September 11th

So I was reading this post in another blog today on how there are some people who think we should move beyond the tragedy that this date represents and not think about it anymore. No way; I'm going to remember this date as long as I'm alive, not quite as much as the day my dad passed away, or when it happens to my mother if she beats me, but it's pretty close to the top. Yeah, I take it personal, and I'm not forgetting a thing.

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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.

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Read Part 1.

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It came from biology, and history. From Konrad Lorenz speaking of “militant enthusiasm" in his book On Aggression, and how it can be initiated, and manipulated, in humans and in other social animals (rats, for instance). From the episodes in American history that have led to popular uprisings, to “eagle screams for the flag" (words of J. M. McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom), to mass recruitments into the armed forces, to war. The minutemen on Concord green – who precipitated the American Revolution, not to mention an inflated reputation for civilian militias that nearly lost our war for independence within two years of its beginning. The bombardment of Fort Sumter – our Civil War. The sinking of the battleship Maine - the Spanish-American War. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor – World War II. I am sitting in a YMCA gym knowing that I am reliving the emotions of December 1941. Even our President said so. And I am not comforted.

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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?

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For the story behind this poem, go here.

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quiet

in the post of the smoke
there is quiet

the roiling has subsided
busy has returned
people are the same
      but not

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