Memories of an Anniversary, A History Boy, 12/09/2016

This one is about September 11 and its strange mythology. The event doesn’t even really seem to exist in the American collective social memory, as far as I can tell. Yes, we talk about it. The ceremonies are there. But a real reckoning with that horrifying day and its meaning remain absent from our society. At least on the aggregate level.

September 11 is an erased presence, constantly hovering in the American cultural psyche, but never directly confronted. 

I don't know that any one day’s events have been so traumatizing to American (and wider Western) society in generations. Pearl Harbour is, I think, comparable, but it doesn’t have the same international resonance as the social-psychological horror-blast of the World Trade Center’s destruction.

When Pearl Harbour was bombed, most of the world was already at war – continental Europe under Nazi German occupation, China and southeast Asia under the boots of the Japanese Empire. The rest of the world’s trauma was ongoing.

September 11’s trauma was not just through the shock and surreality of the event itself – the crumbling towers and dust overcoming ordinary peaceful Manhattan – but the immediately visibility of the event around the world through our media. Hundreds of millions of people saw the towers fall as it happened.

But the American people were traumatized most of all – it was an attack on their country. I remember the shock and horror of the event, but I remained a little separate from it. The attacks happened to my neighbour. However close America and Canada may be in many ways, I am not an American.

Rudy Giuliani and George W Bush at Ground Zero,
overseeing rescue and recovery efforts after the
September 11 attacks.

Americans have the most to work through and confront in themselves and their own culture about what that mass trauma did to them. Yet Americans have done the least reflection on the cultural soul that was scarred so deeply 15 years ago. 

In the immediate aftermath, Americans turned to revenge – the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the war on Al Qaeda was a matter of retribution to them. George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the administration then used the hunt for Al Qaeda and its allies into an excuse to pursue the invasion of Iraq.

That war in Iraq was motivated by neoconservative dreams of an American military empire, and the belief in the necessity of an American war machine to guarantee the freedom of their allies, or the perverse utopian dreams of Project for a New American Century that a mass-scale military invasion could install a thriving democratic political culture.

Yet that war was little more than an orgy of violence – prisoner abuse; the use of white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah, where thousands of civilians were burned alive and its pollution continues to ruin lives with birth defects and kill with cancer; the constant brutality of the American mercenary armies. 

Through all the Bush years, America as a wide culture turned away from reckoning with the damage September 11 caused the national psyche.

That looked to change with the prospect of the Obama Presidency. But the Republican Party quickly turned from its defeat into ignorance of their leadership’s horrifying blunders and intentions. 

They instead turned to a single-minded dedication – vilify, delegitimize, and destroy Barack Obama no matter the cost. By doubling down on the racist opposition to the Obama Presidency – the popular attitude among a vocal minority of Americans that a black President was inherently illegitimate because of his blackness – Republicans saw a route to electoral victory.

The Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq, when US-
employed mercenaries at Blackwater killed 17 and
wounded 20 after starting a shootout when they saw
a woman and her son driving a car suspiciously. Just an
average day in the American occupation.

So instead of turning the collective conversation of American conservatism to grow from the mistakes and horrors of the Bush years, that whole society of conservative America turned to an aggressive campaign against Obama.

That turn in conservative America has now become an aggressive campaign of white nationalism. The Republican Party, having embraced racially motivated hatred of Obama to regain state power, facilitated the rise of Donald Trump to the Presidency. 

Ironically, it will be the staunchly America First Republican party who installs a stooge of Vladimir Putin in the White House as they embrace the white nationalism of Trump and the alt-right. 

Trump’s campaign has been run by pro-Putin political consultant Paul Manafort (still an influential foreign policy voice, though he was forced out of his campaign leadership role). His aggressive white nationalist agenda is the American equivalent of the Russian white nationalism that Putin’s foreign policy encourages to undermine democratic governments and movements in former Soviet Bloc states. 

One of their major funders is Peter Thiel, the immortality-obsessed oligarch who has worked for years – with growing success – to destroy a free press, and who declared democracy incompatible with freedom. 

Trump’s campaign is likely using former FOX News head Roger Ailes’ dossier of damaging info on many influential media figures to strongarm them into favourable coverage. Meanwhile, his campaign manager Steve Bannon runs the white nationalist news site Brietbart, which has cultivated the alt-right and its online bullying culture to explode onto mainstream America.

Trump launches his campaign to become President. The
most infamous escalator ride in history.

In all of this is a refusal. The refusal to consider what September 11 did to American culture and self-consciousness. It culminated in what I consider one of the most revealing moments of madness the Trump campaign has produced.

This August, Rudy Giuliani said in a live media interview that there had been no radical Islamist terror attacks in the United States before the Obama Presidency. Giuliani had been mayor of New York City on September 11, and worked with President George W Bush at the Ground Zero site. 

While the context of Giuliani’s interview made it clear that he was referring to the years under the Bush Presidency after the World Trade Center attacks, the message was still an erasure. 

September 11 became something to be avoided, fought against, a matter of pain and fear. All the ceremonies and anniversary solemnity can’t achieve a genuine reckoning with its meaning. What matters is that there must never be another September 11, that the event inspire fear of its repetition. 

The fear and hatred American politics has used September 11 to build has erased the event’s own meaning and significance. America is still trembling even as the culture believes itself strong and growing stronger. Americans’ refusal to face the terror of that day in its fullness has seen them embrace the politics of perpetuating terror themselves. 

As I’ve grown from age 18 to now, that descent is what I’ve seen of America. And it terrifies me.

Will I Follow or Will I Be? When the Truth Is Clear, Composing, 04/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . Okay. I’m finally going to do this. Break open my brain a little bit and talk about people's immanent power to shape their own lives and produce new ways of life. And this is going to get deeper than some smooth-talking Tony Robbins shit here.

When I first came across this idea, I felt like the
experience of September 11 was such a pivotal event in
shaping my personality. The surreal weirdness made such
an impact on me that I felt as though how I understood
the world was profoundly different than how I did before.

Profound truths can emerge from an event. The world unfolds at a particular place and time in such a way that it produces a deeply meaningful and complex insight about the nature of existence. It could be the nature of your existence as a person, maybe the nature of human existence generally. Maybe your own understanding of the nature of human existence. It takes a lot to unpack that.

Sometimes, that’s what I think philosophical thought really amounts to. Unpacking the more profound meanings and truths of our lives so we can see all the details splayed out before us. 

How is an insight complex? Most of the time, we describe insights as simple, don’t we? An insight is the “Ah-ha!” moment. It’s where everything makes sense, and everything is clear. That’s supposed to make the world simple. 

Well, there’s nothing about being true or making sense that implies that what you newly understand is simple at all. Plenty of us understand a lot of different aspects of the world that are incredibly complex. You can have an insight about any part of reality that illuminates a pretty complex field. 

You may actually have a hard time explaining precisely what you understand. There’s an old adage in analytic philosophy that if you truly understand something, you can explain it easily. Well, that’s frankly bullshit. 

If you understand something very complicated, you may not be able to explain it easily. Maybe not without a years-long apprenticeship or course program. Maybe it’s more intuitive knowledge that only manifests after years of practice. The point is that what we understand may have many different facets, aspects, perspectives, and interlocking parts.

But that isn't the only single event, or an image of an
event, that can transform a world and how people can
see themselves. In this case, the power of this event
reaffirmed an ethical principle very important to me.
But I was glad that it did so for many others.

Depth of a truth is another matter, but related to its complexity. It’s more about whether some piece of knowledge captures some fundamental or essential aspect of its subject matter. Do you understand what makes a system operate the way it does?

Take away some object or stop some process that’s part of some larger system. Some piece of architecture without which the entire building would come crashing to rubble, or none of the electricity would flow throughout an entire city. You have a deep truth if you know about some piece of the world like that. Knowledge of what’s fundamental.

Knowledge is always produced in someone. It’s a function of a consciousness, of a creature’s awareness of the world. What is known and what can be known depends on what the knowing creature can do. So all of our knowledge is rooted in action – a new piece of knowledge lets you do new things. 

Even if all you’re doing is thinking in a way you’ve never thought before. Each new piece of knowledge – some act of learning – changes us just that little bit. A small difference, but we can never say the world is ever quite the same. In that sense, every change is a radical one. 

A change in the smallest possible quantity is still enough to transform X into Y. Every one of our acts has that power. I mean, all acts and changes have that radically transformative power. But human beings are included in that group – we’re part of the universe, which means we have the power to change it.

And that’s what activism of any kind really is. That’s the point Antonio Negri and Michel Foucault – to talk about the passage of Commonwealth I’ve been discussing since Monday. That’s the profound insight that comes from reflecting on these ideas. 

Not every event in our lives is going to cause a widespread
social and material transformation in the world. But each
of them will have their own significance and beauty. The
world according to each of those moments. 

Understand that every act you make radically transforms the world. Understand the weight of everything you do when even our most insignificant movements have the inherent potential to flip the world around. Not every sneeze is going to change a whole country’s political system or end all war and poverty, or anything like that scale.

But the lesson is that because we can make simple, ordinary changes in the world, we can also make massively important ones. At their most fundamental, every change is radical – the difference between X and Y. Every difference makes a difference. Some bigger than others, but a difference nonetheless.

Understand that we have this power. And then jump for joy that we have it.

• • •

This post is another one of those moments where I basically write philosophy for you. Almost freestyle. A pure cut of conceptual exploration. Maybe you think it’s bunk, maybe I illuminated something for you. I’ve heard people tell me Plato was nonsense. What constitutes peer review in this context? 

Stick it in your pipe and have a think. Let me know what comes out of it.