Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The most remarkable thing to me is that the U.S. has not recovered from 9/11 either psychologically or economically. We are investing trillions of dollars in security (when does the quest for security become “paranoia”?) and occupations of two hand-picked enemy countries. The occupations are conducted in such an expensive manner that we are actually funding our own enemies (see this 2009 posting) and therefore can continue indefinitely.
Bad things happen to people and countries. Parents die or divorce and children recover. Beloved girlfriends or boyfriends abandon their lovers and yet still most of them graduate from college or medical school. Cities are destroyed by natural disasters or war and people rebuild.
The U.S. has not suffered anywhere near the damage of a defeated or occupied country during World War II. Nor have we experienced anything like the violence that overwhelmed Rwanda in 1994. Yet somehow we do not seem to be able to move on. Even the rebuilding of the World Trade Center can serve as a symbol of our sluggishness. One World Trade Center is scheduled for completion in 2013, twelve years following 9/11. Twelve years is enough time for a mid-sized Chinese city to build a network of highways, a subway system, an airport from scratch, and a healthy fraction of a Manhattan worth of office and residential space (admittedly not always wisely).
So here’s hoping that the next ten post-9/11 years will be ones of true recovery.
Phil,
I thought one was supposed to place bad events in the rear-view
mirror? If so, why do we have all the continual hand-wringing and sad stories
after it’s been ten years since this happened?
The bad guys probably glow at all of our sad TV shows that rerun the terrible
tragedy over and over.
You made a post a few weeks ago wherein you stated that you thought the
U.S president should NOT make a big deal over our enemies, ala Bush
always talking about them. Well, shouldn’t we be the same way over the
9-11 events?
Most of the damage of 9/11 in the usa has been self-inflicted.
Once upon a time I built a blog module for the ACS. And so I created a blog of my own to test it with. And one of my first blogs was a fear that when we entered Afghanistan, we would get bogged down it, just as the Soviets had.
Heh. For quite a long time I thought how childish and cowardly, ignorant, and naive I was. Heh.
Maybe one day we’ll have better leaders and be better people.
Here’s to dividing by zero.
What legacy and honor have we left to the victims? That torture is now state policy, that their murder has been venged by one hundred fold mostly innocent deaths, that we’ve indebted and weakened our proud country to fearmongering? If we really want to pay tribute to the victims of this evil and tragedy, it will be by preserving their memory while leading America back into a credible moral authority, financial strength, and inspiration, rather than our current path of bankrupt bullying.
I saw an article talking about how, on the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a few newspapers ran a small piece commemorating the event and a service was held out in Hawaii to honor the war dead, but there was nothing even close to the 24/7 media blitz we’re seeing over 9/11. Pearl Harbor was certainly of much greater world-historical significance than 9/11, but it seems that was an age when 1) people would have found all this maudlin sentimentalizing to be exploitative and in poor taste, and 2) people wanted to put the war behind them and get on with their lives, not keeping rending their hair and gnashing their teeth to the point of absurdity.
The undertone that I keep noticing, in media discussions of 9/11 a decade on, is sheer incredulity. People are astonished, unbelieving, then angry and vengeful. Such things should not, do not, cannot, must not happen to Americans in their own country. (Unless, of course, they are done by other Americans).
One aim of the 9/11 attacks could have been to bring home to Americans what Pythagoras said nearly two and a half millennia ago: “Accept in your mind that, if something can happen, it can happen to you”.
To those of a sensitive and imaginative disposition who have troubled to find out much about the world we live in, that might seriously threaten their sanity. But it is ineluctably true. Westerners cannot go on behaving and feeling like visitors to a zoo, watching “the lesser breeds without” suffer and die, while feeling smugly exempt and invulnerable themselves.
We keep bringing up 9/11 because it’s the only one we’ve got.
(Yes, I know that’s not entirely true. There was the previous attempt to take down the WTC that damaged the parking garage. There was the attempt to blow up the Los Angeles airport that was foiled before it started. There were the ones like Oklahoma City and Columbine but they don’t count because they were done by Americans. There were the ones like Waco but they were good because they were done by our government in pursuit of Justice.)
In short, if you have only one tune for your harp, that’s what you play on it over and over again. The American People must never forget that we are in constant danger and must be willing to sacrifice all our liberty to gain a little more safety.
There are several reasons for the high-profile observance of the 9/11 anniversary. The first is that our leaders desire and benefit from the continued reinforcement of the Fear and Terror most of us felt on that day. In particular, the Bush administration masterfully exploited that Fear and Terror to empower themselves. The attack instantly transformed a floundering president of questionable competence who came into office under a cloud into a authoritarian Unitary Executive with the Wartime Authority to nullify whatever constitutional constraints he (and Cheney and Rumsfeld) found inconvenient. That authority not only empowered him to declare an open-ended War on Terror (modeled after the War on Drugs), but to advance agendas not directly related to “homeland security.” He indulged the neocon dream of “liberating” Iraq (under false pretenses), and also pushed through tax cuts.
Despite Obama’s promises of “change,” he seems disinclined to relinquish the powers his predecessor asserted. His approach to “homeland security” and civil liberties seems all but indistinguishable from Bush’s. Like Bush, he recognizes the great political value of keeping the Fear and Terror of 9/11 continually in the public’s mind. The Anniversary commemoration should only renew our willingness to sacrifice rights and privacy whenever an official insists it’s necessary for “security.” Psychological or economic recovery would lead to demands for restoring constraints on those powers. Keeping the wounds open and the trauma fresh reduces that risk.
Another reason is that, unfortunately, many people genuinely have reason to celebrate 9/11. It provided opportunity for a secure job funded by those trillions of dollars spent on wars and “security.” And for a privileged few of them, the Homeland Security bureaucracy provided an unprecedented opportunity to do what bureaucrats can normally only dream of: Build and lead an empire that has unlimited authority to expand its power and budget, free of the oversight, accountability, and constraints imposed on normal agencies, shrouded behind a curtain of “national security” secrecy. The TSA is the visible tip of the Homeland Security iceberg, which can only hint at the scale of arrogance, incompetence, waste, and abuse that isn’t visible.
And finally, as a nation we have become addicted to Fear and Terror. The Bush administration may have been the latest and most expert at exploiting it, but they were not the first. Before we went to War with Terrorism, we were at War with Communism and Drugs. Before that, there were the saboteurs and the Japanese-Americans who needed to be sent off to camps for “national security.” Before that there were the Bonus Army, the Anarchists, and the Wobblies. We may sing of “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but we have actually been One Nation Under Fear for over a century. So of course we will continue to relive the Fear and Terror of 9/11. And we will accept, and even welcome, the belief of the people who run the “Homeland Security” empire that protecting America requires the systematic destruction of what makes America worth protecting.
If we are ever to restore our status as a unique nation admired around the world, psychological and economic recovery from the 9/11 tragedy is essential. Unfortunately, too many people have too much of a stake in keeping the wounds open and bleeding for that to happen. The most serious, enduring damage from the 9/11 attacks was not inflicted by Osama bin Laden, but by our own leaders, with the acquiescence of a nation too long defined by Fear and Terror.
I think ti’s pretty simple…
Staying terrorized yields the following:
1) Lots of money for defense contractors.
2) Lots of money for DHS, TSA, etc.
3) Lots of money for mercenary companies
4) Justification for the patriot act, national security letters, etc.
5) A scared populace thinking about terrorism and not other concerns.
6) A go-to topic for media that will garner ratings.
With so many benefiting from the current state, it doesn’t surprise me that things haven’t changed.
I have to agree with Ted and Eric. My ex-daughter in law is married to a guy who rose to the great high rank of Lance Corporal in the USMC and who has been making a six figure income for the last nine years as a contractor for a security company. For all that time I have told my wife that the gravy train will soon end.
Don’t forget that its cheap to put on a memorial show. You get out the old footage, and you let all your salaried talent just hang around and reminisce.
My heart goes out to any person, family or business affected by 9/11. However, we are over doing it and over compensating [1] at the wrong places. Why? Did we spend this much on our service man and women who got hurt fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq? How about the families who lost loved ones while fighting? Show me any other time in history coming close to this kind of compensation in this way — I really cannot understand the logic other than trying to be overly too politically correct.
[1] http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/defenseandsecurity/a/randon911.htm
George Packer on the state of the US, a decade after 9/11.
9/11 has little to do with our economic problems.
In December 1999 I was hanging out with my in-laws, watching a football game. In normal times, the ads would have been for beer, but then the ads were all for financial services. I got home and moved half of my position out of stocks, and then moved the other half out four months later, bracketing the market top.
Roosevelt’s New Deal fell apart in the 1970’s because of runaway inflation. As the money supply expanded, wages and prices would go up. People forget that Merrill Lynch was a penny stock in 1979 — the financial industry was on the ropes because they couldn’t create products that would preserve wealth against inflation, never mind grow it.
Reagan created a new environment where power moved towards capital and away from labor and commodity producers. The government was free to print money and know it would puff up asset prices instead of driving up the cost of living. This, together with falling interest rates, meant great profits for the financial services industry, but now the industry is fat and lazy — there’s more capital in the world than the system is able to invest profitably, so returns are approaching zero. To get the system functioning, a large fraction (half?) of the capital in the world needs to disappear, but the people who control that capital aren’t going to let that happen.
Another looming issue is that we don’t have a plan for where we’re going to get our energy that makes sense. We’re running out of cheap fossil fuels and global warming is already causing an increase in severe weather that’s costing the economy billions. There’s enough U238 to sustain our economy for millennia, but commercial breeder reactors that can use it don’t yet exist, and the Fukushima accident is going to make it very hard for the industry to move foreward.
Unsustainable private debt, public debt, consumerism in the U.S., producerism in China, and repressive governments in resource exporting countries are all under pressure. The Arab Spring is much more interesting than what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. 9/11 may be a symptom of wider problems, but it’s nothing compared to the more serious threats to the legitimacy of the government such as a “tea party” composed of social security and medicare recipients and a growing population of people who refuse to take vaccines.