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Obligatory 9/11 Fifth Anniversary BlogSeptember 11, 2006 Of course I was stunned. Nothing like this had happened in my country in my lifetime. Everybody I know was stunned. To be otherwise was to be incapable of understanding -- either that, or so accustomed to such happenings that yet another one was ho-hum. September 11, 2001, however, did not blow out the window everything I knew or thought or thought I knew about the world. I have evidence of this: an e-mail I sent to friends that evening was published two days later in the Martha's Vineyard Times as "A Writer Describes One Way to Avoid Defeat." Other people's assumptions and beliefs and theories went down with the towers and disappeared in the rubble. Within a day or two I had learned to act as if mine had too. People -- I'm talking about people I know and like, smart people, most of them, with dependable senses of humor -- seemed threatened by coherence in the face of the incomprehensible. As if anyone capable of making sense couldn't possibly understand the magnitude of the situation. As if they considered themselves better than everyone else. Makes me positively nostalgic for Rudyard Kipling's "If," which begins
Kipling considered it a good thing to keep your head under pressure -- if you can do it, and all the other things he lists, "you'll be a Man, my son" -- and he evidently realized that many people consider this threatening. I don't think I would mind too much if Rudyard Kipling considered me a man. Five years later I'm still proud of that e-mail -> op-ed, and what I'm most proud of is that I was able to lay out my thoughts and impressions without forcing them into a neat little package. Journalists, politicians, and experts of all kinds were jumping to conclusions based on sketchy knowledge of either Islam or modern Middle Eastern history and on a rather shallow understanding of the United States' place in the world. Privilege and stupidity aren't the same thing, but unexamined privilege looks a lot like stupidity. U.P. can't see what's right in front of it, does see what isn't there, and processes information like a PC with a few chips missing. Like your average PC, its error messages are chronically unreliable. It never comes out and says "That does not compute." It thinks it has the right answer and resists all evidence to the contrary. Conventional wisdom has it that 9/11 changed everything. Other than the New York skyline, I'm not so sure. I think the C.W. is both superficial and ahistorical. In mid to late September 2001 I happened to be copyediting Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare. It's a study of the much-studied Salem witch crisis of 1692, and it explores a hitherto underexplored root of the hysteria: the brutal warfare then taking place on the frontier between Anglo newcomer and Wabanaki native. Terror/counterterror: which you thought was which depended entirely on where you stood, and who you thought was justified. I was particularly struck by the story of an Anglo trapper who ran a trading post on the frontier: he was tried for treason in the Massachusetts Bay colony for saying in public that the Wabanaki might have a reason for acting as they did. He was acquitted. U.S. history is punctuated with people who weren't so fortunate. What changed on 9/11 is that the privileged white middle-class-and-up guys, the ones most accustomed to covertly and overtly scaring other people into doing what they want, got scared. Turnabout is not fair play in their world. During the "gays in the military" debate early in the Clinton administration, it dawned on me: what was driving the opposition, and perhaps male homophobia in general, was the fear of being hit on by other guys. They didn't want other men to treat them the way they treat women. For them manhood isn't about keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs; it's about doing unto others what they aren't allowed to do unto you. On the whole I prefer Rudyard Kipling's higher standard. Some of my later musings and meditations on 9/11 can be found in "My Terrorist Eye," which begins about a month before the third anniversary of 9/11 and was completed about a month before the fourth. One of my points was that women and people of color could teach those privileged white guys a few things about living with fear. What terrifies me most on the fifth anniversary isn't the possibility that I may be blown up by a desperation-crazed jihadist. It's the near certainty that many of my countryfolk -- most of whom are of reasonably sound mind in reasonably sound body -- don't know how to process information. After 12 and even 16 or more years of schooling, they don't know how to gather facts, assimilate them into a coherent pattern, devise and test hypotheses, and use all the above as a basis for considered action. Or perhaps they can do this in chemistry lab or English lit, but they can't manage it in real rough-and-tumble life. This is scary. People who can't think for themselves are patsies for spoon-fed solutions, most of which are devised by fearmongerers with ulterior motives out both ears and up the wazoo. In a crisis they default not to a god of love and compassion, law and justice, but to a god of "my daddy can beat up your daddy" and "because Daddy said so." Speaking of English lit, anyone else thinking of Macbeth? of Lady Macbeth trying to wash the blood off her hands, of her husband scrambling to the top of the Scottish heap -- and then what? My country is a big blundering superbaby on a binge. You better believe I'm scared of the havoc it could wreak: what it's done already is beyond ugly. What will it take to get the U.S. of A. into a 12-step program?
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