Happy 25th Birthday, 9/11

Hard to believe it’s been a quarter century! Feels longer!

Generally speaking, it’s useless for anyone my age or younger to opine on 9/11. I was in 4th grade and we sat criss-cross-applesauce and discussed our feelings day-of; mountain time zone was too physically and temporally attenuated to call off the school day. (Ms. Dunham’s approach would have served the nation and the world better than what we did, to be fair.)

I remember the pervasive fear. The anthrax attacks didn’t help. (Just writing those two sentences one after the other has retroactively made me into an “anthrax WAS an inside job” guy.) The flags and yellow ribbons and hate crimes against Sikhs? All part of the stew, baby.

Limp Bizkit was popular, and Creed, and Korn. Music sucked, and we didn’t even have hate or irony-watching Entourage yet (the apogee of Bush Era Culture). It felt like (and was, in retrospect) a transition time.

That’s about all I’ve got. I mean, I was 9 (going on 10 in Nov.–only bears mentioning because, at that age, the difference between a Nov. 1991 birthday and a July or Aug. 1992 birthday is marginally more significant than at 34). I could write about my thoughts on Bionicle? (First two generations cool, scrap the rest.) I could talk about the music I was listening to? (NOW CDs–maybe NOW 8 or 9–and Sex Pistols and Jimi Hendrix and other “backfilling music taste as a stand-in for personality”-grade rock history CDs bought with Christmas Barnes and Noble gift cards from my uncle Pete.) I could talk about what I was reading? (Mostly adult reference books for pre-Christian Mediterranean history and, shamefully, Harry Potter.) These are the memories and thoughts and consumption habits of a literal 9 year old. There is nothing interesting there.

The interesting thing is trying to remember how it felt. I mentioned that pervasive fear and made sideways comments about hate crimes, but that was in the cultural radiation. And it felt radioactive. I’ve always been too much of a limp wristed little pinko to fully buy in to bloodlust (outside of sports), and I distinctly remember thinking to myself, a couple weeks into the invasion of Afghanistan “uhhh, hey, why isn’t this a CIA operation? Like, why are we at war when it seems like it was one guy? Why hasn’t the CIA captured or killed Osama?” (Oh, you sweet, kind, naive little moron. I have so much to teach you.) So I was never gonna be the guy Putting A Boot In Your Ass Because It’s The American Way (rest in piss, Toby). I was never going to get fooled by the marine fighting the lava monster and I thought that 3 Doors Down “Kryptonite” song was merely okay. So I felt the shift, almost certainly more acutely than most 9 year olds.

I saw my canadian dad and former shaved-pink-hair punk mom put up an American flag (one, hilariously, without a flag stand that could stand up to foothills wind speeds and necessitated us burning one flag before a more permanent setup was devised). I felt the collar of the country tighten, the shoelaces, too. I saw fear and despair on the faces of adults morph–almost in real time–into rage and a desire for vengeance. It was fucked up.

Bloodlust was what was in the air. 3,000 people had died, and someone needed to pay. Everyone needed to pay. Everyone needed to pay and everyone needed to participate. This was a group project of omnicide, and we were all in the same group.

I remember that I was in the crowd at Invesco Field at Mile High when some random guy yelled out “WE GOT SAD-DAMN” (pronounced like a depressed water retention method) and everyone around me started baying like werewolves. I was in the crowd in front of the White House after Osama was killed, smoking weed in full view of the roof snipers and wondering why any of us were out here. At the time, I justified it as catharsis, but I’m an adult and I know better now. I just wanted to party in plain view of cops I knew would do nothing in response. No higher purpose.

And what would we have been celebrating anyway? The only thing I think about Osama when I think about him (other than “he should’ve hooped”) is “good game, you clearly won, dude.” Because he clearly won. Look at the last 25 years of American life and try, TRY to tell me he didn’t. You do so, and I’ll involuntarily commit you, because you’re having a psychotic break. We had an act of exemplary and spectacular violence visited upon us, and we took the bait. Hook, line, and damn sinker, we took the bait. We destroyed our own privacy and two full ass countries. We elected a rotting clownfascist (twice) and re-elected a dullard who paints in his free time. We made constitutional scholars into war criminals and senile veneer advertisements into genocide collaborators. We made our constitution into a suicide pact (well, to be fair, it kinda was already; I’m America’s #1 James Madison Hater, fuck that antidemocratic manlet dipshit). We got punched in the mouth, and we did a mass shooting over it.

Because, yeah, here this far down, I’ll say it. We DID deserve 9/11. Like, did the majority of the discrete individuals who died on that day deserve it? No. Did the intentional object of the United States, an object of which we are all component parts who bear responsibility, deserve 9/11? You’re fooling yourself if your immediate reaction isn’t an eye roll with how obvious the question is. We were already the 4th Reich by some decent definitions, for chrissakes! (I personally subscribe to the fascist baton toss theory of the end of WW2, by the by. I 100% unironically believe that the USA is the 4th Reich and that it’s important to note this for analytical and tactical reasons.) We have visited nothing but death and exploitation and misery upon the rest of the world ever since we decided to expand by blood for the first time, in 1848. (This doesn’t count the native genocide, just counting official state action against other state actors.) If you didn’t see something like 9/11 happening EVENTUALLY, you needed a lesson in Newtonian laws of conservation of motion. And Osama was happy to teach you.

And that’s kinda where I’m gonna leave it today: Did we learn that lesson Osama was trying to impart? Looking around right now, I see a simmering genocide against trans people, jackbooted ICE thug roundups of brown people, a flailing and failing war in a country that starts with “Ira-“, fewer reproductive rights than when I was born, and a president in his second term with approval in the 30s.

Happy 9/11!