Granted, Lower Manhattan took a tragic hit, a decade ago, and many people suffered as a result (I know I live a couple of neighborhoods upwind) but none worse than the people of Iraq and Central Asia. Somehow, I suspected (and was proven sadly correct) that their experiences would not be evoked, as part of the 9/11 hagiography foisted and verbal monuments cast to sacred victimhood, as part of the official ceremony commemorating the event.
Moreover, not long after 9/11, an attack was launched from Lower Manhattan that collapsed the global economy. I, for one, would like to hear a bit more about that.
By parroting the self-serving hagiography of 9/11/01, as well as, "I support the warrior, but not the war" type fallacies, liberals continue to play right into the sustaining narratives of the national security state.
Case in point, the empty, oft-heard, liberal pundit assertion, "My idea for a 9/11 tribute would involve bringing our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan home, with proper benefits." Nonsense. Worse than nonsense: Precious, cloying, self-congratulatory piffle. The statement is axiomatic of the feckless calls and specious cries common to that species of walking clichà © known as "troop-supporting" liberals.
As far as I'm concerned, "our troops"--human delivery systems of U.S.
government sanctified terrorism--can walk home"that way, maybe, they
might learn something about the larger world, other than their mission
to kill the people they happen upon without question, and then share
with their fellow belligerently ignorant countrymen what they learned
about life (its sacred quality) on their long, Odysseusian journey home.
Apropos, reasonable liberals counsel such declarations serve as "bad public relation" tactics. "Don't you realize that you risk alienating Middle America? Remember, the reactionary fallout created by the radicalism of the 1960s?"
The fact is: The passionate questioning of the entire war effort in Southeast Asia, the role of soldiers included, helped to bring an end to the war and factored into the soldiers' rebellion at the later stages of the protracted conflict. In increasing numbers, the conscripts began to refuse to kill and die for a dubious cause...they went hippie on the ass of the military state.
The activist left ended the war; self-serving liberals blew the peace.
The "bad PR" involving "spitting on the troops" was after the fact, rightwing confabulation"promulgated to intimidate liberals into shamed silence, and, of course, liberals being liberals, it worked. True to form, they "distanced" themselves from the "troop-demoralizing radicals of the irrational left." In reality, they fled in fear from arrays of rightwing created strawmen.
PR itself is the dubious craft of professional lying--corporate era legerdemain. In fact, the craft is the opposite of the resonate truth carried by deepening poetry, poignant prose and challenging political speech--the near exclusive domain of the left in the 1960s.
You ask what makes me sigh, old friend
What makes me shudder so
I shudder and I sigh to think
That even Cicero
And many-minded Homer were
Mad as the mist and snow.
--William Bulter Yeats, except from Mad As The Mist And Snow
The inspired, enduring (very threatening to some) art, music and political action of the era were not the result of liberal accommodation and compromise. Antithetically, the cause of peace and justice (briefly) made some headway despite liberals not because of them.
As a famous literary drunk once quipped, "Rome wasn't burned in a day." Change will not come with a victim-centered view of the world...including viewing the nation's toxically innocent, economic conscripts as mere victims of circumstance. Yes, young people make stupid choices--but treating them as victims does not serve them or the nation well.
"Liberal compassion" should not be extended to countenancing acts of mass murderer. Time and time again, liberals play into rightist propaganda, by allowing the discussion of U.S. militarism to be framed as exclusively pertaining to the sacrifices of individual soldiers, whose fates, in the larger context of events, have been appropriated a device of imperial plunder. By truckling to this narrative, liberals play into the propaganda of those who prosper by the homicidal designs of the present day U.S. military state.
Instead, let us endeavor to disabuse the culture of the delusion that there exists noble sacrifice in the act of killing and dying for the agendas of empire. When an individual U.S. soldier begins to stagger in the direction of his own humanity (renouncing his complicity in the death-sustained system, as many did during the Vietnam era) then we should open our arms and embrace him with a fierce compassion.
On a personal basis, my family had little money. And I made many self-destructive choices, but I also had tenacious mentors who challenged me...called me on my destructive nonsense"pointing out the bulwark of denial and hubris that sustained its shabby, ad hoc structure. Making a home in being lost, I took up residence in the enduring structure of poetry, literature and music"Whitman, Kerouac, Rilke, Dylan, the Allman Brothers, Leonard Cohen, Iggy Pop, Joe Strummer, and others too numerous to name taught me to question, as the expression went, "everything."
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