Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Over the weekend the comparatively sensible "progressive" Web site Common Dreams was blaring a huge Drudge-like headline, "Canadian poll: Vast majority say U.S. partly to blame for 9/11." And the point is? Canadians can be insensitive assholes, too? I know that U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, has widened the audience for bin Laden's fascist, anti-West appeal. But a year later I'll still insist that he's a brutal enemy who cares more about imposing his blinkered brand of Islam on the world, keeping women out of public life, and smiting infidels than about liberating Palestinians.
And was that really the biggest news, progressive or otherwise, over the weekend? In San Francisco, the big lefty 9/11 observance and antiwar rally happened Saturday, but it was glommed onto a preexisting series of annual 9/11 demonstrations that, kind of unbelievably, started in 1999 to rally support for convicted cop-killer and left cult figure Mumia Abu-Jamal. (The organizers had picked 9/11 for the way it married the imagery of emergency and police brutality, and didn't have the good taste to drop it when a real tragedy came along.)
I have more respect for the "No More Victims" tour, also hyped on Common Dreams, designed to honor the suffering of all terror victims, from Afghanistan to Palestine to Israel to New York. But I've found myself thinking bad thoughts about it too: Isn't it sort of another way to blame the WTC victims? They died because these other people died in these other countries, thanks to evil U.S. policies. (God forbid we should care about these particular 3,000 terror victims for one single day.) Still, the involvement of 9/11 victims' survivors has kept the movement grounded in genuine sorrow over what happened a year ago, rather than in cloaked glee at another chance to bash the U.S.
If we're going to play the blame game, and blame America, even partly, for 9/11, isn't it fair to include the American left? After all, the left's failure to figure out how to communicate with their fellow Americans, rather than condescend to them, has to be judged part of the dysfunctional political landscape that lets American foreign policy be dominated by hawks and neo-imperialists. Personally, I don't blame the United States for 9/11, so of course I don't blame the American left. You can be critical, even harshly critical, of America's foreign policies without believing that those policies are responsible for a religious zealot's murderous deeds. But those who do might have to think about how their blame-game analysis makes themselves culpable.
I don't apologize for my grief over Sept. 11 last year, or now. I don't think it was out of proportion, better saved for Rwanda or the West Bank. First of all, I grew up in New York, a working-class Irish Catholic, estranged from my socially conservative family --yes, they're cops and firefighters and civil servants and blue-collar workers -- through my groovy radical elitist years, more accepting as I became a grownup.
I had no attachment to the towers until they were attacked and I saw the wounds of smoke and flame, then watched terrified human beings, tiny against the skyscrapers, jump to their death. I saw innocent people who died doing their jobs -- faxing contracts, making deals, cooking breakfast, washing windows -- and a lot of them who died trying to save other people. Early on, I thought about how -- when the hijackers flew those planes into the towers -- they shattered everyone's stereotypes of New Yorkers. Outside New York, they're all a blur: Blacks think they're Jews, and Jews think they're blacks. Working-class folks think the city's run by evil cosmopolitans; cosmopolitans think it's been ruined by working-class civil servants, urban corruption that Rudy Giuliani couldn't change. But when the towers were savaged, out tumbled the real New York: Irish and black, Italian and Jewish, Dominican and Chinese, immigrants from everywhere; they lived in Staten Island, Washington Heights, Harlem and New Jersey; they were investment bankers, pastry chefs, bicycle messengers, mothers. All those souls and all those stories; I pity anyone who couldn't be moved by it.
Yet I admit that I've sometimes cringed, over the last year, at the way 9/11 has been used: to defend an endless war against terror, to justify John Ashcroft's war against the Constitution, to sell magazines and "American Idol" and a war against Iraq that I oppose. I applauded the early, restrained, ally-supported strike on Afghanistan, but I've come to deplore the Bush administration's cowardice when it comes to taking on the job of rebuilding that ruined country: I'm afraid Hamid Karzai is going to be another 9/11 victim, somebody whose death is marked by a plaque and a ceremony in Washington, while the U.S. marches into Baghdad, throws that country into bloody chaos, finds and uses and discards Iraqi pawns like Karzai, war without end, amen.
So more than once, even before this kitschy anniversary, I've had to check myself and ask if the outpouring a year ago, the one I joined, had more to do with sentimentality and voyeurism and entitled naiveté -- How could this happen to us? We're Americans! -- than genuine grief and horror at an outsized human tragedy. I've let myself wonder if I was duped: If Sept. 11 really wasn't that big a deal next to Rwanda and Bosnia and Chile. But I resist such cynical accounting. If you can't care about all of those horrors, you can't care about any of them. And if we let grief and anger about Sept. 11 belong to the right, they win. The left can't change America as long as it hates it.
A little over a year ago, Bush's handlers had a problem similar to Kelly Clarkson's on "American Idol": How to make their product seem legitimate. More Americans voted for Al Gore in November 2000; a divided Supreme Court had to step in and stop the Florida recount to give the White House to Bush. A first year whose only accomplishment was a massive tax cut that predictably revived massive federal deficits and arguably worsened the recession had not assuaged many people's doubts about his presidency. There's no denying Sept. 11 gave Bush a legitimacy the Supreme Court couldn't, which is why he continues to wrap himself in the symbolism of the tragedy -- but that's no reason to pretend it wasn't really a tragedy.
So I'll observe Sept. 11, stand by my grief of a year ago, defend caring about it to whoever tries to minimize what happened. How to observe it, though, is a tougher question than whether to. I already had the best possible anniversary moment two weeks ago, watching Bruce Springsteen in San Jose. Apologies to anti-baby boomers, Springsteen revilers, everybody younger and/or cooler than me, but no other mainstream star has risked his status to do what's almost impossible: Tell the stories of the people who died that day, with all due grief, and also rail against the administration for the way it's used that tragedy to justify "a rollback of civil rights," which Springsteen decried from the stage at every stop in the tour.
On Sept. 11 itself, of course, I have to work. But I'll get up early and I'll be awake to remember that devastating hour of terror. Strangely, the main thing I remember, a year later, is everyone's kindness that day, as well as a sense of meaning and purpose and even, in the following days, a strange optimism. I too thought that the terror crossing our borders would pull us closer to the rest of the world -- to Rwanda, Bosnia, Chile, the Middle East; would ultimately help us lose not just our alleged innocence but also our isolation. I actually think that happened, the Bush administration's return to unilateralism on Iraq notwithstanding. The battle over who owns 9/11 -- what it meant, how it changed the nation, and how it should be remembered -- is still being waged. And if we surrender it to cynics on the right or the left, the bad guys really win.
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