"9/11 Changed Everything," indeed.

To begin to write for the third time on this subject, I would need to go to the ends of the subject. As with each previous time, the real occasion for writing is obscure, as it should be, if there is going to be any use to it. Way back in 2001 and 2002, the fools who had to have something to say as they closed their thirty minute tours of news would quote governmental press releases and talking points fallen from Dick Cheney's desk and say, "It's no exaggeration to say that 9/11 has changed everything." I didn't believe them. I vaguely remember a floating head on a screen waxing poetic and summoning all the atmospheric Murrow he could (but only managing Brokaw) and saying that we would be telling our children about the event that defined their world. It was Pearl Harbor. . . or not quite that, but it was like it.

The news readers going basso profundis was inconceivable comedy to me. Even looking back, the most I can come up with by way of how I felt is a paraphrase of Lincoln, who said that, if the United States were ever to die, it would be by suicide, not conquest. 

Then again Lincoln embarrassingly underestimated the thanatopsic urge. So did I.

Oh, historians of the time in question have said that Cofer Black and the Spook Patrol began giving W. Bush daily briefings with unfiltered intelligence -- that is, with no analysts involved, no hierarchies of threats, no assessments of feasibility or reliability, just every single hateful and violent threat made by the whole world -- and this every morning before the Ovaltine. It scared Bush senseless, and he said "Yes" to every request. This is how the USA PATRIOT ACT went from controversial to routine -- even boring. The same scary people with scary reports kept working on their haunted house routine, because Obama began saying his job was, "Keeping Americans safe" in 2009. The man who campaigned on civil liberties began devouring them at a pace that his predecessor would not have imagined.

Assassinations? Secret detentions? Suspension of habeas corpus? Phone taps on a national scale (i.e. a small nation of people, not every person in this nation)? "Why object, if you have nothing to hide" uttered as a legitimation, when it had last appeared in satire or dystopian cliche? All of this has come to be a portion of the invisible architecture of American reality -- a base condition for living for most citizens. W. H. Auden's "The Unknown Citizen" is unteachable now, both because its commentary has been bunted in front of home plate and, more, because its world of a state with an indexed population of statistics is now so far beneath the N.S.A.'s capabilities and the ostensible goals of "total informational awareness" as to seem boring.

September the eleventh thrust a cup of hemlock into national hands. Our leaders presented as a chalice, and all drank. 

I do not mean, though, that losing "the American way" or civil liberties was the death of America. Instead, I mean that, frighteningly, the vapid people were right: we changed everything on the day, soul first.

In 2011, the little people who live inside of the television asked, "What have we learned from 9/11?" We learned nothing, of course. We learned nothing because there was nothing to learn from a billionaire attacking centers of international capitalism. We learned nothing because 9/11 handed its victims suffering rather than pain, and suffering neither teaches nor presents norms. Most of all, though, we learned nothing because to learn we must first recognize our world and ourselves.

September the eleventh was suffering for those of us in New York City. I feel confident that it was for those in the affected wing of the Pentagon and for the families of the lost in Pennsylvania as well. No one can learn from suffering, only  from pain, but suffering is less focused. Rarely is suffering for a particular reason, or even for a passion. Even more rarely is suffering for a passion or reason that carries with it a moral value or heuristic principle. Instead, people may grow while suffering, but they grow by having empathy or understanding (of humanity, of self, of family) increase. 

Most of us would rather attend a seminar.

Among our problems with 9/11 is just simple recognition. "We" don't do much introspection of the moral sort. For a nation of self-help patrons and "Face the Press in Review This Week" organizers, we love to look at the individual self and the weekly events, but not much from a decade or a community.

 Why there is a new government,

and why the parties are disenfranchised

The Republican Party has variations on "self" in its definitions. It's the party of "self-reliance," of "individual liberty," of "personal responsibility," and it performs a fan dance with libertarianism. (Well, it used to. Since 2012, it has been more of a peep show, where the primaries are all access libertarian and the general elections put on a flag G-string.) The Democratic Party is the party of good governance, of community building, of ensuring welfare and commonweal. Most of its definitions feature "community" and "common" in them.

September the eleventh made both parties aliens to the United States. Unlike the United Kingdom and numerous European nations, the U.S. has no "government" distinct from its politicians. We do have a civil service, but it is weak and without an identity of its own. It is certainly not operating contrary to the political system. There could be no American "Yes, Minister" the way there was an American "House of Cards," because our civil servants have less and less job security and are beholden to political appointees who face the spoils system. Thus, most talk of "the government" Americans do has been faulty from nearly the day of Andrew Jackson. It has certainly been faulty since the 1980's. However, since 2001, we have begun to grow a government, complete with self-protection and ideology separate from the political EVEN AS the traditional civil service has been put under more political control than ever before.

This government of 9/11 begins and ends with a fiat: It is the job of government to keep the citizens safe from "evildoers"/ "those who wish us harm" (the difference is one of dialect, not language). You heard Bush say that his job was keeping Americans safe countless times. You may have even heard Cheney and others lie and claim that Bush was a good president because there were no terrorist attacks on Americans during his presidency. If you have been listening, you have also heard President Obama define his job this way, and probably as often as his predecessor. 

 

The problem is that, well, keeping citizens safe from harm is simply not one of the duties of the presidency. The president of the United States is the head of the executive branch. He is the chief cop and the chief enforcer of laws. In war, she is the coordinator of the armed forces ("commander in chief"). There is no warrior king, priest king ("decider"), or even "CEO president" function to the job. Armed forces keep us safe from foreign powers, and police keep us safe from those on our soil if they have broken a criminal law. Secret services stop agents of enemy and foreign powers. Quick: what part of the government is the Secret Service a portion of?

We all want to be safe, of course. However, we also all want to be asked how we are kept safe, if we are a democracy. A critical difference between democracy and fascism is that we do not believe that a Great Man (or woman) might, with will or strength, achieve what the people, with consent, do every day. A critical difference between democracy and the Soviet is that we do not believe that the Party or state leadership can, with critical efficiencies or expert policy, achieve what we do in our stumbling consensual manner.

Never mind my idealism, though. The parties are aliens to the government of the United States because this government dedicated to keeping Americans safe has a new question to ask. It is no longer concerned with the individual's happiness or the group's welfare, as both are irrelevant. Instead, it asks, over and over again, "Who are you? What is the identity of the citizen?"

Define for yourself the goal of N.S.A. and other agencies dedicated to defeating foreign agents in an era when "agent" no longer means what it once did. Whereas once an agent was a person not only acting in the interests of a foreign entity but acting at the behest of that foreign entity, an agent now does not need the alien entity's knowledge, much less involvement. This is because the agent is no longer of a foreign power, but a foreign ideology. Furthermore, that ideology is not named. It isn't "the Communist Party": it's "terror" or "wishing us harm."

Even though we in the United States do not have an official religion or official ideology, we have a shifting net of enemy ideologies that are largely identified solely by the willingness of anyone propounding them to, coincidentally or consequentially, advocate violence against the U.S. military, U.S. citizens, U.S. territory, or U.S. assets. Think back to 1978 for a moment and remember the anti-nuclear protests held throughout Europe. It was a weapon that made plain the fact that some of Europe would be a battlefield in a coming war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., and the people living on that battlefield were less than pleased. Some of them were infiltrated by Soviet agitators. Some of them were violent. Most of them were neither. Were that today, would N.S.A. label "Belgian" or "Social Democrat" as enemy ideologies? Under the philosophy that demands that all believers in a religion or religious sect are "enemy" today, it might. This is a consequence of 9/11 and defining the goal of government as "protecting Americans." Once that becomes the goal, violence is the only qualification for enemy status.

 

Imagine that you are floating in the ocean. Now, so long as you float, you will be rescued. However, a line is tied to you and attached to everyone you know. For reasons unclear to you, some of these people cannot swim and have weights attached to them, while others are just struggling swimmers like yourself. Even the people you are tied to who are swimming are themselves tied to all the people they know, and some of them are sinking. It is fairly likely, depending upon how many people you know, that you will be dragged down.

As far as the security government is concerned, a person is not a person. A person is a set of associations -- a deferred identity calculated by its connective power. Each association is either dangerous or not. If an association is not dangerous, it carries no weight. If it is dangerous, it weights the person. Furthermore, the attachment's weight is determined by its own attachments. Are you an enemy of America? Well, a friend of yours who has a friend in the Peace Corps who made friends with a group of people in Yemen has sunk you. You do not know this, of course, because you do not know your friend's friends. Your friend, in fact, does not know his friends are today called "terrorist" by someone. They, indeed, do not know that they are "terrorists," necessarily. Even if they have shouted, "Death to America," they could have repented of the view. It would not matter. It does not matter because the government's role is to "keep Americans safe," not to produce an accurate risk assessment.

 

Once we take the one, small step, from "provide for the common welfare" to "keep Americans safe," safety trumps all political activities and all operations of the state. The citizens cease to have civic value and transform into menace or neutrality, and only menace or neutral. The two political parties, therefore, become entirely beside the point. Individual liberty or community building are meaningless questions to a government dedicated to detecting threats and sifting its own population into only two piles.

I could offer up homespun analogies on the philosophy of safety. I could ask you to compare a nation to a household and to think of the effects of parents who seek to keep their children safe at all costs with not a thought to the children's happiness, prosperity, or education. However, those analogies foster reductive thinking, because nations are not families, or businesses, or enough like anything except themselves to be profitably compared except to each other. In fact, nations are capable of a phenomenon that is almost without parallel in any other organism: they can grow alienated from themselves. Nations can, under the worst possible circumstances, begin to operate one way while believing another; they can begin to concentrate power in one spot while announcing it in another. The most famous, and therefore guarded against, condition of national alienation is the phenomenon of bureaucracy. When the civilization is not rule by the demos (democracy) or representative (res publica/republic) or divine person, or by select family, or by the wealthy, but, instead, by bureaus, then an unthinking, vegetable mind governs indifferently to all concerns and makes all political exchanges inefficient.

We are not in a bureaucracy. We have something else. Dana Priest's report on “Secret America,” where she began to see just how large the expenditure and secrecy is in Classified work, certainly testifies to a potential bureaucracy of safety, but, forgetting the inefficiencies of duplication and lack of oversight, we have an alienation where no one votes for safety as a national priority. Neither chamber of Congress, no election, and no presidential order reorganizes society onto safety first. All the same, it is there, and it determines the activities of all other facets of the nation.

 

One way that we can tell that our nation is alienated is the staggering bathos of the safety measures. When, two weeks after September eleventh, military with sub-machine guns were stationed in Penn Station in New York City, it did not make travelers feel safer. Coming in from Madison Avenue and having one's eye first fall on a soldier with a slung machine gun did not set a commuter's mind at ease. The harlequin pantomime that has replaced airline boarding – shoes off, hands up, standing in a booth – does not give safety, either. Crucially, both “left” and “right” react the same way to these measures. The left rejects the loss of civil liberties, and the right fears “the government” and calls for a right to have personal firearms to protect itself. These measures launched in the name of security represent no one's political idea, no one's civil goal, and deliver no one's social good, but there they are. The most conservative president in history and the current president alike have presided over measures seemingly no one has endorsed.

What began as an urge to reverse every expansion of civil liberties of the 1970's with the USA PATRIOT ACT turned into something else. It has turned into something with the power to generate itself, something that moves by a vegetative mind, with a motive (to make America safe) that is paramilitary and unconstitutional. The government that is arising now, what people call “the security state” (a misnomer, as this is not the state; it is beneath the state and beside the state), sets out an end goal that cannot be achieved without the elimination of free will.

Pain and Suffering (the usual)

"Probitas laudatur et alget."--Juvenal Satires I 74

Virtue is praised, and it starves.

I've been in a dark, dark place for a while. Last Wednesday, before I found out that I had $88 to last until September 30th, I was faced with a choice: do I tell my first year students about 9/11 or not? If I do, then I'll have to go there. If I do not, then they may have no idea that their entire world was created out of an act of instinct rather than thought. As I have before, I chose to go. My thinking is that I may be the only person who lived through the two months that were "9/11" in New York City that these people will ever meet, and, if I do not tell them, they will never know.

I began, therefore, with the day. I have written about it before -- how the sky was more perfectly china plate blue than any sky I have ever seen in any place, how the temperature was the sort of chill that teases at one's senses like a lover, enticing and exhilarating at the same time, how the air was so clear that it was possible to see all the way from 90th street to the end of the island, how sparkles appeared on the painted steel lines, how sky scrapers popped one by one across the edge of the window frame on the #6 train. It was a day when even I wanted to play hookey, and I was a) new on the job, b) never skip. (I've taught with high fevers, with tubes running into my bile duct, and once while hungover.) I told them how a full house in the WTC would have meant up to 40,000 dead, so God (or random meterology) saved a lot of lives, because a whole ton of folks went in late.

I told them how, at 10:30, I went on my religious pilgrimage to the bodega for a bowtie donut and a cup of coffee. "You guys will learn that I am very religious," I said, "about lunch." I told them that I gazed down the vast hill and saw a snuffed candle and didn't know what I was seeing. I told them how we knew that we had orphans in front of us, that we were teaching children who had no parents, but we had to be cheerful and normal. Teachers whose own children worked in the towers had to show no signs of concern.

Then I told them about the young woman. I said that she was very attractive, and they seemed puzzled, so I had to add, "I'm a heterosexual man. I'm going to notice. You may think I'm old, but I'm not dead." I told them that she confirmed that people had jumped from the towers. She was filthy, and on 9/11 I silently upbraided her for it in my mind. I now know that it was the 120 mph dust cloud that made her dirty. She had said to me and another stranger, "I was in Liberty Plaza. I was where the bodies landed." I mentioned to the students that, all her life, she would have to deal with seeing people alive, falling, and then, in a fraction of a second, dead.

"What a jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worships,
but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief,
discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!"--Sterne

The people who saw 9/11 on their televisions received a different thing. They felt pain. We humans have only had movies and television a very, very short while, and we neither evolved nor were made with these technologies. If you see or hear a person get injured, you immediately wish to respond. This is human. Despite those people who say that we are all indifferent to one another and out to line our own pockets (shouldn't someone who says that be placed on a malarial island somewhere?), the fact is that we're pretty social. The sound of babies crying is used as a torture. We can't watch or hear another person get hurt without wanting to react to it, to make things better.

Out in America, and perhaps the world, people saw the planes hit the towers, heard the firemen calling for help, saw the towers fall, and then saw it all again and again and again. However, they could do nothing . . . nothing at all, to help. There was no "donate money here" button on the screen.

Television presenters are accustomed to narratives, to stories, and they told 9/11 through a narrative structure. Before the afternoon had come, they were saying who did it and going on to "Why do they hate us?" By the next day, the television news had a complete arc: "They hate us because of our freedom, and they struck us to take our freedom, and now the sleeping giant will get them for what they did."

When you feel pain and cannot respond, pain leads to frustration, and frustration leads to anger. People lined up to enlist in the armed forces. They were angry. W. Bush played on that anger. He might even have genuinely felt it for all I know. The fact is that watching a huge amount of pain delivered and being unable to anything to, about, or for the situation is going to make anyone angry. This is extremely potent stuff for the amygdala of anyone.

In New York City, however, we did not see it. Even the people who were at Liberty Plaza could not have seen it without incredibly bad luck. Had they seen one impact, they'd not have seen the other. Had they seen both, they'd not be standing there to see the collapses. Had they seen the collapses, they'd not have seen the ash and debris cloud. Instead, everyone heard the part that directly affected the individual. The people in New York City knew less about what was going on than the least attentive viewer in Hawaii.

Whatever we saw, heard, or felt, we responded. We had no choice but to respond. If we wished to, we could go down to the pile and volunteer, too. Many civilians volunteered on the first and second day. Even people in the outer boroughs, though, had to respond to the attack, because all had to get food. No trucks were allowed across the river. We had to get transportation. We had to find out if the people we knew were lost or had lost people.

Also, 9/11 never stopped for us. It played all night, each morning, all day, every day. The ash floated down for days. The smoke blew for over a month.

New Yorkers had an a) unrelenting, b) unexplainable, c) irreducible, d) meaningless and constant suffering. Pain makes you act. If a person has pain and cannot remedy it, the person feels anger. Suffering is otherwise. Suffering will not listen to anyone saying, "They hate us because of our freedoms." Aside from that statement being irrational, the statement is entirely non-ameliorative. No one and no thing is made better by understanding that someone hates us for freedom. If the fires burn today and will tomorrow, it does not matter. Furthermore, there is no "make them pay for this." Not only did "the evil men who did this" already "pay" for what they did (they were in the pile), but the fire would burn tomorrow just the same, whether some Afghanistani village were blown up or not.

Suffering is knowing that the air is harmful and that it will be that way for a month. It is seeing ash-covered bicycles being discovered long after the event. It is men with submachine guns suddenly showing up in the subway station to "reassure" us! Suffering teaches no lessons. Suffering has no meaning. Suffering is not sent or received.

Job is the greatest book about suffering ever written. Job does not learn anything, precisely. However, Job grows as a soul in the course of his suffering. You and I are not Job. At the apogee of his growth, Job is able to say, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." He is not happy with the giving or the taking, but rather saying that the power is God's and that God remains good irrespective of which act is involved or how it affects us. He is not, I think, saying what Leibnitz says -- that what is painful or bad to a human is good in the grand scheme of things -- but rather that however giving or taking treats the happiness of a person is incapable of lessening God's glory and goodness.

To arrive at a conclusion like that and not be a quietist or defeatist, to keep insisting that he will not confess a false sin, nor lose faith, Job's soul is truly great. There is no lesson, though. Had Job not reached that wisdom, the suffering would have been the same, and coming to the understanding doesn't make the boils drop off.

If you are punched in the arm, you will want to match aggression for aggression, but if you suffer, you won't think that more suffering will help. I think about a bomb or missile that blows up a building and kills four or five innocents but also kills the most lethal terrorist. The village will neither know nor care about the military value of killing this aggressor, but it will know suffering, as it has to have funerals, tend to orphaned children, live with seeing that flash of light and the flicker between life and death. It will have to repair a building, constantly aware that here was where this or that man died. This is why it was hard for those of us who went through 9/11 to agree with the Bush administration's need to go "get" the bad guys.

On the other hand, for those who felt the pain and frustration and, honestly, impotence, of seeing that much pain without redress, a vast act of aggression was on the cards. The nation's instinct was pushing, and that allowed for politicians with dark ambitions and black hearts to get passed unthinkable laws and to reverse America's position on human rights without a discussion, much less a vote, even less a judicial review.

How Bill O'Reilly Can Be Accidentally Correct

Well, Bill O'Reilly is going to have a heck of a time being correct on purpose. He made an argument, a very smug one, on the absolute proof of the existence of God. In case you missed it, it happened a while ago that O'Reilly said,

O'REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can't explain that.

His statement was stupid, and it still is. In fact, it is a bottomless stupidity, because it requires Mr. O'Reilly to not merely not know something that most of us know, but to actually forget things that he almost surely learned.

What causes the tides? The moon. The moon is large enough to attract rocks, to attract water, to pull on everything, even making the Earth bulge just a wee bit. Effectively, as we go from day to night, as the moon goes from over the water to opposite the water, a huge wave develops from the center of the ocean rising, then falling. Voila! The tides come in and go out. 

However, O'Reilly thought that the tides were mysterious, proof, in their reliability, of God. Nothing so vast could be so precise and so regular, it seemed to him, without the omnipotent being attentive to it. Interestingly, another argument of ignorance for God is that something is too unreliable or small to be anything but evidence of God. Thereby people will argue that a cancer in remission or a car accident must establish a divine intervention (randomness mandating a controlling intelligence) and that the modern tide tables' precision proves that God is being a global harbormaster.

I know that there is a God, but I would not offer the sort of argument that either Bill O'Reilly did -- where the vastness of anything proves it or the bewilderment of chance demands it -- and the idea of holding up such an argument as if it were self-proven is sadly funny. However, Bill O'Reilly, as I said, got accidentally correct. The first place was by showing, rather than knowing or telling, the process of his need.

It's not my place to judge anyone except students who pay me, and then I only judge their writing. I do not know the depth or complexity of Bill O'Reilly's faith, and I hope that it is deeper than he showed in that anecdote. What he showed, though, was a faith born out of incomprehension rather than mysticism and an assumption that Authority is always in control of all large actions. A person touched by that need will carry with him an assumption that "the government" is in control, that a bad meal at a restaurant was the result of "the staff" persecuting him, etc.

O'Reilly's attitude toward tides is not fundamentalist Christian. We can glance back a couple of centuries and see how actual puritains viewed the inexplicably large. See Daniel Defoe's The Storm as one grand example. At that time, no one knew how the winds worked, really, although they were getting close, and you can see that Defoe ascribes divine power to a place beyond the physical but saw in individual providence of survival or perishing as tinged with God's power. Defoe, unlike some today, had the brains to realize that bad events did not equal a scourge. (See also his A Journal of the Plague Year.)

O'Reilly's "proof," that tides are too big to exist without some Authority in charge, is a true statement about a mind set, a psychology. For some people, all things incomprehensible are also under authority. The atomic bombs are well regulated, the NSA spying is too big to understand and thus a self-aware and self-controlled entity. 

The other way O'Reilly was accidentally accurate is that, in the most technical sense, we really don't know what causes the tides.

1. The moon's mass is sufficient to attract the oceans, which are 70% of the earth's surface (0.02% of the mass of the planet).
2. Time lapses with cameras on a Foucault's pendulum show that stones on a mountain side rise and fall with the moon.
3. #2 is probably wrong on the how they compensate with the cameras.
4. In physics, gravity is the weak force that all particles of matter have attracting to other particles of matter.

So, each bit of matter wants to be near all other matter.

Very well. How?

The truth is that the simplest, most logical explanation for the tides is the gravitational effect of the moon. All persons of sense would accept that answer. Certainly, that's my answer. However, Isaac Newton, when he was working with gravity, couldn't explain how it reached out. He had to resort to spirits, in effect, and "fluxions" to get things attracted. No one can see a "gravitron" or any strings pulling pieces of matter together. We universally recognize the force as present, but it isn't even like a magnet with iron filings.

Bill O'Reilly's explanation is no explanation for the existence of God, although it does give us insight into a paranoid personality complex. Further, if he were to be correct, on the basis that no one can adequately explain gravity, he would exchange one type of indeterminacy (perfect regularity, but no visible cause) for another (perfect agency, but no visible means).

Dropping the Button

"Now that highway's coming through,
So we all got to move.
This bottom rung ain't no fun at all." -- John Doe, X, "See How We Are"

In 2003, I made the same salary that I make now, until I was laid off. However, I did far better, because I was not in a "right to work" state that was eager to cooperate with any bill collector, no matter how shady, and garnish, pre-tax. That job lasted only three months, more or less, because the year before the head of the schools had written over one hundred million dollars in bad checks. The school system therefore laid off everyone who had been hired that year. However, I had money left over enough, after paying rent and power and the like, to keep paying rent and groceries and telephone for another six months. Today, a paycheck does not last a month.

We have insane inflation. If it's measured by indicators, then our inflation rate is flat or terrifically low, but it is about like the incessant hammering of a man's gaze on a woman's body. It looks for any slip, any weakness, to see the forbidden and then glories on "win." Ritz Crackers now come in half roll sizes for the same price. . . because you might buy them. Your "big" candy bar got smaller and flatter to get wider. The result of shopping anywhere but Mal*Wart is that irrationally selected items of grocery will be $1-$2 above that evil empire of land destruction.

Once, I went to a school that charged $7,000 a year for tuition, and that was the highest outside of the professionally expensive schools (Ivy League, Bard, Sister Cecilia's Special), and the retiring head of Coca-Cola gave the university $110,000,000.00. The school responded by raising tuition, and one VP was honest enough to say they were doing it because Vanderbilt and Duke were raising theirs, and, if we didn't raise ours, people would think we weren't as good.

Businesses seem to be run by the dicta that they have a duty to maximum profits. This is not true even in neo-classical economics. As Henry Ford said, their goal should be the highest quality possible for the lowest cost possible while paying the highest wages possible. Once you believe that your job is "maximize profits," then the job gets easier, and you believe perforce in every other organism as a resource to be mined.

The majestic pile

I was in church this morning, and the offeratory came around. I thought about how I had no cash to put in the plate, and how I was uncertain that I would have money even in two weeks to send off to help pay for the house I'm living in -- much less cover expenses.

I thought that I might put a pain pill in the plate.

(Prescription drugs do not go into the inflation index, I bet. Then again, they don't increase in cost. They all cost exactly the same thing, which is a metered price-per-dose, and that price depends on how far you can be pushed before you would rather die or suffer. These days, $2.00 and $3.00 seem to be popular dose prices.)

"Do you remember that fell evening,
When you heard the banshees howl?
Those lazy drunken bastards
Were singing 'Pity in the Vale.'
They took you up to midnight mass
And left you in the lurch,
So you dropped a button in the plate
And spewed up in the church." -- Shane McGowan of The Pogues, "The Sickbed of Cuchuliann"

Pogue mahoney and all that, but this is not a matter of shame or tradition. This is a matter of relief. Life is beautiful, when once want is gone, which is why want never seems to leave.

"What a jovial and merry world would this be, may it please your worships, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!" -- Corporal Trim to Uncle Toby, Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Critically, functioning in any given context depends upon having the prerequisites. Even the widow's groat is not a prerequisite of church, but it is of being a church member. One always feels insufficient if one is insufficiently integrated. Going to the town commission meeting is free-ish, but one knows that voices carry best when carried by money. Old cars are charming, and then they are not.

When we wonder why the poor do not voice their opinions more or participate more in local politics, we show our own obliviousness. The inverted world we occupy, where a pocket sized computer that plays only games, the DS III or whatever it may be now, is easy to get, but where shelter is dear and food is a war between corporations that own all brands and want to test each buyer's attention to the limit, makes it quite, quite clear that only the wealthy have three dimensions to their social and political selves. The rest of us are fractions and shadows -- sources of revenue or labor or data alone.

I do not want to be a resource, human or otherwise, for the continuation of the lopsided wave that is American capitalism.

In Which I Step in It

See, over here, you've got your sex, and over there, you've got your gender, and the two don't always meet.

I don't know whether or not to treat my readers like sophisticates of The Second Sex who all, themselves, know that there is a construction in society and by society of roles for sexes and that these roles are more or less dormant scripts. We call these "gender," and they are, as it were, the two halves of the Dramatis Personae of the play. Within each half, there are subtypes, but each is defined ahead of time by the corporate authorship of the audience and the other players.

"Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves?" -- D. H. Lawrence, "Tortoise Shout" (in magenta, no less!)

In addition, there is a social play going on, whereby one sex or gender gets to be the normative one and the foreground object to the organization and the other is the supporting role. This is an elaborately negotiated and continually adjustable script as well. Both of these together constitute gender.

Or should I treat my readers as people who believe that "gender" and "sex" are synonyms and that "masculine" is simply an adjective of "male?" I kind of need you guys to buy into the first set of assumptions, at least for what follows, because, even though it might sound airy fairy, it's actually the conservative position.

I know how the complaint that "the boys look like girls, and the girls want to be boys" goes back to the 1960's in the U.S., and then the 1760's, and then Juvenal's Satire II, where "Gracchus has presented to a cornet player-or perhaps it was a player on the straight horn-a dowry of four hundred thousand sesterces. The contract has been signed; the benedictions have been pronounced; a crowd of banqueters seated, the new made bride is reclining on the bosom of her husband. O ye nobles of Rome! is it a soothsayer that we need, or a Censor? Would you be more aghast, would you deem it a greater portent, if a woman gave birth to a calf, or a cow to a lamb? The man who is now arraying himself in the flounces and train and veil of a bride once carried the nodding shields[21] of Mars by the sacred thongs and sweated under the sacred burden!" (By the way, all you right wing flip-outs, the second satire is not about homosexuality. It's about hypocrisy and gluttony and the chasing of pleasure in neglect of duty while, at the same time, pretending to being a moral authority. Read with both of your eyes open.)

However, things have sped up thanks to our wonders of technology. Medicine -- the science, and art, of eliminating physical maladies, sought, caught, and targeted the very serious diseases that industrialization had made ubiquitous among women. Estrogen, progesterone, prolactin, and a host of hormones secreted in amounts previously undetectable are now known, pretty well understood, and reproducible from biological sources. Cancerous conditions and failures to survive infancy led to the laudable pursuit of testosterone's cousins and children, and all of the growth hormones and muscle mass factors, which the body orchestrates so subtly that it would take a fetal heart monitor in a concert hall to hear the notes, are comprehended, cataloged, and producible on demand. Plastic reconstructive surgery -- impelled by the viciousness of our military technologies and their own responses to medicine -- learned to make faces, shape cartilage, and craft features, and, because of cancer's ravages and Oncology's growing successes, how to mold soft tissue and bring sensation to it.

In short, boys can be girls. Girls... not entirely.  The spongy mass down below on men remains an unique signifier so far, but it will fall to persistence and desire.

I mentioned some time ago that I was posting essays at DailyKos. There are several recurrent themes to the essays there. One of them is job loss. One is death. One is, "I just got a vagina," or "I just bought my son her first bra," and I'm so proud. I was not shocked at this last. After all, at Wikipedia a shocking number of editors and chatterboxes were transsexual (compared to international norms). One was thirteen and undergoing transition from male to female.

Indeed, the wider world has largely been buffaloed into silence on the issue of transgender for good and bad reason. There is a lightning quick accusation of anyone with any question of any sexual reassignment of either homophobia or patriarchy or repression. A long list of stories of misery and repression will follow. The dire and genuine instances of grievous wrongs done are now serving to disable any consideration of any expression of reassignment. This is a mistake. The world cocked an eyebrow only when a pair of parents joyfully began sexual reassignment on their five year old boy who was or felt or wanted to be a girl.

If one knew of no real biographical case and only considered transgendered as a phenomenon of biology and brains (sex and the squirts of hormone), then we would expect it to be roughly evenly distributed between men and women, and yet male to female vastly outnumber female to male transsexuals. Given the potency of male hormone and the exquisite balance and perfect recipe of female sex hormones it requires to manifest in a brain/behavioral change, it would seem far easier, biologically, to err in female to male, not male to female.

Additionally, we would not expect to find sexual orientation and gender identification to be at odds at any great degree. In other words, there shouldn't be a great many male-to-female lesbians, and yet there are quite a few. Obviously, sexual orientation and sexual identity are not the same, and gay men are not really women any more than lesbians are pseudo-men.

Me? I'll be the one. I'll step in it. I'll say what no one will say. I'll say that no child should be given sexual reassignment therapy. Puberty and menopause/andropause are the two biggest biological revolutions we experience, shy of birth and death, and darn near everything can change. Puberty is also the time when gender is its worst, and where both sexes might wish devoutly to be the other.

Specifically, though, gender -- the code of behavior -- is freer for girls than boys, from a boy's perspective, but it is not freer for boys from a girl's perspective. The actual sex of female or male is equally awful and annoying or pleasant and liberating, but the gender...that's different.

What a male child sees is that girls get attention. They can act out and be the center of attention and be admired. Boys are not allowed to do that. Girls can also opt to stay home, can be retiring, and can be wounded, where boys must be vigorous, outward looking, and strong. They see the ability to appreciate art and giggle, where their own code demands that they ride skateboards and break their knees. The male adolescent sees feminine as being free to choose, as girls can be boyish or dandy and be acceptable, while their code tightens on them and demands muscular competition. They see feminine as offering, again, attention and the freedom to feel, while their world has only the category of "man enough" and "fag." Only the adult man sees feminine as no greater than what he has, because only the adult is free from (one hopes) being defined by others.

A female child sees boys being allowed to go out, when they must watch their clothes and looks. She sees that boys can go screaming at full voice into a muddy stream without a thought in their heads, and people applaud it, where they have to worry about every detail of how it will look to other people. They see masculine as being unlimited and free. The female adolescent sees masculine as powerful. Boys can ask for what they want, and no one will judge them for it. They can go out whenever, and they can say whatever they want, because no one is keeping score on them. Boys don't have to take an hour getting dressed so as to not be made fun of by the other girls for having some fashion that they can fault. Only a woman can see masculinity's restrictions and adjust her own degree of participation in the codes she passed through.

Now, if a boy child says he wants to be a princess, then no stinking wonder! If a male adolescent is miserable and thinks girls have it made, and he'd be such a dyke, if he were a girl... then that's just poppycock. We have found ways of making each other miserable and suicidal, of gouging out chunks of affection and memory from one another through gender, simply because we're all enslaved for five to ten years by a wild, flaming itch of desire.

Are environmental estrogens and endocrine blockers doing a number on the males of the United States? You bet your "Just Bitten" lip gloss they are! Are little boys ready for the joy of buying their first breast forms and picking out their vaginas? No. That's sexual reassignment, and sexuality isn't, I think, the issue, as much as gender.

By the way, below is a photo of your author holding The Ladder he built and described in the post below.

Why is the Gin Grinch saying these mean things?

I'm thrilled that Newt Gingrich is getting some of the negative attention that he has deserved for decades. He has enjoyed a Pat Buchanan like existence -- uttering troglodytic slogans, spitting poison, retreating to a cavern of stink, and always, always, always getting paid. Finally, though, his millionaires have met up with Romnoid's millionaires, and Newt's getting Newtered.

That said, he hasn't changed. There are three stages of a newt's life cycle. There is the newt in repose, when it gathers resentment and money, the newt campaigning, when it empties its bladder of all the stored resentment, and the newt sunning itself on the rock while in office, which is the time it picks on flies and claims to be defeating dragons.

However, Newt Gingrich, from Pennsylvania, found a niche in a defense contractor dominated area of Atlanta, and he migrated into that area and expanded to fill it completely. When he lost his position in Congress, he played dead, perhaps, but he is an old pro at playing possum. Once he was no longer Speaker of the House or minority or majority whip, what was the harm in putting him on Meet the Press FIFTY-THREE TIMES? After all, as an unelected, non-policy person, who could be more germane for a Sunday show?

I know that Mitt Romney is supposed to be the "perfectly lubricated weather vane," but Newt is self-lubricated. As for where he points, it is not where the voters push, but where they pull. Himself, he goes here and there, spinning as ego and carnal bliss may lead, but as a campaigner? He has one trick.

It seems tone deaf, if not suicidal, for Newt to go for the racial folderol, doesn't it? Even an audience that booed Jesus Christ applauded (lightly) when Juan Williams pointed out to Gingrich that his garbage about "Food Stamps" seemed racist. In 2008, the United States elected its first African American president, and it did so with a huge popular vote margin. Racism, qua racism, doesn't really win.

It's just that Newt is a salamander of habit.

We got our first taste of "strapping bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps in 1980 from Ronald Reagan. It is possible that, in this age of more-lunatic-than-Reagan economic politics from the Republican Party, we have forgotten what Reagan Republicans looked like. It was Reagan who gave us "Welfare queen" and the "young buck" in 1976, and he kept the language going in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Newt liked. Newt learned.

Reagan Republicanism is misdirection at its most basic. Gingrich is caught. He has lost his ability to appear financially right wing, thanks to the bane of the far right wing corporate attack ads aimed at him. He has lost the ability to be the moral majoritarian, thanks to all the stained bedsheets being waved about. These are his winning issues! He has lost his stance as the smart guy by being exposed as silly, stupid, wrong, and extremely arrogant.

He has nothing, so he goes to the one thing that always works: the flashpot distraction of "lazy Black people are taking your money." It has always saved him in the past, and it's working for him now.

The most significant problem with Newt's flashbang grenade is that the room is too small.

You see, the diversion is working for him, among primary voters who boo Jesus Christ. This group wanted to be convinced only that there was a reason not to succumb to the inevitable Mittens. He has been able to interrupt everyone else by saying, "Don't you hate Welfare queens and gang bangers getting rich in their lazy 'hoods off of your money? Have you noticed that the President is a . . . guy who helps those people do that?" They were saying, "Gingrich has no economic plans as radical as ours, has no social policies as vicious as ours, and he has been free with his penis, unlike us," since the burden to pass for primary voters appears to be radicalism. He has succeeded only by saying, "Maybe, but I'm willing to say racist things in thinly disguised code without apologizing."

The most essential problem with Newt's turn is that it's a repeat. I don't mean by that, by the way, that racists have learned anything.

Have you noticed that Newt never campaigns on his Congressional accomplishments? Wouldn't you expect the legislative leader of the Republican Party in opposition to a Democratic president to campaign on successful legislation? Wouldn't you expect him to boast of his Contract On America? In 1994, Newt announced a takeover. He had a vision. He and his party were going to flat out dictate legislation.

You see, they succeeded. That's the thing. Newt should be campaigning on all he accomplished, because he got his way!

He SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT to prove that "government isn't the solution to the problem. Government is the problem." The nation did not agree. You see, the truth, which is that the government is made up of the people, that our government is us, was made quite clear. Furthermore, he CLEARED THE WAY for corporate contributions to campaigns. He set in motion the destruction of Glass-Stegal that led to the banking collapse. He enabled the merger-mania that made Mitt Romney millions. He cut the capital gains tax so that Mitt Romney could draw ten million dollars a year and pay 15% in income taxes.

Why isn't Newt bragging about all that? Don't Republican voters like what they want?

More particularly, though, Newt's signal success was making good on his promise to get rid of all those lazy Welfare queens. The Welfare Reform Act of 1995 is Newtie's. (I vowed not to vote for Clinton's second term when he signed it.) You see, Newt Gingrich killed Welfare. It doesn't exist anymore.

Under the new thing, no one may receive aid for more than three years without being disabled. Therefore, it's three years and then starvation, so no "ten kids in a Cadillac." Foodstamps also ended. Both are now state programs. This has allowed vicious states to be vicious to the poor and humane states to be less vicious, but no one is being kind, or even reasonable.

In other words, Newt has to claim to have had no successes in order to campaign on lazy people on Welfare. He would rather present himself as a failure to repeat his 1980's campaigns than give up the dodge of racism. The campaign racism of the 1980's was bull to begin with, of course, because, when Welfare did exist, it went to Caucasians at a rate greater than demographic percentages would indicate, and Food Stamps are primarily to benefit dependent children. No one is a "buck" with a T-bone, but no one ever had been.

Never mind that, though: reality is not what Newt wants. It's not what he can afford.


Incidentally, this...

This is very funny and very well done, and don't even bother trying to tell me that it isn't, because there is "well constructed wit," and that's different from "I was in the mood to laugh."

I Get Mitt

“I like being able to fire people.” – Mitt Romney, January 9, 2012.

People complain about Mitt Romney. They say that his followers are Romnulans. They say that he is a Romneybot. They say that he is a failed experiment by the Blue Fairy, who got bored of granting the wishes to suspiciously loved pediatric puppets and decided to see if she could turn a real boy into wood.2 But I get Mitt. Mitt's a regular guy, and his quote from the Chamber Com/Mers was proof of that.3

While candidates of questionable patriotism like John Huntsman might think the sentiment makes Mittens “unelectable,” I, and CBS Money Watch's Suzanne Lucas, know that Mitt was just being a regular guy!  It's probably going to win him votes among highly successful people.4

All Mittie meant, according to Ms. Lucas (and I'll bet she's really pretty!) is what Thomas Carlyle said earlier:

Whoever has sixpence is sovereign over all men – to the extent of the sixpence; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him – to the extent of sixpence. – Carlyle, Sartor Resartus 5

Now that Carlyle guy's character is poor, but the poor people get to fire people, too, and Mitt's unemployed! He doesn't even get a paycheck! So Mitt, just like every other regular guy, just means that he likes being able to say no to the people who fail to please him, and don't we all?

He's a regular Joe six-pack, complaining about the government. Those guys who make more money than he does and do an inferior job. It's the right -- nay, the pleasure -- of successful men to tell off inefficient and lousy workers as you demand better service.

A highly successful American man.

I remember, once, when I was in the small (I guess it's a town; "farm," "manorial estate," and "smear" all seem to miss the mark) of Dunwoody, Georgia. This town suffered from an infestation of money. There was an insidious rot of the stuff everywhere, but especially in the homes and cars, and I was in what was then its shiny new mall, called Perimeter Mall.6 I was in line at the McFood's, but I was unable to practice my love. A middle aged man was in front of me, and he was yelling at the counter help.

The beef patty in his bread sandwich was not warm upon reaching the plastic tray, and the condiments were applied unevenly. Furthermore, the pommes frites were tepid. He demanded . . . . Well, I wasn't entirely clear what it was that he demanded. He refused a coupon and a replacement. Instead, he was telling the counter boy that HE KNEW what it took, that HE had spent years in business, and YOU DON'T GET AHEAD by giving an inferior product.

The boy behind the counter looked as though his head were about to explode.7 Myself, I wanted to rabbit punch the business expert very much. I even formed a fist with one knuckle protruding, and I was examining his medulla oblogata.8 I thought it would be easier than asking him at what point he had gotten confused and believed that he had wandered into a three star restaurant or mistakenly assumed that he had paid for food of higher... well, food.

Now, though, I get it. That was Mitt. He was firing someone.

When depression strikes, and it strikes with a wet thud most of the time,9 some people hit the chocolate pie, some people regress, and a lot of people go for “retail therapy.” Taken to any kind of reliance or extreme, buying one's way out of a funk is a disease, but going down to the hobby store to buy a $1.29 Guillow Glider can be an enjoyable lift of the spirits. Put $25 in your pocket and go to the dollar store, and you can feel like king or queen of the world. Carlyle's quote comes true: you command the earth to the extent of that $25.

You become the Disney Princess, the Man of Largesse. Go to Krystal or White Castle, and you can purchase whole hamburgers for less than a dollar. This is that necessary, joyful illusion of prosperity and comfort and, most dear of all, power over one's tiny, crashing world, that we all have available to us to some small extent, if we have some employment.

Not everyone wants to be the Princess, though. Some people want to be the Queen.

”I don't want to get married. I just want to get divorced.” – Natasha (Jessica Harper) in “Love and Death”

Mittie's one of us, you see. He likes to lift his spirits by going out and, to the extent of two hundred and fifty million dollars, telling people that they're not good enough.10

You enjoy yelling at the mail man and paper boy, don't you? Well, so does Mitt. It's just a question of scale. If you have a problem with the difference in scale, it's not because Mitt's different, but because you're envious of him. It's true that he may have to buy up a company in order to demonstrate to it just how inferior it is, has to hire it in order to fire it, but that's again just a question of scale and envy on your part.

Some children go through the “fa-da” phase. (Ok, all children do, although I promise that I didn't. I only went through the fa so phase.) This is when they demand that Mommy give them a toy so that they can throw it on the ground and demand it again. It is great fun for the infant, because it proves that the infant has power. Some infants get stuck in a pleasure principle of gathering in, and others a destructive principle of tearing down11, and that's just how it goes -- but that's totally normal, just a regular guy kind of thing. The people who get into the love of accumulating can end up being addicted to things, I suppose, but, on the other hand, the ones who like to destroy make good human resources people.

So let's all give Mittie a break. He's a regular guy. He just likes to be able to fire people. Surely that bodes well for all of us as his employees, if he becomes president, doesn't it?
==Notes==
1.
    There is no first note.
2.
     I think it is entirely unfair to the conifer and angiosperm phyla to accuse Mitt Romney of bearing any relation to them. Furthermore, although the dream of a little boy born to a bachelor could be read rather, err, curiously today (just why did Giapetto want a boy he could control?), I think that it isnot true that those who call Romney wooden are trying to contrast the Mormon church's superfetation with the Roman Catholic Church's recent difficulties.
3.
     The connections between the Chambers of Commerce and SMERSH are well known. One has only to look at the video of Romney's remarks to spot several doubtful looking individuals.
4.
     Super effective people don't read books. They read summaries on the web that are based on summaries gotten from hornbooks.
5.
     If Carlyle had staid like he was when he wrote Sartor Resartus, more people would like him today. That book was sort of the last hurrah of the younger generation of Romantics, the last gasp of aestheticism (but no one told Aubrey Beardsley that). Unfortunately, he started making kissy faces at the boots of Great Men. . . and so did his wife, I think. . . and his historical view started getting pretty oily.
6.
     This mall was named for its proud stature of riding the "perimeter highway" of I-285, which is itself a strange thing, as "interstate" 285 goes around in a circle and therefore does not go inter state at all. It does, however, mark the state of "Atlanta, those people, it, what can't come out here" and "Us, normal folks, you know?, do I have to spell it out?, nice places." The demarcation was entirely economic, of course, and completely polite. Except in Stone Mountain. And Cuming.
7.
     This was not because he was going to holler back at the cretinous monster in his face, but rather due to the state of his acne.
8.
     Look at your dominant hand. Clench a fist. Now, stick your second finger knuckle out a bit by means of bedding the nail of that finger against your thumb. Be vewy vewy quiet as you approach the important business executive. Smile and stand behind him. When you hear, "Oh, sure, Obama wants to tax the top 2% of our income, but then it'll be 50%, and it's like Russia" or some other bit of insane certitude, bring your dominant hand back even with your ear, and strike quickly at the base of the offender's neck. Laughing hysterically or jumping up and down in glee is not necessary.
9.
     It can also fall like night, creep like a thief, strangle like a pillow, drown like a flood, massacre like a battallion of syphilitic cossacks, snipe like a myopic sharp shooter,  or overpower like a 1949 Oldsmobile sedan being swung on a pendulum from behind you.
10.
     Of course it's completely unfair to suggest that a highly successful businessman would spend his entire net worth on buying things in order to savage them. After all, his five boys have their ten million trusts, and he has operating capital. He probably operates on less than a tenth of that total worth -- $20,000,000.00 or so -- so it's hardly worth talking about. Chump change, really. Not enough room to maneuver, really, even when it's a buyer's and firer's market.
10.
     Bet you thought I was going to go for the anal retentive/anal expulsive thing, didn't you? Well, I'm not. I don't even know about that.

The borders of Paradise

This morning, and I have all my essay ideas in the morning before thoughts can side track the natural impulse, I heard an Iranian-German artist lady talking about filming dancers in Iran. She said that dance is absolutely forbidden in Iran, but they have something called "rhythmic movement" that is allowed.

"No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of the misunderstanding of the ends of art." -- Ruskin

We can take Ruskin's quote and nod sagely. "Yes, yes," we say, "and out of the crooked timber, what-what." The later Victorians were full of awareness of imperfection, situated as they were in the satiated and regretful phase of empire. Category and clarity had swept away the sights of beggars, but not the beggars themselves, and "The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness, than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings," as Hazlitt wrote in 1829. Many had come to realize that the noise could not be shut out, that, as Horace said, "Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret" (in Epistles) ['You can drive Nature out with a pitchfork, but she will return again']. Cover the nudity, and it's still under the covers.

Nevertheless, when we persist through these ages of empire, of decay, of self-conscious sadness, there is a tendency on our parts to turn from a red faced public servant with a sack full of fig leaves to John Cage. We go from purists to artists of Autotune. This produces its own dialectic, if not enterically then exotically. The religious fundamentalist and the political fundamentalist alike appeals to any population that is awash in too much embracing of porous borders. Each generates its own idealistic ideology, its own Zion Celeste.

The political idealists are easier to talk about than religious revolutionaries, as they seem to conform to readily understood causes that have economic and material bases, and they often transform into other parties, other organizations. Thus, it's not so hard to talk about fascists in Germany (but you'll have a heck of a time nailing them down in Italy), and it's not that hard to talk about the John Birch Society in the U.S. or the National Front in the U.K. These groups all set out to be puritanical -- to achieve an ostensibly conservative goal by the eradication of all accumulated state apparatus and the imposition of a morality and clarity that had been muddied by Them and the agents of evil.

The political groups want to stop the flow of population, the drift of genes, the spread of culture, the transformation of economic structures. In that regard, they are not conservative, but Utopian. They are not, and never have been, summoning glories of the past but promising a thing that cannot be: a frozen moment of security. To achieve any of their goals would require immense power, tremendous abridgments of liberties, and endless regulation -- as both Italian and German manifestations of fascism have attested (and the latter also required a reiteration of slave labor for its economics to function). This is because they are attempting the impossible: they want to stop nature.

It is natural for people to mix their genes, to mix their tongues in more than one way, to invent and forget, and to flow as far as they can to opportunity, because humans are opportunistic.

Is the same true of political purists of the communal variety -- the socialists? Since these groups begin by embracing paper work and rules and the state's place in administration, it is hard to see how they are betrayed by their actuality as much as that they fail by siphoning off their potential in their implementation. The ideological and idealistic energy behind their endeavor lessens with each aparatchik, each factory boss promoting his buddies, each rigged election, and each set of police necessary to monitor these.

In Iran, they had a completely idealistic revolution. It was simple: they would have a real theocracy. In Afghanistan, the same thing, more or less, from a different branch of the religion. In 17th century England, too, they had a clean, clear idea: the Lord's own nation, led by saints inspired by the Holy Spirit. We know from history that the English were unhappy with their government and, because of the semi-feudal nature of the remaining state, were able to affect a second revolution to restore, but with changes, the prior government and nation state structure. That is not to say that Cromwell failed, or the Taliban failed, or the Ayatollahs failed, because "fail" depends upon the goal sought.

I know that it's convention for the Marxists to reject religious socialism as being non-revolutionary, it's also true that the power of the supernatural ideal powers the endeavor once in place far more effectively than a philosophical system. The problem, though, is that they have a problem of ensuring that their ideology extends into the subject. In other words, when Christianity or Islam ceases to be a religious choice and becomes your employer or your state, then your state and your employer have to, as a matter of existence and operation, extend religious faith into the mind and soul of the employee and citizen.

The ideal, which is lovely and functioning when idealists join, becomes state power when those idealists triumph and make the ideal the innervating element of the state.

Once Oliver Cromwell became Protector General, it became necessary to ensure the Christianity of the people. Instead of trusting the people to be Christian, the state now had an interest, and therefore it had to have proof. Further, it needed to specify for its functionaries how and what would be considered moral. Idealized states spin paper as a precondition of their existence. Perfection, after all, is only perfect if it is protected in a static position, and that means ruling out change or ruling in qualities.

Therefore, the Iranian "rhythmic movement" and "approved hairstyles for men" are examples both of the native authoritarian extension of power into an ideological space of the subject and the deterioration of the subjective ideal that frames the power impulse. A state may start out with the simple ideal of good men and women, but it will need to say what constitutes good, and then what constitutes bad, and then it will make the soul of the individual, as well as the body, its concern.

Our dilemma, then, as humanity, is that we accept the blood and pus and confusion of allowing each other to sin, and thereby create a call for our overthrow, or we strive to a perfection that, by its nature, is death. Either that or, more sensibly, we worry about the neighbors' health and happiness and our own goodness.

The Anniversaries and the Lies

It's time to have it out with the date, to have the date out, and all that it brings, to neutralize the things above it. I have written about September 11, 2001 twice now, and I never thought that I would write about it once. I hadn't the right, for one thing, and I am not special. Further, there was nothing to say: what does the fly say about the glass sky scraper it bumps into?

Immediately after September 11 itself, there were calls for oral history projects. One of the major insurance companies, I believe, offered to cover psychological counseling for anyone. (The catch was that they wanted you to become a policy holder, and then they'd offer it.) There were services available, but I needed and had a right to none of that. First, there were worthier stories, worthier people, worthier deeds and witnesses. Secondly, I had nothing to say. Nor was I honoring my phlegmatic heritage nor modesty by trying to allow the graver wounds a place in line.

Whenever there are military memoirs, they begin with statements like, “I arrived on Paris Island October 3, 1967” or “I served Mil. Sec. IV, Advanced Combat, for III Corps in-country 1971.” This is one reason such memoirs have always had the smell of gun oil about them for me. They begin, and sometimes continue, with barking of incomprehensible military acronyms and slang, and I never understood why any honest person would write that way until I came to write about 9/11 for a wide audience this year (2011). I make no claims for my honesty, but the reason that the military memoir starts with such mystifying language is fear. It is the same reason that I would not go forward at the time, the same reason I would not speak of my experiences, the same reason that I do not have a right to be bothered by them now.

We live in a world of official voices and official views, an atmosphere deep in images and narratives of what has happened and, worse, what it means or meant. A soldier writing about Fallujah first knows that an official account exists and/or that there is a news and television narrative competing with his own. (If there were not, he would have no need to write. He could simply say, “Richard Lowry's book on the battle mentions X, and I was part of that” or “Most people know that the battle for Fallujah happened twice....” This is why soldiers, to qualify themselves, and to validate and limit themselves, to protect themselves, have to say exactly who they were inside the context of the military and how they have a right to a story in the first place. Even if the public never challenges the author, the author feels that challenge, just because she or he knows about the competition, knows that, in a sense, the world does not need a new story as much as the author needs the world to hear it.

If a memoirist continues with the slang and acronyms, then he or she is probably a chowder head, but most do not. The same is true, I think, of those who write now, years too late, of 9/11. I will not speak for others, though. They speak for themselves.

My experiences were non-traumatic. I lost no loved ones. I was not injured. My apartment did not burn, and I did not even go without electricity. I have the least right to a voice of any who were on Manhattan that day. This is a fact, and it is an inescapable one. I have reminded myself of it, too. Every time that the vague misery, the disquiet that cannot be found or quelled, the sense of misunderstanding and theft, has come up, I have repeated this to myself. I can be depressed about my economic position, my finances, my family life, my love life, politics, the people claiming to speak for religion, but not this.

“Nevertheless, it moves,” as the man said. In 2002, we did not talk about the attacks. In fact, no one I knew talked about them at all. We knew about them, so we didn't talk about them. Even as we navigated around the attack sites, we did not speak of them. As we developed strategies for teaching students who had lost parents, we did not speak of the attacks. As we saw and read about the clean ups that were going to identify “abandoned” cars and property, we did not say anything. In fact, the first time I remember even alluding to the attacks with another New Yorker was in early August of 2003, when I was on the #6 train, heading home at 4:30, and the power went out just as the train was over the Bronx River. We sat in the car for twenty minutes before MTA had a solution, and, while we sat there, we talked, and several of us were of the opinion that it was another terrorist attack, and we'd just have to find out after we got somewhere what was affected. (We sat in the car for only twenty minutes, because the MTA had all sorts of plans and were very well practiced. They got us from a trestle bridge to a station without A/C power.) The attacks were there, like the delays, like the smoke, like the hole, like the idiot tourists, like the souvenir sellers from New Jersey, like the new emergency plans, like the economic depression that hit the island, so what was to talk about?

In 2006, I was away from there. I was in small town Georgia. The television did not have a major paroxysm over the anniversary, but public radio shows that were based in New York or Philadelphia did. I found myself, though, having sadness that I could not argue myself out of. The day – the unfathomable mixture and lack of meaning of it – was a revenant, and I had come to its grave. I had had an experience. I had an experience that a million shared, at least.

My experience was of an open question, of an unsolvable riddle. I do not mean “Why did they do it?” Who cares why they did it? It would make no difference. I do not mean, “What are we going to do about it?” It doesn't matter what we do, neither to the dead nor the living. I also do not mean, “What does this mean?” I think most people would be satisfied with knowing that it is random or purposed or cut off from sequence. I mean, instead, “Who am I in this? What happened?”

That year, 2006, I grappled with the single question that had been most on me since the day: am I brave, selfish, giving, or cold? Hundreds of people without training ran down to the pile to help, but I didn't. Tens of thousands suffered the ash, but I didn't. Dozens hugged and cried with survivors, but I didn't. I was practical. I was analytical. I was intellectual. I considered the various authorities, evaluated them, and made decisions. The jumpers and those who were showered with body parts or the binary of life/death presented in a second mesmerized me as a symbol of all of these questions combined. Neither prepared, thought, analyzed, but each had to be herself or himself, and I did not know that I had such a self to rely on, that there was a core beyond the analytical. The artist – refined soul, delicate senses – and the vision most raw and unsought flung upon her became my heroine. She was 9/11 in sum. [I link little. I can tolerate few.]

Five years later, the world has only grown colder, and the chill has allowed not oblivion, but deception. The stunned, altered, confused, tearful visage has suffered another insult: it has been erased, substituted, and summarized. None of us could perceive what happened, either in real time or in its contours. I do not think the Palestinian family or neighborhood struck by an 'errant' missile, or an Afghan wedding party mistakenly hit by Hellfire missiles can. Death that appears so quickly with such ragged and arbitrary edges cannot be understood by the living, because to understand a thing, we have to have a concept of it, and that means being able to define it. To define something, we must know where it begins and ends. (Hegel's phenomenology vexes us because, if someone points at an apple and says, “I mean that apple,” he says, “By apple to do you mean the skin, the red, the shape, the thing on the table, the thing on this table, the thing and the table, the thing, table and chairs? What is it exactly that makes it 'this'?”) When there is a 9/11, no one inside it can know it. It is too big, and we are too small.

We started out not knowing what was happening, but we who lived did so only by never understanding what it was that actually happened. To live, we cut our perspective down into segments of arc. However, the nation outside us had an image. While we knew who we lost, for the nation the victims of the attack were changing. We all knew and mourned and loved the lost firefighters and police who responded to the attacks. We took flowers to the fire houses. However, before Oliver Stone's movie, “9/11,” came out, but definitely shortly after, the nation's image of the victims of the attack changed from stock brokers and office workers to firefighters and police. The image now is perhaps two large, empty buildings falling on 3,000 firemen.

Additionally, the then-president used the attacks as a reason to bomb (which I supported) and invade (which I supported somewhat) Afghanistan. After that, the then-vice president began trying to use 9/11 as a reason for invading Iraq. I was one of 500,000 New York City residents who marched to protest that. However, in the national consciousness these are both “wars of 9/11.” Thus, for many people and, ten years later, media services, the 9/11 attacks are 'about' firefighters and the U.S. military.

The attacks also meant the rapid passing of numerous laws that took away civil rights from citizens. There followed new practices and Executive Orders that reversed longstanding U.S. practices. These are each comprehensible. The wars fit into a narrative logic for the national mind and mood. The civil rights measures affect citizens and inflame imaginations. If we combine this “meaning of 9/11” with the other, we have either a fascist or proudly strong state either regaining its strength or betraying its foundations. Either way, it makes for good television and good debate. It also makes for possible debate.
From Iwo Jima.com: a vigorous debate!
As the tenth anniversary has come along, outrage pushed me. I am no closer to solving the questions the day embedded in my soul. I do not know who I am at core, do not think that I have now grown some core being that would show in the flame. I do not know what the day meant. I do, however, know that understanding its ineffability will do absolutely nothing to cure the pain the question causes. However, when someone else comes along and says that there are “conclusions” for 9/11, I boil. Conclusions? We can't even find the facts yet.

I should allow the nation its track and train, and saying “Not in my name” rings hollow, but there is an evil at work that is as old as the serpent. Humans can turn on the television or the DVD-box and watch people get their throats slit, listen to the blood gurgle. We can excitedly tune in to see a man saw his leg off to get to a knife to stab another man in the stomach. However, if we hear a baby cry, or if our own child is screaming, or if we see a starving child, we cannot bear it. This is because, as animals and creatures, we have a place in our minds called Story. In Story, violence is acceptable, because it is “not real” and always has a reason. For a non-sociopath, reality is sharply different, and the person who can watch violence in story may not be able to watch any pain in person. So long as narrative (story) is used only for made-up things, it is useful.

Evil occurs when reality is put into narrative so as to remove part of its meaning. Sometimes, this is done on purpose, and we call it propaganda. Other times, it is done unintentionally, and we should watch out. I hope what is happening to 9/11 is unintended. I hope that the news people of the moment and the producers today were and are overwhelmed by the event and as unable to put contours onto experience as we were, that they were as shocked and blinded by the violence as we and that their subconscious minds merely protect them by imposing a narrative. However, after a decade it is no longer possible to forgive or excuse imposing story.

The actual story tellers have avoided narrative (“9/11” and “Flight 93”), but the news people have resorted to it. From them we get “What is the reason” (cause) and “How will we react” (response) and “What with the country do” (reply), to “How is the battle to find the Guy” (climax) and a wished-for “Mission Accomplished” (denouement). This narration was overlayed on our reality. Stories have their conclusions built into them by their forms. The political story news created was on top of the original fiction of getting “the guys who did this.” They, of course, were dead already.

We have to stop telling lies. It isn't that the conclusions of that narrative are worse than another. It isn't that it's a bad story or a good story. It's that it's a story. Let at least one thing be untellable. Let it be uncontainable. Let it be too big to explain. That, after all, would be the only experience-based explanation. The only way to stop inflicting the trauma on us is to let the trauma be too big to be falsified.