Summer Fundraiser 2013, Day 3
The theme of this quarter’s fundraiser is the amplitude of time — its nature, its passage, and how it is understood by those who experience it. The 9-11 terror attacks were what drew us into the blogging business, so it’s only fitting that we take a look at the flow of time as reflected in the horrific events of that day, and what followed afterwards.
Virtually everyone in America remembers exactly what they were doing on September 11, 2001. That’s the nature of how we experience cataclysmic events: they become part of the familiar furniture of one’s existence from then on, always present at the back of the mind, if not at the front of it.
My parents had such a moment on December 7, 1941. I shared with them a similar moment on November 22, 1963. September 11, 2001 was the first such moment in the 21st century.
I was working in Richmond that beautiful September morning, and as the news filtered through the office about what was happening in New York, everyone stopped working and gathered around in solemn groups, sharing what information they could collect. There was no TV in the place, and only one radio, which didn’t work very well. After the first half hour or so all of the major news sites on the web — CNN, Fox, the networks, Drudge, etc. — were overwhelmed and would no longer load. I was able to pick up the BBC site for a while, and saw photos of the burning towers in Manhattan. People stayed on the phone to their loved ones, hearing accounts of what was on TV. I talked to Dymphna almost constantly, and she reported what she was hearing on NPR.
Our office closed before lunch, allowing everyone to go home and stare at what was unfolding on television. By then both towers had collapsed, and the reruns of those choking clouds billowing out over lower Manhattan ran almost continuously, as if in a loop. I stopped off at a relative’s house and watched some of the coverage before making the long drive home.
It seemed as if my mind ceased functioning normally that day, a condition that persisted into the days that followed, only lifting gradually over a period of several weeks. I imagine that most people had a similar experience — it was as if the world no longer made sense, and normal thought was no longer possible. I went about humdrum daily activities in a fog, somehow able to function, but utterly preoccupied with what had occurred that day, and the aftermath of it.
It was hard to concentrate at work. Fortunately, my boss was understanding about it — she was preoccupied herself. For hours at a time I was unable to focus on programming tasks, and instead browsed the news and opinion sites on the web.
In the weeks and months that followed I gradually felt myself drawn into reading and participating in what eventually became known as the Counterjihad. I found the official explanations of the role of Islam in the 9-11 atrocities to be inadequate, and began reading up on Islam using more comprehensive sources of information. It took several more years, but our continuing preoccupation with the events of 9-11 eventually prompted Dymphna and me to start this blog.
In the fall of 2001 it was commonly said that “everything changed on 9-11”, and for a while it was true. Even NPR — which I listened to in the car going to and from work — seemed almost jingoistic on occasion.
But it didn’t last. Old habits snapped back into place for most people. The war in Iraq re-established the familiar animosities and dividing lines. NPR went back to shilling for Progressive politics and ankle-biting the military. George W. Bush sold us the religion-of-peace and tiny-minority-of-extremists memes that we so desperately wanted to believe.
But those weren’t enough for some of us. The 9-11 changes didn’t recede. There remained a nagging sense that something was wrong, that V.S. Naipaul had been prescient, that the “clash of civilizations” was real, and that Islam really did pose a danger to the entire Western world.
Those who felt that way tended to fall in together with one another and contribute what time, talent, and treasure they could afford to aid in the common endeavor. New websites and organizations were founded that opposed Islamization. The superstructure of what we do now took shape, and almost immediately met with official and unofficial resistance from the government, the media, and the culture at large.
Because we Counterjihad-types spend so much time interacting with one another, it’s often hard for us to remember that the world at large considers us at best addled eccentrics, and at worst dangerous fanatics. There may be millions of us, but we are not in the mainstream of our culture. Not at all.
Try speaking frankly about what you think and do in front of a group of “normal” people, and watch them look aside, change the subject, and sidle nervously away.
September 11th?
That was then. This is now.
Such is the timeline of events over the past twelve years: a cataclysmic change, and then a gradual, imperceptible return to normalcy, a resumption of the status quo ante.
But not for all of us. For some of us, “normal” didn’t return. It’s never coming back.
Yesterday’s generosity flowed in from:
Stateside: California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Tennessee.
Near Abroad: Canada
Far Abroad: Australia, India, Poland, Slovenia, and the UK.
Our deep gratitude goes out to those who have chosen to help us stay in business.
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For myself, nothing changed on 9-11. The news that Islamic terrorists had hijacked airliners and used them as missiles unfolded as part of a larger inevitability. There were only two real surprises for me. The first was the collapse of the towers, to which I responded with the words, “That shouldn’t have happened, the structural elements are fireproofed”. I was unaware that the asbestos insulation had been stripped out and replaced (at great hazard and expense) with an “ecologically friendly” cellulose based material (by government mandate). The weaker material had been blasted off by the initial impacts and did nothing to prevent the inferno from melting the structurally critical elements. It is worth noting that a very similar situation resulted in the loss of a shuttle not much later.
The other great surprise for me was the ubiquitous use of the words “changed everything”. I had not the slightest idea what had changed. There was nothing new about the threat of Islamic terrorism, it was actually something of a joke by the time 9-11 actually occurred, the idea of Islamic terrorists as such was considered passé in fiction unless presented with a novel twist. Al-Qaida had already tried to destroy the WTC with a truck bomb in the substructure, the bomb went off prematurely and so only the parking levels (and the hundreds of cars there) were seriously damaged. Osama Bin Laden had been the chief architect of that plan as well, and his desire to destroy the WTC as a symbol of America’s economic imperialism was well known. The Clinton administration attempted to downplay the incident, not even bothering to make any effort to pursue Bin Laden or his organization, but that was their response to all terrorist incidents. The idea of using airplanes as suicide weapons had been in the popular consciousness for some time, there had even been an attack on the White House (which did little damage, as it was a poorly planned attack by a deranged individual who only had a small plane).
It slowly dawned on me, as I observed the strange behavior of Americans and the rest of the Western world, that what changed on 9-11 was the delusion that terrorism was something that happened in movies, rather than real life. The Clinton Administration and their compliant media had managed to convince America that terrorism wasn’t real, that vigilance against attacks from “militarily insignificant” countries was a sign of right-wing idiocy. It was as ludicrous as, for example, using lethal force to prevent an inflatable rubber raft from getting too close to a modern Aegis destroyer, lest the rubber raft attack the modern destroyer. That such thinking had, in fact, led to the exact tragedy described above, along with other preventable attacks, somehow did not do anything to alert people to the danger of their comfortable delusion that terrorism wasn’t real.
On 9-11, terrorism became a real threat in the minds of people that had always dismissed it as a staple of movies and jokes. Why? I can only imagine it having something to do with the fact that of the thousands killed in the attacks, the vast majority were ordinary people who were just going about their daily routine. They were “kindred spirits” with all the people who thought that ignoring the threat of terrorism meant it couldn’t happen to them. People who, until that point in my life, I hadn’t even known existed outside of mental institutions.
I struggled with that in the aftermath, while everyone else sorted out the reality of terrorism, I sorted out the reality of people who had willfully ignored the reality of terrorism. What was on the day itself merely a puzzling phrase unfolded in my mind as a vast chasm, alienating me from society.
In the end, the first surprise came to symbolize the second. The WTC towers collapsed, killing thousands, not because of the act of terrorism itself (which only killed hundreds) but because the fireproofing that would have averted the collapse was deemed unacceptably dangerous and removed in favor of an alternative that offered no actual protection in the event. Likewise, the mental attitude necessary to self-defense against a real danger had been systematically stripped out of Americans, and this process had gone even further in the rest of the Western world. Islam didn’t do this. Oh, the threat of Islamic terrorism was and is real, on an individual level. But even at this stage I don’t see Islamic terrorism as having the power to subdue the West. The moment the people of Europe and America are actually willing to fight, the battle against Islamic terrorism will be a foregone conclusion.
But the infantile helplessness which allowed 9-11 to happen, deliberately inflicted by the ruling class to make the people more docile and easily controlled…that betrayal cannot be so easily dismissed.