Walking that back a smidgen / exegesis

[Michael Bailey]

>
> But with all the pompous moralizing about 9-11 going on,
>


Not all of it was moralizing; not all pompous, either. Actually some great
and poignant writing in the Orlando Sentinel, for instance.

it’s nice to find someone who agrees that the response was wildly
> inappropriate as to nature, targets, and scale - and it was used as an
> excuse for those right wing buttheads to enact their dream program.
>

Matter of public record; Patriot Act is still on the books. Inter alia.

Any ad hominem smearing of said right wing buttheads is icing on the cake!
>
>
Smearing -  wrong word;
Assigning opprobrium?



>
> On Sun, Sep 12, 2021 at 6:36 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Did I miss a satire here?. The Intercept-- of investigative reporting is
>> all I know of them---did a sly Swiftian piece on
>> Rummy?...where's the clue?.......
>>
>
The Intercept sends me their free newsletter. I don’t know much about them
either.

The headline for the piece popped up - “The Most Terrifying Thing About
9-11 Was America’s Response”

Says I to myself, mustn’t miss this!

Type of writing: brief op-ed
I don’t think he’s trying to compete with Pynchon or Melville here!

Author: Jon Schwarz
Clicking on that name, I got:

Before joining First Look Media, Jon Schwarz worked for Michael Moore’s Dog
Eat Dog Films and was a research producer for Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love
Story.”

He’s contributed to many publications, including the New Yorker, the New
York Times, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Slate,
as well as NPR and “Saturday Night Live.”

In 2003, he collected on a $1,000 bet that Iraq would have no weapons of
mass destruction.




So he’s in a respectable clade. Running with a good pack, and not hindmost,
either.

Now to the text!

I invoke Fair Usage to quote -

“ woke up around 8:30 a.m., took a shower, and made a mug of Nescafé
instant coffee. By the time I opened up my laptop and maneuvered to Common
Dreams <https://www.commondreams.org/> — the favorite website of all
progressives of that time — it was 9 a.m.

Common Dreams was then designed with the important stories in the middle of
the page, with brief snippets about less significant issues in a column on
the left. It was the left-hand column that featured one sentence in red:
“Plane hits World Trade Center.”

This gave me three minutes of delicious ignorance during which it was
possible to believe that a plane had hit the World Trade Center’s north
tower by accident, three minutes to live in the post-9/11 era without
realizing it. Then, at 9:03 a.m., like everyone who’d turned on a
television, I saw United Flight 175 smash into the south tower.”


- Personal reminiscing. (For my part, I was driving to the doctor for a
tetanus shot and heard it on the radio. The shot worked, believe it or not
- sometimes modern medicine doesn’t suck.)


Onward: “I soon left my apartment and walked to Seventh Avenue, where there
was an unobstructed view of Fulton Street two miles to the south. What I’d
seen on TV was also there, in reality: thousands of people dead or about to
die in the most excruciating ways imaginable.

I’ve thought about that moment in one way or another every day since. As a
cosseted, white, male, college-educated American, I’d had fulsome
opportunities to consume history’s many hideous events mediated through
movies and books. Yet the mortifying truth is that I’d never genuinely
understood, not just with my brain but also in my stomach and intestines,
that the victims of all of them were as real in every way as I am. World
War II, I’ve realized, was not a long-running show on the History Channel.
The Rwandan genocide was not a movie starring Don Cheadle
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x8UzELvKlY>. The El Mozote massacre was
not an artful article by Mark Danner in the New Yorker
<http://www.markdanner.com/articles/the-truth-of-el-mozote>.”


- As Bob Dylan might say, bringing it all back home.


“ Before long, I was back at my building, where my upstairs neighbor was
describing her morning to several attentive listeners. She’d been at her
job on one of the top floors of the World Trade Center’s south tower at
8:46 a.m. and by happenstance was glancing out the window at the north
tower as American Flight 11 flew into it. She said she and her co-workers
were advised not to evacuate, but half of them did anyway, and had made it
down in the stuffy stairwell to below the 78th floor when their building
was hit by Flight 175. So they lived. They hurried to the ground floor, and
then she’d just walked home, as the south tower collapsed behind her.”


- so those who didn’t believe the official advisory survived. Sheesh - had
I been there I almost certainly would’ve stayed, unless some angelic
co-worker grabbed me. Work ethic.



“ There she was, in her wee Greenwich Village apartment, every inch
utilized like in a cabin on a ship. She’d been grazed by the wings of — not
the Angel of Death, exactly, since that constantly visits everywhere on
Earth, but a more specific celestial being, the Angel of Humanity’s Love of
Ultraviolence.

And there I was, almost exactly the same as her. My monkey brain slowly
reasoned to itself: If it could almost happen to her, it couldhappen to
her, and if it could happen to her, it could happen to me. That night I
dreamed that I was in Baghdad, the U.S. was about to start bombing, and
though I ran and ran, I couldn’t escape.”


- Nightmare following nightmare


“ later that day then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was barking
instructions at one of his minions, who faithfully wrote them down. The
minion’s notes, later obtained by a blogger via a Freedom of Information
Act request, included this line of Rumsfeld’s
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/24/freedomofinformation.september11>:
“go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not.”


I think this is where Mark’s internal text-parser/critic began to barf!

People say things in the heat of the moment. Freudian slip theory imbues
the direction Jon Schwarz went from here.


“ Ever since I read that, I’ve pondered this question: What exactly was
this “it” — related to 9/11 and not — that Rumsfeld was so desperate to
sweep up? And why did we have to keep at it for 20 years, at the cost of $8
trillion and 1 million lives?

There’s a spectrum of possible answers. Some of them are quasi-rational and
are articulated in the effluvia continually generated by the U.S. foreign
policy apparatus. But I’ve come to believe that we can’t stop there, and a
deeper, more accurate explanation can only be found in the murky psyches of
the people like Rumsfeld at the top of U.S. society.”


- he tells us what he’s going to tell us. Will he make a feasible case?


Reading on -

“ Rumsfeld himself wrote a memo months before 9/11 in which he explained
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Price_of_Loyalty/rM5lrsvXwakC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22that%20cannot%20defeat%20our%20forces%2C%20but%20can%20deny%20access%20to%20critical%20areas%20in%20Europe%2C%20the%20Middle%20East%2C%20and%20Asia%22&pg=PA355&printsec=frontcover&bsq=%22arming%20to%20deter%20us%22>
 the core problem facing the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union:
There were now “new regional powers” that were “arming to deter us from
bringing our conventional or nuclear power to bear in a regional crisis.”
In other words, we did not face the threat of being attacked; rather, we
faced the threat of being deterred by other countries when we wanted to
attack them.

The same perspective was expressed at great length in “Rebuilding America’s
Defenses <https://cryptome.org/rad.htm>,” a famous paper produced in 2000
by the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century.
First of all, it stated, all in bold, “*At present the United States faces
no global rival. America’s grand strategy should aim to preserve and extend
this advantageous position as far into the future as possible.*”

But there was a snake in this Garden of Eden. Technological developments
might “soon allow lesser states to deter U.S. military action. … When their
missiles are tipped with warheads carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical
weapons, even weak regional powers have a credible deterrent. … America and
its allies, rather than the Soviet Union, have become the primary objects
of deterrence. … Projecting conventional military forces or simply
asserting political influence abroad, particularly in times of crisis, will
be far more complex and constrained.”

This was too brutal a worldview for American politicians to articulate. But
it at least was logical: We’re going to run the world for as long as
possible, and it’s therefore impermissible for countries we don’t like to
prevent us from bombing them.”


- These statements were not made in the heat of the moment. Rumsfeld et al
(the Right Wing Butthead contingent) put these out after calm
consideration, expecting them to become policy.

I find no fault with Jon Schwarz’s recap.

But much fault with the sentiments themselves.  The United States were
never meant to be an Empire.


“ Things went downhill from there, however. In a 2004 Esquire article
<http://web.archive.org/web/20041124122100/http:/www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=56&num=14737>,
a “senior [Bush] administration official” explained why the U.S. had needed
to invade Iraq. It turned out that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s continued
existence in power “resulted in a very bad message to the world, including
to Islamic terrorists, that America … could be defied.”

This emotionalism about Saddam was bipartisan. In 1993, the Clinton
administration proclaimed that Iraq, having been defeated in the 1991 Gulf
War, had tried to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush while the
elder Bush was taking a victory lap in Kuwait. This later turned out
<https://www.newsweek.com/saddams-files-84273> to have been made up
<http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000194.html> in exactly the same
way as all the tales about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless,
Clinton officials were filled with rage about it. As the New Yorker reported
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Iraq_War_Reader/v_t43lXkDGMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22A%20former%20American%20ambassador%20in%20the%20Middle%20East%20recalled%20his%20surprise%20when%20a%20colleague%22&pg=PA143&printsec=frontcover&bsq=his%20near-suicidal%20defiance%20of%20American%20pressure>
at
the time, they were furious about Saddam’s “near-suicidal defiance of
American pressure. … Many officials in the Pentagon and the State
Department had become increasingly angry with Iraq in the early months of
the Clinton Administration, feeling that Saddam Hussein had been ‘getting
away with things.’”

This is clearly not the language of adults discussing how to deal with
other adults. Rather, it’s the mindset of frustrated parents whose children
won’t do what they’re told.”


- Yes, Jon Schwarz is “tone-policing” here. But sometimes that isn’t such a
bad thing, is it?

Also, as he mentions, not just Republicans but Democrats haven’t
historically carried the anti-unjust-war torch very well either - Johnson
such a domestic mensch, such a foreign policy wretch; Wilson didn’t keep us
out of war; and his namesake Charlie Wilson initiated the mujahideen from
his warmongering intransigent recalcitrant bad self! Born from his head
like Athena!


Jon Schwarz goes on:

“ Even this, though, was more sober than the quasi-sexual perspective of
others in the U.S. foreign policy establishment. Thomas Friedman, the
three-time Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist, famously explained in
2003 a few months after the invasion of Iraq, “We needed to go over there,
basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world.
… Well, suck on this! [That] is what this war was about. We could have hit
Saudi Arabia. … We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.””


- Yeah. That’s disgusting. 9-11 hijackers were predominantly Saudi, weren’t
they, not an Iraqi in the cohort, and we go after Iraq? That’s as bad as
Catwoman attacking Batman for no reason at all! Friedman’s got to be
embarrassed about that, hasn’t he? I mean, he’s supposed to be all
“globalization helps everyone, the world is flat” - how about “Thomas
Friedman is a jingoistic hack?” Suck on that!


“ Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s similar worldview was
described
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/State_of_Denial_Bush_at_War_Part_III/FHn-M8fZ96MC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22Because%20Afghanistan%20wasn%27t%20enough%2C%22&pg=PT519&printsec=frontcover&bsq=%22Because%20Afghanistan%20wasn%27t%20enough%2C%22>
 in journalist Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial”:

“Why did you support the Iraq war?” [Bush aide Michael] Gerson asked him.

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict
with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to
humiliate them.””



- Yeah, well, Kissinger - “he never met a war he didn’t like,” I think
Yossarian, er, Joseph Heller, once wrote.

But for some reason people listen to his ilk. Wouldn’t it be great if he
and the other ilksters saw the error of their ways? Even now he could do a
good thing for once in his life!


“ Why are all these people lost in these disturbing fantasy worlds? After
witnessing the last two decades, I’d suggest that we need to understand a
peculiar quirk of human psychology: The powerful always loathe those with
less power. My grandfather was a historian
<https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/lewis-hanke>
 who spent his life studying the Spanish conquest of the so-called New
World, and as he put it:

The hostility of those who have power toward those who can be called
inferior because they are different — because they are others, the
strangers — has been a historical constant. Indeed, at times it seems to be
the dominant theme in human history.”



- Here Mr Schwarz goes to the heart of his thesis. He adds the personal
touch, disclosing the generational wisdom of his grandfather and sharing
the fruits of that person’s lifelong study of evil as expressed in empire.


“ The “it,” then, that Rumsfeld wanted to destroy on 9/11 was almost
certainly every frustration he felt at the rest of humanity. This started
with Al Qaeda and easily extended to Saddam and Iraq. But we can be sure
that he also hoped to cow all the non-white people around the globe who
were generally failing to comply. Next he could overwhelm the obstinate
Europeans with their affectations to a higher morality. Obviously the
Democrats, who continually tried to steal his money, would have to be
crushed. And then at long last his daughter, going to Oberlin and dating
that white guy with dreads, would see the error of her ways.”


- If you aren’t on the Schwarzian bandwagon by this point, this
characterization will drive you off the rails on a crazy train. But I’m
saying yes, yes, recognition and sad laughter. I mean, that’s exactly what
he and his PNAC wienerheads set about (with the exception of his daughter’s
dating life - not sure how they handled that) Iraq, Afghanistan, ignoring
the UN in favor of the Coalition of Wienerheads, Freedom Fries, Patriot
Act, the whole demonic litany.

As Frank Zappa said, “Bow-tie daddy, don’t you blow your top, everything’s
under control.- Don’t try to do no thinking, just go on with your drinking
- just have your fun, you old son-of-a-gun, and drive home in your Lincoln”
Probably not the deepest analysis, but at some point doesn’t one wonder,
got to be something wrong with these dudes!?


You can sense Schwarz is winding down:
“ Of course, this doesn’t make “sense” in the way we want to think of it.
But neither has the “war on terror.” It’s been 20 years of mindless
violence, cruelty, and waste, the U.S. lashing out like a gigantic beast
without a functioning frontal cortex, visiting numberless 9/11s on
innocents as it staggered around the globe.”


- Yup, and yup, and well said in the bargain!


“ But that does make sense if you ignore all the speeches and op-eds and
instead start from the presumption that the political class running this
country is overflowing with the primate wrath of the powerful who are
nonetheless not omnipotent.”


Meh - I like my formulation better: “something wrong with those kids!”


“In the weeks after 9/11, I told friends who didn’t live in New York that
Al Qaeda had really put the terror back in terrorism. But the fear I
experienced that terrible day does not begin to compare with the dread I’ve
developed since. On September 11, 2001, I realized that I was on Al Qaeda’s
list. Since then, I’ve learned that I’m also on the list of the far more
mighty people in charge of America, just a little further down. Even with
the most concrete dangers facing us — the destruction of a livable
biosphere, an enduring pandemic, and much more — they are absolutely
committed to following the same path, driven onward by complex delusions.
Power tends to corrupt, not just in a standard moral sense but also
intellectually and emotionally, and they’ve held extreme power for a very
long time. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that if we let
them, their corruption will surely destroy us all.”


- if we let them? Yeah, let’s bell that cat. But as a side bet, let’s hope
for a bit of luck. Maybe the horse will learn to fly. Maybe the WD40 of
compassion will seep into some key places. Maybe the genome will adapt and
bombs will bounce off our heads, or we’ll all become so good-looking that
nobody will want to kill each other, we’ll all be smooching and canoodling
and complimenting each other. Have I told you lately, you look fabulous?


Pretty good article, the closing wasn’t all to my liking but the rest was
primo!







>>>