Frankly Speaking, or The Real Spirit of 2001
There was a great deal of ink spilled a few months ago on the ten-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001, a mix of justifiable grief and disgusting national self-congratulation over our response. That day, there were heroes in New York, and on that airplane over Pennsylvania...and cowards everywhere else. I thought of this because of something I saw today. The most talented pseudofascist, Cagney Syndrome sufferer, and would-be whorehopper in the comics business, the man who turned Batman into Mussolini and almost made us love him for it, gave a mighty hawk and harrumph a few days ago, and spit this hairball onto his website: PTOOIE! And when the title-inspired visions faded of Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Michael Moorcock laying into the guy who presumes to share my fondness for fedoras with steel-toed DMs, I thought about the unworthy national hagiography of 9/11/2011 again.
The thing about Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group is, they are not equipped to be an existential threat to the state they're attacking, on their own. The essential modus operandi of terrorism is to make your enemy do your work for you, by fear, disruption of normal routine, and unconsidered action. Since 9/11/2001, we have obliged the bastards just wonderfully. Back when our closest ally was under a real threat, when the shit falling out of the sky to break their resolve was backed up by hordes of trained soldiers ready to surge across the English Channel if the UK actually started to weaken, they made a very simple poster. It said, "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON." They never actually started to toss it up in any large way; they didn't have to.
That wasn't the spirit I saw in September 2001. Yes, I was scared too. But I wasn't scared of an airliner falling on my head or a mad Arab popping up behind the shrubbery with a Russian surplus rifle, I was scared because the general mood of everyone in the street and on the news was that of chickens piling suffocatingly into the corner when you thump the other side of the henhouse. And the ones braying for revenge weren't any braver, they were just the ones on the bottom that start kicking and usually cut a couple others' throats while they're at it.
And, since then, the kickers have taken a chunk out of all of us. We've fought ourselves into a situation where, admittedly with more ostensible success than our Asian adventures of decades ago, we are compelled to "declare victory and get out of there," and in the process raised public debt to the point that there is a rush for the corner again, and the lying greedheads and mad fantasists of Social Darwinism and the Prosperity Gospel can use that panic as a pretext for their attempts to undo every advance our civilisation has made since 1900. Meanwhile, they managed, at least for a while, to make their reckless profiteering the preferred manifestation of Not Being Scared, the chosen way to puff up like a cornered cat. And when they fuck up, the little guys eat the losses. Fuck the losers, they are an inferior species, the blood of Ham, the damned rather than the elect, say the ones who can trace their own blood back to the righteous hypocrites on the Mayflower, or at least plan to marry someone who can. If the shade of Osama bin Laden is laughing at anything, he is laughing at this, at our delighted self-destruction and the proof of the wickedness of the ones in charge over here.
No, I am not being fair. But neither are they. These are not uneducated men. They know better than the cowardice of 9/11, better than to think that the rising tide raises boats with holes in them and caulk weighs too much, better than to think that they are different from the rest of us but for luck and rapacity. They are not stupid men--could they not profit through the worst times? And yet they say this in the mirror, and they say this to us. They choose it in utter perversity, in contradiction to the sense that, by their own pride, is needed to turn mere greed and luck into success. This is what the protesters across the nation are fighting. This is the sickness of the one percent that must be stopped.
The thing about Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group is, they are not equipped to be an existential threat to the state they're attacking, on their own. The essential modus operandi of terrorism is to make your enemy do your work for you, by fear, disruption of normal routine, and unconsidered action. Since 9/11/2001, we have obliged the bastards just wonderfully. Back when our closest ally was under a real threat, when the shit falling out of the sky to break their resolve was backed up by hordes of trained soldiers ready to surge across the English Channel if the UK actually started to weaken, they made a very simple poster. It said, "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON." They never actually started to toss it up in any large way; they didn't have to.
That wasn't the spirit I saw in September 2001. Yes, I was scared too. But I wasn't scared of an airliner falling on my head or a mad Arab popping up behind the shrubbery with a Russian surplus rifle, I was scared because the general mood of everyone in the street and on the news was that of chickens piling suffocatingly into the corner when you thump the other side of the henhouse. And the ones braying for revenge weren't any braver, they were just the ones on the bottom that start kicking and usually cut a couple others' throats while they're at it.
And, since then, the kickers have taken a chunk out of all of us. We've fought ourselves into a situation where, admittedly with more ostensible success than our Asian adventures of decades ago, we are compelled to "declare victory and get out of there," and in the process raised public debt to the point that there is a rush for the corner again, and the lying greedheads and mad fantasists of Social Darwinism and the Prosperity Gospel can use that panic as a pretext for their attempts to undo every advance our civilisation has made since 1900. Meanwhile, they managed, at least for a while, to make their reckless profiteering the preferred manifestation of Not Being Scared, the chosen way to puff up like a cornered cat. And when they fuck up, the little guys eat the losses. Fuck the losers, they are an inferior species, the blood of Ham, the damned rather than the elect, say the ones who can trace their own blood back to the righteous hypocrites on the Mayflower, or at least plan to marry someone who can. If the shade of Osama bin Laden is laughing at anything, he is laughing at this, at our delighted self-destruction and the proof of the wickedness of the ones in charge over here.
No, I am not being fair. But neither are they. These are not uneducated men. They know better than the cowardice of 9/11, better than to think that the rising tide raises boats with holes in them and caulk weighs too much, better than to think that they are different from the rest of us but for luck and rapacity. They are not stupid men--could they not profit through the worst times? And yet they say this in the mirror, and they say this to us. They choose it in utter perversity, in contradiction to the sense that, by their own pride, is needed to turn mere greed and luck into success. This is what the protesters across the nation are fighting. This is the sickness of the one percent that must be stopped.