Nothing Good Came Out of It: 9-11 Twenty Years On

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/10/nothing-good-came-out-of-it-9-11-twenty-years-on/

Time Flies....

             I turned 65 on September 13^th.  When I was younger, I was led to believe that sixty-five was the year a working person could retire from their day job and collect a pension.  That is no longer the case if it ever was.  I am still working half-time to supplement my social security payments.  Be that as it may.  Sixty-five still seems to me to be one of those numerical markers of a human life.  Hence this reflection.

            I obviously don’t remember my birth.  That memory is left to my father and mother (rest her soul).  Indeed, the first memory of a birthday that is fairly complete took place on the evening of September 13, 1965.  That was the day I turned ten.  Our family lived in Peshawar, Pakistan at the time.  My father was assigned to an outfit of the United States Air Force there.  His job and the base itself had some role in monitoring communications and activities in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.  It was one more outpost in the Cold War.  For us kids who lived there, it was just another place to live; a somewhat exotic one, but still just another place we were taken to by our fathers in the US military.

            The location is important to my story because what I am about to describe would not have happened to me and my family if we weren’t in Pakistan at the time.  Over the course of the summer in 1965, a battle of words and troop movements had erupted into a war between India and Pakistan.  The reason for the war (if there is ever a reason for war) was the disputed national entity of Kashmir.  I remain fuzzy on the details even now, but suffice it to say both India and Pakistan wished to claim it as their own.  Many Kashmiris preferred independence—a position nominally taken by the Pakistani government and still opposed by the rulers in Delhi.  For most of the summer, the war between the two nations had not affected Peshawar very much and had not affected the USAF installation at all.  However, when we began class at the base elementary school that fall, it was clear the adults were concerned about much more than our curriculum.  My father finally shared some of that concern with me and my older sister one day.  In short, he told us that there might be air raids on the local Pakistani military bases by the Indian air force.  This meant that things would not be normal for a little while. 

            On September 12^th, 1965 a couple of my siblings and I were playing in the yard when an air raid siren began to howl.  My six-year-old brother began to cry.  Mom came outside and comforted him while we gathered up our toys.  She told us it was just a practice run, but that we should come inside anyway.  Then, the all clear siren sounded.  The next day was my birthday.  I celebrated with my friends at school and in the evening we had my favorite dinner and cake.  I opened presents and went to bed.  At the time, I shared a room with my three younger brothers.  They quickly fell asleep while I read a book using my flashlight for light.  I dozed off around 9 PM.  It was a little after ten that I awoke, startled by a succession of loud noises that started with a whistling sound and ended with an explosion that rattled the windows in our room.  I got down from the top bunk and ran into my parents’ room.  Both of them were awake.  They instructed me to gather my brothers and sisters in the hallway.  Within seconds all of us were there.  My father told us not to worry.  My mother held my youngest sister in her arms and we began to pray.  Thirty or forty minutes later, the all clear signal sounded.  The next day GIs painted the windows of every building on the base black.  Other GIs dug air raid shelters in our backyards.  We spent the next five nights in those shelters while planes bombed military and civilian areas not more than five and ten miles from the base.  The ground shook with each explosion and the air filled with tracers from anti-aircraft guns and other weaponry.  All of the women and children on base were evacuated to a US military base in Turkey on September 19^th.  We did not return to Peshawar until mid-December 1965.

            The next few birthdays were not marked by any such events.  However, a few days before my sixteenth birthday in 1971, prisoners at Attica State Prison in New York took over part of the prison.  I was living in Frankfurt am Main in the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.  By then, my politics were decidedly leftist and my cultural pursuits were definitely counter. My dad and I argued often about the war in Vietnam, the racism of US society and the nature of freedom.  These debates usually began at the dinner table and carried on into the night.  My mother would occasionally ban politics from the dinner table.  Naturally, I followed the reportage about the prison takeover with great interest.  A friend of mine who was a member of the Black Panthers (and the first person to discuss theoretical Marxism with me) told me he feared the worst.  My dad’s parents were visiting.  While I was in class on September 13, 1971, the radio reported that Rockefeller had sent hundreds of cops into Attica with their guns blazing.  The death toll was around forty.  I was both angry and sorrowful.  All those people murdered for no reason but power and pride.  When we sat down to dinner, I was in no mood to hear my father try to justify the attack.  Consequently, the conversation quickly escalated.  Then, out of respect for my grandparents, we both changed the subject.  The debate continued days later after my grandparents returned to the States.

            As the years went on, other notable events occurred around my birthday.  The fascist coup in Chile was one such event.  I was in New York City then and went to numerous protests regarding the coup and US involvement in it.  I cheered to myself when the Weather Underground blew a hole in the offices of one of the coup’s corporate sponsors—IT&T.  I heard Phil Ochs sing at a rally in Union Square.

            I was also in New York City on my birthday in 2001.  Two days earlier, the Twin Towers had been destroyed when airplanes were intentionally crashed into them.  I was staying with a friend in Chelsea.  While the city attempted to make sense of what had happened and families of the victims dealt with their loss, it seemed like Rudy Giuliani’s face glared from television sets in every window of ever shop, tavern and restaurant.  New Yorkers talked to each other and the only vehicles in the streets were in the service of the police and the military.  My friend and I enjoyed each other’s company for a couple more days.  I was trying to get back to Vermont, but there was no public transportation running.  I woke up on my birthday and called Penn Station one more time.  Amtrak was running a few trains.  We said our lingering goodbyes and I headed up Eighth Avenue.  I arrived at Penn Station and waited about thirty minutes to get into the building.  Heavily armed military personnel were checking everyone’s identification and searching each individual’s luggage and selves.  After going through the security gauntlet, I hurried to the Amtrak window and was able to purchase a ticket to Vermont.  There was one more security check to board the train.  Then we headed out of town.  Back to Vermont and into a new, more authoritarian future of war, perennial economic distress, a virtual panopticon to augment greater repression and more.

            As I turn sixty-five, I both wonder and fear for what the future holds.  A president with greater fascist leanings than any president since Nixon sits in the White House.  He exacerbates a pandemic as it cuts a deadly path across the nation with his intentionally ignorant attacks on science and rationality.  His white supremacist allies and backers encourage law enforcement in its most reprehensible acts of repression and the president himself calls for retribution against those who protest his fascist tendencies.  The future of this withering republic is at stake.  I wonder how the world will look on my next birthday.  To be more precise, I fear how the world will look on my next birthday. 

            I do hope I’ve figured out another (legal) way to supplement my Social Security check by then.

           

Is Killing Peasants Protecting America’s Interests?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/11/is-killing-peasants-protecting-americas-interests/

Gonna' Have to Face It, You're Addicted to War

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/28/gonna-have-to-face-it-youre-addicted-to-war/

Democracy is Gone in the USA

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/23/democracy-is-gone-in-the-usa/

The Daily Courage of Resistance--Viewing the film Peace Has No Borders

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/16/the-daily-courage-of-resistance/

Apres Nice: Why We Need an Antiwar Movement

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/15/apres-nice-why-we-need-an-antiwar-movement/

Can We Escape the Eternal Flame?

         

Love, war and peace. Passions transcending time and as permanent as the history being made. Manhattan, 911, and desire. Vietnam, Berkeley and the road. Three main characters personify them all. This novella is a reflection of the time and on the times.

and a link to order it:

Can We Escape the Eternal Flame?  

By Ron Jacobs

Also available from Amazon and other online bookstores. 

ISBN-13:  978-1523695744

thanks....

September: A Mirage of Hope In the Shadows of Despair

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/a-mirage-of-hope-in-the-shadows-of-despair/

Into Your Life It Will Creep--Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/18/into-your-life-it-will-creep/

Judge Roy Bean Takes His Court to Manhattan

After several months of delay due to the legal concerns of his publisher American author Robert Coover published the novel The Public Burning in 1977. This novel is an often humorous and consistently biting commentary on the state of the US empire and the psyche that maintains it. It features (among others) Richard Nixon as the primary protagonist and narrator with occasional appearances from Uncle Sam as a Methuselahian superhero and Dwight Eisenhower as the latest incarnation of the American everyman. The entire tale occurs in the week leading up to the execution of accused atom bomb spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and ends the night of their execution. Because it is fiction, Coover has moved the location of the execution to Times Square. The setting is possibly the most important aspect of the novel in that it portrays the execution not as the ultimate realization of justice but as a piece of national theater. It is a cathartic political moment designed to prove that the United States of America will not be undone by communists and other anti-American misfits, nor will it succumb to those who disagree with the natural order of things under American capitalism. This show is as much for the American people as it is for the rest of the world. No self-doubt is to be acknowledged when it comes to the American destiny. Coover's Uncle Sam character tells then Vice President Nixon as much in a vision: "We ain't going up to Times Square just to fill the statutorial law...," says Uncle Sam. "This is to be a consecration, a new charter of the moral and social order of the Western World...."
When I heard that Obama's Justice Department was going to try at least five of the alleged 9-11 suspects in New York City I couldn't help but think of Coover's novel. In the same way that the Rosenberg execution was a piece of political theatre designed to insure the US public that Washington had the over-hyped communist threat under control, this trial serves the purpose of convincing that same public that the terrorist threat is also being taken care of. During the trial and aftermath of the Rosenbergs, the US military was fighting a war in Korea and occupying a good portion of the world. Involvement in Vietnam on the side of the French was increasing and the ultra-right was relishing the publicity it had obtained thanks to Joe McCarthy and other anti-communist demagogues. Nowadays, the US military is fighting a war in Afghanistan, occupying Iraq and maintaining military bases around the world. The ultra-right is up to its usual publicity-seeking inanities and the economy is stumbling. It's time for a unifying event. Since (thankfully) attacks on the US homeland don't happen very often, the next best thing to rally the masses might very well be this trial.

Currently, there is a sideshow being whipped up by the rightwing that insists that the defendants should all be tried in military courts. Most of those not among that political minority disagree. The right has nothing to fear, however. Despite all the backslapping statements calling Attorney General Eric Holder's decision a triumph for the American way of justice, justice is not really the issue in these upcoming trials. No, what's at stake here for the empire reaches deeper than that. As far as the empire's guardians are concerned, these trials are about the very nature of the American future. Convictions (and most likely executions of the condemned) are essential to the continuation of the project. Doubt must be purged. Naysayers must be silenced. The attorneys that end up defending these men will be vilified. If the defendants are, by some fluke, acquitted, the jury will live in fear of their own countrymen for a long time. The court itself will be an armed camp reminiscent of the prison in Guantanamo where the defendants were held for years without trial. The effects of any torture endured by the defendants will lurk underneath every accusation and piece of evidence presented.
Given that New York is still one of the top media capitals in the world, don't look for a change of venue for these trials. The message here is not in the courtroom proceedings, but in the presentation of those proceedings. The Lady Justitia will be present, but the real force in this courtroom will be Nemesis, the god of vengeance. He has already made a difference, through the fact of the torture used by interrogators on the defendants. Getting the message that confuses justice with vengeance across will be the task of the media circus certain to ensue. The prosecution and their cohorts on the bench are depending on it.

From the trials in Salem to the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs; from the deportations of the anarchists and other radicals during the Palmer Raids of the early twentieth century to the trials of antiwar and black liberation activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of the United States is full of these rituals of cleansing. It doesn't matter if there are any truly guilty among the prosecuted and persecuted. It only matters that the national soul is cleansed and thereby able to begin its mission again--the mission referred to by everyone from John Winthrop in his discourses written on the passage to the new world to every president that ended his addresses with the words God Bless America. The city on the hill is still being built--now on a planetary platform. First, however, we must rid ourselves of those who don't share our vision of that city but would tear it down. More importantly, we must get rid of the self-doubt among those citizens who think the cost is too high. Vengeance under the cover of justice is just the prescription demanded by Uncle Sam and his saints.