Mourning Has Broken: On 9/11
Nineteen years ago today, a high school friend was at work in the World Trade Center when planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists purposely…
Nineteen years ago today, a high school friend was at work in the World Trade Center when planes hijacked by Islamic terrorists purposely crashed into the towers, causing structural damage and fires that quickly led them to topple. Mukul Agarwala was among the nearly 3,000 who died that day.
Keith Estler, another high school friend, managed to escape the towers — you can see him in one of the documentaries that was produced in the months after the attacking fleeing from an elevator that had been stuck between floors but that, somehow, miraculously, luckily, managed to get started again. Keith later committed suicide, an act that may or may not have been connected to that day.
We are 19 years out from that awful morning, yet it hangs ghostly above us, influencing so much of our politics in ways we no longer see. The damaging effects of eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the hundreds of thousands who were killed, our failure to embrace the Arab Spring and the subsequent rise and fall of the Islamic State, the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant attitude that has been sowed into our soil, Donald Trump and Trumpism can all be seen as shockwaves from that morning and our inability to mourn properly, or to understand that 9/11 was not some isolated incident that came out of the blue.
I was 38 when the Twin Towers were destroyed. I was a newspaper editor managing two small, suburban weekly papers that covered towns in Middlesex County, New Jersey, a region with a large commuter presence. Over the next several weeks, we devoted most of our resources to coverage of the impact the attacks had on the towns we covered, coverage that won several awards. The community was in a state of shock similar to one that might be experienced by a family losing a loved one to a car accident. The seeming suddenness gutted us all, but even as the communities held candlelight vigils, raised money for families who lost people in the attacks, and planned and eventually erected memorials, something darker lurked in the undercurrent.
You can see it during Bush’s much-praised “Bullhorn Speech,” when he spoke from the smoldering wreckage of the towers.
Columnist Ken Walsh, in a 2013 piece for U.S. News and World Report, described the speech as “one of the most riveting and important points in his presidency,” and as the point when the hapless Bush found his voice.
“I can hear you!” Bush declared, in a speech far too many praised at the time. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
The crowd of volunteers and first-responders, Walsh writes, “reacted with loud, prolonged chants of ‘USA! USA!’”
Walsh calls this an “electric moment.” The president, then just eight months in office, “captured the mood of the country, delivering just what the American people wanted a combination of gratitude for the rescue workers’ bravery and diligence, defiance toward the terrorists, and resolve to bring the evil doers to justice.”
Americans were angry. Bush, while repeatedly reminding Americans not to take this out on all Muslims, continued to stoke the anti-Islam fires. He told Americans the terrorists, which in most Americans’ minds were synonymous with Muslims, “hated our freedoms.” And his administration, staffed by the detritus of his father’s failed administration, allowed this racist conflation to fester until it tossed gasoline on its smoldering embers and invaded Iraq. The war, based officially on a lie about weapons of mass destruction, was only made possible by our continued bloodlust.
To date, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers — more than were killed by terrorists on 9/11 — were killed in the war. Hundreds of thousands were chased from their homes, made refugees within Iraq and throughout the region. Saddam Hussein, a brutal dictator was toppled, but left a vacuum that quickly led to civil war. Violence begat violence begat violence, and that violence consumed the Bush and Obama foreign policies, constraining both presidencies’ ability to navigate the complicated terrain of the Arab world. The Bush and Obama failures in the Middle East — despite Obama’s success in negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran — played out in Libya and the growth of the Islamic State, and the fear among Americans that was stoked by American right and that ultimately led to Trump.
This is the legacy of 9/11, and it’s why I have grown so ambivalent about the commemorations that have become a yearly event. I agree with Jeff Sharlet, a Facebook friend and author of numerous books, most recently , that “mourning always starts closest to home and radiates outward,” as he wrote on Facebook. “I think it’s very difficult to honestly mourn those far away if you don’t mourn those close by, if you don’t acknowledge the pain that allows empathy, begin with your own immediate grief and sorrow.”
My chapbook, Certainties and Uncertainties, is in a sense a response to the attacks and their aftermath, with poems written in the shadow of far-off American wars. It closes with a poem to my nephew Daniel, written just days before we invaded Iraq that attempts to look at the world of that moment through a positive lens but that, I think now, only heightens the sense of dread we were still experiencing. — not just in the run-up to war, but in the extant fear hanging over us, the “world / under gray skies, / under threatening skies.”
And yet, there is your
tiny body
in the bassinet behind
the nursery window —
how can I not think better
of the future?
How can I not believe
there is something better
to believe in?
How, indeed.
I spent the months following 9/11, the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, reading and rereading Auden’s take on the false and “clever hopes” of what he describes as “a low dishonest decade” — a reference to the realpolitik of the 1930s that allowed fascism to fester and take root in Europe. The right had begun to use the word fascism — or Islamofascism, Christopher Hitchens’ word — to describe what it saw as the growing ideology of antidemocratic terrorism. The speaker in Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which is the date of the Nazi invasion of Poland, offers a sense of certainty that many sought in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — that he
and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
But that certainty is a lie. Auden came to view the poem as too simple, too pat. The poem, he said, “was infected with an incurable dishonesty — and must be scrapped.” The critic Ian Sansom (from whom I borrow Auden’s quotation) describes the poem as “the world’s greatest zombie poem. It won’t die — and never will — because people want it to be true.”
After 9/11, Sansom writes, the poem was in wide circulation, an unexpected poetic response to a calamitous event.
It seemed prophetic, wise and relevant, almost too good to be true. This is partly because it mentions September and New York, circulating fears, and the unmentionable odour of death, all in its first stanza. It was the right poem, in the right place, for a wrong time. At the end of it we come away with an image of some unnamed individual, in New York, speaking directly of their fears and concerns: a lonely, frightened figure, surveying a terrifying world outside. It was a work that spoke to the moment.
To our mourning, I would add, though the poem as Auden saw too neatly summed up the moment. I was caught up by the parallel, and saw poetry as part of a political project, as consistent with Auden’s poetic eulogy for W.B. Yeats. Auden was 32 at the time of the invasion of Poland, only a little younger than I was on 9/11, and I have to believe that his age mattered, that he grew out of the simple sense of black and white that the poem implies.
In the wake of 9/11, too many of us, myself included, reacted in that black-and-white way; repulsed by the horror, many were unable to see the complexity of the world. We mourned collectively, but also retreated into our tribal cocoons. Many of us continue to engage in the. kind of personal and public mourning Sharlet talks about, even as many more use the anniversary to remind themselves to hate, to stoke the embers of their jingoism. This is dangerous, an indication that the nation continues not to have any interest in grappling with our own actions in the world, in asking ourselves what might cause the kind of anger that led to that fatal moment on 9/11. This is not victim-blaming. The death of nearly 3,000 innocents cannot be explained away or justified. But if we are to move forward, we need to ask ourselves why we were targeted, and we need to admit that the Bush “freedoms” line was bullshit.
Our history of supporting tyrants who serve our interests, even if it means smashing nascent democracies in Iran, Nicaragua, Chile (the anniversary of the American-supported coup that ended the short ascendency of Allende is the same day as 9/11), must be a part of any discussion. And our willingness to throw these dictators under the bus when our interests diverge — see Saddam Hussein and the first Gulf War — is a part of this narrative. We tell ourselves that we are the indispensable nation, that we always act with a sense of morality on the world stage, but this has rarely been the case, and maybe it can’t be.
This year, the anniversary arrives amid a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 16,000 Americans and 910,000 people worldwide. There have been nearly 200,000 Americans and 28.2 million worldwide who have been sickened by COVID-19. Millions more have had their lives upended because the virus has caused economic ruin. And we are barely eight months into it. This is before the very real likelihood of a second wave of the virus hits, paralyzing us again, and taking more lives.
Our response to this has been a disaster, mirroring the worst of our efforts after 9/11. The divisions, the cynical use of patriotism, the appeal to culture (then it was an attack on same-sex couples; today it is an appeal to white power). The president stokes this ugliness, embodies it. What’s worse is that we knew who he was when he announced his run, knew he was the modern incarnation of the carnival barker, that he was a con man and TV charlatan, that his entire persona was based on aggression and hate. Still, we sent him to the White House. Still, four in 10 support him, think him something greater than just a politician.
Perhaps Joe Biden can defeat him in November, though we should have no illusions about what a Biden presidency will mean, though there are no guarantees that Trump will abide by the results, that we won’t face a constitutional crisis. And even if he is removed, we should not kid ourselves that right has been restored, that the clock has been turned back to a moment when our hands were clean. They aren’t.
But I have no illusions. If the last 19 years have taught me anything, it is that Americans — like all people — have an incredible ability to ignore what they want to ignore and to believe only what supports their biases. America’s greatness is a given, therefore, anything that seems to contradict that sense of ourselves must be an attack, must be unpatriotic, must be un-American. This was the line the Bush team continually pushed (and that we somehow no longer remember), and it is very much at the center of the Trump phenomenon.
We have to start someplace, however, and remembering and mourning those who were killed on 9/11 — as well, those killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, those murdered by police, by capitalism’s rapacity, by wildfires and flooding, by extreme weather of all sorts, by climate change, by COVID and government inaction, by gun violence and opioids — can be a good start.