What has 9/11 changed? -- Final End

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Date Posted: 21:37:16 09/10/02 Tue
Author: Drummond
Subject: What has 9/11 changed?

Andy is a friend of mine, and an excellent writer.

The Nation Magazine asked readers to write about how their lives have changed since the "events of..."

I responded thusly

The most extraordinary fact about the assacre on September 11, the event that "changed everything," is that, on many levels, it changed almost nothing. Everybody believes the same thing, only more so.

People across the country have used the massacre as an example (usually the perfect example) of what they already believed. For Jerry Falwell the massacre is proof that the lesbians and their ilk have ruined America. For the anti-imperialists, it shows the results of our domineering foreign policy. For my father, the atheist, " 'God' has done it to us again." For environmentalists, it's a symptom of our unsustainable reliance on fossil fuels that drives a disastrous Middle East policy. And for the Republicans, (who've finally smashed open their pi�ata full of policy goodies long hoped for), it somehow rationalizes the weapons gluttony of a 29 billion "anti-terror" budget, "tips" programs for ratting on your neighbors, facial recognition software linked to every traffic light surveillance camera, and the torturing of prisoners of war to exact confessions. (Good thing we won the war against Stalinism!).

For me, the aftermath of the massacre proves what I always believed: that our whole society is so obsessed with it's own fear, so riddled with paranoia, that it will react with a paroxysm of "security" measures to each and every report of violence or intimation thereof, as if further gluttony by the military, the police, and the incarceration industry will rescue us from our closet of horrors. And that every reaction will, of necessity, be an over-reaction: in this case the gumming up of the wheels of all the post offices, travel agencies, foreign student exchange programs and airports when a simple upgrading of the locks on cockpit doors would surely suffice in preventing the same thing from happening again (which, of course, is incredibly unlikely).

Amid all the patriotic ruckus, the thing that is more the same than ever is our determination to prove that we can be even more crass than the worst cynics could ever have imagined. We can't seem to help ourselves from turning everything, even a massacre, into a marketing event: massacre commemorative t-shirts, bumper stickers, wind socks, kites, jewelry, posters, with Old Gory plastered across every shop window, newspaper standard, billboard and supermarket checkout aisle. And to crown the absurdity we have tried to ennoble the flag feeding frenzy as a resurgence of love for our country and a heartfelt sympathy for the victims.

Is it too much to ask for that we be able to prevent ourselves from expressing our grief like we express everything else: at the temple of consumption?

Andy Couturier

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Replies:

Re: I feared this day. -- The Serpent, 22:51:36 09/11/02 Wed
Re: What has 9/11 changed? -- o, 19:09:23 09/14/02 Sat