Because You Never Asked

September 11th

Page 1

It is now the first week of November, almost two months after the milestone in history that has made the title of this essay an unforgettable date. In truth, I am still not comfortable with the subject, but the sense of urgency created by this whole affair is beginning to leave me with a sense of guilt for not having attacked such a monumental event in the life and times we live. Perhaps this is not the best frame of mind to embark upon such a journey, but it seems to be now or never. Here's hoping I can say something worth listening to.

This inability to write about such a mega-event has somewhat puzzled the writer. At first such prudence seemed logical, for there was so much information --- rumor, innuendo, spin, hind- sight, foresight, slant, bias, posturing, history, strategy, politics --- in short, so much bull to sort through and catalog, that stepping back and letting the dust settle, both literally and figuratively, seemed the proper course of action. Now that almost two months have passed, I cannot find fault with such strategy, but I have come to realize that it was not the primary reason for my tentative approach to the subject.

Much of what I'm about to write will not be what the vast majority of the American people want to hear. In the days and weeks immediately following the barbaric act, and, indeed, even as I write, the muscle of the Yankee propaganda machine was unleashed with all the frightening dementia of a steroid crazed linebacker. Indeed, for this writer, the most memorable aspect of these events will be the power and cohesion of this mechanism. Even a Scroogean skeptic like myself could not have imagined the Goebbels-like precision with which American propaganda can he delivered. The Empire is alive and well as we goose step off to war.

Such overwhelming power, I must sadly admit, had me cowed to such an extent, that, with the rare exceptions of the few people I knew would not be offended by my attitude, I meekly put my tail between my legs and acted like the stars and stripes robot we are all supposed to be. But as the days and weeks turned into months, I began to realize that I am not nearly as alone as I thought I was. We are, it's true, a shadowy presence, almost an underground or secret society, but we are there in numbers our media outlets surely underplay. In much the same way they've created a myth of religious devotion in America (see essay "Jessie Ventura"), they've also created a banal form of reflexive patriotic fervor that overstates the situation. This constant patriotic drum beating can be intimidating. Although I was never so intellectually unarmed as to express the "party line" as my own, I was defused enough to not express my true feelings. I've now passed that threshold.

 Undoubtedly, the knee jerk patriots so proudly flying their flags from their SUV's and mammoth sized pick up trucks, along with the hundreds of thousands of fans honoring our "heroes" (more on that later) over and over and over and over again (I really can't exaggerate this) at one sporting event after another, would brand me as un-American, or even as a felonious traitor. They would encourage me to "love it or leave it" and would most likely fly their flags and pray their prayers and sing their anthems in support of whatever information machine they might be living under, be it Hitler's Reich, Stalin's worker's paradise, or the land of the free and the home of the brave. They are the easily worked clay of whoever is preaching to them. They don't hate me intellectually; they hate me viscerally. They don't hate me in their minds; they hate me in their blood. They've been conditioned to hate me, in much the same way they've been toilet trained or introduced to baseball rather than soccer.

 I suggest that my refusal to conform to this massive hysteria; that my skeptical attitude towards the icons of my country and culture; that my intransigence in the face of what I perceive to be an ignominious cultural stupidity out of control, is the most American of attitudes. Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and the likes of Thomas Jefferson must be smiling somewhere out on the vast stellar plains of the universe.

 Before going any further, it's important

 to put this all into perspective.

 Any time a life is lost due to the idiotic misunderstandings our lowly evolutionary status so habitually causes in our behavior, it is a tragedy. When 3,000 people, in one moment of such lunacy, disappear from existence, not to mention the significant loss of physical property, one cannot deny the horrific description of such an event. It is a terrible tragedy. But as the drama has unfolded over the last two months, and the American people are repeatedly told to return to normalcy, to go about their lives, to deal with the trauma of it all, as if they've been subjected to the cruelest deprivations and sufferings ever known to mankind, I was reminded of how easy we've had it, of how little we've had to endure as a people. It might not be an exaggeration to call us the spoiled brats in the family of nations, the youngest child who has been adored and pampered and has grown used to it. We've lost two skyscrapers, part of the Pentagon, 3 commercial airliners, and the unfortunate loss of life already alluded to; there's been the ghost like threat of chemical warfare; there's been some residual economic effects, easily absorbed by a nation with a gazillion dollar economy. Other than these most immediate effects, the event has had almost no impact on our daily lives. If not for the incessant, 24 hour a day ranting and raving of our news outlets, filling space until they can get us to watch a commercial, our lives would be basically unchanged. We've continued to stuff our faces with an unlimited bounty of foodstuffs, in never ending varieties and quantities, as we always have. We've continued to work, we've continued to play, we go to the beach, see new movies, watch the World Series, see the same loved ones and fondle the same erogenous zones we always have. Life goes on and it's a darn good life ... and yet, every day we are reminded of how "traumatized" we are, of how difficult it is to "cope", of how "everything has now changed".

 Compare this to the years of bombing endured by the British during WWII; or what happened to European Jewry during the Holocaust; or the complete and utter destruction resulting from the fire bombing of Dresden in 1945; or the upheavals caused by the two World Wars that raged and blustered back and forth across Europe in the 20th century; or the rape of Nanking perpetrated by the Japanese during the same era; or the fratricidal slaughter which destroyed Spain in the 1930's. I could go on ... and I will. When I think of the floods and mud slides caused by Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, killing tens of thousands while destroying what little infrastructure there was in this impoverished nation; when I think of the devastating earthquakes which have rocked Armenia and Turkey; or the genocidal blood baths recently occurred in Africa; or the killing fields of Cambodia; or the wars which resulted from the colonial usurpation of Vietnam; I could go on ... but I won't, except to mention the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ...

 ... when I think of all this, regardless of who was responsible, or what historical context or lunatic imbecility rampant in our species caused it, I have to sneer at our attempts to weather the trauma we've been subjected to, as if it were an act of bestial savagery the likes of which has never been seen before, as if we are suffering like no one else ever has. On the Richter scale of cataclysmic human tragedies, 9/11 hardly budges the needle. There's been a wholesale use of the word

 "heroes"

 in this drama, and I have had to swallow so much from this menu that I am about to up chuck it all in the following remarks.

 

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Email: JerryG@postcman.info