9/11: Forbidden Thoughts

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.

i don't think that's such a "forbidden" thought. everyone knew -- that day -- that 09.11.01 drew a line between the sunny 90s and the darker new century.

don't really think everyone knew this. i didn't. i thought people would be freaked out about it for a month or so and after that it would no longer be something that people thought of as a big deal. i told a friend this and he was like "you're crazy, this is a major historical event" and in retrospect my friend was right and i was wrong. i was almost 100 miles away from new york and it felt like a pretty normal day. in retrospect you read articles that say "amazingly, there were some people so inhuman and weird that they just did their job as normal that day" but that's what i did and so did everybody else at my job. so maybe that was my forbidden thought, not having a lot of thoughts.

I recall feeling like it was a definite "line in the sand" type day mostly because it felt so open-ended, it felt like it could be the first in a line of succession of attacks against us. the word 'surreal' was used a lot that day and I remember being terrified that we'd be attacked again in coming weeks or that the attacks would be used to justify some heinous behavior on our end (and we know how that turned out).

work was still on (I was off, but I stopped in to get my schedule), but the play I was doing at the time cancelled rehearsal and I think school was closed. I recall being pleasantly relieved that there was no follow-up attack within the month, there was so much disinformation going around.

http://i61.tinypic.com/2gv3khd.jpg

I think those of us in NY are going through the motions now with commemoration. 10 years was something, and 20 will be something less.

In terms of forbidden thoughts: I had dreams for months after of looking out my window (29th floor, FIDI) and watching buildings crumble without explanation. In my dreams, it was sort of inevitable, and sort of epic to see towers come down everywhere - almost like something that made me sad, but that I knew was coming. The Villalobos remix of Shackleton's Blood on my Hands seemed to, eerily enough, capture this dazed sense almost exactly. It wasn't unexciting - when I was quickly walking uptown from Reade St to Central Park that morning, there was part of me that hoped for many more strikes. The Empire State Building seemed like a natural candidate, and I kept it in view while listening to radio reports on my walkman (and yes, this was Walkman era).

Some time in the year after 9/11 I remember being on an NJTransit train with a young co-worker who happened to be Pakistani and I guess we were having a little too loud a conversation about Bush and I said that Bush "basically got lucky with 9/11" -- oh man you could feel the hardness of the stares.

lmao maresnest

https://celebrity.yahoo.com/blogs/celeb-news/melissa-joan-hart-blasts-9-11-news-coverage-if-kardashians-can-be-covered-24-7-why-can-t-the-victims-get-one-day-160055763.html

Actress Melissa Joan Hart — a staunch conservative who has appeared on Fox News — called out the network, as well as CNN, for not having continuous coverage of the Sept. 11 memorial on Friday, the 14th anniversary of the terrorist attacks.

Making a good point, Hart, who does a lot of work with military wives, said that one calendar day should be dedicated to the victims, especially since we live in a time when 365 days of the year are devoted to the Kardashians.

for some reason this strikes me as the most annoying opinion imaginable

lol what a dolt

I don't profess to speak for any of the families of the victims buuuuuut I'd wager not all of them necessarily want what Hart is demanding.

also fuck Clarissa, she should live inside Kim's ass

also, MSNBC already does a real-time rerun of 9/11 every year, which I find pretty distasteful and pointless and creepy. i mean, anyone is free to go on youtube and watch the networks as it happened.

doc's waiting room tv had a History channel thing abt 9/11 yesterday & everyone was watching it & there was this one dude who *stood* & watched it & i just wanted to run out of the room

i don't mind the memorials & remembrances & i still get legit upset thinking abt the people & rescuers in that building

...but there's something about the *idea* of 9/11 & everything packed into that idea that just feels so fetishized now, people go right back there in a heartbeat, camp out there & idk it creeps me out a little now

Emotional pornography

and my other forbidden thought is comparing the national shame of domestic terrorism ie Oklahoma City bombing

no 4.19 memorials or a twenty year special, 168 lives lost there, no war to show for it. those ppl were all just going to work too, i wish we honored them more than they are

idk apples to oranges but it sticks in my brain sometimes

on one hand 9/11 seems recent but on the other hand, it's been 14 years. 14 years after pearl harbor WW2 had been finished for ten years and the korean war had come and gone, too. people still cling to it because it was just such a fucked up event psychologically, combining 3 or 4 major nightmarish fears into one horrible mess.

true

i didn't know exactly what had happened till after the school day was over, but i remember a kid in one of my classes who had seen the attacks on the news saying "another plane crashed into the other tower while they were filming it. it was awesome!"

so "it was awesome!" was basically the first thing i heard about 9/11 and it still sticks with me

9/11 I was slow to react to, given that it was really the first time I started paying attention to current events (and well politics in general). I was so aloof and sleepwalking through my high school years that even when OKC happened, I knew it happened, but I couldn't have even recited the events even two years after it happened.

I also had to digest it fast because I slept through it (it was my only day off from school/work), only to be told what happened in a 2 minute summary by my mother.

I think my guilty thought was "how much is this going to fuck up the way we live for the immediate future?". Obviously I grieved for the people who died and I was terrified as hell (I remember being afraid to drive to Arby's to get lunch!). but I remembered wondering about how the landscape was about to change.

I think the rampant thought policing that some were guilty of (including my father) made me feel guilty for taking any pleasure in those ensuing weeks. It felt like no matter how far from the event we got, someone was always saying "how can you think of <object> when two of our buildings just fell?". we cracked innocent jokes on 9/11 not because we found it silly but we were scared and trying to cope.

Nowadays, it just feels overblown to me. I don't agree with Morbs that America should just "get over it" per se, but outside of a moment of silence or w/e, I don't get the watching hours of 9/11 themed programming or having ceremonies every year. Yes, it was a big deal, but largely because we'd been shielded from events like this that are a daily reality in other countries (although this was a pretty large-scale effort by any measure, obv).

I also resented the "9/11 brought the country together" narrative and talked of the unity of the nation in the days following. I felt like any 'unity' was short-lived. I really felt like it brought a lot of ugly out of the civilian population - what with the civilians who committed "revenge" murders against people they thought were Arabs in the days following, people who used it as excuses for xenophobia, etc.

like we were all back to hating each other's guts by the weekend!

Everyone pretty otm.

At a free library in a newstand in Chicago once I found a pamphlet containing the testimony of mastermind of the whole thing (KSM) and it was weird, he seemed to see himself as somewhat stylized after the American forefathers. He thought of the American Revolutionary War freedom fighters as admirable historical figures.

al-Nami obvs, and maaaaayyyyybe al-Ghamdi, but the rest of these dudes? I mean, you can kinda see why they ended up hijacking a plane.

9/11 is a marking point before which 1984 seemed like shocking dystopian fiction and after which like passe retro futurism. All kind of inalienable rights and foundational truths being casually tossed in the trash, publicly, and if you didn't like it, you weren't a real American.

"Team America World Police" and "Fahrenheit 911" were both left wing band-aids but I think ultimately did more harm than good in normalizing the new America. Nowadays "Murica!" is a ironic/kitsch embrace of that post-9/11 hipster nationalism, enabling a generation of leftists to shrug their shoulders and put it out of mind. The right continues to lead the Zombie US towards their self-conceived Judgement Day while the left holds a "I'm with stupid ->" poster.

the left doesn't seem able to muster up much of a reaction to the right, it seems to begin and end with reposting john stewart oliver daily show rants on facebook and saying "this." There's not enough anger.

Anyway 9/11 is odd bc it's not something that frightens me as possibly occurring again, it just lives in my memory as this really horrific one off. And also as the window of opportunity the US had to prove we weren't douchebags but then of course we blew that opportunity good.

we should never ever ever "get over it." that's a fucking awful thing to say.

u must be new here

http://thatgrapejuice.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/dj-khaled-that-grape-juice.png

"Team America World Police" and "Fahrenheit 911" were both left wing band-aids

Yeah the movie that posited Michael Moore as a suicide bomber trying to kill the only people protecting America, and Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon et al. as members of an all-powerful actors' cabal called "F.A.G." was a left wing band aid. Good job apprehending culture as usual, Bruneau.

I watched the second plane hit live, I had came back from an open day at a university, it was afternoon britishes time, my first reaction was woah awesome until i thought oh yeah skyscraper and plane there must be so many dead then II felt p remorseful

Haha yeah team america world police is an apology for US foreign policy. found it pretty funny but vile politically. Not for nothing is south park republican a thing on the internet

I never took Team America that way.

Like, the whole "dick-pussy-asshole" speech has been quoted ad infinitum by glibertarian and right wings warmongers since the movie came out.

I see your point. At the time though (I've only seen it once, in the theater, on release) it felt like an antidote to self serious Mission Accomplished nationalism.

otm w glibertarian

In another interview, Parker and Stone further clarified the end of the film which seems to justify the role of the United States as the "World Police."[33]

Because that's the thing that we realized when we were making the movie. It was always the hardest thing. We wanted to deal with this emotion of being hated as an American. That was the thing that was intriguing to us, and having Gary [the main character] deal with that emotion. And so, him becoming ashamed to be a part of Team America and being ashamed of himself, he comes to realize that, just as he got his brother killed by gorillas — he didn't kill his brother; he wasn't a dick, he wasn't an asshole — so too does America have this role in the world as a dick. Cops are dicks, you fucking hate cops, but you need 'em.

as with most movies, the filmmakers' insights don't really matter to me

nor do the stuff dumb idiots take from it. some people probably took "slavery, fuck yeah!" at face value, too.

I watched the second plane hit live, I had came back from an open day at a university

exact same for me, don't suppose it was uuuuuh actually i've forgotten, strathclyde i think?

Anybody else get recurring bomb threats at their college in the days after? We had at least two in our library

the real 9/11

pic.twitter.com/Rd4sT5kd4Z

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