fuzzy, invisible line into repression. A majority of us in recent polls, feel fine about requiring a national ID card and number. “Your papers are not in order! Step this way please!” A generation from now, this will not be ID papers, but an implanted ID chip. Do we want this? Big Brother will always answer: “If you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we search.”

In a case soon to be heard in the Supreme Court, the U.S. government is seeking broadened authority for police “to approach and search passengers” on public transportation, and to do it without first informing people of their rights. Arguing the case for the Bush administration is Solicitor General Ted Olson, whose wife was on the plane that flew into the Pentagon.

Daily we get emails and links from friends of friends with new tales of repression. The Green Party woman denied a flight in Maine. The Secret Service at the door of a college freshman in North Carolina, asking to search her apartment for “un-American” literature (a poster mocking Bush for 152 executions on his Texas watch). Author Starhawk detained trying to enter Canada to protest IMF meetings, her computer seized and read, her companion jailed. With the accumulation of data on all our histories, any security agent can use the internet to instantly call up practically anything about us—arrests at protests, credit record, published writings. It’s only a small step until the internet, once envisioned as a tool against repression, becomes the tool of dossier-building.

Let’s not go there. Let’s remember we’re coping with a lot of stress from a tv-driven blowout that has trashed our unwarranted sense of invulnerability. It’s like how you feel when you walk into your house and find it burglarized—not so much the loss of stuff as the sense of being deeply offended, invaded and disrespected. Well, welcome to the real world. We stuck our nose into the hornet’s nest of the Mideast by helping to disenfranchise Palestine. The bees came out and stung us.

A recent letter signed by 100 Nobel laureates helps put things in perspective. Far from howling at the outrageous attack against the City of the Hill, they said the most profound danger to world peace is that the world’s poor, most of them in equatorial nations, will have their environments trashed by global warming and they’re not going take it laying down. They write, “If we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor.” This sounds like WTC times 1,000.

They go on, “The only hope for the future lies in co-operative international action, legitimized by democracy. It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security (read Star Wars), in which we seek to shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world. To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all.”

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