I was on my way to grad school. It was the beginning of the semester and I was on my way to my morning class. NPR announced that a plane had hit the WTC. I thought, "what kinda fuckin' idiot could hit something that big." Then I was off to class.

Class ends and then I find out that we're under attack, according to the media. At first, I was surprised and shocked more than anything. I leave school (they cancelled the days classes), and I realize that Atlanta is in gridlock. It's impossible to get out of the city b/c of the traffic. So...I wanted to go somewhere where I wouldn't hear or see anything about 9/11. I decided to go and eat. Guess what? Even the Korean restaurant had it on the TV. Over lunch I realized that I had an uncle worked in the building so I felt kinda sick.

Then I go record shopping...same thing...they have a 2 way radio and they're playing the news. I finally make it home, have dinner with my folks and then we get the call: my uncle mike and cousin carl, who both worked on the 86th floor of WTC 2...Carl made it out, no word whether or not Mike did. I knew right then...for some strange reason, I just knew he was gone.

9 days pass before my family reconciles with the fact that he's gone. My father's sick to death, worrying about his kid brother...saying things like "he's got to be roaming around the city, not knowing where he's at." My cousin's on TV, pictures are on the net...the whole thing sucked.

At least my aunt got to speak with her husband one last time, the only problem is that he said, "I'm leaving now, I'll see you in a bit." He never made it out.

Ya know, I'm a smart liberal guy. I'm familiar with much of the academic literature written about this. I have my problems with the Bush administration and I think that America does indeed create its own enemies. But at the end of the fucking day, ladies and gents, most of these folks were just going to work. they just were just trying to get by and make money like anyone of us. They went to work and they were burnt up and killed.

I realized in the midst of giving my uncle's eulogy that all this shit was utterly meaningless. We can go on and on about the woes of the situation, joke about what cool shit we did that day...and even discuss the political and military situation we find ourselves in today, but one thing I think that needs to be made plain...it's totally fucked what happened. No one "deserved" to die that day.

My father is all sorts of fucked up now. One minute he hates our government and thinks Bush and years of strife with the middle east are to blame. The next minute, he's on a tirade about how we should nuke and pave the middle east. It sucks.

Death is never cool and it'll be years before we know more about this situation, if anything at all...in further depth that is. Like any situation, we're all monday morning quarterbacks when it comes to this. That is fine and I would encourage dialogue. I would just ask that people be senstive to the fact that some of us lost family and friends there.

Biznono wrote:The NYT headline made me tremble. The Onion made me, and everyone I know, laugh. And really it was the latter that did something more remarkable in rediscovering the line between humor and indecorum that had been lost for what seemed like an endless week.

this onion issue, she is a great accomplishment of mankind

but the logic here may nevertheless relate to the larger point that Sept. 11 has been big business for the cultural industries, whether you're on the right, on the left, or on the touring circuit as a representative of the self-proclaimed middle.

i think it is possible that he would grant this as a given, as i do. but his point is that the activity is in examining the event and its aftermath, as distinct things that need explaining on new terms. rather than 'it's not as bad as this other thing that happened in a war-torn nation on the other side of the world' or 'it happened because we give money to this country or gave money to that dictator.'

As I saw things then, and as I see them now, the attacks on the WTC, in particular, were attacks against multiculturalism as it is expressed in modernity; they were attacks against secularism; and they were attacks against the _idea_ of America -- that is, not just the US as a twenty-first-century political entity, but the US as the product of Enlightenment values. Like Griel Marcus, I am upset that these values are under attack and do my best to defend them.

agreed

Given this, and given what has happened with regularity over the last few centuries, I think, pace Marcus, it is entirely fair to say that every bit as surprising as the events of Sept. 11 was that something like them hadn’t happened sooner. Credit our separation from the rest of the world by two oceans; credit the fact that (to our credit) we give far fewer causes for grievances than, say, Russia -- but whatever the case may be, it is still perfectly reasonable to say that what happened to us -- even if its symbolic content is huge by virtue of the role New York City and this country play on the planet -- has happened to others and shouldn’t have come as a total shock. The shock, to me, was how it happened and how devastating it was in human and material terms; what was _not necessarily_ shocking is that it happened at all.

i understand this. but to say:

'mass death has been visited on every other place on the planet. therefore it is reasonable to assume it would visit our very young country eventually (if we callously overlook wiping out native americans for the time being)'

this is very different than saying

'we had it coming'

and 'we had it coming' or 'we are culpable' is very different than simply saying 'we have enemies; some earned, some unjustly inherited.' the latter being the point i think you are making.

also, the destruction was wrought:

1) in the largest, most powerful free country on earth

2) by a group of just 19 men

a very small group of men destroyed the world trade center (we do not have to capitalize it! it was the world trade center!), threw the world's economy into tremendous disarray, blew a hole in the seat of this most powerful nation's defense. killed a few thousand people in the process. in a very short time span, more or less out of the blue (overlooking overlooked intelligence heads-up).

i submit that this is unprecedented

there is also reason to remember the basic truth that is articulated, even if in occasionally nauseating ways, by the left: we have played a role in the creation of our enemies.

it is easy to pick out things we have done that ought to create enemies. but these enemies are at least as much created, as you say earlier, by a hatred of pluralism and liberal western society, as taught to them in and out of school from a very young age. it's no mistake that most of them hail from saudi arabia and its state-sponsored wahhibism.

if it is in this broad sense that you mean we have played a role in creating our enemies, i agree. i do not think we are culpable in these attacks, however. our overall position in the world has made us into a sitting duck, yes. the bad things that we have done so outweigh the good that we are in some way to blame for 9/11, no.

I would say that had the Bush administration kept all this in mind -- the indignation, the will to fight, but also the recognition of our failings -- they may have seen the wisdom of avoiding the sort of inflammatory radical response -- of avoiding the “honest-to-God” rather than well thought out response -- that will continue, justifiably, to be the deeper meaning of the invasion of Iraq.

yes

i am, obviously, convinced about certain things regarding this subject. i base this partly on some faith in my ability to reason, and partly in the fact that the most learned writers i read see things this way--'learned' regarding the middle east in the sense of scholastic and usually experiential depth. i have encountered many learned writers who are maybe more learned about european history or linguistics or something than they are the middle east (biznono, i am speaking of others! shit, you are lebanese, for christ's sake!), and these writers tend to be the handwavers. their analysis breaks down pretty quickly.

my last point here, however, is that it is painfully difficult to argue this subject, which i feel passionately about, when i feel equally passionately that our present leadership is doing a terrible job of addressing the problems we face in this area. i find myself being sympathetic to people like cindy sheehan, despite the fact that she calls insurgents in iraq 'freedom fighters' and so forth.

hence, iceland. no one ever answered my question. is it nice?

abcgroupdocumentation wrote:it's totally fucked what happened

i am so sorry for you, your father, and the rest of your family

I had just opened the Sam Goody store I was running at the time. Some kid came in and bought that awful Nickelback record that was popular at the time. He brought it to the counter and asked, "you been listening to the radio?" I assumed he was inquiring whether or not I had heard the hit single from the Nickelback CD he was buying. I (to avoid an uncomfortable conversation where I tell this kid what I really think of his favorite band) say, "no, not really". He said, "it's pretty crazy!" I'm thinking, yeah Nickelback is fucking crazy. Then I started thinking maybe something was up so I called another store and KABAMMM, the towers were hit by planes etc. etc. etc. I went home (they closed the mall) and my roommates were staring at the TV. I couldn't keep watching the same scary/sad/crazy/nightmarish shit over and over so we went and played tennis because it was a beautiful day. I didn't personally know anyone who was there. My girlfriend at the time's mom worked in NYC in one of the towers every other week (she flew back and forth from Mpls.) that was her week to be in Mpls.

tmidgett wrote:this onion issue, she is a great accomplishment of mankind

Everyone should read the "Holy Fucking Shit" issue of "The Onion" that was published after September 11.

My favorite article?

"Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American-Flag Cake"

"I baked a cake," said Pearson, shrugging her shoulders and forcing a smile as she unveiled the dessert in the Overstreet household later that evening. "I made it into a flag."

The Onion, after this terrible day of September 11, 2001, you have made me laugh and cry and use my brain again in a non-reptile brain way!

Salut, The Onion.

tmidgett wrote:hence, iceland. no one ever answered my question. is it nice?

I was only in Reykjavík for two days and two nights, but that was enough time to discover that Iceland is one of the best places on earth. They have great people and great food. They have the Blue Lagoon. They have the Phallological Museum. They have a letter that looks like a D mixed with a T (I think it's called eth), which is unique to their language. It's pretty expensive, but well worth the trip.

Where else can a little known rock band play a show that starts at midnight on Easter, with the hottest Viking band in the history of the Faroe Islands playing across town, and STILL play to a full house? Where else?

Ciao Tim! Si, si, si, about feeling like is painful to argue subject with Bush in office.

OK, I do list for you from point of view of Lebanese Texan raised as Roman Catholic whose profession is to study European Protestant Reformation (with undergraduate minor in linguistics!).

Do we deserve our enemies?

No.

Are we innocent in the processes by which they were created?

No.

Did we “have it coming” in a moral sense (i.e., did we deserve it)?

No.

Was it completely surprising given what enemies of states try to accomplish?

No.

Was it unprecedented in terms of its details?

Si. And the details are worth studying as part of the basis for how to proceed.

Was it unprecedented as an act of terrorism meant to inflict maximum casualties?

No. And this is worth remembering so that, in recognizing that hatred of western society is homegrown in many parts of the world, we don’t ignore the past either (by which I mean, among other things, the long relationship between the west and the middle east; the instructive process by which Europe emerged from its wars of religion in a mood to take reason and secularism seriously as moral principles, etc.).

Tim, to me, I think the Marcus exaggerates the newness of the terms with which we need to think about policy in the middle east. What’s new, or largely new: the scale, si; the level, and potential level, of destruction, si; the superceding of the economic with a cultural basis for hatred, si, etc.. What’s new to this generation in the US: a pressing need not to think in polarized terms (right, left, etc.)! What’s new to this generation in many parts of the Middle East: the pervasiveness of the hatred of the west that trumps one’s love of earthly existence! But what is still true? Radical reactions, like Bush’s “honest-to-God” reaction to September 11 taking the form of an invasion of Iraq, they are in principle as misguided today as they were five or thirty or a hundred years ago.

Put in way that is admittedly maybe frustratingly abstract, I think in the attempt to provide a corrective, Marcus is too dismissive of the attempt to historicize what’s going on. I no like subtext of article!

But what the fuck! Iceland, she is according to a friend of mine who has just gone there to play music: the best place on earth. Is like he has met woman on his travels, although this is not true, but all he talks about is doing what it takes to live there for rest of his years! Tim, maybe we go on trip?

I have lost sight of this provocative thread. So, ok, I tell story only because she has tape machine sub-plot. On the morning of Sept 11, I, cluelessly, got in the car to go get my 8-track cassette machine from the repair shop. Two months earlier it had been crushed in a household accident that destroyed my DAT player and many other smaller things, and my slip from the shop said it would be ready on 9/11. On my way I turned on the radio and listened to events unfold in a state of mind I have only known on hearing about the deaths of family and friends – I, like many people, thought I was having a nightmare. This was happening in Boston and everybody else on the road, including me, was driving about ten miles an hour with their mouths hanging open. When I got to the repair shop, the second plane had just hit, and the guy working there and I both reached the conclusion that there was a good chance that the world was ending. It also struck me, on hearing about the major targets, that this was some kind of attack of sites representative of American political, military, economic, and, possibly, cultural power. Given that the planes had come from Boston and that I was in panic mode, I immediate thought that Harvard University, where my girlfriend had just started working, would be next. I sped to go get her (in my vague memory there was, for a few hours, a period of remarkably unexploited lawlessness that pervaded the city), and we went home and watched everything unfold on tv.

From my point of view there was nothing cool about what happened. Shocking maybe. But it was all so undeniably about death, and change for the worse, and being deprived of words, that it was too terrifying to be perceived as a spectacle. It also quickly became apparent that almost everybody was connected in some way to the people who had just died. I had come back from France into Logan two days earlier on the same sort of plane that had been used in the attacks. Since this was also an American Airlines flight we couldn’t help but wonder about the fate of some of the flight attendants. Two nights later, while watching pictures on TV of local people who had been killed, I saw a picture of my friend’s new father-in-law, who I had just met at the wedding a few months earlier (one of the minor themes of the wedding was that this guy, who would later be on one of the planes, was a prince among men). Jesus Fucking Christ, what a totally joyless time this was for everybody! So many depressing stories on this thread to remind us of how depressing this all was.

Anyway, one of the more minor consequences of it all is that I couldn’t touch my 8-track once I got it back home. It was like a new shirt I once wore on a transatlantic flight on which I vomited over thirty times. The sight of the shirt would make me sick. i had to give her away.

What can I say? To the Tascam eight-track machine: you were the object for many months of so many terrible feelings. I am sorry. But truth be told, you were never repaired correctly, and now you have been retired. Is maybe good, because I have blamed you for many things for which you could not have possibly been so responsible.

Is theme of day, no?

j_harvey wrote:

tmidgett wrote:hence, iceland. no one ever answered my question. is it nice?

I was only in Reykjavík for two days and two nights, but that was enough time to discover that Iceland is one of the best places on earth.

I have never been, so this is hearsay that is maybe to be irrelevant to peoples... but the folks I know who went there loved it, said it was unimaginably beautiful. They also said it was way too cold.

I have no source to site, but I've heard that Iceland is plagued by extraordinarily high rates of both alchoholism and suicide. Apparently the winter there can become unbearable to some.

toomanyhelicopters wrote:

j_harvey wrote:

tmidgett wrote:hence, iceland. no one ever answered my question. is it nice?

I was only in Reykjavík for two days and two nights, but that was enough time to discover that Iceland is one of the best places on earth.

I have never been, so this is hearsay that is maybe to be irrelevant to peoples... but the folks I know who went there loved it, said it was unimaginably beautiful. They also said it was way too cold.

I have been there, and this is exactly what I came away thinking. So beautiful. And also so desolate, wet, and cold.

The people were very nice, they made us feel at home and comfortable. The whole island only has about 25,000 people living on it. The city of Reykjavik is not a city, however, it is a small town. A nice small town with a great number of shops and nightclubs, but a small town nonetheless. I think I would have been much more excited about the time I spent in Iceland if I drank alcohol. The nights are lit like day for part of the year (at least the time of year I was there, there is an equal amount of time when the days are dark like night) and people seem to take advantage of it to drink and drink and walk and talk and drink.

Iceland is not crap, but I wouldnt want to live there unless I could live at the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon is beautiful and the few hours I spent in its stinky, hot mineral water made me sleep like a baby that night.

Biznono wrote:What can I say? To the Tascam eight-track machine: you were the object for many months of so many terrible feelings. I am sorry. But truth be told, you were never repaired correctly, and now you have been retired. Is maybe good, because I have blamed you for many things for which you could not have possibly been so responsible.

Is theme of day, no?

This... is beautiful. Salut, Biznono! I enjoy your story!

9/11 I was living in Dresden, Germany with my (German) girlfriend (you see the logic) and my mother and aunt were visiting me.

We were out shopping for various German products (strangely, knives) found much cheaper in the East than in the US--a story in itself--and as we were browsing the store owner told me that an airplane had just hit the WTC. I was thinking cessna or some small plane filled with dynamite by some splinter-group from New Jersey that had tried ten years previous to do the same thing. Nothing big. Maybe a fire and some dead investment bankers, but nothing serious (even though I take all loss of life seriously, don't get me wrong, but investment bankers have little, shall we say, currency with heaven.)

the owner had this grim look of concern on his face, which was strange, considering how unemotive East Germans can be. A small stone of discomfort grew heavier as we shopped. Finally, we get back to the car and I immediately flip on the radio, trying to get the news to see if it was major enough to garner German media attention (which ain't too difficult, unlike in the States, international news comprises probably 50% of all German/Euro news)

the first thing I remember hearing is that the first tower had collapsed. mind you, I hadn't seen any pictures nor was the report more than a cryptic announcement by a German radio voice. I'm now driving back to downtown, to our apartment, and am translating what the German news is saying to my mother and aunt. still on the road we then hear that the second tower has fallen and that the pentagon was also on fire.

what went through my head was the following: this is the end of liberalism with a capital L. i know that may sound cheesy, and i still am uncomfortable with the thought that liberalism as a coherent idea or ethos or whatever existed prior to the year 2001, but i kept on thinking: this will lead to a military crack-down in the Middle East, which is probably exactly what these people want. no-more global village, but more geo-politics.

i don't pretend to know what 911 "means" but i do agree that the rituals of remembrance and self-reflection have been a boon to people of many political or ideological stripes who make a living writing about contemporary events. but they are just as ill-equiped as anyone else is to really portend what will happen. (the military crack-down is a short-term response, there are any number of possible equally feasible alternatives)

but in historical terms(and I'm not just thinking of Europe and the Middle East over the last 1000 years but Eurasia for the last 7000), sedentary civilizations have always been prone to attacks from nomadic groupings. it's not new in any meaningful sense, unless you consider the world economic system qualitatively different today than it had ever been before, and that therefore, this non-state terrorist violence is somehow novel. which is bullshit as far as i can tell.

seeing the pictures on television was anti-climatic, if one wishes to use the term, and my imagination was worse yet strangely vague. since i didn't feel any acute physical danger myself, as i was an ocean away, maybe i can't share in the trauma?

i am an american by the way, in fact, born and raised in texas (which is a huge pain in the ass if you live in Europe for any extended period of time by the way, it got only worse after Bushie became president. it was an exercise in humility to listen to all these rarified opinions by people who had never been there...i'm not defending the place but life is very complex even "down there"...will the lebanese roman catholic from TX please stand up?), BUT in spite of regional history and government being crammed down my throat, i don't identify with the place any more than i do with the rest of the country.

which doesn't mean that i don't value a lot of things about the US, and wouldn't be willing to sacrifice myself for a good cause but i'm not dying for reality-television, jessica simpson, and jay-z . (i probably would die for saul bellows, fleetwood mac's tusk album, bach, etc., but it's in a certain way impossible to separate the first set from the second, unfortunately) which is why i and a lot of people are ambivalent about moral judgements in the broader sense or at least should be. the best things about a liberal order are ambivalence and irony....it's good leadership that is a crap shoot....

9/11 was an event and a spectacle. for better or for worse, this country is an empire, and responds accordingly. who cares whether "we" deserved it or not? it's an outcome of the social order and problems within it.