9/11: One Bugle Will Sound

I don’t have to tell you this. If it isn’t burned like a brand into your consciousness, you’ll have to dig a pretty deep hole and pull it in after you to stop somebody else from putting it there. At 0846:40 Eastern Daylight Time, 11 September 2001, American Airlines flight 11, a hijacked Boeing 767, struck One World Trade Center (the north tower).

I don’t need to tell you what happened next. How the loss of one building complex and a big hole in another resulted in a tsunami of American militant enthusiasm that engulfed us, willingly you will remember, in a War on Terror. A wave of rage and paranoia that has encompassed the bungled invasions of two nations and a parade of soul-destroying atrocities that threaten to make people hiss at the English word freedom like they used to hiss at the Russian word for truth (Правда; "pravda"). A wave that has now passed, leaving us with the sad choice of fighting a long and costly endgame, with no certainty that the benefits will balance the expenses, or of cutting and running, leaving us with the shame and crippling malaise of defeat – just like in the decade after Vietnam.

I have already written of my experiences at that time. And how We the People have all been here before, with waves of militant enthusiasm provoking the first bloodshed in our “Civil" War, igniting the Spanish-American War, and – in a chilling tale of clandestine operations – catapulting us into World War II via the mechanism of the Pearl Harbor “sneak" attack.

The fifth anniversary of that event is Monday.

And on Monday, if I am spared, I will do as I have done every year but one since 2001. I will go out to the footbridge that connects Boothbay Harbor with East Boothbay Harbor (the bridge is over the Harbor) - and at 8:46 AM, Eastern Daylight Time, I will play “Taps". Followed by a verse of the hymn Once to Every Man [or Heart] and Nation. For, as I wrote on that earlier occasion:

“… at that hour in 2001, our moment to decide came, and we made our choice. Our 'Christian' nation chose not to turn its cheek (and thereby 'heap coals of fire' on the 9/11 perpetrators), but to turn its back on its supposed spiritual leader and, instead, embrace the animal spirit of militarism and retaliatory vengeance."

Kyrie eleison.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.