Never Again

I get angrier every year on this day. I am never exactly sure why, it could be the recognition of everything that came after the disaster, it could be the zeitgeist of pseudo-patriotism, or perhaps the outpouring of saccharine sentimentality from people. The anniversary has morphed into nostalgia, WTMJ just asked viewers "What's your most vivid memory of 9/11?" Facebook is inundated with recollections of where the writer was that day. Every news channel plays up the memory, ahistorically, as though context is meaningless. That context was that the United States at the time was being run by the most corrupt, incompetent, venal, bunch of gangsters in our history. The American experience of 9/11/01 should include a commitment to never, ever, again let the fabric of our nation be so torn apart.

Of course, it is impolite to remind people of this. As though living through the corruption, war crimes, and devastation once was enough. Americans need to remember though, just how close we came to dictatorship and collectively vow not to let it happen again. A giant hole seems to have built up around 9/11 to the point that right-wing commentators sometimes try to get away with asserting that "no terrorist attacks occurred on US soil during the Bush administration." The entire business: the wars, the torture, the rendering, the privatization of government operations, the debt, the deficit, the tax cuts, the corporate colonization of Iraq and its oil, the witch hunts of dissent, the color-coded terror alerts, the no-bid contracts, and the marketization of fear were just what the Nineteenth Century Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich called "politics by other means." The total war on liberalism taken to its highest form by the most vile foes of democracy and good government this country has ever seen.

Right-wing sociopaths in this country have long memories for the slightest errors committed by Democratic administrations, but reminders of real crimes by right-wing heroes are met with either unbelievable screeching or refusal to even admit they happened. If somehow the admission by a bush official that "you don't roll out new products in August" (in reference to the buildup for war in Iraq and the beat down of anyone expressing doubts) ever got as much repetition as the throwaway line by Rahm Emmanuel that you never let a good crisis go to waste, America might find the resolve to resist making aggressive war on other countries "just because."