I decided to write this and post it after the tenth anniversary of 9/11 for two reasons. One was that I didn't want my thoughts to be construed in any way possible as being disrespectful to those that died on that horrible day, and the second was that I didn't want anyone to think I was just being a cold-hearted bastard.
Well, here we are, a few days after the 10th anniversary and we've seen all of the flag-waving, we've heard 'God Bless America' eight million times and we've heard the 'USA' chants at various and sundry sporting events, and the net impact of what we've apparently learned since the towers came down is actually pretty close to zero.
Let me be very, VERY clear about something from the start: what happened that day was a terrible crime against humanity. Thousands of innocent people died that day for reasons they didn't understand, and hundreds of thousands more would similarly die in the months and years afterwards, equally uninformed as to what it was they had done personally to deserve a premature death.
The men and women that died trying to help their fellow humans that day were, and always will be, true heroes and heroines. I have never understood what makes people want to run into a burning buildings to save complete and total strangers, but I am grateful that there are so many that do. On that day those people demonstrated the kind of selfless humanity that was so utterly lacking in those that planned and carried out their cowardly mission.
And then there are the politicians.
Whenever I think of a politician I normally envision a slimy, toad-like, fork-tongued creature. Someone that is capable of talking out of both sides of their mouth at the same time, with no qualms that they are the walking embodiment of human refuse, and completely and totally devoid of a moral compass.
The days after 9/11 were to show the world just how despicable the genus 'politicus americanus' could be.
On both sides of the aisle.
The republicans, led by their cheer-leading simpleton in the Oval Office, became the prime examples of why Americans are hated abroad more than any other variety of tourist, with their braying and loutish proclamations of 'we're gonna get 'em dead or alive', and 'you're either with us, or against us'. They became the zenith of dumbed down 'Cowboy Diplomats', thumping their chests in impotent rage, knuckle-dragging morons to a man.
The Democrats on the other hand, simply laid down and died. None of them, separately or together, could muster the spinal or intestinal fortitude necessary to suggest that it was possible to both honour those that had died and sacrificed on that terrible morning, and question how it had come to pass that 19 men (15 of whom were from Saudi Arabia) armed with nothing more dangerous than box-cutters and radical religion, had managed to bring the self-proclaimed most powerful country in the world to its knees, all in the space of a few hours.
Here's the part some of you aren't going to like. I am not going to go into all of the various and sundry conspiracy theories that have sprung up since that day, but I will tell you this: in my opinion, the official story of what happened that day is precisely that, a story. The 9/11 commission report would be almost complete fiction if it hadn't used real people's names. Face it, the republicans spent over $40 million investigating Bill Clinton's blow-job, but less than $14 million on the worst terrorist attack on US soil in American history. None of the key-players were placed under oath, none of their testimony was recorded, and they were not allowed to subpoena people, or follow promising leads. In other words, the narrative had already been written before the first commissioner had been picked.
What we DO know about events after that day was that a 342-page bill that was written pre-tragedy, just waiting for the right moment, that would dramatically alter the Constitution of the United States, and radically increase the powers of the Presidency and his spying agencies, was passed entirely unread and almost unanimously by the sheep in Congress in the dead of night. If that bill were to have been entered under any other circumstances, by any other administration, it would have been ridiculed as the unconstitutional power-grab that it is, and the person that presented it would have been laughed out of office. As it is, the person that presented it was "re-elected" (again, only if you believe the narrative), and his subsequent predecessor, an alleged Constitutional scholar, requested that it be re-authorized, wholly as is. Much to our chagrin it was.
What we also know about what happened after 9/11 is that the memories of those that died was cynically used by a war-hungry administration to justify starting a war against a sovereign country that had nothing to do with the attacks at all. It did have everything to do with furthering an oil-grabbing agenda that had been in place before those planes had even left Logan International Airport. Are you really surprised that two Texan oilmen would have grabbed the chance that 9/11 offered to them, especially the pea-brained younger one with Daddy-issues? Of course not.
But what angers me most about the last ten years as that the united feeling we all had immediately following 9/11 was cynically twisted by a powerful few to drive a stake deep into the heart of the framework of this great Republic, and perhaps forever alter its destiny.
We have had to give up our freedoms from random invasive and blatantly unconstitutional body-searches at airports, we have had the right to privacy in our verbal, electronic and written communications stripped from us, and when we ask if we are on someone's watch list, we run the risk of being put on that list. The President now has the authority to strip an American of their citizenship, or their life, without any review or recourse. Right to a speedy trail? Gone. Fourth amendment protections in your home or of your person? Gone. We are told we are "un-American" if we question what happened that day, we were told that if we didn't support the President (at least the republican one, apparently it is okay to question the legitimacy of the President if he is a Democrat) we were being "un-Patriotic". People that voiced their dissent loudly were attacked, sometimes physically. Some were black-listed. The USA didn't come together, it fell apart, and worse still, it moved backwards, back to the 1950's. People became afraid to speak out, people that had been friends for years, suddenly became raging, screaming enemies. And where was the supposed "liberal media" as all of this was going on? Why, the presstitutes were out front and centre of course, leading the cheers with flag-waving banners on their screens, and blaring headlines touting our brave commander-in-chief as he declared war on a noun and attacked the wrong country entirely.
So here we are 10 years later, picking the scab off that horrendous wound once more in raucous displays of fervent patriotism at football and baseball games, whilst still waging war against a noun, fighting two and a half wars half a world away, and with the citizenry at home more polarized than before the attacks. I'm not suggesting for a single second that the goat-fucking sonofabitch that dreamt this attack up and who is currently enjoying a dirt-nap at the bottom of the Indian Ocean won anything that day, but I can tell you this, it sure feels like we haven't either.
And that makes me sad, ten years later on.
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