Better late than never...

I actually wrote this back on September 11, 2008, and I don’t have to tell you what that’s the anniversary of. That was also the time my Internet connection went the way of all things not paid for. I intended to post it as soon as I had my connection back, but for reasons I now don’t recall I failed to do so. My bad.

But while cleaning out old files I ran across it as a MSWord file, and realized it was too good (and to long) to just trash, even though it is a bit out of date and the next anniversary of the event in question won’t come for ten months. So rather than hold on to the article until September of 2009, I present it here. Sorry about the delay.

The original title of the article was simply September 11, 2001.

September 11, 2001

(As I write this, my Internet connection is down. This isn’t really that big a problem, as I usually compose off-line and post later anyway, saving final editing until I’ve posted. It’s now Thursday, September 11, 2008 and the connection is still down. I’ll be posting this as soon as I have a connection again. I apologize for not being able to post this in a timely fashion and hope you’ll be, or have been, patient.)

WARNING - This is going to be a longish post full of a lot of history that you probably already know, with a smattering of remarks from me that probably won’t surprise you either. If you want, and aren’t smart enough to just skip the whole damn thing, skip ahead to the section titled "In Conclusion" to read my conclusions and find out what the hell all this history stuff was getting to. But I’m feeling wordy tonight, so I’m going to keep typing.

This is the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and if I need to tell you that then you’re living either in another country from me or under a rock. Here’s the story as I remember it, about the attacks and their aftermath, and a bit about where they’ve taken us. A bit about what we have become in the years since, and it ain’t all that complementary.

Reliving History

That September morning, I was on my way to work. and running a tad late.

I had a forty-five minute drive to my office, and I was pushing it a bit to get there as close to on time as I could. So, there I am, driving down the freeway, when I notice car after car pulling over to the side of the road. I had no idea what was going on. Thinking that there might be a problem with the road up ahead, I turned on my radio to try to get a warning of any upcoming difficulty.

I could not possibly have predicted what I heard next.

The station I had set was a music station that never had network news, but I was suddenly listening to a network newscast about something that had just happened in New York. What the hell?

Within five minutes I was one of those drivers that had pulled over to try to get a handle on what they were hearing. For the record, I didn’t. Not then, and not entirely even now.

I sat, stunned, listening to how a jumbo jet had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. Even though the newscasters were already speculating about terrorists, I didn’t want to believe that...after all, something very similar had happened in the 1940’s when a B-25 crashed into the Empire State building. That certainly could have happened again; I did not believe--did not want to believe--that this could be a terrorist attack.

I remembered that on the day of what had previously been the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, the Oklahoma City bombing, many people had initially cried "Arab terrorists!" when in fact the terrorists had been entirely home grown. I thought that if this did turn out to be an act of terror that it was far more likely to be domestic malcontents rather than foreign "Solders of God." But really, I wasn’t thinking terrorists; after all, it had happened before.

Then a second plane crashed into the other tower, stretching probability beyond the possibility of an accident. From that moment on, the America that I lived in became a far different, far darker place.

In the months that followed, a wave of highly un-American feeling swept through the country and disguised itself as patriotism and "Americanism." It was anything but. I watched as Americans and their government institutionally accepted acts that would have been unthinkable, illegal, immoral, or downright evil on September 10. Racial discrimination, gross violations of the Bill of Rights, sweeping powers given to the government (and particularly the President), restrictions on free travel, free speech and habeas corpus, all things that would have been unthinkable on September 10, became not only accepted but the law of the land (or when not actually written into the law, at least the rule that governed the of the application of the law).

What amazed me, and amazes me to this day, was that the very people who had been so steadfast in championing the rights of the individual, the people with bumper stickers that read I Love My Country but I Fear My Government, the people who up until September 10 had yelled the loudest at any threat to individual freedoms, became the first people to jump on the government’s bandwagon in their efforts to severely restrict those very same freedoms, come September 11. The same people who had laughed about G. Gordon Liddy printing President Clinton’s picture on paper shooting targets, and asked where they could get one, and had scoffed at the "liberal media" for making a big deal of it, now treated any word spoken against President Bush as an act of treason.

What a difference a day makes.

I remember stumbling on a web site that someone had put up following the attacks, a web site that showed pictures from U.S. embassies around the world showing the spontaneous outpouring of grief and sympathy felt by people in other countries; Europeans and Asians and Arabs and Persians and Indians and all manner of people from all manner of places. People crying, flowers left at the gates, signs of sympathy and support. I have to admit, I cried when I saw that site. (I imagine that that site is long gone now; if anyone has the URL of such a site please send it to me.) The sympathy of the entire world was with us. We could have used that universal good will to accomplish so much in the months that followed September 11, 2001. Our people, though grieving, were never more united; our nation was willing and able to move as one to accomplish a common goal.

The Bush League

Unfortunately, our leader was George W. Bush. Bush used the united American people to push his own agenda. In addition to the one thing he did that I don’t have a problem with, invading Afghanistan (some of us had been saying since the Taliban came to power that they should be dealt with, and I regret what it actually took to get us moving), most of what GWB did wasn’t so laudable.

For example, immediately after invading (and achieving victory in) Afghanistan, Bush pushed is into a war in Iraq on the pretext that :

1. Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussain, were somehow linked to Al Queda and Osama bin Laden (they weren’t.), and partially responsible for the attacks of September 11 (no evidence of this, either).

2. Iraq had, or was developing, "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD’s), notably nuclear and biological/chemical weapons, which they would inevitably deploy against the U.S. (Despite exhaustive searching, not one WMD was ever found, nor could we find any evidence of them, no evidence that any were in storage or any evidence that such weapons were currently under development.)

3. The Iraqi people were just waiting for us to liberate them and they would all welcome us with open arms. (How late do they stay open? Still waiting on this one.)

We let these things happen. We let a lot of things happen back then. For example, we let our government detain and brutalize prisoners and deny them the rights guaranteed by the Constitution; indeed, the government tried to argue that since they weren’t U.S. citizens they had no rights. This radical interpretation of the Constitution hasn’t stood up to the Supreme Court’s standards, but I haven’t seen the Bush administration in any hurry to make changes.)

And the most tragic thing about the whole Iraq mess is that, initially, most of us bought into it. Even me. While I was expressing doubts about the invasion before it had even happened, even I thought we’d actually find WMD’s or at least some evidence of them. I didn’t buy all of the garbage Bush was spewing to get us into war, but I never thought that once we were there that we’d find nothing. I rather think that Bush was counting on finding something to use to justify what he had done, but nothing. Nothing.

So George starts to spin things another way. Suddenly it wasn’t about WMD’s at all, but it was about liberating Iraq from a despot who would use poison gas on his own people. Which he did do; no question, he was a bad guy and deserved removing, but that is not how the war was sold to us and I wouldn’t have gone along with a war just to change an unfriendly regime. Whether there actually was a justification for Iraq based on Saddam’s actual behavior and not his imagined behavior, as bad as he was I can’t say that it was enough to justify an invasion, especially not one billed as an act of self defense. When we invaded we did it for other reasons, more selfish reasons, and to say otherwise when the lies are exposed is disingenuous.

And while he was doing all this, GWB also managed to piss away damn near every ounce of goodwill that the U.S. had gained after the attacks. (It wasn’t just abroad that George had blown it; his own popularity at home, which had been phenomenally high after September 11--higher than any President other than Reagan--is now phenomenally low.) More than anything else, this really pisses me off. We had spent decades being thought of as the neighborhood bully, despised yet almost always deferred to (a status greatly diminished since the other big kid, the Soviet Union, had left town) when fate makes us the objects of the entire world’s sympathy and respect. So what did we do with that? We invaded a couple of Middle Eastern countries and started throwing our weight around trying to regain our lost bully status. Respect went out the window, with sympathy close behind. GWB obviously wanted us feared again; he got us hated and distrusted, but not exactly feared.

In Conclusion

It all comes down to this: Bush lied and we let ourselves be lied to. Even though what he was saying wasn’t true, we so wanted it to be true that it became a justification for our actions. (That’s our actions, not just our government’s; the government was not only acting in our name, but with our blessing.) When it all proved to be smoke and mirrors, a different story was created, one that still cast us as the Good Guys, and even though many of us were by then ready to say that the Emperor was naked it was and remains a story that a good many Americans are more than willing to buy.

And here’s where we actually get to the point:

Notice that I keep saying "our actions." It’s one thing to blame George Bush, et al, for lying to us and leading us down the primrose path, but we have to admit that he couldn’t have led us if we hadn’t wanted to be led. This all wasn’t something he did, or at least not just him; this was an action of the United States of America, and that’s us. All of us. Remember that Congress, even the democrats in Congress, largely supported Bush’s drive to the Persian Gulf. Remember that public opinion, while not without significant dissent, was solidly behind Bush.

It bothers me not only that so many of us are still willing to go along with all this crap, but that we were all so damn quick to buy into it in the first place. None of us have clean hands in this, and we can’t entirely blame our leaders for doing what we wanted them to do; leading us. We the people were, for s long time, more than willing to be led.

(I take no comfort in the fact that we didn’t actually elect Bush in 2000; the Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiters of all things Constitutional, defied the Constitution and selected a President for us. But that’s another topic for another day.)

I don’t hold out much hope that we’re going to become a nation of people who tell their leaders what to do; after all, we have a long-standing tradition of being told what we want and buying it (literally). But we need to be aware of just where our leaders are leading us; it’s one thing to rally behind the President in a time of national crisis, but we can not, should not follow so blindly that we’re led right off a cliff. It’s one thing to say, as an old favorite song of mine said, we won’t get fooled again; the truth is that we might. Politicians being what they are, we probably will. But it’s our responsibility to be aware of where, and how, we’re being led. Any time someone says "trust me; I know what’s best for you" demand an explanation, and if one isn’t forthcoming then perhaps it’s time to stop following.

If your trying to go east and the train you’re on is headed west, the time to jump off is well before the train gets to wherever it’s going.

The Blues Viking

UPDATE - 11/22/08

If ever an article needed updating, it's this one, even though I've just published it.

Remember that I wrote this more than two months ago; the economy hadn't completely collapsed, Barack Obama hadn't been elected, we were facing an election with an uncertain outcome and things looked a bit bleak.

Well, the ecomomy has fallen apart and the election is over without any of the disruptions that I and others had feared. And even though things certainly look bleak as far as the economy goes, I have to say I have more hope for the future than I probably have a right to. I credit this not so much to Obama's election, as unlikely as that was, but more to the President that Obama promises to be. Here I am, facing a far more dismal future than I could have contemplated just a few months ago...and I feel better about it than I really should.

In short, I have hope.

But hope or not, I stand by what I said in the article; that the greatest loss to America in the attacks of September 11 was the loss of ourselves, of the high ideals that America had always, before GWB, aspired to. I hate what that man has made of us,and I hate that he actually got us to do it to ourselves, and I recognize the uphill battle that Obama will have to fight to undo all that Bush has wrought.

Good luck, President Obama. -BV

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.