Barely Legal

For a long time, I resisted it.

The subject was simply too BIG to contain mere politics.

But now?

Nine-Eleven is old enough to VOTE.

And it *NEEDS* to!!

The beastly, wretched, contemptible current occupant of the People's House actually DARED to invite the fucking TALIBAN to Camp David for a meeting.

This barbarous, benighted, toxic assemblage of *ostensible* humans, was invited by the so-called president of the United-Fucking-STATES to attend a sit-down in a space traditionally reserved for heads of state, and legitimate representatives of the human species, in civil assemblage.

This.

Is.

ENTIRELY.

Unacceptable.

On that chilly Tuesday morning, 18 years ago, civilization was dealt a grievous blow by its OPPOSITE: Malign, retrograde, nihilistic representatives the most savage, feral manifestations of what our type of naked ape could possibly embody.

I would not endorse the treatment for a rabid **RAT** that I would enthusiastically support for these fucking murderous savages.

And yet, there was Donald t’Rump, in the full FLOWER of his clueless arrogance, the absolute tone-deaf APOTHEOSIS of his witless, arrogant, self-absorbed idiocy...

LEGITIMIZING these bipedal tumors with an invitation to the space where Statesman and  Peacemakers had sat down to discuss the matters of human civilization.

Many, MANY have been the examples of how he has COMPREHENSIVELY disqualified himself as a leader, as a citizen, as a gods-damned *MAMMAL*.

*NONE* has *EVER* surpassed the craven stupidity of this plan.

And --color me ALTOGETHER unsurprised-- those cowardly, dark-hearted, theocratic miscreants used a car bomb to slaughter more innocents, before their unwiped arses ever difiled a seat at the table with the Founders’ heir.

Again.

And, as a result, the FOOL elected to cancel the meeting he should NEVER have scheduled in the first place... 

And dismissed his National Security Advisor --flawed as he might be, but FAR too principled to serve in this pustule’s ‘administration’-- for daring to contradict him on this matter that any PARAMECIUM would have seen as perfectly OBVIOUS.

**ENOUGH!!**

There are people who, in the course of my life, have given me many reasons to love them.

I am fortunate in this.

However, some of them STILL manage to support that steaming pile of putrescent vulture-shit. 

SOMEHOW, they have managed to insulate themselves against the information that would lead them to the incontrovertible, *OBJECTIVE* conclusion that Donald-fucking-t’Rump is the WORST thing that has EVER happened to this Nation. 

And I include the Civil War in that.

 Many are the reasons that I love these people. 

But I will NEVER again entirely trust their judgment.

This Nation means far too much to me. 

The harm that was done to it on 9-11-2001 was far too devastating to EVER trust people who could be so misguided in their beliefs about what is good for this Republic that I love.

9/11 is 18 years old.

I trust that it will guide the people of this Grand Experiment to make a much, MUCH better choice, next year.

A slow, excruciating, humiliating, natural death to Donald-Fucking-t’Rump, for defiling what I revere, for dishonoring the memory of the fallen, for all-but-ENSURING that our worst days are yet to come.

And SHAME on the FOOLS who support him.

Suite: 15

Almost didn't post this year. (Still counts if I haven't slept, yah?)

This was the first time since That Tuesday that I've actually been in New York on 9/11. Went up alone this weekend to help out my mom, in my childhood home.

As I drove back to my present home tonight, on the Belt Parkway, I could see --for the first time with my own eyes-- those twin pillars of light, tracing their starward trajectories opposite those described by the Towers whose memories they evanescently embody each year.

Zero-Seven hushed from the speakers. Late-night traffic was sparse. The Moon serenely choreographed its silvery swarms on the estuary.

I was Sad.

Still am.

This has been a year replete with Losses: Bowie, Rickman, Wilder, Schandling, Marshall, Vigoda, Finkel, Baker, Formerly-Formerly-Known-As, etc., etc.

And other Losses, FAR more personal. Losses of the kind that BAMPF the marrow from your bones, suck the mitochondria out of each and every cell, leave you gasping for joy like a COPD sufferer on Everest's summit. One of them I associate inextricably with New York (I fear seriously for my equilibrium and my breath, when next I set foot in Lincoln Center...or in pretty much any Irish pub...).

So, awash in the howling winds of all those vortices (and yet VERY consciously Mindful of one I've thus far been spared [Kenahorah-Poo-Poo-Poo]), revisiting That Other One seemed a bit much.


So, I almost didn't post.

It was the lights, done me in.

Photons, fired from the very site of such ruin were striking mine own retinae at just under vacuum-C, in real-time. 

Whatthefrak was I supposed to do with that??

As I've said before, I watched those Towers go up. From my sixth to my thirty-fifth years, they lived....and then they died.

And they were anything but alone.

Alas, it made me think of the status of the zeitgeist that lurched its charnel-fanged maw to our throats on That Day.

And that did nothing for the Sadness.

The three --variously-quixotic-- contenders for the Oval Orifice do not inspire.

One, whose tenure as SecState offered up a dreary litany of squandered opportunities (Green Revolution, Al-Maliki's Electile Dysfunction, Ukraine incursions, Arab Spring, "'Reset' Buttons" [Staples irregulars?]...), and a prickly, imperious tone that frosted every interface. It was dismal to a degree that rivals even that of her sodden successor at Foggy Bottom.

And another: notoriously mercurial, viciously thin-skinned, exuberantly-unburdened by any discernible capacity for critical, strategic thought...nor much in the way of raw material for such thought.

And, of course, the Upstart: affable, experienced, idealistic, congruent (at times to the point of unprecedented --and very refreshing-- self-deprecation)....but possessing his party's characteristic Achilles...well...LEG of a breathtakingly naïve conception of geopolitical realities.


So....Yah. Not sanguine.

Neither volatile bellicosity, reptilian manipulation, nor ostrich imitations stand even a Truth's chance on social media of bending the orbit of such Malevolent Clarity by so much as an arc-millisecond.

"Spectacle" attacks like the one having its Quinzeañera today seem to have fallen out of vogue (cf. Yiddish utterance, above), having been succeeded by Lone (/Known) Wolf, and platoon-level soft-target wetwork.

Decisively draining the political, ideological, and economic feeder streams of such "democratized" mayhem would require a multifarious deployment of subtle, nimble, attuned, toothy (with baked-in face-saving compromises), FOCUSED foreign policy, a global Counterinsurgency approach whose likelihood of arising from the daily briefings of any of these Misfit Toys' tenures on Pennsylvania Avenue is....well...


Let's just say that, amid everything else, I was aware of being rather ignominiously discomfited at the fact that I was in New York today.




And that Pisses Me OFF.




Troofer-Dipshit Half-Wit Mental Gymnastics aside, it's plain to any reasonably-informed, rational thinker from the pic below that the Towers' structural support system was exceptionally well-conceived...save for a low-probability but devastatingly exploitable vulnerability.

Alas that the same might be said for the security of the Republic and of its citizenry.




Damned lights.

14

14 years.

Many decades.

No time at all.

Lost in the blur and the bustle of the day-to-day, eclipsed by the Meantimes --marvelous and morbid-- overwritten by the business of existing, and --every now and then-- Living......It waits.

The defining Moment of our times.

As with all things of comparably enormous import, the interval seems murky, phenomenologically muddled as to perceived duration, because, although it slips farther and farther away in 'objective time' (whateverthefrak that is), it remains present, because it underlies --at varying depths-- everything else.

"Why should it loom so large, when suffering at least as horrid befalls vastly more people on a daily basis, elsewhere in the world?"

Fair question. And one which is typically answered with far too little depth, such that it appears --alas, all-too-often correctly-- to connote an ugly over-undertone of chauvinism ("Because they were MERRRRcuns!").

But obviously that's not it, or I would hardly have brought it up.

That was the day that asymmetric warfare joined --and soundly upstaged-- Great Powers War (hot and Cold) in the annals of geopolitical mayhem. It was the day that a band of highly disciplined, guilefully canny, chillingly Certain individuals successfully exploited the very best aspects of an advanced, evolving civilization, in order to deliver a withering blow upon it --and, in so doing, force a spasmodic realignment of the vectors of power across the whole skin of this Marble-- for the sake of one that's among the least advanced, and pointedly retrograde in its evolution.

It was the day that decisively cemented into the zeitgeist that which had already been true for some time.

Wars no longer had "fronts."

And they never would again.

Warriors could, once upon a time, come "Stateside," and reflect --in safety-- on the horrors of battle, while "civilians" would seek to comfort them, secretly thanking their deity of choice for the fact that they wouldn't have to face such nightmares, themselves.

And now they would.  Now they would have to bare their muffin-tops at the airport if they should be foolhardy enough to wear metallic belt buckles, expose to public scrutiny their threadbare, swampy socks. All because a caustic ideology had sufficient emulsifying force to yoke the divergent hatreds of myriad factions into a perfect storm of deadly intercontinental venom.

On that day.

Yes, a great many people in this world just might be sufficiently aware of those events to look up briefly and say "Yeah? And?" But everyone that any readers of these words would be likely to encounter did experience a Sea Change on that day.

It's the kind of thing that always lives/lurks, to varying degrees in the background.

How far into the background has a distinct bearing on how we approach these Anniversaries.  Many say that we ascribe an outsized value to That Day's events, and in so doing we create the conditions under which the hatreds that burst like a long-neglected pustule are simply allowed to re-fester. They add that we must strive to live in the kind of world in which such things are not allowed the space to happen ("Be the change you want to see in the world").

A laudable sentiment. However, it is one which perilously papers over the fact that, in the absence of evidence that it is broadly shared, serves essentially the same purpose as a "Gun-Free Zone" sign does to an armed psychotic (Target-Rich Environment [without the irony]).

Which brings us to those for whom it is seldom/never very far into the background (like Yours Truly). For people toward that end of the spectrum, the alarm clock didn't come with a snooze button.  The vigilance which was triggered by an understanding of the full scope of those events' antecedents continues to resonate to the frequencies that reveal their continued presence in the world.

And they grow worse.

Thus, the task incumbent on this magnificent, vulnerable Civilization is to harry and scatter the agents of chaos that struck with such malevolently spiteful brilliance on That Day.  We must discredit and Shame those raging revenants' ideology without respite, without recourse to the precious platitudes with which the typically --though not exclusively-- well-meaning apologists for negotiated, multicultural coexistence seek to minimize the existential threat that it still represents.

As is sometimes said, "We may not be at war with them...but They still are with us."  

That bears reflecting on.

And for those who are gearing up to deliver some retort which suggests (or asserts) that the USGOV was responsible for 9/11 (either via missiles/planted explosives, or via deliberate withholding of actionable threats [e.g., for the sake of ginning up a war, on behalf of Big Oil/the Military-Industrial-Complex/whateverthefrak])....I reckon you might as well Unfriend me instead.    Right now.

I'm not having it.

You see, I have no respect for Troofers. That would seem an uncharacteristically un-nuanced position for me to take. I am pleased to report that this would be an accurate statement. I fully acknowledge that it is not altogether immune to exception (what is?)...but it has sufficiently robust heuristic value that I choose to treat it as a functional Fact.

I do not consider 9/11 conspiracists to be serious people.

The willful dereliction of intellectual rigor which is required in order to partake in an Alex Jones version of that reality is of sufficient magnitude as to disqualify an individual's opinion from my consideration. I don't listen to Scientologists, either.  I'd not presume to infringe on their right to express their opinions, obviously.  But life is short.

You see, there are people in this world who are entirely too invested in the belief that, somehow, they are clever or savvy or well-connected enough to be On To It....which all-too frequently leads them to drift more and more Out Of It.

"Theories" like these are the very definition of such Mission Creep.
Hint: The unfolding of any sufficiently complex occurrence, in nature and/or in human affairs will invariably be riddled with anomalies.

And so will our descriptions of them....even when they are accurate.

A scattered smattering of "hmmm"-worthy, apparently paradoxical factoids do not invalidate the central thrust of events, any more than line noise nullifies the music.

There are no altogether Noise-free Signals in any 'verse that we're ever gonna live in.

But "Paranoid is just Reality...on a finer scale."   (/"Strange Days")

Seriously. Just keep it to yourselves.


Regardless, it's been 14 years.  Or 25 seconds. I go back and forth.

12

I've got nothing.

Every year, I steep myself in the memory of That Terrible Day. Every year, I strive to find something Meaningful, heartfelt, and as non-political to say as I can muster.

But I've got nothing.

In truth, 9/11 has barely been on my mind today. Every client's receipt I filled out made me utter a little "huh."  I scrolled down past Facebook posts about Remembrance (most quite lovely and, to a heart which was differently disposed than mine today, quite moving).

I was largely unmoved.

Jimmy Carter was responsible for the foolish appeasement and empowerment of the USSR with his prattle about our "Irrational fear of Communism." He demoralized a nation with his defeatist cardigans, appalling fiscal policies and blather about "malaise." He oversaw the gutting of our military, and of our Intelligence-gathering capabilities (particularly the HUMINT which would have saved so VERY many lives).

And the Soviets invaded Afghanistan ("They lied to me!"). And the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Khomeini's goons. And NOBODY saw either one coming, or could do a blessed thing about it. Good Marines and Delta Force operators died in fire, in the desert outside Teheran, because our helos were ill-equipped to fly in sandy conditions, in order to rescue the hostages who should never have been taken in the first place. In a poorly-conceived scheme to make things difficult for the Soviets, what would become the Taliban was trained, armed, and empowered.

Communism enjoyed a burst of propaganda enthusiasm at the impotence of the Capitalist US, both Sunni and Shiite Islamopaths were emboldened and equipped to take their previously-merely-irksome Jihads into the realm of full-blown Global Asymmetric Insurgency.  And oceans of blood were spilled (are still being spilled!) because that imbecile miscreant was somehow elected to be President of the United States.

And he still won't shut that gangrenous hole in his half-melted, smarmily-grinning/sneering face about the dark fantasies he harbors in that singularity where a heart is generally thought to reside, when he belches forth about Israel and the "Palestinians."


And yet, at this moment, I almost feel nostalgic for the Carter years.

The unmitigated HASH which the 44th occupant of Penna Ave has made of this Nation's foreign policy, the sheer, mind-numbing amateurishness of it simply boggles what little of my mind I can stand to direct toward it (have ya noticed that I've been blogging about movies and tech lately...when at all?).

It all sounds so eerily familiar: An unnecessarily-empowered Russia, under Czar Vlad I, Iran inching toward nuclear arms, Syria gassing its citizens and launching cyber attacks against Western news agencies, China arming up, Eastern European allies left to twist after risking Moscow's wrath by agreeing to host subsequently-"Reset" anti-missile batteries against the aforementioned Iranians, oil prices unnecessarily high (and the aforementioned Islamopaths and Putin Syndicate kleptocrats rolling in the lucre), because gargantuan domestic energy supplies can't be tapped for fear of angering petulant environmentalists, a hard-won victory in Iraq slipping into ignominious defeat due to inexcusable neglect (thus further empowering both Shiite and Sunni Islamopaths)...

Again: Mind. Boggled.

The task of undoing the damage that two terms of an Obama Presidency have already wrought (and threaten to deepen further) will be the work of generations. Indeed, I am none-too sanguine that some of it can ever be undone.


And I think back to the 90s and the wholesale turning-away from geopolitics which the End Of The Cold War made everyone think they had the luxury to enjoy. And I think of how I've felt all day. And I shudder at the horrors which will all-but inevitably sprout from the seeds that have been planted over the last 5 years. And I try to find the words for my dread and anticipatory grief.

But I've got nothing.

11

When I was a kid in NYC, the local TV station, WPIX Channel 11, was commemorating an anniversary or somesuch, and arrived at a creative ad campaign. Actors would play assorted people throughout the city, who were asked to help out Channel 11 with finding a proper symbol for the station. Invariably, over their shoulders, the towering endeca-digits of the WTC mocked their perplexity.

One of the dwindled but enduring artifacts of my college-era obsession with the ancient Greeks was a deep admiration for the geometric simplicity, the sleek, unadorned, cyclopean sincerity of those Towers. They were edifices of frank, unapologetic Commerce (which, in those days, I conceptualized more as a linear juggernaut, than as the nimble network I envision today). Of course, at the time, I also thought the Chrysler Building was, by comparison, a grotesquely baroque bastardization of Deco and Gothic and Neo-Fascist architectural indecision and pomposity. What can I say: I was, in so many ways, a thoroughgoing ninny back then.

Like those New Yawkahs from the WPIX ads, the Towers were an axis mundi for me, ubiquitous as the Moon. I remember going over the Queensboro Bridge in my parents' car, gawking at that impossibly high constellation of construction lights. Those brilliantly-silvered or celestially-coruscant or mist-wreathed binary reminders of the power of intelligence and will were ever part of the semiotic scaffolding which defined my world.

That billowing dust cloud contained a little something besides the (immeasurably more precious) molecules of my fellow humans. It marked the atomization of one literal and countless more abstract nuclei of my scheme of organizing my experience of self-in-world. It was like that character from "The X-Men," the one who teleports, and the air which had just been displaced by him would slam into the sudden vacuum with a "BAMPF!" They were gone. And, in ways both subtle and gross, nothing would ever be the same. If nothing else, the Phantom Skyline Syndrome is likely to be a life-long affliction.

I've striven to keep these Things as trans-political as could be, and I'd rather like to keep that up. Suffice to say, then, that the forced conceptual and emotional reconfiguration of things did not stop at the local space surrounding me. Rather, it spun vortices outward into my most far-flung theories of how nations and cultures and ideologies and power-flows were arrayed on the whole of the skin of this Globe. And the BAMPF is still echoing, as those views evolve at a pace which would make Stephen J Gould --rest his bones-- really proud.

This past July, I was on the Circle Line, with Ma'am 'Cyte, and the Li'l Cyte, and had my first close look at the construction of what I hope someday to stop referring to as the "Capitulation Tower."  Of course, any project of such scale and scope will evoke wonder, but the new WTC simply leaves a sour finish on my palate. Am I like a disgruntled denizen of Radio Row here? Or is it the absurd delay, political wrangling, failure to be configured as a reproduction of the Towers (11 floors taller, their footprints transposed with their fallen forebears'), its misleading altitude tally (a number of stories of non-habitable space --complete with token wind turbines)? Or maybe the residue of the wrenching realignments of the geopolitical context which are woven into its DNA simply by virtue of when it arose. I don't know.

I just know that I feel myself to be in a holding pattern as to the larger implications of That Other Tuesday (as the unusually self-referential nature of this year's post will attest). Maybe this is the Equilibrium before the next Punctuation (again, with the Gould). Maybe that's just an artifact of the election season. The many gods forfend that the next surge of change should be predicated on so calamitous a happening. May it be so that, whoever is wielding the ordnance, the feeder streams of the torrent which obliterated so many worlds that morning are being drained with implacable and irreversible efficacy ("Truthers" need not comment. It will not go well).

In the meantime, I suppose the news station "New York One" might have something to think about.

Ten Years Hence (unstructured musings)

Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is a scattered shadow of what it once was. A fragile but viable democracy hangs on in Iraq. There have been no successful mass-casualty attacks on soft targets in the US in ten years. Something is finally rising from the hole at Ground Zero. Afghanistan...well, it is just not what it used to be for aspiring Jihadists.

Despite the best efforts of Liberal Democrats, "Anti-War" Progressives,  and their strange bedfellows on the Paleoconservative and Libertarian Right, things are unambiguously better now, Global Counterinsurgency-wise than they were ten years and one day ago, in a host of important ways.

But I still watch footage of that chilly Tuesday morning, a decade ago, and feel as though a dangerous fire is still smoldering under the wreckage, somewhere.

The other night, Nickelodeon was running a marathon of "Friends" episodes. After I got over the initial shock and dismay that the episode I watched (which I remember watching when it first aired) had been made 17 years ago (!!), I found myself, as I so often do, scanning the background of the establishing shots, and seeing those Towers on the skyline. I suppose there is something unhealthy about this. Just the sight of those marvelously stark rectangles, rising from a thicket of lesser buildings, is oddly restorative for me. It enables me, for just that moment, to position myself in a headspace in which vicious Jihadist murderers had not rammed a jagged dagger through the tender skin of my innocence and idealism.

But they did. Those Towers are gone. Forever. And thousands of lives have passed from infinite possibility to mere remembrance. And yet, as Mr Hengist ably laid out in today's post, there remains a growing cadre of dangerous fools who urge us to "just get over it, already."

No, dangerous fools. I will not. Not now. Not ever.

Because the next feeling I have when I look at the Towers in film and video, right after the warm and comfy one of a world in which my main concern was adjusting to marriage, and getting my Psychology license, and finding the best possible cappuccino, is rage. Smoldering, caustic rage. That the kind of  atavistic hatred which moved the muscles of those 19 hyperempowered psychopaths was allowed to fester and to find a means of expression, such that it pierced so many lives, enrages me. That the full import of that abominable act still eludes so many, and that they can still --with all seriousness-- attribute it to something which is the "fault" of the open, pluralistic society whose very openness provided the means for that horrific spasm of bloodletting...enrages me.

As I said before, I  loved those Towers. I loved the fact of them. I loved the aesthetic of them. I loved the meaning of them. I loved the commerce, and the clarity, and the sheer exuberant simplicity of them (even if these things were mostly hidden from the transnational progressive consciousness which lived in that much younger version of me at the time). My rage is the the fire which was ignited in me at the time, and it has not gone out. I hope it never does. That fire is the engine which keeps fresh in my mind the degree to which I cherish the very things which those cancerous zealots sought to extinguish, the very things which so many dangerous fools are still trying to aid them in extinguishing. The freedom to think and act and trade and (refrain from) worship(ping) as I choose, to view women and homosexuals and fellow agnostics and atheists and people of faith as equals, to differ with them in a spirited and open dialogue, to tilt a pint with them as I do so. To love them, even as I work with all my might to move this Nation in a direction which is altogether orthogonal to the vector along which they would steer it.

For the guidance system of those planes is still active. It is still aiming for the symbols and foundations of a civilization which it has never matched, and which it can only muster the wherewithal to destroy.

And I will be damned if I will let it.

(Edited to add link in last paragraph [evidence that Paul Krugman needs to find a nice, quiet place with a lot of mirrors, far away from decent people], and address an oversimplification)

ADDENDUM: Re-reading the above, it occurred to me that it might seem strange to see a psychologist speaking positively of rage. Fair point. To clarify, what I feel is the kind of rage that smolders, deep down, but is not altogether squandered in mere stewing. It is jacked into the power systems, its energy yoked to the motivational systems which feed such things as blogging, voting, campaigning, and maintaining situational awareness (both of the 'scanning a crowd for suspicious activity' sort and the 'keeping abreast of global events' sort).

So, I suppose there are really two fires smoldering here: the one which feeds the virulent fantasies and hatreds of the individuals and organizations which would like nothing more than to perpetrate an encore to the events of 9/11/01...and the one in me, and in others, to extinguish the first. They are both dangerous...but the latter is a hazard to those who, unlike the innocents on that horrid day, most assuredly have it coming.

Forget 9/11? Fuhgeddaboudit, Pal.

[by Mr.Hengist]

Now, me, I’m not big on anniversaries, not even my own birthday. Just not caring, is all. When I was a kid I looked forward to my birthday, sure – presents! – but as I got older, for a variety of reasons, I grew out of it. There’s no day I set aside for celebration or remembrance of anything anymore, and that’s just me. I’m not against this kind of thing but it doesn’t resonate with me.

That’s why the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has come and gone these blogging years without comment from me, although 9/11 marked perhaps the darkest days in my life and set in motion changes in me which were, for me, profound. It’s in the days leading up to the 9/11 anniversary that people reflect on that day and how we move forward. E.J. Dionne Jr. has phoned it in with his September 7th, 2011 column, “Time to leave 9/11 behind”.

As the title promises, the first line delivers:

“After we honor the 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we need to leave the day behind.”

It’s a familiar refrain, one I’ve read from Liberal pundits since, well, shortly after September 11, 2001. We shouldn’t use this as an excuse to make war, we’ve gone off-track, we need to understand that we were attacked because we’re hated, and with good reason, we need to make amends so the world will love us again and we’ll all live together in the world with harmony and respect for cultural diversity, and then unicorns will fart rainbows, blah blah blah, blah blah, blah.

Although the Liberal MSM never stopped airing the pictures and video of the planes hitting the towers (look, big explosion!), even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 they wouldn't air the pictures or video of the jumpers. Those were the victims above the inferno in the towers who jumped to their certain death rather than stay and succumb to the smoke and flame. What hell that must have been for those office workers that the better option was to jump from the top floors of a skyscraper. Not a few, either; surviving rescue workers described having to be exceedingly cautious when entering or exiting the towers to avoid being crushed by a random person falling from the sky, and how unnerving it was to hear the bodies thumping on the sidewalk every couple of minutes. Why the media embargo? While not graphic, they were horrifying, and they angried up the blood. Americans were, by and large, ready to unleash our war machine, but already the imploring chorus of restraint was stirring from the anti-war left, who saw us as having gotten our just desserts - Blame America First.

It only took a half a year or so for the focus to shift, as the Lefties knew that this war business wasn't going to treat them well. Modern Liberal Democrats are not the leaders you want in charge in a time of war, and they knew it, so on the whole they thought this 9/11 thing was taking domestic and foreign policy in all kinds of wrong directions. Like hamsters running the wheel for hours on end, they get tired and rest for a spell but soon enough they're back at it. It's their hobby horse and they're not getting off it, because we can't change policy until you people get over the hurt. So, like, it's sad & all, but can't you just leave it in the past? Besides which, you deserved it.

“As a nation we have looked back for too long. We learned lessons from the attacks, but so many of them were wrong. The last decade was a detour that left our nation weaker, more divided and less certain of itself.”

I’ll refrain from rebutting the arguments that Dionne neglects to make himself, but suffice it to say, he’s wrong, wrong, wrong. We learned valuable lessons from 9/11, and perhaps not well enough, and our response has left us stronger, not weaker. Hey, if Dionne won’t make the case against, I’m don’t have to make the case for.

“Reflections on the meaning of the horror and the years that followed are inevitably inflected by our own political or philosophical leanings. It’s a critique that no doubt applies to my thoughts as well. We see what we choose to see and use the event as we want to use it.”

I suppose it would be unfair to point out that Dionne, perhaps tellingly, focuses on how we choose to “use the event as we want to use it”, because in essence, I agree with this paragraph. Let’s just say, for now, that E.J. Dionne and I disagree on all the particulars.

“This does nothing to honor those who died and those who sacrificed to prevent even more suffering. In the future, the anniversary will best be reserved as a simple day of remembrance in which all of us humbly offer our respect for the anguish and the heroism of those individuals and their families.”
“But if we continue to place 9/11 at the center of our national consciousness, we will keep making the same mistakes. Our nation’s future depended on far more than the outcome of a vaguely defined “war on terrorism,” and it still does. Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies.”

Long have the Liberal-Left fervently implored us not to take 9/11 so hard. Let me start hitting a couple of the specifics here:

First of all, it’s arguable whether we place 9/11 “at the center of our national consciousness”, but if that’s the case then it is so for reasons which are far beyond the ability of anyone to simply wish it away. 9/11 will gradually diminish in importance as time stretches the distance between the now and then, but what Dionne and his ilk have either never grasped or simply wanted to make not so, is that it was an event on the order of magnitude of Pearl Harbor. It is both tiresome and insulting to hear from Dionne et al that we should just get over it. Not happening, not anytime soon.

Then there’s the part where he acknowledges that “Al Qaeda is a dangerous enemy”, but “our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies”. I don’t think it’s necessary to belabor the obvious contradiction here, as these two ideas are mutually exclusive. What Dionne means - but apparently lacks the skill to put clearly - is that Al Qaeda will never succeed in reestablishing a caliphate. It's either clumsiness or intentionally intimating that, in some sense, we are really threatened by Al Qaeda.

In the sense that Al Qaeda will never succeed in their mad fantasies of a worldwide caliphate, Dionne and I agree. I wouldn't be entirely sure of their chances for a regional caliphate, nor would I take off the table the possibility of various other states in the being absorbed into the orbit of this yet-to-be established caliphate. At any rate, I wouldn't want to establish odds, as I think they're pretty long on even the most modest of their goals.

This is an entirely separate question from whether Al Qaeda is an ongoing threat. They are. A diminished, less capable threat, not to be underestimated, but pursued to the ends of the Earth and exterminated wherever they are, no matter how long it takes. Further, Al Qaeda is but one organization of many that are like-minded and equally dastardly. The point I'm driving at is that what Dionne wants is for us to go back to 9/10, and I'm here to tell you this a mad fantasy of Liberal-Leftists. They've probably got a better chance of realizing their fantasy than Al Qaeda does for realizing theirs.

“We asked for great sacrifice over the past decade from the very small portion of our population who wear the country’s uniform, particularly the men and women of the Army and the Marine Corps. We should honor them, too. And, yes, we should pay tribute to those in the intelligence services, the FBI and our police forces who have done such painstaking work to thwart another attack.”

I presume Dionne is preferentially giving shout-outs to the Army and Marine Corps based on casualty figures, but really, all of our armed service members have borne an extraordinary burden. One of the lessons we should have learned from the military engagements of the last decade is that our military is inarguably too small to do this without having to resort to extended tours of combat duty. Whether you support the war(s) or not, the presumption that we have the ability to fight such wars can no longer be taken at face value - or be relied upon as a part of our defense posture. If the possibility of going to war to defend, say, Taiwan or South Korea, is off the table because it would outstrip our capacity to effectively prosecute that third front, then that’s an excellent argument for augmenting the size of our armed forces because weakness invites attack. That lesson was, alas, not learned.

Still, it’s worth noting that Dionne doesn’t go the route of infantilizing our armed forces by talking about them as if they were children forced to go to war, or as bloodthirsty killbot murderers leaving a wake of devastation and suffering. I wish more antiwar folks were as decent as Dionne is here.

Hey, I wish for a lot of things.

“It was often said that terrorism could not be dealt with through “police work,” as if the difficult and unheralded labor involved was not grand or bold enough to satisfy our longing for clarity in what was largely a struggle in the shadows.”

Here Dionne constructs a straw man but doesn’t even bother to knock it down. Let me set it on fire by pointing out that one of the problems with using law enforcement to prosecute a war is that law enforcement is, by varying degrees, reactive rather than proactive. Without probable cause, how to apprehend suspects? How to obtain sufficient evidence to obtain the issuance of arrest warrants, and under what standard of law do we operate – ours, or the laws of a foreign country? To what degree to we constrain and expose our law officers by working with a foreign government in the investigation? By way of example, let me point out that when it was determined that Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan, the Bush Administration demanded he be turned over to us. The Taliban responded that, no, they would be doing no such thing, but they would consider extradition if we could present a case to an international court of law, and besides which, they had no idea where he was, although they would be happy to pass along any message we might wish to send him.

[Go back and read the rest of that last sentence now that you've stopped laughing at how the Taliban were demanding we persuade an international court of law.]

Further, law enforcement is subject to the legal constraints of a civil society rather than an effectively lawless badlands or an actual rootin’ tootin’ battlefield. In that kind of environment it is impractical to the point of being an impossibility to maintain the integrity of a chain of custody for physical evidence, and even the problematical nature of the reading of Miranda rights makes the notion of a legal battlespace, quite frankly, bizarre. Proverbially speaking, it’s bringing a knife to a gunfight, or in this case, an arrest warrant to a gunfight. OK, the FBI carries guns, but up against RPGs, AK-47s, IEDs and, well, you get the picture.

“Forgive me, but I find it hard to forget former president George W. Bush’s 2004 response to Sen. John Kerry’s comment that “the war on terror is less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering and law-enforcement operation.”
“Bush retorted: “I disagree — strongly disagree. . . . After the chaos and carnage of September the 11th, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got.” What The Washington Post called “an era of endless war” is what we got, too.”
“Bush, of course, understood the importance of “intelligence gathering” and “law enforcement.” His administration presided over a great deal of both, and his supporters spoke, with justice, of his success in staving off further acts of terror. Yet he could not resist the temptation to turn on Kerry’s statement of the obvious. Thus was an event that initially united the nation used, over and over, to aggravate our political disharmony. This is also why we must put it behind us.”

What is obvious to Dionne in Kerry’s statement is left unstated, and it deserves to be fleshed out. I won’t do his work for him, but I will point out that intelligence gathering and law enforcement operations do not preclude warfighting as a means of confronting enemy conspirators and combatants. For a couple hundred years now, the U.S. has used all of these tools in the prosecution of war.

The disconnect between these two ideas – those of Kerry and W – is that W was responding to the unstated premise in Kerry’s statement: that we can use intelligence gathering and law enforcement to mitigate the threat of Al Qaeda without waging war.

The political disharmony Dionne laments is a direct result of the disagreement between these two ideological camps over this question. What’s more, that disagreement was fueled by the political calculus of Democrats who parlayed an issue of national security in order to get more political power, which is simply unconscionable.

I’m sure Liberals will take exception to that statement, but let me preempt their howls by asking this question: how else do you explain the promises of candidate Obama, which were very much in alignment with the spirit of anti-war Liberals, to the actions of POTUS Obama? From the continuance of warrantless wiretaps, to the dramatic expansion of drone airstrikes, and the extension of the Patriot Act, to the Libyan war, and so on, it seems obvious that POTUS Obama has fallen far short of the standards he set for himself. I’m not trying to use these reversals as a cudgel against POTUS Obama, but rather, to point out that, in reality, as POTUS Obama either knew or learned, our country is not well-served by prosecuting a war as if it were a matter solely for intelligence gathering and law enforcement.

While I'm at it, let me also point out how disingenuous the Left has been over these past years. Yeah, yeah, when W was in office, the Constitution was shredded, he thought himself a king, the republic was doomed, and America as we knew it was being destroyed by the evil Republicans, damn those soulless ghouls. The Left marched by the tens of thousands, they did, to stop the wars and take back America! When they did take back America, or at least the government - which, surprisingly, still existed, and still somehow allowed free elections - Democrats won all three branches of government and those very same policies were met with... muted grumbling. Only the far left still seems to be waving their pitchforks, but mainstream Liberals have given their guy a pass.

“In the flood of anniversary commentary, notice how often the term “the lost decade” has been invoked. We know now, as we should have known all along, that American strength always depends first on our strength at home — on a vibrant, innovative and sensibly regulated economy, on levelheaded fiscal policies, on the ability of our citizens to find useful work, on the justice of our social arrangements.”

I’ll defer to Dionne that “the lost decade” is a phrase used with some frequency in Liberal circles, but that phrase has no currency on the Right. At any rate, American strength is not dependent on the false choice Dionne presents. Our economy must be strong in order to have a strong national defense, and our national defense can only be strong if our economy is strong. We can’t have one without the other, but regardless of economic circumstances in our national defense we must wage war on those who wage war against us. It always pays to destroy our enemies, even though it costs us.

“This is not “isolationism.” It is a common sense that was pushed aside by the talk of “glory” and “honor,” […]"

… aaaand let me stop Dionne right here and call out this BS. Glory and honor were never used by the Bush Administration to justify warmaking; this is a shameless manufacturing of a lie to serve Liberal dissent. We did not go to war in Afghanistan or Iraq for glory, period. We did not go to war against Afghanistan or Iraq for honor, either. We did not go to war against Afghanistan or Iraq for treasure either, but I digress. Dionne would like to portray hawks and neocons as warmongers seeking glory and honor, but Dionne forgets that these are the facile accusations of the Liberal-Left, now so ingrained as to be taken as self-evident truths. Recall what I said above, about how accusations against their political opposition are first taken as a possibility, then as probably true, and from there a certainty.

“[…] by utopian schemes to transform the world by abruptly reordering the Middle East — and by our fears.”

Here Dionne is alluding to the neocon ambition of upsetting the apple carts of the undemocratic Middle East dictatorships and facilitating the emergence of representative republics. It’s a shame that POTUS Bush largely gave up on that ambition in his second term, but it’s somewhat encouraging to see the possibility of that dream coming to fruition in some parts of the Middle East today as a part of what’s being called the Arab Spring. You might think that current events would have Dionne thinking twice about calling such a scheme utopian, but, well, apparently not.

“While we worried that we would be destroyed by terrorists, we ignored the larger danger of weakening ourselves by forgetting what made us great.”

And what made us great? Glory? Honor? I’d like to address this statement but as it stands I can’t make heads or tails of it and I’m not about to flesh out his argument that isn’t made so that I can rebut it.

“We have no alternative from now on but to look forward and not back.”

We can do both, unless you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Of course, Dionne has been arguing that we shouldn’t look back, not that we can’t, so this statement is simply empty rhetoric, and it’s just so very lame, but it does set up his final paragraph:

“This does not dishonor the fallen heroes, and Lincoln explained why at Gettysburg. “We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow this ground,” he said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.” The best we could do, Lincoln declared, was to commit ourselves to “a new birth of freedom.” This is still our calling.”

It’s nice that Dionne concluded his piece with a quote from that venerated Republican Lincoln, whom we all hold dear to our hearts, but the conclusion of his piece ends up right where it began, with Dionne lazily waving his arms, chanting, “Forget, forget, forget.”

So let me sum up my fisking with this:

9/11: Never Forget.

Afghanistan: They'll Cut (a deal) and Run

[by Mr.Hengist]

The initial reports had the casualties at 80 dead and 120 wounded in Charsadda, Pakistan, on May 13, 2011. The attack was loosely targeted at a training center for Pakistani security forces. One bomb killed cadets and, notably, bystanders at a nearby market. The second bomb, by design, killed first responders tending the victims of the first bomb. In this how the Taliban expressed their sympathy and anger, in deeds fitting their words, at the U.S. having sent ObL to sleep with the fishes. In deeds, how like ObL and Al Qaeda; their aims and methods make for a well-suited match. It's a timely and poignant reminder of why we unleashed our fury on them in the aftermath of 9/11, and a rebuke of our having let so many flee to safety. We should have done a better job of cutting off their escape routes and killed them in in far larger numbers.

POTUS Obama reluctantly fulfilled his campaign pledge by increasing our troop presence in Afghanistan by paltry numbers. Having done so, POTUS Obama is now once again looking for the exit. Instead of redoubling our efforts in response to Taliban atrocities, the Administration "has accelerated direct talks with the Taliban" and "U.S. officials say they hope [this] will enable President Obama to report progress toward a settlement of the Afghanistan war when he announces troop withdrawals in July." Let's hope the Taliban don't cut a deal until at least the next round of U.S. elections so that we can replace these Democrats before they can run away.

Two Shots and a Splash

[by Mr.Hengist]

The news came late and I was already visiting the Land of Nod, during which all I could dream about was making stock. Vegetable & meat stock in my slow-cooker. All night long, dream after dream. I kept waking up and thinking, "Augh, another one - why can't I have better dreams?" I've been planning on making that dream come true this weekend when I'll use my slow-cooker for the first time to make vegetable/meat stock, and I've been sort-of looking forward to it, but spending a whole night dreaming about is kind of lame.

When I woke up and checked the news I learned that another dream had already come true. A desire, really, not a dream - an angry, blood-lust desire for death upon that POS ObL. I read the banner headline and, as is typical of me, I had no reaction but an unverbalized need to read more, to learn more, to put the headline into a context into which I could weigh its veracity. ObL dead, they say, but we know that many of Al Qaeda leadership have been declared killed many times, only to pop up alive again whack-a-mole style. The more I read the more certain I became that it was a believable claim, although I will admit that when I read that the body had been dumped at sea I had my first verbal thought, which was "How convenient." I'm a skeptic by nature. I guess it just takes time to sink in when the news is big; further reflection elevated the probability of the truth status of this news to high. OK, look, I hadn't had any coffee that early in the morning and, in retrospect, it probably would have helped things along. The news started to sink in when I got into the shower.

ObL is dead. Well, good.


Surprisingly, that's all it's amounted to for me, in terms of the emotional resonance it's had on me. Not triumphalism, not jubilation, not even satisfaction. Pity, that; I'd hoped to get more mileage out of it. Granted, I'm not one for celebrations in general, but I've gotten more jollies out of finding a stray sawbuck on the sidewalk. I'm not sure why. I still feel anger and sadness at 9/11 when I think about the horror of that day, and I still feel the hot anger and bloodlust well up when I think about the jihadists and their evildoings. I don't know and I'm not going to dwell on it because it's not important. ObL is dead and that's a good thing, even if that's all there is to it for me.

Kudos to our combined intelligence and military which carried out the mission, with well-deserved accolades to follow. Surely the kill-team need never buy their own drinks again. Kudos to the Obama Administration for following through with the pursuit and having the cojones to execute when the opportunity was established. Really, you have to hand it to POTUS Obama: candidate Obama said he would go into Pakistan to get high-value targets, and, by Crom, he has. He's long-since stepped up the missile attacks inside of Pakistan, and with this mission he's ordered a boots-on-the-ground assassination of a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, highest value target. May the Cambodianization of Pakistan continue until we've reached a satisfactory outcome.

There's snark and criticism to be had at the expense of the Obama Administration, yes, but it's mostly persnickety. I will add the following thoughts:

- Assassination mission against ObL, not "kill or capture": good. The potential for intelligence gleaned from interrogation has little promise in this case. Let's face it: there's nothing we could offer to coax it out, and this administration would probably not extract it by force. The fiasco of trying to apply the due process of a civil prosecution which we've already seen with the Gitmo detainees would go to 11 for ObL; better to avoid it altogether.

- Burial at sea: good. For exactly the reasons given for doing it, it's good. Granted, my first impulse was far more excessive even than Glenn Beck's ("wrapped in bacon"), so much so that I will not sully this blog with my dark and profane fantasies, but I've reconsidered the matter and the disposal of the corpse as it was done was the correct strategic decision, IMHO.

- The ever-changing details of the mission: sadly, it's to be expected. I've come to the point where I note with a mental "Asterisk of Doubt" all information we get in the opening days of crisis. Even seemingly unmistakable chunks of a story can later turn out to be altogether wrong.

- Not releasing the ObL kill-photo: my loss. I'd like to add it to my collection, as a trophy. At any rate, the era of photographic "proof" has passed for this kind of thing, as everybody knows that, given enough time and a motivated forger with good photoshop chops, one can fake such a thing. It reminds me of a podcast to which I'd listened of an event at the Heritage Foundation, "The Role of Psychological Operations in Strategic Communications" in which one of the speakers describes talking to Afghan villagers after 9/11 and how they didn't believe it happened, even after being shown video. Oh, they knew about airplanes, sure, because airplanes flew over the skies of Afghanistan, but skyscrapers? Why, everyone knows you can't build a building that high! They were convinced it was some kind of Hollywood trickery. At any rate, there is an accounting to be made amongst the Leftists who oppose the release of the ObL death-photo yet clamored for the release of Abu Ghraib photos - another time, surely.

Not surprisingly, there's a chorus from Liberals that the death of ObL means we should get out of Afghanistan. As if that was ever the point. Well, I'll give the hippy-dippy peaceniks credit for consistency on this: when things go well, they see that as a reason we can finally leave, and when things don't go well, they use that as an argument for why we should leave. They did that for Iraq just as they're now doing it for Afghanistan; it's sort-of an unfalsifiable assertion in that regard.

This is why it's important for the Obama Administration to make it clear that our fight wasn't just against Al Qaeda, but rather it is against the jihadists who seek to destroy the West and subjugate the world under Sharia Law. Sadly, of course, he won't do any such thing, as neither he nor Democrats in general seem to believe any such thing.

At the very least there must be a dear price to be paid by Pakistan for their complicity and aid to Al Qaeda, and the jihidists who fight us and our Allies in Afghanistan and India and elsewhere. Perhaps Obama has the temerity to cut off aid; I suppose it possible he might more closely ally the U.S. with India. I'm ready to be pleasantly surprised - but not hopeful.

Nine Years Down the Line

This text field has been empty for quite some time now.

I'd been watching footage of that Terrible Tuesday, trying to move myself to generate some meaningful associations, to stir the psychic pot and see if some words would float to the top, and spill out onto this screen. But, like Kurtz, all I could come up with was "the horror."

The fact is, that I am tired. I feel as though I will never again have as clear an access to my feelings on the horror which reached from the darkness of those benighted hearts to strike at our civilization as I did on a late night, two years ago. I know I did not say all there is to be said. Far from it! But I just can't seem to find the words to yoke themselves to the thoughts and emotions which still swirl in me as I think back to that surreal morning, almost a decade ago (!!).

I can't help but feel that I am not alone in this. The fact that this Nation elected a president who, in his words and deeds, seems to live in the world of 9/10/01, the fact that somewhere around 1/3 the US population harbors some variant of the unutterably nauseating belief that it was actually our own government which had a hand in the atrocities of New York, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, PA, the fact that Iran inches, all-but unmolested, toward the capability to field nuclear weapons (!!!), or that, somewhere in this world, Osama bin Laden still draws breath, or that the very idea of constructing a mosque, mere steps from Ground Zero itself (!!!!) is felt to warrant serious consideration, or that the site itself is still a big fracking hole in the ground...It all just leaves me numb.

For all of the heartfelt and sincere statements of remembrance, the Facebook profile images replaced with pillars of light on the scarred NYC skyline, the earnest statements that we should "never forget..." too much has  been forgotten. The terrible duties imposed by the horror which was visited on us are now routinely trivialized by fools who fail to grasp the enormity of what was done, and of what it demands.

I am tired. And I feel as though we are all just falling, falling.

Godspeed, and Good Hunting

[by Mr.Hengist]

Awesome: The USS New York has set sail on her maiden voyage to New York City, where she will be commissioned into the fleet on November 7th, 2009.

"Falling Through Fire"

I respectfully submit this essay by "Doctor Zero" at Hot Air. At this moment, I have nothing to add.

Eight Years Later

Lately, my head has been far too crowded a place. Family, professional, and other considerations have taken up most of the available real estate. Not a place I'd feel confident that I might find suitable words of remembrance and reflection for the grim anniversary that has rolled around once again.

I will take a pass, and refer you to my post from last year. I don't feel as though I am likely to match it, and don't want to fall as short as I surely would if I were to undertake the effort tonight.

Savor the moments, cherish your family and friends (whether they share your views or not). Live as well as you can. And don't forget.

New Abnormal

Sitting in a bar near O'Hare Airport in Chicago, watching the planes break through the low-lying cloud deck and slice through the rain, trailing wingtip vortices made visible by the prodigious moisture in the air.

A few hours ago, that was me, dropping through that cloud deck (after a flight which was spent in a featureless pearlescent white-out. So much for my eagerly anticipated gawking at the landscape).

A few hours before that, I was taking off my belt and shoes in public at Philadelphia International Airport, chuckling because it was more productive than stewing in rage at the medievalist miscreants who had made such antics necessary.

I'd been reading Fred Burton's Ghost (a good read, if you don't mind how hard he's trying to sound like a hard-bitten but hurting Film Noir detective), which did nothing to improve my mood with respect to the deadly earnest absurdities which travelers will face for the foreseeable future. Islamic terrorists have been targeting air travel for a long time. 9/11 was only the most recent and dramatic example of how those whose benighted dead culture dooms them to crawl in the dust have become obsessed with punishing those whose who thrive by denying them the skies.

During my news crawl, I came across this article on the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies site. I'm not going to go into this too deeply, since time is short, and I'd like to not be flooded with adrenaline and ready for combat during this pleasure trip. The article touches on the outlandish conspiracy theories which substitute for critical thinking in the Middle East. Such fantasies find all-too receptive audiences here, even among good, smart people who are trying to get a handle on the perplexing and appalling realities of a world at war.

Unfortunately, although proceeding from the best of intentions, those good folks are essentially making excuses for the barbarities perpetrated by our enemies. In the end, there is no justification for the deliberate targeting of innocent people going about their business...at least not within any belief system which we can afford to not crush decisively. It very simply does not make sense to draw equivalences between the tragic and accidental killing of civilians by weapons we have spent enormous sums of money to give the capacity to strike enemies with precision while sparing bystanders...and the very deliberate and merciless slaughter of those civilians for the sake of intimidating them into hewing to some demented religio-political belief system. As much as it may shock the multiculturalists and moral relativists, one is quite simply better than another, and behaving as though it were otherwise simply feeds into the agendas of the very people who will be the first to saw off the heads of those who have proved so useful in disseminating their narrative of victimhood.

On Sunday, I will be back in line at the airport, my cologne and toothpaste in ziplock bags, my belt and shoes on a conveyer, maintaining calm, vigilant situational awareness, taking personal responsibility for identifying any potential threats which airport security might miss. I'd much rather focus on the excitement of flying, which I love more than most things on this planet. As soon as we throttle up for takeoff, that's exactly what I'll be doing. Till then, however, I will be living in that "New Normal," and making sure that I begrudge every single goddamn second of it.

It Was A Gorgeous Day For An Atrocity

[by Mr.Hengist]

I can remember walking to my car and looking up at a stunningly crystal clear blue sky and thinking how spectacularly gorgeous it was, and how I’d have liked to have just stood there and stared at it but, alas, I had to get to work by 8:30AM and I was already tight for time. Shortly after I got to work I was sitting at my desk, working, and half-listening to the president and designer of the company for which I work yelling on the phone at his guy in Italy about a production issue, when he stopped short, and asked, quietly, “What?” and after a short pause, he said, “I’ll call you later.” It got my attention. Something was up.

He walked over to the Assistant to the Controller and asked her to bring up CNN on her computer. I was just a few desks away, and I opened my browser and did the same. The CNN webpage was loading slowly, so I got back to work and checked in a few minutes later. The pictures weren’t loading, but I remember reading something about a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. I recalled a picture I’d seen of the Empire State Building after a B-25 had crashed into it in 1945 making a gaping wound in the side of the building. The CNN website was slower than I’d ever seen it. I could call up the front page sans pictures but not any of the articles.

The enormity of the day unfolded slowly, and my memory has gotten somewhat hazy over the years. My second assistant told me it was a stunt plane, something she’d heard on the radio. When the Controller told me what kind of plane it was, he asked me if it was big. “Oh, yeah,” I told him, “that’s a big plane. Transcontinental big!” After ten or twenty minutes I was able to get a picture from CNN but I could hardly make sense of it. I could see what seemed to be a slanted line on one of the towers with some smoke coming out in a few places. It wasn’t at all what I had imagined.

I remember when my second assistant told me that a second plane had crashed into the other tower. It was then that I knew this was no accident, that this was a deliberate attack on America, and I told her so. My second assistant spontaneously asked me the question we’d hear a lot in the following years, “Why do they hate us?” I mumbled a wishy-washy answer about how the United States had done some bad things in the world, but as the words came out of my mouth I knew that they were inadequate. I didn’t know what to tell her.

I remember when she told me that one of the towers fell. I was stunned, I looked away, and my unfocused gaze fell on a window overlooking green grass and parking lot asphalt, and I saw none of it, as in my minds’ eye I saw one of the towers toppling over, and I was awash in grief. “Oh, no,” I said, “Oh, no. All those people.” The people in the towers, the people on the ground, there had to have been thousands of people dead.

I remember later talking to my first assistant about it, and I was telling her we’d have to see how things played out. “This is war!” she shouted at me, and I thought, war against whom? Who had done this? How could we be at war when we didn’t even know who’d attacked us?

I remember the Controller telling me that there was a fourth plane hijacked and still on the loose. I looked him in the eyes and told him, “They’re going to shoot it down.” He turned away wordlessly, but later he came up to me and told me with some measure of astonishment that he’d thought about it and I was right.

I remember walking over to where my assistants were listening to a radio, and hearing the announcement calling for all active or retired firefighters, police, and medical workers to report for duty if able, and later that all the major roads going into the city had been closed. In the late afternoon my second assistant broke down in tears, and she told me she hadn’t been able to reach her father; he worked near the Trade Center and nobody knew if he was OK. I reassured her as best I could and explained that the cellphone networks are easily overwhelmed when a disaster strikes, so it was to be expected that his phone was unusable.

There were all kinds of conflicting reports about how many planes had been taken throughout the day, and at one point around mid-day there was a rumor reported on the radio that the Supreme Court building had been bombed. When I heard that I told the office staff that early news reports were often wrong, and that could take hours or days before a coherent, mostly-factual narrative emerges.

I kept on working throughout the day. I wasn’t going to let this stop me. I had a job to do and what was happening was fifteen miles away. Our NYC office was fine, and of the few people in the city I knew I could reach none f them, and there was work to be done. Besides which, I work for Israeli Jews, and after all their family and countrymen had been through with the Second Intifada I didn’t want to appear to be a weak American, unable to face assault and adversity. Still, I could feel it in the pit of my stomach, a leaden weight of dreadful haunting fear that would be my constant companion for the next several days.

I remember that after work the first place I drove was to a gas station to fill up the tank, just to be on the safe side (and I still carry the receipt); then the slow, slow drive home on unfamiliar local streets, bumper-to-bumper with thousands of other displaced commuters, and getting lost for a spell as I tried to keep on a generally correct heading, knowing that once I’d hit a major road I’d get oriented again. I occasionally caught glimpses of the Long Island Expressway, empty but for an occasional vehicle or two racing at top speed towards New York City, towards an ugly mess I could hardly imagine.

I remember getting home and calling my family to let them know I was OK.

I remember turning on my television but getting only static on most channels – the regional broadcast antenna had been on one of the towers, and the towers were no more. Channel after channel of static, and only fair reception on the rest.

I remember watching the news for the first time that day, watching the plane hit the tower, the enormous fireball that ensued, and watching the towers collapse, replayed over and over.

It was a year before I could be away from a radio or the internet for longer than a few hours without needing to check in and see if anything bad had happened. I needed to stay in touch or I would gradually become anxious.

It was years before I could see a commercial jet in the sky without feelings of vaguely ominous fear. Where is it going? Is it banking too steeply for normal flight? Is it flying too low, or too fast?

And to this day, when the sky is that gorgeous, deep, crystalline azure blue, I think back, and I remember.

Seven Years Hence

I was asleep when I got the call.

I seem to have a way of being woken from sleep when disaster strikes. I was snoozing when the Challenger exploded on liftoff, woken by my mother, grumbling about her tendency to exaggerate. I was deep into a long-forgotten dream when my friend called to tell me that Columbia had burned up on re-entry, with all hands lost.

On Tuesday, September the 11th, 2001, it was, again, my mother who rousted me from my slumbers to tell me that the World Trade Center had been struck by a plane and was on fire. I tuned into NBC news in time to watch the second plane hit. I watched, stunned to silence, as the billowing mountains of smoke poured from the stricken towers into that preternaturally clear and lovely morning, blinked and rubbed my eyes as the first tower fell, longing for it to be an optical illusion.

I am an expatriate New Yorker, transplanted by initially reluctant choice to Pennsylvania, where the market was rather less saturated with other members of my profession. I had only lived in Philadelphia for 11 months. I had been in New York the previous week-end. Most of my friends lived in and near Manhattan.

I began scouring my memory for any people I knew who might have been in Lower Manhattan that morning, and seized upon my closest friend, Mike, who was working at Goldman Sachs at the time. Heart-wrenching hours passed, during which I called his cell, over and over. But, of course, the cell tower had been atop the building, which was no more. As with so many of the other people who were straining the cell network to the breaking point, I labored to prevent my mind from straying too far into a reality without him in it. Finally, he called me back and described his harrowing experience of walking out of the Financial District with thousands of dazed and dusty souls.

It would be days before I had confirmation that my oldest friend (since kindergarten, and inseparable through much of childhood), a NYC Police officer, had escaped unscathed.

In the blurry days which followed, I begrudged every moment I was separated from the television, flipping back and forth through the constant coverage. By dint of having been the first channel to which I tuned, I locked onto Tom Brokaw as an emotional anchor (in both senses), such that his voice will forever be associated with those days in my mind. I learned about al Qaeda, dimly recalled the connection with the first WTC bombing of 1993, the attack on the Cole, and on the African embassies, I recalled the Buddha statues getting blasted by the Taliban, learned of something called a “Fatwa” against the US by that fellow, Bin-something.

Once it became clear to me that I had been outrageously fortunate enough to escape losing any friends or even acquaintances, I began to mourn in earnest for the only direct loss I had suffered. I had lost the Twin Towers. It was simply safer than thinking about all the innocent people who had been snuffed out that day (though, weeks later, on my first visit to NYC since the attack, with the acrid smell of burning insulation still hanging in the air, I had a vivid image of drowsy office workers commenting on the weather, munching bagels and sipping coffee as the nose cone of an aircraft looms bizarrely in the window, and wept. Finally.).

I loved those buildings. I had the good fortune to go, several times, to “The Greatest Bar On Earth,” sipping single malt scotch and smoking cigars and marveling at the full moon's frost on the harbor. Earlier, during college, my friends and I, flush with free-lance neurochemical tinkerings, tottered about the deserted streets of Lower Manhattan, finding ourselves seated on the benches of the WTC plaza, our gaze swept up those improbable geometers' lines like superhighways to the center of the galaxy, waiting for the inevitable “Blade Runner” flying cars to arrive for their slalom.

Seven years hence, the phantoms still shimmer on the edge of vision as I behold the wounded skyline of my beloved City.

No politics. This is simply too big, too elemental a subject to be so reduced.

The will to perpetrate such horrors must be recognized as the primordial enemy that it is. Whatever one's narrative of how it arises, the chilling subordination of essential human empathy to the merciless logic of ideology must be resisted with every sinew of our civilization, for the sake of civilization itself.

Three thousand worlds came to an end that day. We who inhabit those that remain have some decisions to make about what shapes they will take. We must be wary of the impulse to wrap the memory in a comforting cocoon of concepts, the temptation to insulate ourselves against the brutal force of that collision with raw, unconflicted hatred. Patient and implacable, the will that guided the hands of the 19 was not consumed in the flames that they wrought. It waits and tests and gathers its malice against the day when we next divert our gaze and relent in our efforts to subdue it.

I, for one, do not relish the thought of yet another rude awakening.






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