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CounterPunch
September
11, 2002
Abusing the
Sorrows of September 11
by Pierre Tristam
My personal acre of hell froze over for an instant
last month: I felt a lusty pang of love for Phyllis Schlafly,
baroness of the religious right and most things wrong. Schlafly,
you see, offered the best advice to schools regarding this week's
anniversary of Sept. 11: "There is nothing that schools
can add to what happened on September 11, that the children
haven't already seen in the media. They should stay off it and
teach what's true." Like English and math.
But the Eagle Forum Lady's words have
soared no further than the wingtips of her quote marks. Schools,
pre-schools and probably au-pairs everywhere will be riveting
their wards to a wasted day (or week) of warmed-over grief and
hero worship, to maniacal patriotism and manufactured gravity.
It isn't enough that adults muck up the world on a daily basis
in the name of power and pride, or electoral necessity. Let's
draft the kids, too, and muck them up with the same conceits.
I'm happy to say that my daughter's school
is showing admirable restraint, as such things go. It is going
no further than the wearing of red, white and blue for a day,
the moment of silence at noon, and the student-led -- if they
so choose -- talking about "feelings," that wormy
substitute for reflection that so often turns classrooms into
talk show sets. Pointless, but still an improvement over last
May, when the school's year-end assembly culminated in the showing
of one of the World Trade Center towers afire and with Lee Greenwood's
nasal pride for a soundtrack. I don't know which of the two
-- the burning images or Greenwood's voice -- was more traumatic,
but my 8-year-old was in tears all the same. It was, of course,
the desired effect. It was also a needless and cruel parting
shot from an otherwise fine school year.
No risk-taking this time around. I'm
taking Wednesday off and taking my daughter with me. We'll loiter
on the beach or compare the musty smells of a couple of used
bookstores, find a fun cemetery to walk around or look up the
number of crematories in the Yellow Pages -- anything but play
reverent to the day's pieties.
This isn't to deny the day's importance,
let alone the loss it marks for so many thousands. But in truth
most of us millions arraigned in the safety of our routines
cannot know much about that loss and don't want to know much
beyond the rituals of easy empathy. Life as we know it in its
everyday grinds and pleasures hasn't changed. We're not at war,
never were, and only get away with pretending to be because
we've too easily accepted the speechmongering of a president
for whom perpetual war is the only viable re-election strategy.
September 11 is one of the great tragedies
of history, an act of cowardice and evil possible only when
the fanaticism of religion -- and yes, absolutely, Islam in
this age -- combusts with bigotry. Whatever the grievances of
one part of the world against another, of Arabs against America
if you like, many of which are perfectly legitimate, none, not
a one, not by any definition of retaliation, self-defense,
attention-grabbing or desperation, justifies the events of September
11.
Muftis and mullahs with their turban-tongued
sermons have no business lecturing America about its many failures
when every minaret from Algiers to Islamabad is a mile-marker
of repression, a stake through the human and civil rights of
people at the mercy of the world's most totalitarian governments.
Out of that came the preachy terrors of Osama and his rags of
bandits. In a previous age that's all they'd have remained --
rags. But technology is their short-cut to mayhem, so we must
deal with them.
We must, but what we have done has been
quite different. America has never had a less worthy enemy,
yet we've elevated him, or it, into an enemy as worthy of a
war supposedly as important as the fight against Hitler and
as open-ended as the Cold War, with demands on the national
treasury, the national defense, the national esprit de corps
nearly as intense as was required for those previous wars,
and with sacrifices in our own civil liberties that make this
"war for freedom" a farce of a contradiction. We'll
look back on this one day and wonder how we could have so easily
been duped, how we could have let a president use September
11, misuse and abuse it like no tragedy ever has, mostly for
the wrong reasons -- namely his re-election and his administration's
pay-back to energy and military contractors, for whom fattish
profits are always a question mark without a good, fattish war
to bank on.
The question not asked in the year since
September 11 is this: Are we better off than we were a year
ago? Of course not. We're probably not any safer from freak
attacks. We're economically weaker, thanks to an administration's
reckless give-aways and overspending. And as if that could have
even been possible a year ago, we are more reviled around the
world than we were then, because our national arrogance, unlike
Wall Street, has been on a bull run unparalleled since William
McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt bullied about.
I only need to look at such perversities
of arrogance as "America Bless God," that astounding
bumper sticker peddled by religious fanatics of our own, to
know that something more than perspective has been lost in the
past year. While the nation's routines are unscathed, the nation's
ideals are not. They're corroding from within. So forgive me
if I don't play along in Wednesday's spectacles. It's not for
lack of sorrow. But the mourning is misplaced.
Pierre Tristam
is a News-Journal columnist and editorial writer. He can be
reached at ptristam@att.net
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September
7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim
and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
September
6, 2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September
5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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Read
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Whiteout:
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Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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