Remembering 9/11

Notes from a highly personal turning point

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, I wondered if I had something in the notebook that might still be of interest. At age 75, my life can easily be divided into thirds, with the end of the Vietnam War and 9/11 as dividing points. As it happens, my whole professional career is nestled between those two events. Before, I was studying. Later, I've been reflecting. My wife wants me to write a proper memoir of this life, but I've struggled coming to grips with it all. I don't have time to write this up now, but I know that I've occasionally reflected on 9/11 as both a personal and global turning point, so I thought I'd look around to see what I could find.

Sept. 5, 2001: I started my "online notebook" up in February 2001, well before blogging became a thing, with no expectation that anyone would read my paltry entries.

Packing for trip to New York. Looks like I'll mostly be off-line again. (Next live entry: Oct. 27, 2001.)

I drove from Wichita to New York City. I had built a prototype website for Robert Christgau, and was going to meet with him and set it up. Meanwhile, Laura flew out, spending some time with her college friend, Elizabeth Fink. Liz had plans to fly to California, but I could stay in her Brooklyn apartment while we worked on the website. Then, well, something happened.

Sept. 11, 2001: I was effectively offline, so I didn't write anything until I got back to Wichita. I wrote the next two entries on Oct. 28:

In Brooklyn, chez Liz Fink, on fateful day. Liz was to fly to CA that morning; Laura to KS that afternoon. Liz left early for airport. I got up around 9AM, saw white smoke out of south window, was pleased to see that yesterday's rain clouds had parted. Liz came back, told us that a suicide bomber had attacked the WTC. We look out window and could see, I think, one tower burning: smoke black from tower, but white as it wafted over Brooklyn.

We turn TV on. Now both towers are burning. We watch TV, hear of up to eight hijackings, watch the towers fall, the Pentagon burn. "America Under Attack" was emblazoned on TV, an instant reduction that only fueled the growing war talk. I spent much of the morning thumbing through a photo book called Century — a graphic reminder of how grisly the 20th century had been, and of what modern war really looked like, on scales both large and small. With so much history in front of me, it was easy to imagine scenes of real war, and identify why today is different.

Imagine, for instance, being in Sarajevo, surrounded by hills and the persistent threat of mortars. Imagine being in London during the Blitz. What's different today is that once you escape the WTC area, you're safe. We see people strolling across Grand Army Plaza: no panic, just a long walk home. One can imagine far worse: a dirty nuclear bomb tucked into a small truck in a downtown traffic jam would have caused a panic evacuation of all Brooklyn. New York never seemed so vulnerable. But even a hijacked nuclear bomb would fall short of war these days.

Later we see a grainy broadcast from Kabul, a rocket flare and explosion. Speculation was that America was striking back — temporarily forgetting that Afghanistan already had more war than it would ever need. I commented that if indeed the US attacked Afghanistan, it would mark the second time that Afghanistan destroys an empire.

The flights out were delayed, so our visit was extended. Also, I couldn't see Christgau: for a few days, we couldn't go into Manhattan, and it was at least a week before I could venture below 14th Street, where he lived.

Sept. 15, 2001: I had more news:

My sister-in-law Janet finally calls in. [She had been stuck in Las Vegas.] The news is terrible. Her son's wife, Lucy Fishman, is missing, presumed dead. She was a secretary, worked on Floor 104 of the south WTC tower. It had been two years since I'd seen her, and at that time she worked for a different company, downtown but not WTC. They came out to see us in NJ shortly before we moved to KS. I made dinner — mostly Italian, trying to negotiate my way past some known picky eaters (and failing completely), but Lucy enjoyed everything. [We had attended their wedding, but I had met her before. They had a new baby. She also had a daughter from a previous marriage.] We talked computers: she talked of Microsoft software failing so frequently that she described Dr. Watson as her "best boyfriend."

For me, this put a face on the tragedy. [No one else that I knew in New York actually knew anyone who was killed.] My first considered reaction on 9/11 was to recall Malcolm X's "chickens come home to roost" quip: the lesson that years of racist violence sown comes back, not in kind but in new and resourceful ways. [I was not alone. Liz's brother, Larry (the photographer), had chickens on his farm, and was arranging a picture.] But the subtext, that the original violence explains the ensuing violence, misplaces the key point, which is that the cycle of violence has to be broken. We cannot allow anything that came before to justify the WTC attack, nor can we allow the WTC attack to justify further attacks on innocent people. The bottom line here is that there is no way that someone like Lucy can be held accountable for any aspect of US or US-backed violence in the Islamic world. Nor should she be cause for further violence.

I recall Wendell Berry's essay on the Iraq war, "Peaceableness Toward Enemies," where he argues that the only way to have peace is to become peaceable. Those of us who survived Sept. 11 have survived a wake-up call: we need to look at our lives, and work all the harder to make right.

After Laura and Liz were able to leave, I was alone in the apartment, so I shut off the TV and blacked out the news. (I'm not a news junkie, and Liz's prediction that the news would soon become unbearable was prescient, as usual.) I spent some time with my nephew's family, worked on the Christgau website, attended a peace rally in Union Square Park, and scrounged around bookstores looking for understanding. I found very little. The first book I picked up was about the hill stations in India — an intuition that racist colonialism was at the root of the problem, perhaps recalling Jan Myrdal's brilliant Angkor: An Essay on Art and Imperialism. The book I only later found was Gilles Kepel's Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, which viewed 9/11 as an act of desperation by a failed movement, what we'd call a "Hail Mary pass." Bin Laden delighted less in the body count than in that he had drawn Bush into a trap, where America showed its true colors.

In mid-October, I was ready to leave. I had parked my car in New Jersey. When I picked up my car, a friend asked what I thought about "9/11"? It was the first time I had heard the term, although it must have saturated the airwaves by then. I drove back to Wichita, taking a southern route that dipped through North Carolina and crossed Arkansas. Flags and paranoia were everywhere, including Confederate ones once I passed Richmond. It occurred to me that New York was the best place to have been during those early weeks, because the trauma was real there, and politicians like Giuliani had real work to do, while everywhere else people had nothing but their ginned up hysteria. Not sure when I got back, but the notebook entries resumed on Oct. 20, and I made a mostly Moroccan birthday dinner with 19 dishes.

Dec. 3, 2001: No entries in November. I could have written much on the drive to war, including Bush's bullhorn at "Ground Zero" (itself a useful propaganda coinage). I recall bits on TV where Netanyahu and Peres were cackling over how America needs Israel's expertise in counterterrorism. (John Major had the same thoughts, given Britain's own experience of provoking terrorism, not least of all by Israelis, who knew how to play both sides of that game.) So while I didn't catch up, I did start to take more notes:

Resolution: write more. As a minimal step, I'll just keep this file open. Try to jot down passing thoughts.

Hendrik Hertzberg [wrote]: "One way in which this conflict is indeed different is that there is no antiwar movement to speak of. . . . Apart from traditional pacifists, who oppose any use of force on principle, and a tiny handful of reflexive Rip Van Winkles, almost no one objects, in broad outline, to the aims and methods of the antiterrorism campaign."

I'm not sure which one of these diminutive and deprecated groups I belong to, but it isn't hard or unreasonable to find objections to either aims or methods in the US's "antiterrorism campaign." The aim is clearly to contain terrorism by repression. More basically, this means that the aim is to reassert the inevitability and indomitability of US global power. The campaign we're witnessing is the reflex of power provoked. But the methods do little more than remind us that the US's real power doesn't amount to much more than the ability to indiscriminately bomb and wreak havoc, to unleash terror at a pitch that Al Qaeda can only dream about. . . .

I've never thought of myself as a pacifist — I don't have the instincts, and I don't have the faith. But I hate it when the media dump on them: experience has shown that their instincts are usually right, while the instincts of the warriors rarely give us anything but more war. And when that becomes ridiculously obvious, we'll need all the pacifists we can find.

I'm not sure why I excepted myself from the pacifists here. Maybe to make the point that pacifists are precious even if you can imagine conditions under which you would support a war. My own examples are so deeply historical I'm not sure they're valid anymore. I can understand why one might want to fight against the Nazis (in WWII) or slavery (in the US Civil War) or British imperialism (in our Revolution), but I'm not sure that was the right answer, in part because those wars, no matter how nobly conceived, brutalize fighters on all sides, as well as victims.

Dec. 5, 2001: It's easy to forget now, but the idea that the US was under attack was wildly validated by a series of anthrax attacks.

Old news, but it looks like the anthrax threat which so effectively pushed up US paranoia to grease the skids for Bush's Afghan adventure was done with US government-made anthrax. Without getting into the question of who mailed the anthrax, or why, one conclusion is obvious: the terror would not exist had the US military not developed the weapon. Which is to say that at least in this case terrorism could have been prevented by the simple, sensible policy of governments not developing terrorist weapons.

I've long found it curious that the attacks stopped at the point where the mania threatened to actually damage the economy by shutting down the post office. Eventually someone conveniently dead was fingered, and nobody seems to have asked why, let alone cui bono?

Dec. 7, 2001: I wasn't writing about music back then, but I occasionally made notes about movies.

Let's talk about something else. . . . We also watched 1999's James Bond tramp, The World Is Not Enough, on TV. What a relief: terrorism so absurd you could laugh at it, or more likely snicker. Bad writing. Worse acting. Ridiculous action sequences. Bad science. Lame technology. Giggly sex. It was a hoot. B−

Dec. 30, 2001: I quote a letter to the editor I wrote in response to a piece called "Bush's rookie year a success":

Bush's rookie year a success? Well, he's certainly accomplished a lot: a war that is projected to be endless and that provides Israel and India an excuse to step up their own wars; an economy in the toilet, with rising unemployment; tax cuts to the rich, and bailouts to big business (although not enough to save his buddies at Enron); the end of the surplus that supposedly had been necessary to keep Social Security solvent; an assault on our legal system which has safeguarded our freedom for over 200 years; and not the least bit of attention to skyrocketing health care costs; and, of course, more damage to the environment. I'm just not sure how much Bush success we can really afford.

I added:

The list, of course, could have gone on and on, but in tallying it up so far I'm struck by how huge these calamities really are, and how hard it was less than a year ago to predict so much damage so soon. Equally amazing is how little attention people here seem to be paying.

I'm stuck now by how much of this, including "how huge these calamities really are," could have been reused to describe Trump's rookie year — either of them, but the second mostly serves to remind us that bad things can always get worse.

I'll stop here. The following months focus more on Israel and the Intifada, at least until 2003, when Bush finally got his Iraq War. I remember some discussion from 2001 about how Bush tried to steer blame for 9/11 to Saddam Hussein (who he also blamed for the anthrax attacks), as Iraq was the war he wanted to one-up his dad with. I'm pretty sure I've written other versions of my 9/11 memoirs, but finding them is going to take some work. (My initial search for "9/11" netted 1274 lines, from 196 monthly files.)

But to bring things up to date, I'll end with one more post:

May 5, 2025: It is often acknowledged that the Bush wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were monumental failures, the people who run America's foreign policy are still locked into the same mindset, one which allows them to see no options other than doubling down on force. Iran is another example, and to some extent that's just down to Trump, but it was only an option for him because Bush tagged Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil," and that was only an option because Carter and Reagan were such sore losers after literally everyone in the country turned against their Shah.

Carlos Lozada's The Washington Book is stimulating a lot of thought on my part. One nice thing about it being an essay collection is that when I run across a chapter I like, I can usually find a link to the original that I can share. The biggest and most important piece so far is 9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed. I've read about half of these books, plus twice as many more, but I reached this same conclusion before I read any. I'm not sure I can find the citation, as I wasn't blogging at the time, but my initial reaction was that it was a "wake up call," a challenge to reexamine one's values and make remedies to get back into the right. But I started with a pretty keen awareness that America wasn't always right or honorable or even decent. I had learned that much while growing up with the Vietnam War. What the last twenty-four years [since 9/11] have taught me is that Americans have not only "failed the test," they've become much worse people as a result.

I don't particularly like to blame people for their leaders, even in a nominal democracy — and ours has long been held together by slender threads. And I don't like generalizing about any group of people. But it's disturbing how easily Americans fall for nonsense like "soldiers keeping us free" (on 900 bases around the world), and that pricey high-tech weapons systems are needed to protect us from attack ("peace through strength"). And how indifferent those same Americans are to crimes committed in distant lands, using our weapons, often by our own hands. These people are failing multiple tests, involving ethics as well as intelligence.