First’s original editors, longtime New Yorkers, were fully alive to experiences of love and death on 9/11. We printed a set of responses to the attacks that implicitly contradicted those who assumed “anti-Americanism is a necessity” (without imposing a patriotic litmus test). Our post-9/11 issue featured red, white and blue colors above the fold, though that wasn’t a simple flag-waving gesture. The exemplary citizens (and New Yorkers) invoked on our cover were Latin Americans and an Afro-American: La Lupe, Eddie Palmieri and Jay-Z.
I’m reminded of how our colors seemed out of time to the all-knowing Left when I listen to commentary by pundits like Mehdi Hasan who link the post-9/11 “War on Terror” with l/6. That tendentious timeline all but erases the threat once posed by radical Islamists. It assumes American Islamophobia/xenophobia was always a scarier thing than Islamofascism. (I wonder if Mehdi Hasan noticed what happened to Samuel Paty—the French middle school teacher who was decapitated last October after he dared to teach his students about the Charlie Hebdo murders.) While it’s probably true the threat to Americans and Europeans from Islamist terrorists has diminished in recent years, that’s due largely to those Kurdish fighters who turned the tide against ISIS at the battle of Kobani. Future historians may come to see the Kurds’ victory there in January 2015 as the true culmination of the war that blew up in America on 9/11. The Kurds certainly grasped the meaning of their victory: “The battle for Kobani was not only a fight between the YPG and Daesh [ISIS], it was a battle between humanity and barbarity, a battle between freedom and tyranny, it was a battle between all human values and the enemies of humanity.” The clarity of these (mainly Muslim) soldiers who beat an international army of Islamists underscores the not-knowingness of Mehdi Hasan et al.
The following set of posts—by Donna Gaines, George Held, Hans Koning, Wendy Oxenhorn, Fredric Smoler, Laurie Stone, Kurt Vonnegut, and Peter Lamborn Wilson—mixes pieces from First‘s back pages with writing by authors who published their first thoughts on 9/11 in other places. B.D.
Skies Over America
Right now I am looking out my window, listening to planes—They sound a little louder than before—and I wonder if I am right to stay here and go to my work each day, to send my children to school each day. Every evening, I take my daughters out to a café—I see people in my neighborhood and we all stop to talk a little more than usual and laugh nervously and embrace those we hadn’t seen since before all this changed. I am torn. I like this new solidarity, this new seizing of every moment. There is something beautiful in this strange fear-based appreciation that causes me to dance in the street with my child as a car goes by blasting salsa, to speak a bit more frankly to people without trying to find the “right words,” to find a beautiful dress to wear even though I’m just going to the grocery store, to let go of my world, to stop right now as I’m writing to you and feel the wind coming into my room and the morning light that is touching me as I write, the sky is amazing. I have to stop writing and take a look at it.
There are enormous white clouds reflecting the most glorious gold light and they are remaining completely still, while smaller clouds below are being blown across them by strong windss. They look like hundred of people running, yet those white clouds, those magnificent light-reflecting clouds just remain, in perfect peace. There is a seagull flying alone, enjoying this moment of freedom, unaware of my thoughts, unaware of the people below who are in their homes, thinking what I am thinking now. He continue s to fly, unaware that I am watching my sleeping child and wondering if we will be together when something else happens.
The sky just got gray and the sun is hidden, everything looks dark, there’s another plane overhead and it’s remarkable how much louder they sound now. A huge crow just perched himself outside my window, and he’s screaming at me. I’m not sure if he’s yelling at me to get the hell out of New York now, of if he came to wake me up from this dream I am having and r mind me that this is all just part of the plan–how can I be wasting this glorious morning with such rambling thoughts, when there is a day to be lived.
All the noises have stopped. There is a strange quietness. No planes, no birds, no thoughts. Maybe I’ll go back to sleep for just a little while.
–Wendy Oxenhorn
Death from Above
A contribution to a First forum on 9/11 (“Five Years On”) published in September, 2006.
The first truth about 9/11 is its uniqueness. That is to say that in the morning of September 11, 2001, it would be a new and unheard of occurrence. It was a natural disaster.
The second truth is that this natural disaster was nonetheless planned by human hand and mind. The way people died was unheard of—the closest parallel is perhaps the sinking of the Titanic, that same fall from the warmth and order of daily life into nothingness. (This is also reason that the Titanic, almost a hundred years later, is still so strong a part of our tribal memory.)
I cannot think, though, of any parallel where human thought has come up with a disaster of these dimensions. Ravachol, the French anarchist who was executed in 1892, and August Valliant who threw a bomb in the French Chamber of Deputies (which did not kill anyone) executed in 1894, are still remembered names in French politics. The assassination of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in 2004 still traumatizes Holland. It is not a matter of numbers only.
I find a chasm between the experience of the World Trade Center for the average New Yorker and for a veteran, any veteran, of one of the many wars of recent years. I know 9/11 only from a distance, but it has lastingly influenced me more than my time as a sergeant in the British Anny during World War II.
Men died, we were shocked and aggrieved by this. Those deaths, though, still “fitted” into our daily lives, they were not an outrage against nature.
9/11, by its birth as a thought product of man, does not fit in anywhere. shows human nature as a phenomenon which at its darkest denies all rules of life. It shows that, given the right circumstances, we will be able AND WILLING to destroy the world.
–Hans Koning
xx
That Tuesday Night
That Tuesday night, after the towers
burned & fell down-
town, after watching them crumble—
unlike the one Paul Newman
saved in Towering Inferno—
from the plaza in front of Rosenthal
Library, after walking home
from the subway in the yellow
summer twilight, gagging
on the acrid air and looking
at the thick sooty column rising
downtown where the towers
had loomed Gargantuan on the skyline
for over three decades,
I went to wash my face,
as though cold water and soap
would wake me from this dream
of violence and violation,
and I saw that man in the mirror,
red-rimmed eyes, yes, but
the same sagging wrinkled
skin, the same thinning,
graying hair above the same lined
forehead, and I knew that he
was lucky to have lived
to sixty-five—too young for WW II
and Korea, too old for Viet Nam—
lucky to have lived his soft
American life without much fear
from abroad, except spotting airplanes
as a kid and catching a breath or two
as JFK stood down the Russians in ’62,
and in the glare of the bathroom light,
the sirens screaming just up the street
at St. Vincent’s, I knew nothing
could ever make me
safe again.
–George Held
After the Bodies Fell
A few weeks after the attacks of 9/11 Dixon Place sent out a call to artists to create a performance. This is what I wrote. In 20 years, my style has changed. Of course. I notice I was at something I return to—looking for a link between my actions and those of the people most vilified with just cause in a given moment. In this case, I look at ways I might be compared to the Taliban! The event was beautiful. There was no electricity in this part of Downtown. Candles, flash lights, extraordinary tenderness and beauty. Was anyone else there?
(Performed as part of “From the Ashes,” organized by Dixon Place, presented October 26, 2001 at CUANDO about the events of September 11.)
I don’t like sleep. I have bad dreams. I’m being chased. I abase myself for love. I find myself half undressed on the street. My bedroom has no ceiling, and things fall in.
Particles are falling but don’t come to rest. They rearrange themselves, the way memories do in dreams. The particles have a smell. If they have a smell, they have a taste. Some people chose to leap, arms waving and legs cycling, as in a dream.
I awoke from a bad dream and forgot the story, was left only with the taste. I read about why America is hated. The writers mourned the falling bodies, but glee leapt off their words. They said they, too, hated America, and I remembered the taste of pleasure at someone else’s misfortune—schadenfreude it’s called. I can seldom resist it, like when a friend is screwed and I know they brought it on themselves, and I gloat because the thing that got them screwed annoys the hell out of me, too. Aggression leaps off me. People can smell it. The work of my life has been to understand why I am hated. The effort puts me to sleep.
The word peace has no sex. It sounds like something can be agreed upon, when nothing can ever be agreed upon. The word rest feels like a challenge. Particles can’t resist a challenge. In one story, America has been awakened by falling bodies, but it wants to go back to sleep. If it goes back to sleep, it will have bad dreams. Who can deny that the work of life is to understand why we are hated?
The insides of other people are not like mine. I can seldom remember this, and when I do it’s too late. I’ve insinuated myself where I don’t belong. I’ve become exhausting to be around. People move away from me, their arms waving and legs cycling, as in a dream.
The hijackers have dark hair and olive skin. Something they loved has been hurt. I have dark hair and olive skin. The blossoms of olive trees are white, the leaves shaped like lances. Three hijackers went to a strip club the night before their suicides. They didn’t insinuate themselves where they didn’t belong. They weren’t exhausting to be around. It’s easier to sell anything with sex.
In a TV interview, a terrorist said that the reward for a martyr’s death was marriage in paradise to seventy-two virgins. Looked at from the point of view of a virgin, the man can never come to rest. The leaders of the Taliban wear eyeliner and wish to be glamorous. It’s easier to sell anything with sex. Under their rule, it’s a crime for a woman to expose even an inch of flesh in public. The flesh of women insinuates itself where it doesn’t belong. The flesh of women is exhausting. The women dream of walking naked in public. For adulterous sex, the women are executed in public. Crowds cheer as the condemned woman kneels and tries to escape. It’s easier to sell anything with sex.
On TV, David Letterman asked Rudolph Giuliani if he understood the terrorists, and the mayor said he did not. He didn’t understand how a group of people could stay committed to a cause of killing and of dying for what they believed in, though a few minutes earlier he’d said that Americans had become united in the cause of destroying terrorists. He had fallen asleep between the sentences. Something he loved had been hurt. It had seemed that the noise of the crash and the smell of burning bodies would follow a sleeper into dreams and be waiting, in tact, when the dreamer awakened. But in Giuliani’s dreams, people had the same insides as him, used the same sex toys as him.
It had seemed the terrorists had rearranged the particles. The executions of Afghan women now qualified as TV news, even though American dollars had supported the Taliban during Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan. Now, on American TV, the Taliban looked like it had insinuated itself where it didn’t belong. It looked like the Taliban had become exhausting. After the bodies fell, it had seemed people understood that everyone was at risk and that this great leveling was what had been called for. Equal risk was the great leveler of East and West, regardless of how much anyone believed in anything apart from moving particles.
After the bodies fell, it had seemed that the only sameness that existed was in everyone’s seeing things differently. Religious leaders said the religion of the terrorists wasn’t a real religion, although it shared with every religion a belief that its sense of reality was the true one. Like every other religion, it told fictitious stories about what a man is and what a woman is. Like every other religion, it rationed pleasure with the peculiarly irrational promise that something gratifying could come of this.
After the bodies fell, no one knew what to do. No one who sounded certain sounded sane. We were on the verge, spores floating amid the particles, bearded men in hats smelling something foul in the bodies of women, dreams of fictitious sameness disguised as songs of peace, dreams of fictitious difference disguised as revelation, hearts engorged with schadenfreude, penises trembling, vaginas kept under wraps, aggression turned into lances instead of sex, eyes at half mast, eyes at half mast.
—Laurie Stone
Published in Signs, Vol. 28, No. 1, Gender and Cultural Memory Special Issue, Editors Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith (Autumn 2002), pp. 473-475
Al is Conscience and Tendre Hearte
A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches there was fascinated to see undergraduates singing “God Bless America” in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined forty-eight hours before. Maybe it helped to be able to smell the fires that were still consuming the dead – you could do this from Washington Square Park. At approximately the same time, at a college a bit over the city line, where the dead could neither be smelt nor, perhaps, fully imagined, white ribbons instead signaled solidarity with those “faculty and students of color” who felt unsafe in the face of American racist violence.
If one was in a jaundiced mood, that latter use of white ribbons was an implied assertion: “neither six nor seven thousand murdered in an instant, among them the hundreds who died trying to save the others, nor the many more left grieving for them, shall dislodge our faculty and students of color from the pinnacle of the most piercing victimhood. What spurious moral claim do the dead and their mourners have the audacity to press, given the fears of these purer victims, who can sense the lynch mobs massing behind the dorms?” But while there were no lynch mobs behind the dorms, within a couple of days, when around the country some people were murdered, and others were being harassed, it seemed less delusional, and the politics less mad. Solidarity with people one knows, who may need it, rather than with those already beyond all aid, was not an obviously foolish or wicked response – except that “feeling unsafe” remains a less dreadful thing than being unsafe, or dead, or widowed. One felt that those conditions ought to have excited more sympathy than seemed to be the case.
For after all, the people under the rubble were not yet beyond all hope, nor were their survivors. But concern (let alone just anger) for the dead, the missing and the bereaved seemed pretty perfunctory in the teach-ins, and in the faux-Left organs of opinion. The rhetorical sequencing became drearily predictable: a rather terse acknowledgement that this was an awful thing, then a long and leisurely trawl through the reasons why the country to one degree or another might have deserved it – or been imagined to have deserved it, by people who weren’t entirely crazy to think so.
From the faux-Left’s paladins, the Chomskys and the Pilgers, there was stronger stuff, or perhaps the argument was simply made with greater clarity: the awful thing done to us was not nearly as awful as the awful things we regularly did to them, to the Iraqi or Sudanese or Palestinian or Afghan or Vietnamese children: tu quoque, with bells on. Our direct victims were computed to total millions in these increasingly ingenious calculations, so six thousand, the initial number given for the American dead, wasn’t after all a very big deal; certainly not a big enough deal to rethink the dystopian narrative that has passed for history in this sturdy tradition.
At home, you generally had to hunt a bit to find this stuff – although it did at least break the surface in a couple of distinguished national magazines. Abroad, such tones could be detected in less obscure places. In the UK, two quality dailies, the Guardian and the Independent, ran rather a lot of it. Two examples, selected from an embarrassment of riches, must suffice, one from the Guardian and the other from the New Statesman: the Guardian‘s Charlotte Raven, insisting that “anti-Americanism” remained irreproachable, compared the US to “a bully with a bloody nose”. This was a pretty simple extended metaphor: the World Trade Center was our nose, and the blood, less imaginatively, was our blood. Since a bully with a bloody nose is normally considered a very cheering sight, an outmatched but plucky fellow drubbing his tormentor against the odds — Tom Brown thrashing Flashman at Rugby — Ms. Raven’s laconic expression of distress over the dead seemed imperfectly convincing.
Over at the New Statesman, the leader writer conceded that while bond traders might be thought to have as much of a right to life as Iraqi or Palestinian children, we should remember that the bond traders, unlike the children, had been given a chance to vote for Ralph Nader, but had declined to do so (at least in sufficient numbers to retain a strong argument against being crushed, asphyxiated or incinerated). While it seems that the actual social composition of the labor force at the World Trade Center was unknown to the New Statesman‘s editorialist — who presumably wrote without having seen the color Xeroxes taped to the mail boxes and lamp posts all over town — one cannot be certain that among the scientific socialists at the New Statesman, those immigrant busboys, waiters and hundreds who died trying to save the custodial staff and file clerks might not have been a price worth paying for a crack at entombing or immolating a few bond traders — omelets, eggs, etc. But this reaction was the harsher end of respectable printed opinion in North Western Europe. What was more common was what we heard at home, as well: we must seek to learn why we are so hated, and mend our ways. Complicity in violence done to the Islamic world, we are told, is consistently high on the list; if we cease to so offend, we shall cease to be hated.
But some journalists at the leading Greek newspaper (Kathimerini) apparently cheered when they saw the footage of the attack on the WTC, and in Athens a large crowd at a soccer stadium jeered through a moment of silence for the American dead — then burned an Israeli flag, and tried to set alight a less-flammable American one. In Greece, as it happens, the US is hated not only for supporting the Colonels, but for more recent crimes: for the military assistance we rather belatedly rendered to Bosnian and Kossovar Muslims, and for the protection we let Turkey extend to Cypriot Muslims in 1974. In Greece we are hated for being pro-Islamic. And when you think about it, Islamic rage at complicity in killing Muslims is pretty hit or miss. The Soviet Union’s very direct Muslim-killing operations in Afghanistan — where the dead probably exceeded a million — seem to have aroused less anti-Russian rage than our supplying the Israelis with cluster bombs produced anti-American rage — yet over the course of both intifadas, the Israelis’ total of Arab dead is down several orders of magnitude from the Russian’s Afghan score. When you think about it a bit, that seems curious. Leave aside Stalin’s murders of, say, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, and other Muslims, which approached a million, and look only at the recent killing of Chechyns — which arouse far less fury than does our complicity in much less bloody Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.
And it’s not just the Russians who are, relatively speaking, off the hook. Chinese torment of Muslim Uighurs does not arouse audible protest, and while Hindu torment of Muslim Kashmiris enrages Pakistanis, it does not seem to feature too prominently in Arab, Indonesian or Turkish politics. Tormenting Muslims does not invariably arouse general fury unless an American or an Israeli is the offender. Further reflection only deepens this puzzlement. From the moment of the massacres at Shatila and Sabra, Sharon’s derelictions, which permitted Maronite Lebanese to mass-murder Palestinians, have been accounted rather more vile than have been the direct actions of the mass murderers themselves: the Maronite Lebanese who did the killing are almost never mentioned, while Sharon’s infamy remains notorious. Twenty years on, there are prominent newspapers where one is hard-pressed to find reference to Sharon that does not mention this crime; the nearly contemporaneous destruction of a city in Syria, when Hafez al Assad shelled Hama and successfully terrorized Sunni Islamists, killing around 10,000 of his fellow Syrians, remains comparatively obscure. In parallel, Turks, American allies, killed Kurds in the course of suppressing the PKK, and became the object of odium all over Western Europe; by contrast, Saddam Hussein’s employment of nerve gas against other Kurds did not seem nearly as offensive, in either Europe or the Middle East. Jordanian and Kuwaiti killings of Palestinians have proved very much less memorable than have Israeli killings. American killings of Iraqis, done to safeguard Saudis, are apparently unforgiven by the Saudi beneficiaries themselves. And all this suggests that the helpful advice to mend our ways, and thus be less hated, derives from a bad case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. The hatred seems to some degree independent of our stated crimes, which suggests the possibility that our enemies cannot be appeased: the well of grievance may be bottomless. And if we cannot appease our enemies, it logically follows that we must deter or destroy them.
On the faux-Left there has been no great rush to acknowledge this possibility. Almost all “Left” discourse on the question, here and abroad, has instead focused on explanations of why we are by no means blameless, followed by shrill denials that we have any effective military response to the devastatingly effective violence which has been wielded against us. These are followed by jeremiads about the hecatombs of Third World innocents our government are preparing to deliberately slaughter, and especially of the vast numbers who are soon to be pitilessly slain by our air force, to perverse political effect this while the military authorities repeatedly promise to avoid precisely such a policy. We are also warned that a new Korematsu decision hangs over us, as the authorities meditate just how they will herd masses of Americans into camps. The repeated and admirable pleas to protect our fellow citizens from violence and discrimination, by politicians unused to making such pleas, go unheard, while the initial and apparently continuing paralytic indecision of the civil and military authorities goes unseen. President Bush, who in many people’s estimate initially looked and sounded like a frightened child, and who subsequently seems to have adopted a policy formulated by a State Department desperate to minimize the use of military force, is instead depicted as a deranged and blood-crazed militarist, and not, as seems vastly more likely, a man out of his depth, surrounded by people notorious both for avoiding hard decisions, and for hopeless bureaucratic factionalism.
So, in the phrase Claude Raines made immortal, the faux-Left has been rounding up the usual suspects. The Americans are criminals, not victims, and this distinction must be established before the dead are cold in the ground. The use of violence is permitted our enemies, or at least excused in them, but reprisals are beyond the pale. We are in no way obligated to come up with a plausible strategy for deterring the mass murder of our fellow citizens: that is not what politics is about, not our politics, anyway. But stopping foreigners from mass-murdering one’s fellow citizens is the very beginning of all politics, which is why it should be obvious that in addition to being dishonest and otherwise immoral, the faux-Left position is a disastrous political strategy. There is no surer route to perfect irrelevance than telling the rest of the country that you have nothing useful to say about their fears for their very lives, other than to imply or declare that they deserve whatever happens to them.
Crisis of Meaning
A few days after the event, The New York Times ran an interesting article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird effect: suddenly it seems impossible to have advertising at all. It seems massively “inappropriate to move product as per usual with shrieking & insinuating, mocking & sneering, prurience & peeping; with hate & envy masked as fashion, with greed thinly disguised as freedom of choice.
Death and tragedy occur every day, every minute, not only in the former Third World, even in New York, even in America. Why hasn’t advertising ever seemed shameful to anyone ever before? The media—which cannot utter a sound without puking up a—speaks now of the waking of a sleeping giant (meaning that we will no longer tolerate terrorism etc.)—but what was this sleep? And what does it mean to wake into a feeling of shame?
Last week, it seems we were willing to admit that our highest social values could be expressed in price codes (the “mark of the Beast” as the cranks say, the “prophets of doom”). This week, we feel shame. In a Times interview a fashion designer expressed doubt that her work had any significance and wondered if she could go on with it.
The fashion industry is also ashamed; Hollywood is ashamed even the news media expressed some fleeting longing for decorum & dignity & decency.
Are we supposed to feel this shame over our triviality, our mean-spiritedness, our PoMo irony, our consumer frenzy, our hatred of the body and of all nature, our obsession with gadgetry & “information,” our degraded pop culture, our vapid or morbid art & lit, & so on & so on & so on?—or should we defend all this as “freedom” and our “way of life”?
Our leaders are telling us to return to normal routines (after a decent period of mourning) in the assurance that they will assign significance to the event, they will embody our hate & desire for revenge, they will mediate for us with the forces of “evil.” But what exactly is this normal life to consist of? Why do we feel this shame?
Schoolchildren (again according to the Times) ask their teachers what it means that the terrorists were willing to kill themselves; and their teachers evade the question, saying we don’t understand either—they’re bewildered. Awake but confused by a crisis of meaning. Last week all meanings could be expressed in terms of money. Why should 5000 murders change the meaning of meaning.
A hyper-fashionable Italian clothing company uses death to sell its products. Photographs—even huge billboards—showing people dying of AIDS or waiting to be executed—designed to sell woolly jumpers. Is this life as normal? Should we return to it?
For a few days no music was heard in the streets. No thumping bass speakers rattled the air, no chants of hate for women & queers, no “Madison Avenue Choirs” hymning the celestial delites of commodities or vacations in the midst of other peoples’ misery.
For a few hours or days there appeared no official spin on the event, no slogan/logo in the media, no interpretation, no meaning. We watched the cloud drift around the city, first to the East over Brooklyn then up the west side of Manhattan, finally over the east side as well. With the smell and the poisonous haze around the moon came a nightmare about the occult significance of the cloud:—angry bewildered ghosts in a vast white cloud. And we breathed that cloud into us. We’ll never get it out of our lungs. What the cloud wanted was an explanation, a meaning.
But next day the spin was in, the media had found or been given its answer—”Attack On America,” our freedom, our values, our way of life, carried out by “cowards” who were nevertheless not “physical cowards” (as some official explained in the Times). Perhaps they were moral cowards? He didn’t say.
Why do they hate us? A few people have asked but received no coherent answer. Do “they” hate “us” because we use 75 percent of the world’s resources even though we only constitute 20 percent of its population?, because we bomb Baghdad & Belgrade without risking even one American life?, because we export a vapid sneering mean-spirited culture to the world, video games about death, movies about death, TV shows about death, commodities that are dead, music that kills the spirit?, because we’ve made advertising copy our highest artform?, because we define “freedom” as our freedom to rule & be ruled by money?
The politicians have told that “they” envy us and our way of life and therefore wish to destroy it. Envy—yes, why not? The whole system of global capital is based on envy. It has to be. No envy, no desire. No desire, no reason to spend. No reason to spend, implosion of global capital. q.e.d. But then why should the ad execs & fashion designers & sports teams & entertainers feel this strange unaccountable shame?
And why should the terrorists have been willing to die just because they envy our wealth & our way of life & our freedom to buy, and spend, and waste? What docs 1t mean?
After the Holocaust (or Hiroshima, or the Gulag) certain philosophers said that there could be no more art or poetry. But they were wrong apparently. We have poetry again. It may not mean the same thing it meant before. It may not mean anyth1ng. But we have 1t. And who could have dreamed at the gate of Buchenwald or Treblinka that one day we would have—Nike ads or sitcoms about lawyers?
Is any meaning going to emerge from the 9/11 event? Without meaning tragedy ends not in catharsis but simply depression, endless sorrow. Our leaders “seek closure”—perhaps by killing many Afghan children—perhaps by a new Crusade against the Saracens—and of course by a return to normal. We’ll show “them”—by refusing meaning. We will sleep because it is our right not to awake to confusion & shame.
Our sleep will be troubled. We’ll have to “sacrifice a few freedoms” to protect Freedom. We’ll have to fear & hate. But within a few weeks or months we will have buried even the fear & hate, rather we will have transformed all that emotion to the Image, to the Evil Eye of the media, our externalized unconscious. We’ll have sitcoms again and gangster rap and arguments about our right to download it all for free into our home computers. We’ll get those airplanes flying, once again polluting “our” skies with noise & carcinogens. We’ll overcome our shame. And that will constitute our revenge. That will be our meaning. Our morality.
—Peter Lamborn Wilson
Rivers of Babylon
Remarks delivered at St. Marks on the Bowery on the night of September Eleventh, 2002
My text for tonight is from the Gospel of Matthew:
“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.”
There has so far been only one nation crazy enough to detonate atomic weapons in the midst of civilian populations, turning unarmed men, women and children into radioactive soot and bonemeal.
Let us pray in this holy space: “Dear God, please don’t ever let there be another nation like that.” Amen.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. This is because we are powerless. Peace has no representatives in Washington DC. Why not? Peace is not entertaining. Restraint is not entertaining.
What is entertaining? Take it from this old hack writer. Revenge, like sex, is terrifically entertaining. “Closure. Gimme Closure.” Grrrr.
George W. Bush, with his no-frills education, may believe that God or Moses, or some other sacred advisor, gave us this as a commandment: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
It was in fact the Babylonian king Hammurabi who said it first. And he wasn’t urging his own people to be more ferocious, more bloodthirsty. He was trying to make them less so. He was saying, in effect, that if you must seek revenge, you are entitled to this much of it, and not one bit more. Otherwise, you will create more people entitled to closure, until everybody in Babylonia is going to be seeking closure, and our once great country will go down the toilet of history.
Which it did.
And I thank you for your attention.
–Kurt Vonnegut
The Hidden Face
A contribution to a First forum on 9/11 (“Five Years On”) published in September, 2006.
Five years later, two images from 9/11/2001 compete in my memory. The first is the image of a friend, a musician named Johnny Bully. The morning of 9/11 he kissed his wife and kid goodbye and rode into NYC from Middle Village on his Harley. He had the day off, but he needed the overtime. An hour later Johnny Bully aka Fire Fighter John Heffernan was crushed as the second tower went down. Like so many people, I wondered, where was God as the concrete and steel pummeled another Rockaway hero.
But there’s a second image from that day—of the American workforce drifting up First Avenue from WTC in droves, ties flapping in the wind, suits, high heels, blue collar, white collar, carrying briefcases, jackets, water bottles, marching North towards the 59th Street Bridge homeward bound. The American people, all races, sexes, classes, nationalities, religions and regions of the world. Everywhere, neighbors, shopkeepers offering water, prayers, sneakers, food, and loving-kindness. We assembled on street comers, bound together in one moment. Up from Ground Zero, one nation, one race, one wound, one scar, one fate. Slowed down, we saw each other. One soul, one life, one love. That was God on 9/11.
–Donna Gaines