9/11: Forbidden Thoughts

my 9/11: forbidden thot is that the whole subject is incredibly boring and i never want to hear anything about it ever again

really

question mark

yea rly. and maybe my "boredom" is just a way of deflecting anxiety or something, i dunno, but i'm just not interested. if i pick up a novel, no matter who it's by, and see a blurb on the back noting that it "wresteles with the legacy of 9/11" or whatever, i immediately put it down and move along. shit makes my eyes glaze over, like sports scores or soap opera digest.

My forbidden thought, 9/11 is all about American exceptionalism.

Yes, the death toll was very, very large for such a brief event, and the collapse of the WTC was unprecedented, in that 110 storey skyscrapers had never been destroyed before, mainly because there were so few of them. But viewed as a civic disaster, or as an attack on civilians, or as a deadly event, or through any gneralized lens or frame of reference, it is just one amid dozens and dozens of similar events in the past century.

What makes it so obssessive to modern Americans is that we do not expect to be attacked by our enemies in our "homeland". It is nearly unthinkable. This is also at the core of the Cold War hysteria, once the Russian Reds had The Bomb. And why we spend so fucking much on "defense".

The entire Eastern hemisphere has suffered so many wars, disasters and hatreds that they must find our reactions to 9/11 somewhat incomprehensible.

yeah my forbidden thought follows the line of jesse's in that i had the "thrill of the nonbanal," but even more than that i sensed a weird and perverse kind of disappointment when i realized it wasnt going to get worse, that no more planes were gonna crash and the immediate drama was over.

u are all disgusting human beings obv

maybe not so much a forbidden thought as much as an observation; as someone who works in documentary TV, it really seems like 9/11 is the "boy meets girl" for the entire genre. i.e. "what's our story angle gonna be about these cheese crumpets?" "well i had a shop on wall street on 9/11..." "WE'VE GOT A STORY!"

but even more than that i sensed a weird and perverse kind of disappointment when i realized it wasnt going to get worse, that no more planes were gonna crash and the immediate drama was over.

I actually felt the same thing, and I suspect a lot of people did even if they wouldn't admit it. really well put.

like, I wonder even if some of the more war-mongering types I've encountered, who had really strong reactions - even though they didn't personally know anyone who died nor ever spent time in NYC - were really just trying to hang onto the strong emotions they felt that day.

but even more than that i sensed a weird and perverse kind of disappointment when i realized it wasnt going to get worse, that no more planes were gonna crash and the immediate drama was over.

I actually felt the same thing, and I suspect a lot of people did even if they wouldn't admit it. really well put.

Completely know where you're coming from, i couldn't believe what i was seeing, but was kinda disappointed when it ended so quickly.
I still look for new footage and i'm equally as shocked when i see something new even though it's been such a long time.

my first reaction to the planes hitting the towers was one of amazed amusement. i marvelled at the spectacle. was suprised how much it looked the same as what it would have looked like had it been a movie. then i thought about what it meant and what had actually happened - i didn't actually know what the WTC was but i knew an airliner and a tall building would certainly have a large number of people within them - and was bummed. watching the constant coverage i soon grew bored, just speculation and endless replays, telling you less than nothing. i went and played counterstrike.

I immediately thought about how this might benefit Bush. not really an appropriate time for partisan fearmongering, but I hated him even then.

I remember saying something like "we're fucked" b/c W. was our president. At that time I wasn't even paying much attention to him, but I guess it would be hard to not at least be aware that he is a fuck-up.

Is it surprising to anyone else how there are pretty much NO photos or videos of body parts and other carnage? Sometimes I think that it's a case mass self-censorship (I mean that in a good way).

There are photos of body parts and carnage. Believe me, you don't want to see them.

I worked at a photo agency at the time (just down the street from the towers as a matter of fact).
What a human being looks like after falling 100 stories is nothing you want in your mind.

wait wait wait, when did HOOS return?

I'm just surprised that those photos haven't leaked and become more widely available. Not that I want to see them.

Now that I think of it, another "forbidden" thought I had on 9/11 was a curiosity about the carnage.

HOOS was zorn_bond.mp3 and is now back under his old name temporarily

DUMPLINGS! - just out of curiosity (not to be a dick, honestly), but did you forget you had posted the Taliban-spiking-cocaine story in the thread revive when you mentioned it again 40 minutes later? I ask because I did the same thing the other day and it struck me as a sort of exclusively ILX-related symptom

I don't know why it capitalized your name that way. I didn't write it that way, with the exclamation point. Weird.

basically there is no way i ever want to see anything more about 9/11 footage-wise and i'm leaving the actual carnage to the imagination forever. not a fan of fiction or cinema or music that "grapples" with 9/11 either or inserts it in as the big foreboding event to come or the event from the past driving the narrative.

Omar just summed it all up for me.

also when i have seen footage on tv in recent years, they always--no matter what it is--do something like show the plane flying towards the south tower and then fade or freeze before the impact, or show a person slipping or jumping from an open window and then doing the same thing. that kind of refinement weirds me out.

WTF. When I posted it the second time I thought I had only been thinking about it or that I had said it aloud to someone earlier. I'm pushing 36 here, so cut me some slack!

On ILX the word DUMPLINGS! automatically gets capitalized and exclamation pointed. That's not a joke, it's true.

well it's actually a joke too

Omar is OTM, but I can't stop imagining what happened inside the towers. I think a lot about the stockbroker checking his e-mail in his corner office, glimpsing out of the corner of his eye an airplane flying across midtown Manhattan. I try to put myself into the shoes of someone who 60 seconds later became human remains on a sidewalk and conjure up what their last thoughts may have been.

These people are like JFK. Fifty years later, there will be talk and movies and discussion and rude gifs4you, and Kennedy's the only one who has no idea what happened next. The Pentagon, Flight 93, Bush, Anthrax, Iraq, Afghanistan, no Cokes on airplane flights.... all those people in the first tower knew was that their lives were about to end. And then nothing.

It's like I'm writing horrible slash fiction in my head, which I figure qualifies as a 9/11 Forbidden Thought. But I can't help it.

yeah, PP's first paragraph applies to me, too.

I remember saying something like "we're fucked" b/c W. was our president.

i went through a roller-coaster on this emotionally. the day of the attack, i wished that clinton was still president (especially watching the footage the next day of him comforting people in NYC). a few days later, i was impressed with how GWB handled himself -- perfect for the moment (arm draped over the firefighter, megaphone in hand, talking to the crowd). then, there was the unfortunate next 7 years of his tenure.

WTF. When I posted it the second time I thought I had only been thinking about it or that I had said it aloud to someone earlier. I'm pushing 36 here, so cut me some slack!

I'm 35 and this just happened to me a couple of days ago as well. I don't know what to make of it.

Anyway - I remember on that morning I has just arrived to work in Midtown Manhattan and after they closed our building, I had to walk home to Brooklyn (along with hundreds or thousands of other people). At some point I realized I was walking alongside someone I admired from a band I liked. I got kind of excited for a couple of minutes, then I felt really guilty. Whenever I hear that band, ever since then, I can only think of that morning.

My other memory was stopping somewhere near the Brooklyn Bridge and buying a smoothie from a shop that was open. I also felt guilty about that.

A celeb sighting in NYC on 9/11 would be sort of surreal.

vaguely vaughn meader moment - i was working at wuxtry, this record store in town, and i remember this local synthpop band 'i am the world trade center' were supposed to play a show that weekend, and we were talking and wondering 'so...what are they gonna do?' and our boss suggesting ppl should go to the show and throw paper airplanes at them and this is pretty definitely the first time i was able to laugh 'at' 9/11. this would've been on 9/12.

After going through the initial shock/sadness/rage -- not just at what happened, but also at the coming racist bullshitstorm headed towards people of Middle Eastern descent in the US -- I was glad that I'd bought an import copy of Mercury Rev's All Is Dream the previous Sunday (it was released in the US on 9/11), so that I didn't automatically associate those songs with 9/11. But I do anyway.

This isn't really a "forbidden thought" but I just want to write down somewhere that in spite of all my good sense I've been having this terrible, anxious, irritable feeling all day and thinking "something bad is going to happen" without realizing what day it was, and I even had this very bizarre moment at my daughter's preschool orientation where there was one dude who for some reason just looked slightly shady and undadlike to me and I had this dumb thought "maybe he has a gun" and then my veins started pounding and I could feel heat coming off my neck.

I think actually the Syrian refugee stories are affecting me as much as anything (though it's all connected), just keep thinking about the tenuous nature of our society and all that fun stuff.

i work less than a mile from the WTC now, really hope i don't run into a single commemorative thing all day tomorrow, and really think the USA needs to get the motherfuck over it after 14 years.

i've also convinced myself that going down to Brooklyn Heights that evening and breathing in the dust eventually gave me cancer, so there's that.

I keep thinking about how the onslaught of "I had just stepped inside after walking my dog when suddenly I heard the news" posts are about to pop up again tomorrow and cringing.

I actually forgot all about 9/11 and not a single person I know has mentioned it.

I mean er, I forgot thats what today was.

I keep thinking about how the onslaught of "I had just stepped inside after walking my dog when suddenly I heard the news" posts are about to pop up again tomorrow and cringing.

If people still need to work through shit 14 years after the fact, I'm not gonna shut them down. I was 900 miles away in Nashville where nothing happened and I still think about that day all the time.

Everyday life for people like me is pretty banal, and big shake-ups can be fascinating.

Truth. The huge electricity shut-down/blackout of 2003 was a pure guilty pleasure in that way. I was grateful that there hadn't been a attack or a massive loss of life so I could just enjoy the hell outta the disruption.

That poor Columbia crew. I remember watching that white streak across a blue sky one Saturday morning and thinking, Motherfuck, they got that one too.

And then when it turns out that it wasn't terrorism, just a 20-year-old space plane on the wrong side of its warranty, everyone just went whew! and went about their lives. But no one temporarily banned the word "space" from sitcoms or took Ziggy Stardust off the radio like they did in '86.

If people still need to work through shit 14 years after the fact, I'm not gonna shut them down. I was 900 miles away in Nashville where nothing happened and I still think about that day all the time.

― Johnny Fever, Friday, September 11, 2015 8:16 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

People can do what they gotta do, I'm not going to attempt to tell them they're silly for it or try and stop them from doing it. I just won't read them or participate myself because to me, it's tiresome. doesn't mean I wasn't transfixed with fear when it happened and that I don't still lament the trickle down effects of what happened years later!

I'm certainly not claiming victim status or ptsd or anything, generally I am
pretty nonchalant about the day. And I regret our response to it more than I regret the event itself. But I guess deep down something about it scares the crap out of me, return of the repressed etc

I think for me 9/11 (combined with the disastrous) and Katrina (combined with the disastrous response) are these twin events that also coincide with my dad having health problems and losing his job (even though I was in my 20s and not dependent on him) that just generally upended my sense of ease in the world, building into the financial crisis.

Basically living in W's America really undermined my illusions of security.

Anyway, here is a creepy memorial from Somerville NJ that I often think of:

http://img.groundspeak.com/waymarking/large/26a51946-d1f2-45a3-a131-d04918d8de35.jpg

This is probably terrible, but my abiding memory of 9/11 is some kid in front of me in the queue at an independent dvd/video rental business in Dewsbury saying "Fucking 'ell, t'news is going to be on all neet now!"

I am so fucking happy Facebook didn't exist on 9/11

even without it, being in college in FL I was daily pelted with

1) the fake Nostradamus quotes that *predicted* 9/11 getting circulated
2) the assloads of chain emails I got about upcoming 'terror' attacks ie at the mall
3) people saying Afghan citizens weren't innocent because they should have overthrown their government
4) everybody predicting WWIII

https://scontent-lga1-1.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xaf1/t51.2885-15/e35/11899615_1488864238080626_1386440220_n.jpg

Apologies for the size. This is from The 80s: A Look Back at the Tumultuous Decade 1980-1989, published in 1979.

McDonalds one is for an unrelated incident

rip mayor mccheese

America's Burger

20 years later and they still haven't rebuilt the Golden Arches

...

https://i.gifer.com/fetch/w300-preview/47/47619e5bca9708b1e5b88bb23ac236e7.gif

I foresee the traditional Moment of Silence being supplanted in America with the Moment of Incoherent Bellowing, it's just how we demonstrate our reverence now

"Oh I thought it was time for Two Minutes of Hate."

1) i’m definitely over random ppl just posting tourist photos of themselves visiting the WTC ~whenever~

2) i’m at the point where i want every rando to stfu & leave space for ppl directly affected to talk or post photos if they need it. rest of world, just fuckin can it for ONE DAY.

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Saturday, September 11, 2021 11:33 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Tbh, every single living person in the US continues to be directly affected, there is no way any reasonable person should accept the idea that only those who "lost people" were directly affected. All of our lives would be measurably different, and to be honest, probably a lot fucking better.

And of course, that's to say nothing of the millions of Iraqi and Afghani citizens who, yknow, were murdered due to US imperial bloodlust.

so why did saudi arabia participate/primarily drive the attack? i am completely ignorant. certain faction of religious zealots in the govt? trying to get us more mired in the middle east to aserve their interests? some kind of straightforward financial motive?

There aren't any direct answers, but it seems pretty likely that— surprise— the US was working in concert with Saudi Arabia and a number of other regional interests to build more extractive infrastructure in Afghanistan.

Getting closer to September 2001, that year had seen a series of negotiations between the Taliban and a U.S.-led coalition regarding the creation of a new unity government in Afghanistan.

According to attendee Niaz Naik, former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs, “If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid … And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.”

Naik also stated that Tom Simons, a U.S. representative at the talks, told them that “‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation.’”

Such would apparently come to pass after the negotiations broke down. On September 4, 2001, the Bush cabinet authorized the drafting of a new National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). This document, NSDP-9, called for a sizable covert action initiative which included U.S. ground troops and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan.

Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was dead set against U.S. ground troops in Afghanistan but, on September 9, 2001, he was conveniently assassinated, likely with U.S. complicity on some level.

The next day, on September 10, a second NSDP-9 related meeting was held, focusing on various details of the U.S. military and political plans for Afghanistan.

Then, on September 11...

I know that some of this stuff dwells in the land of conspiracy and paranoid spy-speak, but I really don't put it past US hegemonic interests to orchestrate a mass murder of its own citizens so as to better get at natural resources elsewhere.

That quote above is from Covert Action, btw. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/09/11/the-twenty-year-shadow-of-9-11-u-s-complicity-in-the-terror-spectacle-and-the-urgent-need-to-end-it/

I know that some of this stuff dwells in the land of conspiracy and paranoid spy-speak, but I really don't put it past US hegemonic interests to orchestrate a mass murder of its own citizens so as to better get at natural resources elsewhere.

oh trust me, my thoughts on this would probably get me laughed off the board

I welcome your thoughts, personally.

I was about to turn 17. I remember that we had an emergency assembly between when the first plane and second plane hit. I went to a Quaker high school, so it was a very gentle assembly, with talk of "holding people in the light," and so on. I only remember three things from the rest of that day.

1) Saying to my friend Richard, "We're going to start a war in the Middle East, probably against Palestine or Iraq"
2) Watching the second plane hit on live television in my beloved biology teacher's classroom
3) Having a screaming match with my father later that evening where I called him a "bloodthirsty pigfucker"

One of Al-Queda's main beefs with the US was the military bases in Saudi Arabia--particularly because Mecca is there. A cool idea we had later was that we wouldn't need the bases there anymore if we invaded Iraq. Problem solved.

i know this is the forbidden thoughts thread but can we please not do inside job talk this week

i'm keeping mum

The twentieth anniversary of 9/11 was going to be an inside job but it was moved to an outdoor venue due to COVID concerns.

guys do you want to summon the 'Lorax

https://s3-prod.adage.com/s3fs-public/styles/800x600/public/20200803_WilfordBrimley_3x2.jpg

i know this is the forbidden thoughts thread but can we please not do inside job talk this week

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Monday, September 13, 2021 9:10 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well I guess so many in the US have ignored glaring and obvious reality for the past twenty years, what's one more week.

xpost to table

i expressed myself poorly, i didnt mean that anyone who wasnt there wasnt affected. apologies for any offence caused to you or anyone else itt

9/11 was an inside job by Jonathan Safran Foer so he'd have something to write about

Leo Phoenix lives

Hi VG, I wasn't offended, I just get very...uh...polemical about how the reverberations of this event have quite literally led to the deaths of millions. 3100 people dead is a horror, of course, but millions of people? Unbearable to think about, but we must.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkSMSbFV_q0

shameful lol

so why did saudi arabia participate/primarily drive the attack? i am completely ignorant. certain faction of religious zealots in the govt? trying to get us more mired in the middle east to aserve their interests?

I don't think there are good answers. The long game of inciting a war that eventually gets us to take out Saddam (only to be replaced with a state in Iran's orbit?) feels like a big stretch. I'd guess more along the lines of some religious radicals wanted to do it and the people above them couldn't afford to piss them off/stop them.

Norm Macdonald setting up Andy Dick to laugh at a 9/11 joke... 😂😂😂#NormMacDonald #911remembrance #NeverForget911 pic.twitter.com/LGZcGdX2qy

— Zombie🤬Sexbot (@ZombieSexbot) September 12, 2018

I don't know if this is just the media bubble that I've created for myself, or possibly because I'm in the UK rather than the US, but I feel like these days, about 90% of the time when I see a reference to 9/11 it's in the context of an intentionally edgy/bad-taste joke? Or that 9/11 has become almost the default go-to subject for tasteless jokes (maybe the Challenger space shuttle disaster filled a similar place for an earlier generation?) It's maybe a 'safe' subject for edgy jokes because it's obviously inappropriate to joke about but it's not obviously racist/sexist/ableist etc?

I remember people I knew making bad-taste 9/11 jokes almost straight away (I was 16 at the time, so maybe my peer group was more likely to contain people inclined to make offensive try-hard jokes?), but in media anything less than absolute solemnity seemed verboten for quite a while - it's maybe the memory of that period when it forbidden to openly joke about that is why there are so many jokes now? I wonder a bout people who are too young to remember it first-hand, if they'll encounter 9/11 primarily as a thing that people tell jokes about (I feel this was my experience with the Challenger disaster?)

idk if Giuliani's descent into disgrace and buffoonery has anything to do with it (I know a lot of people always realised he was a buffoon, but he used to get a lot of respect across the centre-left and centre-right as well, right?) Or more generally, the Iraq war and the 'war on terror' more generally where there's a consensus view that sees them in retrospect as follies?

9/11 conspiracies and 'jet fuel can't melt steel beams' must be another factor in making it into a farcical subject? or just how the contemporary internet immediately makes anything and everything into a joke

Can confirm, my 1st grade class started making Challenger jokes almost immediately.

yeah I think how the attack was leveraged for just the dumbest and most evil stuff in the succeeding years definitely contributes. as does our response to “a 9/11 every day” in the Covid era.

https://ifunny.co/picture/the-flu-kills-more-people-every-year-lol-CMNd2bdq7?s=cl

eh fuck it

https://img.ifunny.co/images/eb0dac5efff12b9e090cd7779805afed151fb46cadbde1b4f9de7b76bed5cbc2_1.jpg

yeah I think how the attack was leveraged for just the dumbest and most evil stuff in the succeeding years definitely contributes.

Correct. Meanwhile the right wing have gone for conspiracy shit so much in the ensuing decades that their apetite for harping on an event where the conspiratorial pov is not to their advantage isn't very strong.

i think the constant solemnity in the media mentioned cultivated the urge, coupled with the growing cynicism that comes with being lied to 100% of the time by the president as he starts more and more wars

I did lol when I heard someone refer to the burning of the Fox Christmas tree as "Pine/11"

I will say that the 9/11 jokes in my last book always went over really well— even when I read from it in Lower Manhattan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7mvikSQteQ

the real 9/11

pic.twitter.com/Rd4sT5kd4Z

— Right Wing Cope (@RightWingCope) February 4, 2022