thats because you were in virginia. what if you were in new york where they were attacked?
"Fuck off," was my response then, and it's my response now.
What if you were in Cambodia, and Pol Pot was dictator, when they attacked?
On a more serious note, perhaps more important for this event, I was a freshman in college in Pennsylvania when Sept. 11th happened. The event seemed distant and even then (though I had classmates from NY who were sobbing, and I even knew people who knew people who died), and even more far away now. I don't know if it makes me a bad American, but I had a stronger visceral emotional reaction to the shootings in Norway than I did to Sept. 11th. It's also hard to remember what the US was like before 9/11 and our permanent wars in the Middle East.
I didn't wake up that morning until everything was over. I was in California staying with my parents while waiting for grad school to start. I woke up to the radio talking about how the police were securing the Bay Area bridges and other landmarks. I didn't find out what happened until I turned on the computer a few minutes later.
In the short term, I actually did wonder what I was doing going into academics and whether I should have gone into public service - I'd been thinking about taking the foreign service exam before going to grad school. I thought an operation into Afghanistan that ran as if it were a replacement for extradition - as we had no extradition agreement with the Taliban - to capture Bin Laden and others to stand trial was justifiable. I was not in favor of a war. But that makes my views sound more formed than they actually were.
One year after the attacks, I was on vacation and didn't pay much attention to the memorialization. I remember having a conversation with someone from England about Iraq, and didn't think we'd (both countries) end up going to war. He was more worried than I was; as I've said in a number of threads before, I was naive. By that time it was already clear that public service under the Bush Administration would have been a demoralizing experience.
Two years after the attacks, I was more concerned with the wars we were in. Five years after the attacks, I remember thinking that five years after Pearl Harbor, World War II had been over for a year.
I was a junior in college, deep in the Bible belt. My overall impression was that our politics were going to be unbelievably stupid for a long time.
If you want a flashback to just how insane those first few years after 9/11 were, have a gander at Michael Moore's recent column in the Guardian.
I hope we can all agree that the whole "God Bless America" thing during baseball games is a sign The Terrorists Have Won.
And Britta: well, that's understandable, especially since, if you include the first Gulf War and the establishment of the No Fly Zone that followed, the US has been at war in the Middle East for most of the time we've been alive. Oh, plus the 82-84 peacekeeping force in Lebanon, not that either of us would likely remember that.
They were shooting off fireworks downtown in honor of 9/11 last night. What the hell?
I had started teaching at Northwestern the day before, but on that Tuesday I was . . . don't be shocked . . . dicking around on the internet! I remember that Salon's front page featured a caricature of GWB as Major Kong riding the bomb. (And it took them a really long time to get that down.) CA (I think he was dicking on the internet, too? But could we really have had wireless? He must have been watching tv?) told me haha a plane hit something in NYC and took out some tv antennae. We thought it was some teeny single-engine plane. At some point we put the news on and realized it was in fact a jumbo passenger jet, and were watching as the second plane hit. My first thought was, "What an amazing coincidence . . .."
This Jon Wiener piece on the very understated (or re-directed towards communism) response to the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor is worth a read.
The second section [LA Times] did have a column on the Pearl Harbor anniversary, which opened, "This is the day on which innumerable Americans ... will be tempted to go about boring other Americans to death with their reminiscences of where they were and exactly how they heard the news"Not that there is anything wrong with that.
It's also hard to remember what the US was like before 9/11 and our permanent wars in the Middle East.
Five years after the attacks, I remember thinking that five years after Pearl Harbor, World War II had been over for a year.
Occupations, Cold War, Berlin airlift, Korea, Laos, Suez.
Central America
And then my era, Vietnam was news for 15+ years
Reagan in Central America again.
The only fucking shock for me is that some people thought the fall of the Soviet Union might mean the US would find peace, and are now surprised about the "Endless Wars"
We are Rome. We are Empire. We are as a nation fucking war.
9/11 was just one more excuse.
But there are indeed worst ways to be bored to death.
10: I don't find boring the stories about where Joe or Jane Schmoe was at the moment of any particular event. I find them rich with context. Also, your mother.
my older daughter was only 3 months old and husband x woke me up from nursing her to sleep to show me a plane had crashed into the world trade center. like oudemia, I thought it was a tiny plane. when the first tower fell I just literally didn't believe it, I kept saying "it's just hidden behind the smoke," while my husband insisted it had fallen down. I thought it was impossible. when the smoke cleared away and I realized the whole thing went down...jesus. my uncle works around the corner and all his offices windows were shattered, and just full of paper, endless spreadsheets and meeting lists and invoices fluttering down like singed snow.
I was reminded then, and am reminded again, of this surprisingly good essay at Suck.com, and still find the end of it chilling:
If you're looking for the clear act of cowardice around the bombing of the Cole, then, look to the effort to describe it to the countrymen of the murdered sailors. To suggest that an organized attack, brought off skillfully by members of what must be an extraordinarily cohesive organization, represents nothing more than some simpering spasm of pathetic hatred is to carefully miss the very large, very unpleasant point: People who destroy human life in this precise manner are not alone, and not disorganized, and very much not finished.
I kept saying "it's just hidden behind the smoke,"
I said this very thing. I also insisted, when the 2d tower fell, that they were just rerunning the footage of the first tower falling.
I also remember folks unclear on the layout of Manhattan freaking out about relatives who lived on the UES and worked, say, in midtown (and freaking out about them wrt those specific attacks, as if something to do with the Towers could harm them). I spent a lot of time reassuring Chicagoans that no, barring freakish coincidence, your relative is not anywhere near there, and that lots of folks in Manhattan aren't even at their desks before 10. (Seriously, if the Towers were filled with publishing companies rather than financial ones hardly anyone would have been at work yet.)
13: I'm simply reporting what some writer said in the LA Times back in 1951. Do you often find yourself responding defensively to historical stories in old newspapers?
I had nothing, repeat nothing to do with Teapot Dome.
I was on a bar in Durham, which was unusual only for the early hour and the not drinking alcohol.
I was at work three blocks away.
I was watching the news with my dad in Missouri (visiting parents before I was to fly to Berlin, where I was living... turned into a much longer visit that I had bargained for), and they kept talking about the first tower falling, I guess before they had any footage, because they were only showing the smoking building. We kept saying, what in the world are they talking about, that isn't "completely collapsed." And then they did show it and we shut up.
21: I was in a bar where I wasn't a regular, so pretty much as awkward.
I don't think I woke up until later. I was groggy from a night of partying. Also, I was jobless, homeless, largely friendless and broke on an island in the middle of SF Bay. Mostly, watching the TV added to my vertiginous sense of displacement in the world that had begun some months earlier and reached a head at burning man a week before, which featured a long, confusing, and personally important interlude during a sandstorm, which had incredible visual similarities to the footage of people wandering around in the dust after the collapse. So, yeah, not so much relevant to anybody but me.
If that was Treasure Island, my dad was briefly there with the Navy back in the day.
25: it was, yeah. I lived there for a while.
Blandings must be thrilled to read all about our tv watching.
That was the first school year my high school had TVs in each classroom, so we were awkwardly and laconically instructed via the PA to turn them on, between the first and second towers. I had a pretty inappropriate reaction, a rush that something on the grand scale of a Tom Clancy novel was happening in real life.
On a subject that matters more, I keep going back and forth about David Cole's attempt to summarize the state of civil liberties. It is an interesting point that in previous wars and scares, barely any civil libertarians spoke up in the duration; dissenters were rounded up, Japanese interned, with little dissent from civil society or interference by the courts. On the other hand, a lot of lawless and insanely immoral stuff has pretty much been normalized at this point.
Did Unfogged spend any time being outraged by the Holy Land Foundation case? If not, we should:
Now the administration is defending on appeal a conviction, under the same statute, of members of the board of the Holy Land Foundation, the nation's largest Muslim charity, who were sentenced to as much as sixty-five years in prison for providing humanitarian aid to hungry and indigent families in the West Bank--even though, according to the government's own evidence, not a penny went to any group designated as terrorist, and not a penny was used for anything but humanitarian purposes. Lacking such evidence the administration argued that the board members' provision of aid to small West Bank charities violated the law because they should have known the charities were affiliated with Hamas--even though the government had never before said so.
My strongest memory of the day wasn't the fall of the towers, because that was just a set of TV images. It was the Australian Prime Minister's security detail fanning out in the atrium of the Embassy, because that was right outside the door of the conference room where I had been supposed to have a meeting.
Thinking about that, though, it comes to me that the effect of 9/11 was to scare the shit out of the elite. Not just the Australian PM. Think of Air Force One flying around the country looking for a safe place. Think of Cheney hiding out in his "undisclosed location" which turned out to be the AJCC in the Rock, which is invulnerable to anything short of nuclear weapons (and not just any nuke, either, but the Russian multi-megaton jobs). It could have been them.
So they lashed out.
And they made sure we too would be scared. Mama don't feel safe, ain't nobody feel safe. The security theater wasn't (isn't) there to reassure us. It's to remind us that we aren't safe.
Driving back from the gym this morning (yes, I'm a bad person) I saw a sign on the Beltway: "I-395 North [which runs past the Pentagon]. No Trucks. Strictly Enforced." Overkill, fear, or propaganda?
In my office a hundred miles away. I was involved in some political argument on the Slate Fray before it happened and argument continued there all day. The story that some high number of Jews had been tipped off and stayed home from work that day hit the forum around noon.
Late afternoon a colleague stopped in with the first gallows humor of the new world: "so much for the deposition schedule in the cantor fitzgerald case." Our client dropped that case not too long afterwards.
Cheney hiding out in his "undisclosed location" which turned out to be the AJCC in the Rock
Huh. I just the other day heard a rumor from someone that it was this place.
I was in upper Manhattan. That vantage point was a weird combination of the standard not-there one of TV and internet with being fairly close. Panicked foreign relatives wondering if I'm ok, panicked me trying to reach friends who worked downtown.
Late that night I went downtown (close gf's windows to prevent the place getting swamped by dust). Cab managing the checkpoints with clueless national guardsman in weirdly dark streets (power was out) with what light there was all hazy due to the smoke, wandering the streets with candlelight vigils everywhere. The most emotional part for me was the 'missing' poster walls that you got everywhere in the days that followed. Dozens upon dozens of photocopies/printed photos with name, and 'last seen at' and a phone number or address. Generally surrounded by silent staring New Yorkers, occasionally adding another candle (apparently the MTA wasn't enforcing the no open flames thing in the stations).
From the archives: Becks' experience.
Yeah, I told my story a long time ago here, at least once, and on CT as well, so I won't bore anyone with it again, given that it was a fairly boring day here in MPLS.
Frankly, in terms of emotional impact, the Columbine and Arkansas (that was the one not too long afterwards, right) shootings were much more disturbing. I mean, putting yourself in the position of the crew, Al Quaida men, or passengers on those flights (except maybe the Pennsylvania one), and it must have been very dreamlike in many ways. I mean, if you see someone coming towards you with a gun, and you know they're probably going to shoot you, that's the sort of terrifying situation that it's easy to imagine, and indeed that we're constantly being prepared for by popular culture. Being on a jet that's about to crash into an important building -- how do you even process that? It's just not in our realm of experience. Even now, when I'm sure a significant chunk of the population has daydreamed or had nightmares about it, to actually experience those sensations would really be quite surreal.
The thing I've noticed, in talking to older people about Pearl Harbor, is that by the 80s at least, it had really faded into a sort of canned quasi-historical memory for most folx. Now, 9/11 is a bit different, 'cause lots and lots of people were right there, compared to the relatively minimal number of people who actually saw any part of the Pearl Harbor attack happen. And of course the available footage and reportage is a lot more complete. But even so, 30-40 years from now, it's hard for me to imagine that this will be such a big deal.
And then we found $5 and got a black president in Wisconsin.
And of course the available footage and reportage is a lot more complete. But even so, 30-40 years from now, it's hard for me to imagine that this will be such a big deal.
It's hard for me to imagine as well, but that's chiefly because we are (hopefully, presumably) aware of so many other tragic, dire and awful events occurring elsewhere around the world rather frequently, and at much greater magnitude. I keep thinking that as horrible as 9/11 events were for those more directly impacted than Americans who were simply watching on TV, there has to be a comparison check.
That said, my condolences and consideration to those who were there. A terrible experience.
I think I've said this here before, but we were in Italy, in a house with no tv, and didn't find out until the next day when we saw some newspapers. Very weird feeling - I am still grateful that I don't have the memories of sitting through all the tv reporting, but it's very strange to *not* have that shared experience.
I was at my parents' house, where I was spending the summer between my first and second year of college. My summer job had already ended, and I slept late, woke up and heard my dad (off work that day) on the phone, and could tell just from tone of voice that something was wrong -- my first thought was that some family member must have died, but listening a bit I could tell that wasn't it. I stumbled out of bed and he looked at me with a stricken expression and said something like "our country's been attacked." That was shortly after the first tower collapsed, and we watched the news footage as the second one collapsed. Then he said something to me, and I know this phrasing isn't right, but it was something like "you're going to be spending your whole adult life in a very different America". Which I think isn't really right -- it was already a very different America than circa-1970 America, and against big sweeping changes like the growth of the Internet and the steady rightward drift of politics, I think in the long run it won't seem like the key thing to go in the history books about circa-2000 America. Not that that's any consolation to the people who lost someone that day.
"you're going to be spending your whole adult life in a very different America"
Yeah. It was impossible not to know that instantly. Damn my own cynicism and all that, but my first reaction after hearing the news (from my brother over the phone, as I hadn't been watching/listening to the media that morning) was simply "The U.S. is going to go apeshit over this in a very bad way."
After checking in briefly with the newscasts, we went sailing for the afternoon. We did bring a small portable antenna-style radio, but otherwise it was a very pleasant, if sad, sail. By early evening, the news chatter indicated that the US was going to attack somebody, probably Afghanistan. The other patrons at the little waterside restaurant seemed jubilant and vindictive. I can't say I wanted to return to civilization.
May have said this before. I was at work, and somebody was looking at the beeb site and alerted us. My boss, who I regarded as a friend, was in a meeting and I had to break in with some numbers, so I mentioned that somebody had flown a couple of airliners into the WTC. Later he came out of the meeting and asked, "Has anything happened?" I said, "I told you what's happened." He said, "I thought you were joking." I liked him rather less after that.
Everybody spent the rest of the day looking for news sites with enough bandwidth to connect.
36: I keep thinking that as horrible as 9/11 events were for those more directly impacted than Americans who were simply watching on TV, there has to be a comparison check.
That said, my condolences and consideration to those who were there. A terrible experience.
Well, and of course the other point is that we can't have the same kind of national collective memory of this event/resulting war that people who actually have a war fought around them will have. It just doesn't work that way. We're looking at how long? 50ish years now since any white USian who had the experience of having their home be a war zone has been alive. And only a little bit less if we consider the last Native people who could remember the end of those wars. At the same time, of course, one of the reasons this is true is that we've become so adept at exporting war and terror to our internal colonies of Black & Hispanic & Native people, as well as to the 3rd World. And yet, as bad as it has been for people in Detroit or East LA or Pine Ridge, it's qualitatively and quantitatively different from what the average Pole experienced during WWII, or what the average DRC resident has had to deal with over the last 30some years. So yeah, I think this will recede into memory in sort of a geometric progression.
I was in Prague, in a flat with no TV, and no radio. My wife and I had been holed up for a day or two and neither of us had any clue anything had happened until, I think, early afternoon on the 12th, when I went to an internet café and had an email from a friend who'd (coincidentally) been in or near the WTC telling us he was OK.
I had no clue wtf he was talking about. So my wife and I went to her sister's flat to watch the news. Czech TV went with the Carmina Burana over slow-motion footage angle.
The other main memory is all the kids' drawings and flowers outside the US embassy. And sleeping policemen in cars full of machine guns outside.
Czech TV went with the Carmina Burana over slow-motion footage angle.
Where were the taste police?
Ok, for more detail, I didn't have a morning class, and was sleeping in a bit. At about 9 am or so (I think?), my roommate woke me up and said something like, "the world trade center fell down" and I remember thinking, "that's funny that they're demolishing it, it doesn't seem that old." It took a while to realize that it was 1) a terrorist attack, and 2) a significant number of people had been killed. I remember most that I had a class later that afternoon, with a response paper due, and I spent the morning finishing my response paper, only to show up to the class and the professor was sitting there and told us class was cancelled. I remember dropping off the paper and then wandering back out with my friends. Giant TVs were set up everywhere, and they were all replaying footage of the planes crashing into the towers.
About a week afterwards, I received the most touching card from a French family I'd stayed with in a high school summer exchange program, where they basically told us how French people were in solidarity with us, and how they stood with America, and how we'd liberated Normandy, and they'd never forget, etc. I was really touched at the time, and now in retrospect it really seems like the end of an era, the last glow of America being popular in Europe (though I agree that in other ways 9/11 is a blip on the radar screen.)
re: 46
Television news does sometimes like to go with the action-movie angle, but this was far beyond anything I've seen on UK tv. Complete with 'Don Pardo' style voice intoning 'Utok na Ameriku!'
Britta, your remark at 3.last upthread: It's also hard to remember what the US was like before 9/11 and our permanent wars in the Middle East
reminded me that even relatively short age differences make a huge difference. Sorry your generation's experience is flavored by this. My own generation grew up under Reagan; the Clinton era changed perceptions somewhat. I'm curious whether Obama's administration shifts perceptions at all for your generation.
I was in california, and it was genuinely weird. I probably woke up around 7:30 PT,so everything had happened. I was half awake, hearing NPR, and thinking "that's kind off odd that two buildings are falling down. How interesting. I wonder how they controlled that and why people are doing it." Then I woke up fully and realized that it was a terrorist attack, but it didn't seem the least bit real until I saw other people.
"Remember the Maine"
"Remember the Lusitania"
"Remember Pearl Harbor"
"Remember John Birch"
Cuba, Gulf of Tonkin, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama
And there is the downing of that passenger jet that really didn't get a "reaction" because NK is not where we fight our wars extend our empire.
We fight subjugate on Wallenstein's periphery.
Did we "react?" No, it's a show.
Did the oppressed "react?" They pretend to resist.
Am I callous, jaded, hardened? God, I'm 60, I have seen so many people die, so many catastrophes, tragedies, atrocities.
My first thought was about the domestic budget and Bush's agenda. After they showed some faces, I knew some of them from CNBC. I regretted the loss of the Towers.
NPR was reporting on the first plane as I headed into court. Like many, I assumed small plane. As I came out of court, people were talking about the second plane. I was annoyed, assuming this was a stupid rumor started by jumpy people. When I got home and realized what had actually happened, I was just plain grateful PBS played Arthur and whatnot all day that day.
I was home on maternity leave with Newt, who was a month old, and we were watching a neighbor's kids. I spent the morning in a playground with the four of them and hearing news as people walked by and called it in through the bars of the playground. Someone told a little girl's babysitter that the girl's father had died while I was there.
I didn't believe the towers had literally fallen until I got home and saw it on TV. Then we drove out of the city and stayed with friends in Jersey. (Fun fact -- closing all the bridges and tunnels into and out of Manhattan doesn't include Manhattan north of 125th? 145th? The Broadway bridge was open all day.
I don't think people just "assumed" it was a small plane that hit the first tower; I'm pretty sure that's how most news outlets initially reported the story. This matters a lot because I study collective memory. Aren't I cool? Not as cool as Pauly, but still.
I had the same initial belief, but I think I came up with it on my own -- terrorism hadn't occurred to me, and it seemed like the kind of accident that could only happen to a small-plane private pilot.
I'm pretty sure that's how most news outlets initially reported the story.
Is it archive.org that put together a nearly-complete record of live news broadcasts from that day?
That could answer the question totally authoritatively, without the need for these fancy history-talkin' types!
Fine, then. What I meant to say is, collective memory is complicated. Still cool, aren't I?
I hadn't actually looked at the archive.org thing until I linked to it. It seems pretty amazing, and I'm going to go ahead and not watch any of the video at all.
56: you and your authoritative truth claims. Archives are socially constructed and historically continent, you know.
Also (and OT), why don't any students bring bats to Hogwarts? Are bats insufficiently magical or something?
59.1: better than historically incontinent, I suppose.
Was there a lot of rioting at Hogwarts?
Anyhow, what I really meant to say was "hey, Von Wafer, have you looked at that archive? What do you think of it?" But I thought it would be better if I phrased it as trolling.
The comments on that post suggest that the archive is available in about 30 second increments. I don't envy the people who actually try to watch it.
I meant "contingent", of course. Al-Qaeeda stole my "g"!
(And yes, I've looked at that archive. It is amazing. Not as cool as the Katrina one from a few years back, but still very cool.)
Speaking of archives this thread (especially from about comment 200 on*) has a number of folks' remembrances. I'll give Tweety props for being pretty consistent in his report:
I had just gotten back from Burning Man, at which event I had experienced one of the most profoundly overwhelming psychedelic experiences of my life, one which revolved primarily around wandering aimlessly through a dust storm, an activity with visuals nearly identical to footage of people escaping the dust of the collapsing towers.Not that I was checking or anything like that.
*"Architectural criticism has gone too far!" from LB's father comes in at comment 197.
Your poor linking skillz mean the terrorists really have won.
That'd be this thread from August 2008.
Too late. Our freedoms have been sacrificed atop the pyre of your weak html.
If it weren't for weak links you can't fool me again.
As related earlier, I was not in my office at the Pentagon. I was in the US Capitol.
Looking at all this 10 year stuff depresses me. I have friends who still marinate in the outrage and fear. Me, I expected something like that for years so although I was horrified by the deaths it wasn't a shock that it happened. All that "lost innocence" crap bugged me then and now.
Me, I flew out of Washington National today and did m best to ignore CNN droning away in all the gate areas.
The week before 9/11, I had the following two conversations:
In the first conversation, I was asserting that the Taliban had reached cartoon villainy status, in that there was nothing you could learn about the Taliban that you would think any worse of them.
In the second conversation, we were talking about terrorism with my coworker, and we agreed that that there would never be a major (foreign) terrorist attack against the United States, because the US would go totally ape-shit, and everyone knew it.
I would now like to accept the Norman Angell Award for Excellence in Political Forecasting.
Norman Angell Award for Excellence in Political Forecasting
Tom Friedman and Richard Cohen present that one, right?
65: it was super weird, I tell 'ya. Looked just the same.
via a small reference from Anthony Paul Smith at Kotsko's
A Klee drawing named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.Walter Benjamin
Pile of debris = Joyce's midden heap = Ford's bunk
50ish years now since any white USian who had the experience of having their home be a war zone has been alive
Say what? There are plenty of white Americans who have had that experience.
75: Well, immigrants, sure, but there hasn't been a land war on US soil for a long time.
For bob, the comp lit grad student (for who else quotes Benjamin?):
Das Gefühl des Scheiterns, das Bewußtsein der Niederlage beim Wiederlesen der alten Texte ist gründlich. Versuchung, das Scheitern dem Stoff anzulasten, dem Material (ein kannibalisches Vokabular - »We are such stuff as dreams are made of«), der Geschichte des amputierten Helden: sie kann jedem passieren, sie bedeutet nichts; bei dem einen genügt eine Blutvergiftung, der andre hat mehr Glück: er braucht einen Krieg. Ausflucht: Europa ist eine Ruine, in den Ruinen werden die Toten nicht gezählt. Die Wahrheit ist konkret, ich atme Steine. Leute, die ihre Arbeit machen, damit sie ihr Brot kaufen können, haben für solche Betrachtungen keine Zeit. Aber was geht mich der Hunger an. Uneinholbarkeit des Vorgangs durch die Beschreibung; Unvereinbarkeit von Schreiben und Lesen; Austreibung des Lesers aus dem Text. Puppen, mit Wörtern gestopft statt mit Sägemehl. Herzfleisch. Das Bedürfnis nach einer Sprache, die niemand lesen kann, nimmt zu. Wer ist niemand. Eine Sprache ohne Wörter. Oder das Verschwinden der Welt in den Wörtern. Stattdessen der lebenslange Sehzwang, das Bombardement der Bilder (Baum Haus Frau), die Augenlider weggesprengt. Das Gegenüber aus Zähneknirschen, Bränden und Gesang. Die Schutthalde der Literatur im Rücken. Das Verlöschen der Welt in den Bildern.
(Bob, you should learn German to read Heiner Müller. You would like him.)
I saw someone driving a car today with a huge "9/11 Never Forget The Towers" written in the back, and a big American flag flying out the window, and my only thought was "fuck you.". Which is obviously uncharitable, but points out how it's impossible for me to separate the event itself mentally from the insane aftermath.
(Also, not only the insane aftermath, but the knowledge of what an incredibly preventable tragedy it was just makes me so angry at the "changed everything" aspect of the commemoration. Some lunatics got very lucky, the FBI sucked, and airline-run airline security was a joke. That's it.)
With that said, I do think the Flight 93 folks were heroes, and deserve a memorial. "United 93" is a great film. And, 6.1 gets everything exactly right.
The part of 9/11 that sticks in my mind is the short-lived idealism. I was a naive and self-absorbed college student, and suddenly people were talking about learning Arabic. Like we had a sense of purpose, beyond selling ourselves to some consulting firm. And honestly, if you wanted an event that would generate sympathy for the US, even for just a short time, you couldn't do better than 9/11. One of many things that Bush/Cheney destroyed without a second thought.
Look at what comes out of my mouth!
Like we had a sense of purpose, beyond selling ourselves to some consulting firm.
I gotta say, this sentence is making me very sad.
I'm calling Ralph on the big white phone!
I was a naive and self-absorbed college student, and suddenly people were talking about learning Arabic.
And then they found out that you only need bother if you're straight.
I saw the footage of Tower 2 getting hit as I was getting ready for work. I suppose as a lot of people did that day, I just sort of watched numbly as it all unfolded.
I had theoretically known such an event was technically possible, but I have never really believed it deep down. 9/11 made concrete for the first time -- for a lot of people, I think -- that the Rest could actually reach out and hurt the West in a substantial way if they really put their minds to it. Yes, it was on a continuum with other attacks et cetera, but the "loss of innocence" rhetoric is, I think, actually quite apt in this sense: that prior to 9/11 the bulk of the West, liberal and conservative and dissident and conformist alike, had truly believed it was in essence invincible. When Francis Fukuyama published a book claiming the West had reached "the end of History," the tacit assumption of invulnerability behind that claim wasn't the part of his argument that offended his detractors.
Later that day I was struck by three things:
1) A powerful sense of how desperately many people seemed to want to be part of the drama (I had co-workers jittering about how a terrorist attack might hit us any second), or how far the shattering of that sense of security had gone, or both;
2) A sense of dread about what the Bush presidency would do with the power it had just been handed (but this sense of dread was attached to thought that they couldn't to parlay it into a mantle of permanent heroism -- it was a couple weeks later before I began to realize what was actually about to unfold);
3) A sense of how disaster reveals the very best and the very worst in people. The 9/11 memorializations were mawkish and indulgent, but nevertheless the people from all (or at least many) walks of life who went down to Ground Zero to dig rubble were admirable. On the other hand, the very day the planes hit I remember seeing a Republican Congressman using the occasion, with breathtaking cynicism, to stump for ballistic missile defense.
but this sense of dread was attached to thought that they couldn't fail to parlay it into a mantle of permanent heroism
the "loss of innocence" rhetoric is, I think, actually quite apt
Of course it is. Forgive me, please, all, if I say that we needed it. It would be a larger project to say what we should have learned from it, and didn't.
Honestly? I thought an Obama administration might help us do that. A large part of my struggle over the actual Obama administration has to do with whether he -- to the extent that a chief executive can control all of everything --
Actually, I can't finish these sentences.
I've gone back and forth on what/when/how to say anything, but if I have Stanley's permission I might as well. This was already an emotionally heavy time for me as the anniversary of when I was sexually assaulted as a freshman in college and then had a total emotional meltdown, which then often manifests itself as depression or mopiness.
In 2001, I was in college and getting closer to getting out of the abusive relationship I'd ended up in because I thought I didn't deserve happiness, which means I was starting to think about happiness and freedom. I spent most of that day waiting to hear about my aunt, whose office was destroyed when the towers fell but who was physically okay. There was a lot of drama about which classes were canceled and which weren't, but none of that registered much at the time and certainly not since. I saw something on the Salon front page saying a plane had hit one of the towers, pulled my things togher and went to class. At the candlelight vigil, I felt horrible and guilty for crying for myself as well as for terrorism victims, but that's what I'd have been doing anyway.
The part I'm ashamed to post is that I fell into a funk of sorts when all of this cycled again, the first time I've had Mara with me. Something about knowing that this (though not this; I'd have been a professor in my dreams) is the sort of future I thought I'd never be worthy of after I'd felt sullied and suicidally desperate. But here I am and this feels like a better life than I or anyone could have imagined or deserved. I'm so glad I didn't die or give up when I could have. And of course the larger national trauma is more important, but this has been holding me at the verge of tears all week. I never really believed I'd be one who'd get a happy ending, and my friends through unfogged have been such a part of that. So please humor me today and let me be tearfully grateful, which I am.
Sorry. It is stupid to write a comment I can't finish and still post it.
88.last: I know what you mean.
89: Wow, that's a lot of trauma loaded on to one anniversary. Happy for you that you made it through to a better place.
Thorn, I'm very glad you've found this future.
Congratulations on your triumph, Thorn.
I am glad you did decide to post that, Thorn, and that you've found a way past that difficult time.
So did anyone here actually do anything today to mark the occasion, besides posting these comments? I managed to do a pretty good job of avoiding it. My son and I did find ourselves in Lower Manhattan this afternoon, albeit on the east side, to go to a public food market whose board of directors I'm on. (He also got to visit Fresh Salt at one point when he was desperate for a pee.) Fortunately, aside from things being a bit quieter than usual, particularly auto traffic, it could have been any fall Sunday, except for the occasional tourist couple in matching garish 9/11 t-shirts (with the "9/11" being the only difference).
Also very happy for you, Thorn.
So did anyone here actually do anything today to mark the occasion, besides posting these comments?
No.
Well, I watched football.
the occasional tourist couple in matching garish 9/11 t-shirts
Are you serious? I mean, it makes sense, now that I think about it, but wow.
I'm going to get a headband that spells out "Battle of Verdun" in sequins.
So did anyone here actually do anything today to mark the occasion
Radio silence. Actually mainstream media silence: no tv, no radio, no online newspapers.
I'm slightly sympathetic to the misguided tourists who don't realize how much they stick out.
Tourists are like wigs, though. You don't notice all the ones that blend right in.
I tried to write something expanding on Halford's 78, and it came out so nasty I was embarrassed to post it. But I don't think it was quite as nasty, or as dead-on right, as what Krugman wrote:
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
Jesus.
Among other things, I took Krugman's post as a shot at that smug self-justifying prick Bill Keller.
I have a feeling that Krugman's association with the New York Times is not going to end amicably.
Are there matching 9/11 t-shirts whereon there is one tower each?
105: For true tastelessness, these would be sold with two small t-shirts showing planes. For a family of four.
104: Huh. I was prepared to read Krugman earning his nickname as Kthug, but that post seems honest and true. I don't see how any of it could be denied.
I haven't read the Keller.
We have friends whose last name is Tower and it's always very tempting to call them The Two Towers but I don't know if they'd find it funny plus now they have kids.
Krugman earning his nickname as Kthug
I don't understand this nickname at all. Thug = people saying true things the name-caller doesn't want to hear?
108: were the kids planned, or did they LIHOP?
104: I just sent someone a link to that Krugman post. I think you're probably right that this won't end well.
109: I see the Balloon Juice people using the nickname. Maybe other people do. I took it to mean that he's considered a bully by some, in some quarters. Krugman is mean. All the liberals are.
"Krugthulu" is another monniker. I'm pretty sure both are intended ironically.
Ah. So 'thug' in the sense of doing the dirty work. That is, actually saying this stuff, day after day.
I sorta figured they all came from Kth'rugman, courtesy of my co-blogger, but what do I know.
115 cont'd: which was an H.P. Lovecraft joke, but a bit more subtle than "Krugthulu" (really?).
I went to Dealey Plaza today.
I wanted to take a photo of a lovely Romanesque building ( a former court house) that I saw coming in to the city. It wasn't until I was there that I read the name on the WPA plaque. Oh, this must be the place.
I've always liked that Benjamin thing about the Angel of History. Here's the Klee drawing.
I think I've said before how a professor of mine (Ben/jamin Bar/ber) said a couple of days later, "Well, looks like that will be the end of Bush's missile defense plans." Yes, that was Mr. Jihad vs. McWorld's big lesson from 9/11. The seminar I had from him gave me a distrust for popular Serious Thinkers that will last till I die, a distrust that was really helpful during all the shit that happened afterwards. Kth'rugman is right; a lot of people should be ashamed of themselves.
That is, actually saying this stuff, day after day.
Actually saying stuff out loud that's pretty much guaranteed to generate the charge that he's a big meanie, not playing the game, being rude, is biased, is a liberal, not observing the niceties.
The nickname is meant sarcastically.
This essay written by Jeff Faux the week after remains one of the best things I've read about 9/11.
Also, shockingly, Bill Keller is a disingenuous, self-serving piece of shit.
I've just read the Bill Keller piece linked in 104. It's a self-abasing apologia: on the one hand, the invasion of Iraq was a "monumental blunder," and on the other hand, who coulda known, and "I wanted to be on the side of doing something, and standing by was not enough."
I'm not really seeing Krugman's column as a danger to his relationship with the NYT.
Huh, that Krugman piece reads to me as somewhat callous and wrongheaded in at least two ways: first, I'm not sure that 9/11 has become (nor should be) an occasion for shame (though certainly some deeper reflection would be nice); and second, I don't think the nation, insofar as it thinks with one mind or feels with one heart (which it doesn't, obviously), would accept most of what Krugman says. Beyond that, I do agree that the profiteers and pundits should be mortified about what happened starting on 9/12/01.
122 before seeing 121, which is also linked in 104.
I meant to say Krugman "post", as I think it matters a great deal that he put those thoughts in a blog post rather than a column.
Agreed, it does matter whether it's a post or a column.
Also agreed that many Americans wouldn't find his thoughts acceptable, but we know that many Americans don't read the NYT in the first place. Krugman's post strikes me as a coda to the Keller piece: he just couldn't keep his mouth shut (thug that he is), and added, "Right, and you are ashamed of yourself, aren't you?"
Fair enough.
So did anyone here actually do anything today to mark the occasion
Does going to see the new Serge Gainsbourg biopic and eating Indian food count as marking the occasion?
Walked past a really awful bagpiper in the park here when I walked the dog. I assume it was 9/11 related, given that there was a bunch of people on benches listening solemnly, but man, all the pipers who actually knew how to play must have been at more prestigious memorial ceremonies.
123: Profiteers, pundits, and no small number of the people affiliated with the government of the day.
One thing the memorials coverage in Canada was good for was a reminder that as the dust was settling, the EPA and Rudy Giuliani alike were assuring first responders that the air at Ground Zero was perfectly safe to breathe and issuing them largely-useless paper surgical masks. Ten years on, those same first responders are dropping like flies from various diseases derived from the toxic WTC dust, including cancer. The pattern of criminality and lies, callousness and cynicism that went on after 9/11 really has infected almost everything about the day, even the positive legacy of the firefighters.
(That pattern is arguably a big part of the reason there's as large and cross-spectrum a "truther" movement as there is now. The open venality that made itself so visible at the time and afterward made it possible to believe these people were capable of literally anything, including offing thousands of their own countrymen for political gain.)
Huh, that Krugman piece reads to me as somewhat callous and wrongheaded in at least two ways:
Right on both counts, I think. When he says "the nation knows it," he's talking about "everyone" in the Kael sense. There are plenty of people whose appreciation of 9/11 isn't informed by the aftermath, and that's fine. Of course, there are also plenty of people who approve of the aftermath.
But I'm pleased that someone in a public forum is willing/able to speak directly to the aspect of this commemoration that I find so unsettling.
I'm going to get a headband that spells out "Battle of Verdun" in sequins.
ObBrassens:
http://www.frmusique.ru/texts/b/brassens_georges/guerrede14-18.htm
Depuis que l'homme écrit l'Histoire,
Depuis qu'il bataille à coeur joie
Entre mille et une guerre notoires,
Si j'étais tenu de faire un choix,
A l'encontre du vieil Homère,
Je déclarais tout de suite:
"Moi, mon colon, celle que je préfère,
C'est la guerre de quatorze-dix-huit!"
Or here, with entertainingly jaunty tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXLeRi9Xfr4
Or indeed Thackeray:
And ever since historian writ,
And ever since a bard could sing,
Doth each exalt with all his wit
The noble art of murdering.
2001: Working in DC, w/in 2 blocks of WH; went on roof to see burning P; heard loud explosion over towards State; got evacuated, walking 5 or 6 miles; caught ride to newly purchased house & plugged in TV. Rooted for Yankees in series.
2011: Determined to avoid commemoration, avoided internet & TV. Caught 2 mins of TV while taking son's skates to get sharpened, including a gross Verizon commercial. Read books.
2001: I was at work. Somebody went and got a TV and we all piled into an office to watch coverage, because you couldn't reach a news website for love or money. I was lying on the floor and drifting in and out of twilight sleep (9/10 had been a long night out with friends and I was exhausted), which made for a bunch of brief, intensely weird dreams.
2011: Football.
2001: Played computer games in my dorm room (freshman at the time) until I wandered out of the room and saw the news on TV in another room. Classes were at least partially cancelled. Tried to go to a blood drive that afternoon, but couldn't find it; apparently it's hard to organize that kind of thing on such short notice.
2011: Spent a lot of the morning playing computer games that day too. Spent the afternoon at a street festival in Adams Morgan with my girlfriend. I avoided commemmoration stuff without even trying, but my girlfriend had music on instead of the usual NPR, deliberately.
A couple odd things happened, though. For one thing, on Friday, a co-worker said something to me like, "Well, see you next week, hopefully,". I assumed the doubtfulness of that was just because of weather-related complications. Two people had each had problems getting to work, or had to leave early, due to all the rain in the area. But no, apparently he was planning on going to some memorial event, and he felt the need to point out the risk of attack.
And the other weird thing happened about three weeks ago. On 9/11, I called home, and my mom's first words on the phone were "are you OK?" I was a bit annoyed by this - "geez mom, don't worry, I'm fine", like a teenager. In fact, if you look it up, where I went to college was farther from NYC than where she was. Although she was probably thinking more about something else horrible happening that hadn't made the news yet. Three weeks ago, there was that earthquake. I called home almost four hours later and said "just so you know, I'm fine". She was surprised at the idea that I might not be. Turns out she hadn't heard anything at all about the quake yet. Funny how different big news travels differently. (Or just how she gets news more slowly after retirement.) (And then I found $5.)
2001: My day was certainly not very special (wife called me just as I was leaving for work, saw the second, went to work etc.). We both had siblings about whom there was some reason for legitimate concern*, but since we didn't really love them there seemed to be no good way to get any communication to or from them, it did not seem worth dwelling on (hmm, reflecting on it, maybe we really are just cold fish).
*God made my sister late leaving for her work (about block-and-a-half east of the WTC) and SWPL bastard that he is, he had my wife's brother (who lived about a block south of the WTC) taking an early morning Pilates class up in Greenwich Village. Both would have been fine anyway, although my brother-in-laws' roommate was sent fleeing from their apartment by the initial crash, and they both ended up as ash-covered refugees shuffled off against their will onto a ferry to New Jersey. And of course lots of subsequent issues with access to their place (which the Deutche Bank Bldg. fiasco prolonged).
2001, con't unto the next generation: My daughter's HS (in Potomac MD) was run by idiots, and wouldn't let the kids communicate with parents. Said one teacher: "they're either dead, in which case you can't reach them, or they're alive and you'll see them tonight. No reason to be distracted." My son was in 2d grade, and was pissed about being picked up early. There were serving his favorite lunch.
2011: She's since moved on, but when they were visiting in Jan we learned that the daughter's then-bf is a full-on truther. Hard to decide how polite to be in conversation. I'd have done an ask the mineshaft if I hadn't been on leave.
Also, shockingly, Bill Keller is a disingenuous, self-serving piece of shit.
I'm pretty sure he's on still on tap to step down and be replaced by Abramson this month (or maybe it has already happened). So he's busy cementing his legacy as a disingenuous, self-serving piece of shit (although I think he is going to continue to write).
I was lying on the floor and drifting in and out of twilight sleep (9/10 had been a long night out with friends and I was exhausted)
I'm glad to finally hear that I wasn't the only one recovering from a Monday night rager that day.
2011: at the stroke of midnight, I was hosting a bachelor party on a party-bus. Sadly, I failed to arrange for an exotic dancer to tell the bachelor "why don't you fly your airplane into my Twin Towers."
Tower-shaped breasts? That reminds me of how confused I was when reading "Darkness at Noon" and he described his mistress as having breasts like champagne glasses. I didn't realize champagne flutes were not the same as champagne glasses.
Tower-shaped breasts?
I was assuming legs?
The dancer had two enormous cocks. It's like you guys have never seen a phallic symbol before.
Huh, that Krugman piece reads to me as somewhat callous and wrongheaded in at least two ways:
Callous and wrong-headed as, say, the Gitmo or invading Iraq or being cheerfully proud of murdering a man with a needle?
first, I'm not sure that 9/11 has become (nor should be) an occasion for shame (though certainly some deeper reflection would be nice);
I have to say, in terms of remembrance, that the response of the people at the top of our society and their hangers on (usually referred to as elites) was laughable and I felt embarrassed for them. Fair point that in the decade following that on several occasions the same lot has achieved 'just as bad' on a regular basis. I'm not ashamed that the low-level guys did the right thing, and I'm not ashamed of a lot of normal people.
and second, I don't think the nation, insofar as it thinks with one mind or feels with one heart (which it doesn't, obviously), would accept most of what Krugman says.
Well, no. Lots of Southerners would tell you that they're ashamed of slavery and say you should stop reminding them and then go out and prove that that they aren't ashamed of it at all. Mostly they're just upset that they couldn't keep it up. That the people of the United States would not accept the idea that the US did anything bad or wrong or stupid in the three months following 911 is par for the course for humans. Don't mean it ain't true.
Beyond that, I do agree that the profiteers and pundits should be mortified about what happened starting on 9/12/01.
In 2011, I spent a good part of 9/11 trying to dig up the text from the archival remnants of what was going on in 2001.
In 2001, I had gotten up at 1 in the afternoon and worked all night long and come home around 5-5:30 AM, and I was going to waste some time on the internet before going to bed. I encountered a message indicating that 'THE WTC HAS BEEN DESTROYED' and went and turned on CNN just early enough to wait a few minutes before a large plane flew into the other tower. And then I watched one of them crumble.
I stayed awake until 9 PM alternating watching the TV and being on IRC calming people down and on Usenet talking (and then in short order, fighting) and in the interval hitting the news sites. (I was apparently one of the few who could connect to the NYT at all, god knows why.) Things started to take an ugly turn very quickly and on 9/12 broke out into open combat between the (scratch) 'little platoon' of a couple of my friends plus some others (which included one PZ Myers, who does not like me - and I don't like him, but it's personal not political) and a legion of wannabe fascist idiots. I realize now that that was the Fox News Nation rising up to tell us to commit immediate genocide against any brown people we could, and I mean that literally.
For me, 9/11 stretched on for days and then weeks and then a couple of months, until December 3rd, when I saw a picture of a Taliban prison all tied up in the back of what looked to be a C130. The entire bad gay S&M porno movie atmosphere was represented, down to the geek mask. At that point, I realized my team had been seriously outflanked and our last ditch stand in defense of sanity (not even liberalism, just sanity) had been completely pointless and we were in serious trouble.
We got plenty to be ashamed of, but people were so busy watching the TV and convincing themselves that we were all coming together that nobody seemed to notice that the serious problem was not the 3000 dead people, but the fact that 50 million or so Americans had apparently stripped their gears all at the same time.
Now I know how Russian units in the western Soviet Union who had fought well must of felt when they had to turn around and head for what had been their rear. The whole episode is pathetic, but it (also) does provide me with some insight into what got into people's heads immediately after Pearl Harbor.
max
['Of course, those folks had an excuse: they were in a serious, genuine war.']
nobody seemed to notice that the serious problem was not the 3000 dead people, but the fact that 50 million or so Americans had apparently stripped their gears all at the same time
This. Also, Mark Kleiman, although the logic of his argument is that you'd be best off not even reading it.
In passing, never forget that an failed act of terrorism which would have also changed everything if it had succeeded is still commemorated in England after 406 years. So people who just want to put it behind them may need to raise their game a bit.
I don't know if I've ever made this point here, but my entire family and everyone we knew were convinced on the day that it was right-wing domestic terrorists behind it, Tim McVeigh 2.0.
