On "Never Forgetting"

A few reflections, 20 years later.

The floors were getting redone in our house, so we were staying at a local hotel, the Craftsman, for the night.

As was true for all other times in my childhood when things were too big and too emotional for me to understand or cope with, I stayed in a corner and read all afternoon and evening. The book was Phillip Pullman’s I Was A Rat! which is one of those little details that will stay with me forever.

It has taken me a long time—all twenty years, really—to reckon with both the initial tragedy of September 11 and the never-ending tragedy of the world that has been remade out of its ashes. Because make no mistake: the world has been remade. Not just in the small ways that irritate and inconvenience us, at the airport or on saccharine commercials or during election season. The world is bigger than the daily irritations of Americans, and elsewhere (and within our own borders, too) the project has been a much larger one. It has been remade in the image of American Empire, the kind of image that lets Very Serious newspeople make grave pronouncements about the harm we do to Women and Children in the dark corners of the world by ending a war. (No mention of the countless Women and Children killed by us in that war, obviously.)

President Biden pulled us, formally, out of Afghanistan, it’s true. But do not believe for a moment that the larger war is over. Hunter S. Thompson, prescient as always beneath his chemical fog, said it best on 9/12/2001:

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

...We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

He was right, of course, and our drone strikes continue to fall all over Africa, Asia, and the Middle East with little fanfare among the American press or public. It is fitting, really, that the parting shot of this Afghanistan campaign was a drone strike that the military reported killed a high-value ISIS target, who later turned out to be an NGO aid worker with an American visa. The strike killed him, plus three other innocent adults and the six children that had joyfully been swarming his car as he arrived home from work.

In all the years since 9/11 we have been commanded not to forget it. And we never have. But the curious thing is that we have been so busy Not Forgetting that it has precluded our ability to learn or remember practically anything else. A new baseline for American tragedy was established that day: 3,000 massacred Americans, give or take. And nothing less than that has been able to shock us into anything resembling action since. A few dozen murdered children at one of our own elementary schools. A few dozen moviegoers. Grocery shoppers. Concert goers. You name it. We never forgot, and as a result we have been completely desensitized. Quick: what was the name of the guy who opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016? Who was the shooter who killed 60 people and injured 900 others at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017?

I said that nothing below that baseline of 3,000 serves to shock us anymore. But I suppose that’s only half the story, too. Death tolls that reach orders of magnitude higher don’t seem to shock us much, either. The same people making the TV circuit today to give their weepy justification for America’s forever wars are in the same club whose malfeasance and mismanagement of a virus have helped kill almost 700,000 Americans in the last 18 months, a few 9/11s every single day. The idiots on my Facebook feed refusing to get vaccinated because they’re free thinkers who won’t be told what to do by the government--and are thus helping spread that same deadly virus--are the same people beating their chests loudest today about how exceptionally free and proud we are here in America.

There are no political consequences in this country for orchestrating episodes of mass death, only for opposing it. We never forgot 9/11, but we do seem to have forgotten everyone that made their career or their fortune on the back of it. Members of the Bush administration, one of the bloodthirstiest in American history, now make the rounds on the liberal cable news circuit because they were savvy enough to pretend to hate Donald Trump. Others have cushy sinecures at The Atlantic. Meanwhile, Daniel Hale, the man who leaked the dirty secret of America’s drone wars--namely, that they rarely kill their intended targets and far more often kill civilians--was just sentenced to prison time for having the temerity to act on his conscience.

I don’t know why I’m writing all this other than to say that I think we have a responsibility to be conscious of the things that are done in our name in the corners of the world we prefer not to think about, in places we never deigned to learn how to spell. We have a responsibility not to be taken in by the Sober and Thoughtful justifications for waging these endless campaigns of terror, nor the spectacles of national pride (like the one on the football field I’m watching as I sit here writing this) that undergird them. We are not so exceptional that any of us individually has the power to meaningfully resist the industry of death and terror that is so central to the American project.

But together, we might.