I was just going to sleep as the towers were struck. Three hours later it my dad called me. He was in tears and told me to turn on the news, then went on about how the Pentagon was gone, and the Twin Towers were gone. He was shocked. So I was shocked too, because I’d gotten only three hours of sleep and because my dad doesn’t cry.
That summer I had a roommate who was brand new to the University and had just come from Hong Kong. My talking woke him up, and by the time I had hung up and was going to look at my computer to see the news, he asked what was going on. I don’t remember what I said.
What I do remember, however, is my very first coherent response. I specifically had the image of United States aircraft carrier in my mind, and I told my roommate that we—the U.S.—would never stand for this. Unfortunately, my half-asleep shocked response was to be the very mirror of official U.S. foreign policy for years to come. But I wasn’t thinking about that.
I got dressed and went to watch television in the lounge, where a bunch of people from my floor had gathered to watch CNN. By then both towers had collapsed, the Pentagon was in flames, the fourth airliner had long since crashed, and the media had cancelled all commercials and were pooling their resources. I got to watch (and rewatch) images of the towers collapsing many times, and goodness gracious, but I cannot remember a word of the commentary. That was when the cable news networks began doing their tickers at the bottom of the screen—something that has continued ever since—and I remember reading that they had evacuated the Space Needle and Columbia Tower in Seattle, as well as other high-profile facilities in the area. (Years later, it came out that the Columbia Tower had been one of al Qaeda’s intended targets in a larger attack plan, which was scrapped due to infeasibility.)
I think the lack of sleep is really what makes that day stand out in my mind. It is much harder to deal with anything when you’re tired, so my emotions were running high all day. I went down to the exercise room on the recreation level to vent some frustration on an exercise bike. I watched the television there, too. They were already suspecting that it was Osama bin Laden, but they didn’t know yet. President Bush, like the coward that he is, was in flight with full military escort for most of the day. Presumably this was because the government didn’t know if further attacks would be forthcoming, and in that kind of situation, being in the air surrounded by fighter jets is probably the safest place. Cheney was in his famously “undisclosed location.”
I am one of life’s least emotional human beings. By midafternoon I had mostly gotten over it. But the zeitgeist had utterly consumed me. The president spoke live on the air that evening, and the Congress sang on the steps of the Capitol, and vowed to hold session tomorrow. Late that evening I went to a hastily arranged group counseling session that night, as did most of the people on my floor, and listened to people prattle on about whatever it is they were prattling on about. I didn’t really care.
I went to bed very tired. I had lost no one, lost nothing. Seattle was far away from the action.
The thing that really stood out to me in the aftermath of September 11, and something which I may never see again in my lifetime, was the utterly quiet airspace. I live in Seattle, underneath a commercial air traffic corridor. Seattle’s airspace has large jetliners, private jets and propeller aircraft, medical helicopters, news helicopters, floating tour planes, private small aircraft…and for three days, all of that was gone. The sky was utterly silent. It was the silence that stood out the most. I knew that somewhere, up there, U.S. fighter jets were patrolling every American city, but I never heard one, never saw one.
The aftermath had some other curious incidents, too. We found out over the next few days that all the military bases were on high alert, with orders to shoot trespassers. I also remember everyone tripping over themselves to give blood. It stunned me, even then, just how silly this was. That’s way too much blood; I’ll bet a lot of it went to waste. And it struck me even more that Americans were eager to “do their part” to lend a hand in this disaster, but that donating blood is what they came up with. What a stupid, selfish reaction. It isn’t practical, it involves no sacrifice whatsoever, and it gives a false sense of accomplishment. I suppose, for some people, it was their way of trying to console themselves. For others, it was herd thinking. Other people were giving blood, so so would they. I don’t think most Americans understand what sacrifice really is.
I remember a political cartoon soon thereafter, by some conservative bloke I didn’t like. It was an elephant and a donkey, arm-in-arm, and they were saying something like “To arms, old chum?” “To arms, good friend.” Yeah…for a few weeks, there was no political bickering in this country. I will never forget it. Unfortunately, this unprecedented cooperation allowed for the passage of incredibly bad legislation, such as the PATRIOT Act and all manner of other terrible thing. Perhaps you saw the news on Friday, when the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, pursuant to legislation passed by Congress in the aftermath of September 11, the President of the United States has the authority to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely, without criminal charges. Outrageous.
Briefly, the entire world stood with us—a universal goodwill that has since vanished like a mirage. (Perhaps hardcore conservatives would say that a mirage is all it really was, but I disagree. I think we wasted something wonderful.) President Bush soon started wearing that little Stars and Stripes broach on his left lapel, and most other national leaders and top-ranking businesspeople eventually followed. Across the nation, American flags sprung up on every street corner and in every living room window. It was like something out of Nazi Germany, except the U.S. wasn’t evil yet. Today, if anything, there are even more flags on display than there were four years ago.
A military response was inevitable. The blame got pinned on Afghanistan pretty fast. I remember the Taliban issuing a statement calling on the U.S. not to attack their country. Tough shit for them; we launched an invasion pretty fast. However, we did hold off just long enough to make it look as though it were not a knee-jerk reaction. At the time I thought it was a symbol of our government’s prudent military wisdom. However, knowing the Bush administration as I know do, it seems more likely that Dubya had spent that time trying to see if there was a way he could pin the blame on Iraq instead of a nobody country like Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s leader, Pervez Musharraf, was very quick to declare “allegiance” to the United States. I believe he (correctly) perceived that, had he not done so, we would have invaded his country too. I have admired his leadership ever since; he’s a good guy, in charge of a country whose rank-and-file people are very much opposed to the West.
A couple of weeks after September 11, the school year began, and I used my position as a columnist at the newspaper to write editorials on the subject. I think I still have them.
So those were my September 11 experiences. But there is one last thing I want to mention. In that first week, even in that first day, I remember thinking that the nation’s response was as extreme as it could possibly have been. Insofar as are concerned the reactions of ordinary, everyday U.S. citizens, we could have been nuked in twenty American cities, and our response could not have been much more profound than it was. In other words…we overreacted. And here we are, four years later…still overreacting. “These colors don’t run.”
Regrettably, I have to agree with Daniel Krispin that, in absolute terms, the September 11 attacks were nothing as important as we made them out to be. More people die from no health care and extreme poverty, and yet we care little to stop these things. And, so, that we are still making so much ado about Semptember 11 today is frankly embarrassing.
However, inasmuch as the September 11 attacks shaped American culture and American policymaking, they are a crucial turning point in world history. The American culture shifted to the conservative right with the force of an earthquake. Our foreign policy immediately became militaristic and preemptory. American citizens became xenophobic and racist, and responded to the perceived Islamic threat by strengthening their Christian evangelism. My dad said, once upon a time, that the September 11 attacks were the Pearl Harbor of our generation. That’s true, I think. But the difference is that we have sense entered a kind of war that may be unwinnable. We are fighting against “terror.” We have reified the enemy. You can’t do that. You can’t beat an idea with guns and missiles.
President Bush says we have an enemy, and its name is Terror. But not only am I not sure that Terror is our true enemy; I am not even sure we have an enemy at all. And if we do, I don’t think Terror is its name. I think the real threat to America is that we’ve got religious fanatics reading from their Koran on one continent and religious fanatics reading from their Bible on another. These two powers want to clash, and, by God, they will…so long as they remain in control of their respective societies.
I realize now, four years after the attacks, that our response to September 11 was childish, and ill-advised. The initial Afghanistan invasion was a good move. Everything that came after it was wrong. We failed to actually secure that country and build peace there. The government doesn’t control the country, we still have thousands of American troops committed there, and Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and other unsavory characters still run free. Al Qaeda itself has evolved from a tangible terrorist organization into a symbol of Islamic fanaticism; it can never be defeated now, in terms of a direct confrontation. America may or may not be more “safe” in physical terms than it was four years ago—John Kerry was absolutely correct about the abject vulnerability of our ports of entry, transportation infrastructure, and energy installations, and Bush has never acted to shore these up—but whether or not our city walls are stronger and thicker, goodness knows we have more enemies at the gates now than we did four years ago. That right there is the essential error in President Bush’s foreign policy. He treats the whole world as being “with us, or against us”—even our allies. As a result, America is now one of the most despised nations on Earth.
I was surprised when so many countries offered relief to us, following Hurricane Katrina. But once I thought about it, I bet many of them got a secret pleasure out of simultaneously offering help to the needy and humility to the mighty. I can’t blame them. They’re in their rights.
The terrorists, whomever they are and wherever they live, realize that no single bomb or attack could ever destroy the United States. Only terror itself can do that. We could have defeated the terrorists…by not being terrorized. But instead we declared a War on Terror, with a capital “T,” and from that day on, the United States has been in greater and greater peril—not the peril of destruction, but the peril of obscurity. We are fast falling from the world stage as a major power…and history may well show that September 11, 2001, was the catalyst for all of that. Look how we responded the attacks of that day. We were terrorized. Instead of denying the terrorists their prize, we put them front-and-center in American life. The course of our nation was permanently changed. We have alienated ourselves from most of the planet. We have wasted our goodwill abroad. We have wasted the economy. We have wasted the military. We have wasted everything we have to waste, and momentum we have lost will take its toll.
My incoherent response on that morning, thinking of the United States aircraft carrier and the wrath of God reprisal that we would surely deliver to those barbarians who had struck at us…that was the same thing the Bush administration thought, and has lived out ever since. He and his base of supporters known as the radical religious right have succeeded in taking over one of America’s great political parties—the country itself is not yet a theocracy, but the Republican Party is—and these evangelicals are driving American politics, using God as a battering ram on almost every issue: crime and punishment, human rights, health care, taxation, energy, regulation, social services…and foreign policy.
And I think to myself—with chagrin and dismay and even a little honest to goodness fear—what a stunning failure. What a colossal blunder. Will the United States ever recover from this? We succeeded in allowing the fear of terrorism to embolden the worst president this country has ever had. Christian extremists roam the borders with guns, bomb abortion clinics, assault black people and Muslims…and what they do inside the law would fill an ocean. When President Bush declared the “War on Terror,” I think that was the day the terrorists “already won.”
The future is uncertain. So long as we memorialize September 11 as a justification to assail the world with our “armies of democracy,” we are doomed. So long as ordinary Americans submit to the terrorism they claim to hate, and look upon the rest of the world with suspicion and anger, we are doomed. So long as we continue supporting the political party that gratifies our childish lust for the utter destruction of some tangible enemy, we are doomed. There may simply come a point of no return. Maybe we are not there yet; maybe we already passed it. Hari Seldon pointed out that once you can see a cultural shift occurring, it is too late to stop it. That is the basic limitation that defines the science of psychohistory. And although the man is fictional and the science isn’t real, the premise is sound. People like Bill O’Reilly, James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell command assaults on intellectualism and progressivism, forcing America’s ambitions into the strange, contorted shape of a juggernaut under incredible pressure both from within and without. We are an angry, proud, stupid people with incredible economic power and vast waistlines, who waste resources like confetti, who denigrate those who could be our greatest friends, who like our leaders to speak in terms we understand, and who blame the liberal American values that made this country great for all of our ills. America is in an irrational, homicidal state of mind. We’re furious, and we have really big guns. It’s just not a good place for this country to be.
In this uncertain future is the possibility of the total destruction we fear, so unlikely and yet, because of our own overreaction, also a uniquely real possibility unlike ever before. Christian neoconservatives are leading assaults on most of the world, and even on American society itself. Like the Emperor and his death star, they are squeezing too tight, and in the end they will lose their grip. If that comes to pass in a way that rains destruction upon us, we will damn them too late, for we will be damned right along with them.
In this uncertain future is the possibility of complete obscurity, as we squander our superpower over the world and sit idly by while countries like China and the new, budding European Union pass us by in ambition and prudence. I always hesitate in drawing comparisons between Imperial Rome and the United States, but one comparison that I have long held to be completely accurate is that Rome began its decline long before it began losing its military supremacy. There was an entire century before the decay of the culture caused the military to rot as well. Is our culture rotting, now? There are many potential national diseases to which a country could succumb, from every political spectrum and social quarter, but the one that threatens America today is called the “radical right,” and it encompasses both fanatic neoconservative culture that opposes the process of globalization and progressivism, and the evangelical Christian resurgence that now controls much of the country and represses liberty. The health of the radical right is inversely proportional to the health of the United States, and if, against the odds, the radical right changes the course of this country away from greatness and toward the dark ages, then obscurity will be our gift to our children in the generations to come. Of course, it won’t be the same sort of obscurity enjoyed by, say, Belgium. No, we’ll still have those aircraft carriers, those nuclear warheads…it’d be a very dangerous obscurity, perhaps in the vein of post-Soviet Russia, except led by xenophobic religious extremists.
And in this uncertain future is a redemption of the United States of America as a worthy director on the world stage of human evolution. I want to think this is still the most likely of all the possibilities, but I just don’t know. Americans had the chance to denounce the Bush administration as a drunken aberration, by voting for John Kerry in the 2004 election. But that didn’t happen. Bush won a small but decisive majority, and Republicans made deeper gains in the Congress. That sent a message to the world that in the past ten years, the United States has gone in a very different direction. Nevertheless, so much of this can change if the pied pipers and puppetmasters of the radical right lose their grip on that great sea of fickle, stupid, ordinary Americans. If the people start voting against the Republican vision, much of these superficial despotic policies can be overturned relatively quickly. And, to the extent they are superficial, there may be but little damage done. It remains to be seen. However, the longer Republicans maintain absolute power over the White House, the Congress, the Judiciary, the states, the media, and the religious establishment, the deeper their damage will become, and the harder it will be to unmake.
An uncertain future, definitely. That is the legacy of September 11. I lost no family, no friends, but perhaps I lost my country.
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