The Day the Future Died

(I was going to wait until 9/11 itself to post this, but the emotions of this 20 year milestone are weighing on me too much and I have to release them.)

Those of us old enough to remember 9/11 all have our stories about when we first heard the news, but we don't talk enough about our emotions that day. When the actual enormity of the event sank in I was hit by the knowledge that as horrible as the death of this day would be, it would lead to much greater death and destruction in its aftermath. After walking around in shock it was that realization that caused me to break down and cry. It pains me to say I was right in ways I could not even imagine.

There were the wars of course, which dragged on for decades. There were also the drone strikes, "extraordinary rendition," wire-tapping, secret prisons, and torture. Twenty years later the US failed to defeat the Taliban. Instead it militarized its own police, emboldened to commit bloodshed in poor neighborhoods, especially if they were black or brown. Now the terrorists mostly come from within our own borders and had their preferred candidate in the White House for four years. Some of them, including a bunch of off-duty cops and military veterans, tried to overthrow the government this year.

Their rallying cry, "Make America Great Again," is rooted in the notion of an idealized past. 

It was an effective slogan because Americans by and large no longer believe in the future. We are witnessing the consequences of climate change but are doing little to stop it. We let our bridges and roads crumble, block new buildings from our cities, and have endless fights over the smallest changes to school curricula. Our children are shot to death in their own classrooms with such regularity that there are ritualized reactions to it and no expectation that it will ever end. Even before COVID life expectancy went down because so many Americans were committing suicide and dying of alcoholism and opioid addiction. The vaccines made to combat COVID, a genuine marvel of modern technology, have been refused by over thirty percent of the population, allowing the disease to keep killing. 

Our system is a gerontocracy. Our last two presidents were in their 70s, and so is the Speaker of the House. The leader of the movement to push back against the current economic system is even older than the president. University departments are full of tenured Boomers who refuse to retire while younger scholars languish in precarity. The aged rock stars of the 60s and 70s still tour and rock until they literally drop. Film and television audiences are fed a steady diet of sequels, reboots, and remakes. There are no young film stars anymore, just old ones who have not gone away despite their advanced age. Even plenty of original stuff, like Stranger Things, is still drenched in nostalgia for a bygone time. 

9/11 feels like the day the future died. It was a shock to the system disproving America's invulnerability in the most flagrant and tragic way possible. The failed wars waged in the aftermath showed that the United States was in fact not some dominant hyper-power, but a crumbling empire inflicting greater wounds on itself than any hijackers could. It didn't even spawn a sense of civic-minded unity that could last more than a month or two. In the aftermath George W Bush told Americans just to keep shopping. 

I feel like the last twenty years have been a never-ending nightmare of failures rooted in the preceding decades of neoliberal rot. Some of those failures, like the useless wars, have been easy to see. Others, like growing inequality and lowered quality and length of life, have been buried away from mainstream discussion. It's a strange thing that so few believe in this country's future but the majority that doesn't will never outwardly say so. In this country, so invested in its image of exceptionalism, one isn't allowed to admit certain things. So twenty years after 9/11, with great pain, I will. This country doesn't have a future, and most of you know that already. Living in a dying empire is no picnic.   

The Nightmare Century (A 9/11 Reflection)

No Future for You

Every September 11th, I take time to reflect. I remember the feeling of confusion and sheer horror of that day, something our society has tried to paper over with mountains of 9/11 kitsch. I remember the attacks on American Muslims and Sikhs, another horrible thing swept into the memory hole. Living in the time of quarantine, however, the horror of 9/11 and its bloody aftermath almost seems quaint. We are approaching 200,000 deaths. The president still refuses to have a national response. 

I still remember on 9/11 when I realized the enormity of the loss of life. I cried not just for the dead, but for the future. I knew that this horror would lead to many others that would take even more lives, and less than two years later the United States invaded Iraq.

After that came George W Bush's reelection, then Katrina. The nation's capacity for self-harm seemed limitless. 

When Barack Obama was election in 2008, there was a reason that his "hope" message was so resonant. The last eight years looked pretty hopeless to a lot of people my age. His election signaled that perhaps the rest of my life would not be a litany of disasters and self-inflicted crises. That turned out to be false hope. 

During the Iraq War the BBC put out an amazing documentary series called The Power of Nightmares. It told the stories of neo-conservatives and al-Qaeda in parallel. The thesis was that post-Cold War the West had failed to live up to its promises or provide the future people wanted. Instead of offering dreams, leaders maintained their power by calling on the people's worst nightmares. The leaders could not promise you a better life, but they could stop those evil people who were out to get you. 

Obama's hope narrative offered an antidote, but he ended up being replaced by Donald Trump, the avatar of the power of nightmares. He offers no future at all, only an idealized past that never happened. His voters know he is a lying asshole, and that's why they love him. He drives the people they hate crazy, and smites them in the process. 

Masha Gessen's trenchant book on contemporary Russia is called The Future is History, and I think that phrase really sums it up. Putin was a pioneer in getting consent from the people while not offering them anything better to look forward to. Leaders today have followed his lead and mostly abandoned any idea of the future. They revel in an eternal present, Trump's constant Twitter wars and need to dominate the daily news cycle are the most obvious evidence. 

9/11 was the moment when nightmare politics swept away the last shreds of optimism in the post-Cold War world. On this day, 19 years later, I mourn the dead, but I also mourn the death of the future.

9/12 and Failed Tests

In the days after 9/11 I would put this song on and have a good cry

This year the 9/11 anniversary hit me harder than usual. It might be because at my school in NYC there are maybe a handful of students who were alive when in it happened. As fewer people have a living memory, the official memory of the event has now been hijacked by militarism and nationalism. It's become a time for empty patriotic gestures and stupid platitudes. The shock, horror, and human loss are gone.

That event was a test of this nation, and this nation failed. Muslim and Sikh men were targeted by random acts of violence, but they were not even discussed in the public discourse. Muslim students I TAed spoke of the terrible things strangers said to them in the weeks following 9/11, but few seemed to be sticking up for them. The United States immediately moved to a war footing, starting an invasion of Afghanistan that still hasn't ended. Bin Laden wasn't liquidated until ten years later.

The public was distracted by the Bush administration's adventure in Iraq, which a majority erroneously thought was somehow connected to 9/11. The propaganda offensive worked. That war too is an ongoing disaster. The public support for war also ended up giving the Bush administration the validation it needed to engage in systemic torture.

At the end of the Bush administration the last tatters of America's moral authority were gone, and its power in the world fast ebbing out. It was one of the biggest self-owns in the history of the great powers. 9/11 was a test of this country, and it failed that test horrendously.

Donald Trump is another test this country has failed. He came to office without a majority or even a plurality, has behaved like a wannabe despot and the political opposition has done little to reign him in. Children are being put in prison camps but there's hardly a word about it. Sure Democrats won the House back, but Trump's using the Senate to remake the judiciary. That's likely going to prevent any positive political reform for another generation.

The country has managed to survive its failed test eighteen years ago, but this new failure may very well represent a point of no return. Dying empires are not pretty things. I just never thought I'd be living in one. Such is life.

Remembering The Real 9/11

As someone who was just beginning to study historical memory, I wondered in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 of how that event would register in years to come. I never could have imagined that fifteen years later its main cultural manifestations are in "God Bless America" being sung in seventh inning at Yankees games, and whacko internet conspiracy theories. These days my biggest reminder of 9/11 comes when someone makes a "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" joke on twitter. It has been reduced to a symbol by nationalists and has lost its emotional heft due to conspiracy theories.

I have tried, every year since the event, to think long and hard about what I really felt on 9/11. Our nation soon crafted a narrative of resilience, and even Hillary Clinton recently cited the purported unity in the nation the attacks brought on that day. The deluge of official remembrance and media spin has made us lose sight of the visceral human horror of that day. Like others, I was confused and disoriented, overcome by a sickening wave of grief and fear. Nobody was sure of what had happened, or what it would mean. I remember crying quiet tears in the teaching assistants' office, thinking that the attack would unleash even bloodier wars in response. 

I never could have known that the wars would still be going on fifteen years later. Those wars have helped turn 9/11 into a symbol, and have obscured its tragedy. Real people died, real flesh and blood people, and they died by the thousands. For the most part, they weren't "heroes," just ordinary people going about their day. In fact, I just found out today that a colleague lost someone he knew in the attack. My wife has had students at her school who lost family members in the attack. The wounds are still there, even if lower Manhattan has shaken almost all of the scars. I wonder how soon before the last traces of anything real in our memory are gone, replaced completely and totally by bullshit.

So this 9/11, don't let the day be claimed by the nationalists and the cranks. Remember by remembering the people who lost their lives, and don't invest them with phony martyrdom. Don't act as if taking out Bin Laden vindicates anything or lessens the mourning of those who lost loved ones. Above all, remember what you really, really felt that day, before the mechanisms of nationalism turned it into justification for wars without end. Maybe, when the current, unending war 9/11 was exploited to foment finally ends, we can have a true, honest public memory of that day.

Torture Report Time Machine

Based on what happened at Abu Ghraib, as well as the definitions of "extraordinary rendition" used by the Bush administration, I expected this week's torture report to be harrowing.  It ended up being even worse than I imagined, a catalog of crimes that ought to bring lasting shame on this country.  There has been outrage, but I wonder of its limits.  President Obama has been mum, and Secretary of State Kerry had tried to prevent its release.  Most Congressional Republicans opposed its release full stop, and Fox News has claimed its release was meant to distract from Obamacare.

 

Why haven't tales of people tortured due to mistaken identity moved the nation's conscience?  Why is there only limited disgust at rectal feeding and sleep deprivation techniques of the kind used by Stalin's secret police?  Why is there no outcry to have the criminals responsible for these enormities clapped in irons and made to bow to justice?  You could argue that torture, like practically everything else, has been turned into a partisan issue.  Perhaps, but that does not explain why the outrage is only limited to the left of center, and the large, soft American middle appears to be almost completely unmoved.  No, there is so little outrage because this is what most Americans secretly wanted to happen.

Let's take a trip back in time, shall we?  We live in a world where everything is forgotten, where all goes down the memory hole almost as soon as it is brought into existence.  I have made it one of my personal missions to remind people of the reality of American life in the period of hysteria that lasted roughly between 9/11 and the summer of 2005.  The 9/11 attacks provoked a kind of fearsome bloodlust in the American public, only abetted by the Bush/Cheney regime's desire to funnel that hate towards military action.  Muslim Americans were physically assaulted, and their mosques attacked.  Sikh men were murdered for the crime of wearing a turban.  In 2003, most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.  They didn't just believe it because of propaganda, they believed it because they wanted revenge, and any group of Arab Muslims would do for that purpose.

If the vast majority of Americans were willing to smite Iraq with the hard hand of war, inevitably leading the the deaths of thousands of innocents, they hardly had any qualms about shoving food up the rectums of suspected terrorists.  They were the bad guys, after all, right?  Didn't torture work when Jack Bauer used it on 24?  You don't really want to risk letting the bad guys strike again, do you?  And so the CIA, at the behest of the highest authorities in the land, tortured and tortured and tortured.  There was a momentary shock after the revelations of Abu Ghraib, but voters returned Bush and Cheney to the White House nonetheless.  

It would be easy to limit the responsibility for the crime to Cheney/Bush, their henchmen, and the everyday jingoists who bayed for Muslim blood in the aftermath of 9/11.  However, they were enabled by a scared public willing to turn the other way while unspeakable cruelties were committed in their name.  While whistleblowers like Edward Snowden fear prosecution, those responsible for systematic torture walk free, not prosecuted by president Barack Obama.  And last of all, progressives like myself have been much too tolerant of the president's unwillingness to prosecute CIA men who probably earned promotions from their heinous acts.

I repeat: the revelations of the torture report should bring lasting shame on this country.  Perhaps more shamefully, our people have been shameless in ignoring it.  If there is any righteousness in this universe we will face a terrible reckoning.

13 Years Later, Still Imprisoned By 9/11

Yesterday brought news that the president wants to start bombing ISIS in Syria as well as Iraq.  While I don't care much for violent religious fanatics, there does not seem to be much evidence that this group is determined to strike the United States.  It was fitting that the news came a day before the anniversary of 9/11, since Obama's new war is entirely consistent with what people used to call "the post-9/11 world" before it just became "the world."

Like most, I remember that horrible morning very vividly, especially my immediate thoughts when I realized the scale of the attacks (I was listening on radio.)  I knew, right then and there, that this attack would bring years of war and bloodshed, which was the first time that day that I broke down into tears.  The thought that the deaths of that day would end of being just the tip of the iceberg was almost too horrific for me to bear.  Even over a dozen years later the cycle continues, with the vague "War on Terror" apparently never-ending.  (Hunter S. Thompson pretty much predicted this on 9/12.)

Despite the changeover from the neo-con Dubya to the most liberal president since LBJ, the war persists and even strengthens.  We still have Guantanamo Bay.  Despite bin Laden's death, the occupation of Afghanistan continues.  The mess made in Iraq has led to yet another military intervention.  Our government treats its citizens with suspicion, and spies on the people in an unprecedented fashion.  The teenagers I teach have never known a time when their country was not at war.

Thirteen years later, it's time to finally break the spell.  The bodies have piled up, but nobody is any safer.  Come home, America.

Twelve Years Later, We Still Live in the Nightmare

My memories of 9/11 are very fragmentary, but there is one thing I remember like it was yesterday.  I heard the news over the radio at my desk in the TA office (I was a grad student at the time), and I all I could think was "many more people are going to die as a result of this."  I knew in my gut right then that the attacks would be the beginning of an awful period.

In the fear and anxiety-ridden aftermath extreme expansions of the surveillance state like the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security sailed through Congress virtually unopposed.  America invaded Afghanistan, and then George W. Bush managed to use 9/11 as pretext for a war in Iraq, a nation that had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks.  Paranoia struck deep everywhere, and for a time any criticisms of this state of affairs would be met with cries of "treason!" from the jingoistic brigade.

In those dark days I was lucky enough to see a 2004 BBC documentary series, The Power of Nightmares, which no TV outlet in America was willing to show.  (A friend got on a free DVD that came with Wholphin magazine.)  That series convincingly told a parallel history of neo-conservatism and radical Islamism, and argued that leaders like Blair and Bush needed to pump up the terrorist threat in order to legitimize their own power.

Of course, some things have changed, but the power of nightmares still holds sway.  America is out of Iraq, bin Laden is dead, and our current president opposed the invasion of Iraq.  However, he has continued the NSA's vast surveillance program, and is more than willing send out unmanned drones to rain death on those he has targeted, and others who just happen to be in the way.  Plenty of people are still more than happy to sacrifice freedom when their government assures them it is necessary to ward off the boogeyman.  Twelve years after the horrors of 9/11, its nightmare world still dominates our society.  It's time for us to finally wake up.