9/11: Forbidden Thoughts

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

No I actually still drove to school that morning and every class was just 4 or 5 students and the teacher looking sad and cancelling class. I ended up hanging out with my best friends and we went bowling and I'm not sure if that place was closed or not but it is always good to be with the people you love in the face of such horror.

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

I think as we've killed a few hundred thousand people who had nothing to do with it in response, we should PARTICULARLY get the moth-er-fuck over it.

It is the killing that we should get over.

so true, and out of respect for lost lives I will not trench that

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!

― Hammer Smashed Bagels, Saturday, September 12, 2015 4:54 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This reminds me that shortly after the Iraq war began I went to work at a small newspaper in New Jersey, and I learned of but was unable to write about a little french cafe that began to suffer from harassment and reduced business during the "freedom fries" episode -- eggings, people yelling shit out of car windows, etc. The owners were an American Vietnam Vet and his Vietnamese wife.

(was unable to write about because the owners didn't want any more attention and I couldn't really write the story without being able to quote them anyway)

oh christ, the "Freedom fries" debacle.

it really was a drag to be alive in the US in 2003-2004.

Yeah, I mean it's really as much or more that kind of shit vs 9/11 itself that shook my sense of security in the world, sort of like realizing you're on a ship with no captain and no course.

Coalition of the Willing would make a good Depeche Mode album.

Would not like Australian PM John Howard's solos on that

It's going to be a real drag to live in the US from 2018-end

we'd have ya but I'm worried you might be a little too catholic tbh

we should never ever ever "get over it."

I'm not sure what it would look or feel like to obey this dictum, but it strikes me as unnecessarily absolute, especially since the ceaseless wars, the Patriot Act, the xenophobia, and all the other 'responses' to the attacks have affected my life much more directly and much more negatively than the original attacks ever did.

Thinking of 9/11 makes me rather wish that our leaders had showed a lot more wisdom and far less naked political opportunism afterward. Maybe if we finally "got over it", we could disengage our emotions long enough to walk back a few of the stupider, uglier and more harmful consequences of that day.

oh christ, the "Freedom fries" debacle.

it really was a drag to be alive in the US in 2003-2004.

― Hammer Smashed Bagels, Sunday, September 13, 2015 3:20 AM (Yesterday)

yeah the lead-up to the iraq invasion is the single most horrible time in recent history for me, just an endless stream of idiots defending the indefensible basically everywhere you looked, ppl you'd normally think of as sensible and decent buying into the bush horrorshow. and all these years later i still run into ppl who are like "well, they attacked us first!"

it was a dark fucking time

remember that time george w bush won an election because he was the ceo president who just needed to delegate effectively because we were approaching the end of history and permanent prosperity? that was awesome.

it's disconcerting for me personally cuz on a personal level things were p great for me between 2000-2008 (marriage, first child born, busy w cool stuff etc.) but then on the macro level everything was such a colossal fucking bummer

I participated in 2 anti-war protests on campus in 2003. The level of vitriol spewed at those participating was nothing liked I'd ever seen. Strangers came up and screamed at us. Everywhere I went, some friend or acquaintance was talking nasty rhetoric about "anti war protesters" without realizing I was one. I was depressed knowing that the war was going to fuck both our country and Iraq up in terms of lost lives and destroyed economies, and nothing anybody was going to say was going to change it.

The delusions of pro-war supporters amazed me. I was at work at a retail store the day Saddam was caught and everybody kept coming up to me, excited, that we caught him. A radio deejay talked about how she was finally convinced the war would end (when by that point he was a figurehead and little more).

the freedom fries thing was insult to injury. You got your war, now you're bringing xenophobia and nauseating nationalism into it over fabricated wounds.

If there was ever an option to have lived in a cave with a fully furnished fridge, air conditioning, and no phone or television, 2003-2004 was it.

i had some horrible piece of shit middle aged woman go off at me on a flight from SF to London around this time because she (correctly) sensed i was anti- the war and went on this crazy bizarre mental voyage that meant i was anti-war because it was cool and the cool kids hated her in high school and they were all anti-vietnam and they were on drugs and so on and so on. she was sat next to me, and we only interacted because i showed this dumb piece of shit how to make movies come on the screen and she saw the book i was reading or something and started just being really vile and personal and nasty and i lost it and told her she was an awful piece of shit and that i could not talk to her any longer and just put my earphones on and ignored her for the next ten or so hours. like i was about to scream at her. it escalated so quickly, and i don't think i was to blame.

from SF!!

http://s17.postimg.org/6rkr08lpb/Screen_Shot_2015_09_13_at_11_07_23_PM.png

Islam is a cult that does not co-exist with other muslims. Can't argue with that logic!

never trust a Geer

yeah im really upset we didnt kill all 1.5 billion muslims 'while we were there'

odds are p good that this is the type of guy who when challenged even weakly, starts backpedaling and shouting things like "AIN"T I ENTITLED TO MY OPINION"

someone set us up the 9/11