Guest Post by Morbo
Had it been possible, I would have arranged to have been out of the country this past week — the farther away the better.
Australian Outback? Sign me up. Expedition to the Galapagos Islands? I’m game. I’d have been happy to go almost anywhere to avoid the national round of media-driven navel gazing sparked by the fifth anniversary of 9/11.
Yet I was stuck not only in the U.S. but in Washington, D.C., where I was forced to endure innumerable headlines exploring how we’ve changed. Many of the stories just assumed that we had.
I don’t buy it. We haven’t changed a bit, and if we have it’s all for the worse. Far from being a defining moment in American history, 9/11 has, thanks to the Bush administration, become just another excuse for partisan sniping and a rhetorical backdrop for “win-at-any-cost” campaigns. It didn’t have to become that, but the American people chose to let it happen.
I saw the same news broadcasts you did that day. My stomach turned just like yours did. I felt the same anger you did.
And I was foolish enough to think that for once our people might put aside their differences, speak with one voice and respond by making the apprehension of the terrorists who did this to us the only job that mattered. I was foolish enough to believe Bush when he vowed to find bin Laden.
Five years later we are more divided than ever. We’ve achieved virtually nothing in the “war on terror” except learning to tolerate torture, accepting an erosion of civil liberties and gleefully surrendering bottles of Listerine during gate check-in.
Bin Laden, mastermind of the attack, is not only still at large, he continues to send us taunting videos. Bush’s promise to capture him has been forgotten; incredibly, few seem to mind. Someone should be standing up in the House and Senate every day and saying to the president, “What are you doing to bring to justice the man who killed 3,000 of our citizens in cold blood?”
Not only does no one say this, no one seems to care that no one says this.
We flew flags after 9/11. We went to church, and we listened to tough talk from our leaders. But we found no new courage. In fact, we embraced fear. We turned our backs on our own constitutional principles — our nation’s highest values — not for security but the mere promise of security (unfulfilled, of course). We pretended tape and sheets of plastic would protect us from chemical attacks. We purchased gas masks (which we don’t know how to use) as if they were magic talismans that, simply by their presence in our houses, could ward off evil. We comforted ourselves with magical thinking: the dogged belief that major urban areas of millions — places that experience hours-long gridlock twice each working day — could be successfully evacuated in case of some type of attack. We watched the “terror alert” rise to orange every time Bush slipped a bit in the polls and made sure our kids had our cell phone numbers. We embraced a pleasant fiction: We are Americans, we have a plan.
In fact, we have no plan other than to nod obsequiously every time Bush and his quota of imps explain why we must give up another freedom or debase ourselves and what used to be our values by embracing the tactics of those who burn to destroy us. Given no reason to show courage by leaders who peddle fear to stay in power, Americans have embraced abominations like “indefinite detention,” “extraordinary rendition” and “aggressive questioning.” We accept these euphemisms because it’s too painful to contemplate what they really are: imprisonment without trial, outsourced torture and homegrown torture.
By “we,” of course, I don’t mean you who read this. I mean every armchair “patriot” out there who cheers on torture because people with funny names who haven’t even been charged with a crime have it coming to them. I mean every dim bulb who buys the lie that questioning the president is unpatriotic. I mean every couch potato who can’t understand that we can’t fight fascism overseas by embraces its tenets at home. I mean every intellectually uncurious American who can’t be bothered to read beyond what the mainstream media spoon-feeds him and realize that all we have been given by this administration is lie after lie after lie and it was for one purpose only: the pursuit of raw power.
Those people are bad enough. But they are not the worst of it. Here is the worst of it: The American people pretend that the memory of Sept. 11 would always be sacred. They pretend it has great meaning and that, in honor of the nearly 3,000 who died, they would safeguard it by permitting no one to sully the day by exploiting it for base political purposes.
They said these things — then promptly sat back and permitted the Republicans to do exactly that for two elections in a row, each time rewarding them with an expanded majority.
The people yawned and changed channels while the majority party invoked the memory of what was supposed to be a sacred day to win more Senate and House seats and gain a few more governors’ mansions. They sat by placidly while the party that glorified militarism attacked candidates who actually served in uniform. They cheered on the worse possible demagogues who admire police states.
The American people sat on their hands while 9/11 was used to justify invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. They appeared unfazed as resources that could have been used to capture the man behind the plot where transferred to this invasion. The few who took to streets were mocked as losers and misfits who hate our country.
Bush and his cronies are guilty of the ultimate form of secular blasphemy: taking the day that supposedly “changed America forever,” a day of grief and horror that belonged to all of us, and not just implying but stating outright (repeatedly) that anyone who fails to agree with this administration’s policy decisions in response to 9/11 is an enabler of and quite possibly a sympathizer with the perpetrators of a bloody atrocity.
So forgive me if I didn’t feel like exploring the meaning of 9/11 five years after the fact. Now Sept. 11 is what every day is: another opportunity for Bush and Cheney to demonize their opponents, scheme to win elections and tell a fresh round of lies.