I observe that there are folk out there who look at pictures of the Pentagon after it was struck on September 11th, 2001, and don’t see any airplane wreckage. And so they think that, whatever it was that hit the building, it could not possibly have been American Airlines flight 77, grieving families of passengers and flight crew notwithstanding. Those mourners must have been paid off. After all, pictures don’t lie. Unless it’s my kid caught on video smoking dope in the back of the school bus, or my grandfather caught herding people to the showers in the documentary footage of the Polish concentration camp. Those are fakes, my kid doesn’t do drugs and the Holocaust never happened, so there. But if it was a hijacked airliner and not a CIA missile that hit the building, where are all the plane pieces?

Same place they went in the World Trade Center towers. Or have you never wondered how come something as big and fast-moving as a commercial Boeing didn’t shear each tower right in half? This might not be what you want to hear if you’re off to Indianapolis or Istanbul tomorrow, but that hulking city block of a 747 that just lumbered out of JFK with its four engines roaring and its great wings flapping and creaking is one great big hollow balloon of titanium, and if that balloon hits something hard it shatters into dust and what’s left over compresses into a very small pile. I remember the photos of the site of the plane crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart in 1999. Basically, it was a scorched patch of grass in a field. OK, it was a small private jet and not an Airbus, but still there’s something downright insulting about the insignificance of the speck on which Stewart and his entourage were converted to ashes and dust.

For me, the scariest part of 9/11 didn’t come while the World Trade Center dust was still flying for the whole world to see except me, stuck in my office trying to find a news website that wasn’t frozen solid while Alexander Haig was taking charge and spewing bullets on National Public Radio. It came later, after the dust and a roaring quiet had settled. I even wrote a poem about that quiet, which I’ve posted separately. It was the first poem I’d written in more than 20 years. Regular readers of this blog have seen what that led to. Sorry about that.

It came during the evening vigil in the church, the liberal church with its liberal pastor. When yours truly was moved to say that Jahweh and Allah are the same god (which is true, in case you didn’t know; Muhammad is explicit), that the Bible has Jahweh saying “Vengeance is mine", and Jesus talking about “turning the other cheek", and maybe it was something we did that led to this. The liberal pastor was offended, and I suppose I’m fortunate that the liberal church didn’t haul me out and stone me right then and there. The next year, the liberal pastor was instrumental in making sure that the community spent scarce resources on lights for the high school football field, so the town of 2,000 could showcase its budding NFL running backs on Friday nights. He is now a TV preacher. No you haven’t, remember this is Maine we’re talking about. God moves in mysterious ways.

It came during the rally on the Saturday night following the attack. Everybody was there; the YMCA gym in Boothbay Harbor has never been so full. A room full of baby boomers, veterans of the Vietnam turmoil (not many of them as uniformed participants) hollering God Bless America along with the red-and-white clad, tone-deaf community band and shouting murder and mayhem. There were flags everywhere, and prayers, and a fire-and-brimstone patriotic speaker who, if there had been planes available, would have had the entire town on them right then and there, ready to go anywhere and massacre anyone in a burnoose. Dr. Goebbels would have hired him on the spot. I sat there with my red-and-white and my trumpet and my Stars and Stripes Forever. I saw clearly where we would be in four years time. Where we are now. And I have never been more frightened in my life.

(Continued)

  - O Ceallaigh

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