On the last morning of free America
I got to work just before 8:30, as usual, opened up the library, got my email and dealt with it, opened Netscape, around 9...and there on the home page was something about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Shrug. Tragedies happen all the time, and I don't pay much attention to them. A few people die, life goes on. Some drunk or crazy private pilot, probably. I didn't click on the headline; I did whatever I'd opened the browser for.
I don't recall who called first, whether it was my girlfriend (now wife) Rusty, or Mary Burns from Special Collections (who I think had the day off). But they both let me know that this was not your typical tragedy, that something very big was happening. And I wanted to know more. So I hit the Net, just like every other person in every other office in America. And I learned that broadband avails not when every news server in the country is being bombarded. Web sites took hours to load, or so it seemed. So I tried broadcast. No TV in Kulas (we had a straight video monitor for tapes and DVDs). We had a room full of receivers, but none had antennas, and none brought in anything but static. Mary and Rusty kept calling, people coming through to the music department were pumped for details and provided with what I had. I'm a librarian, damnit, let me do my job of transmitting information. Work keeps me sane. Yes, I'll show you how to find Rite of Spring, if you really care today. Nobody did.
German class at 11:30, was it? And that bastard Benseler dropped the lesson plan and had us talking about it, in English yet. Nein. Fick das. Ich kann die Wörter für dies auf Englisch kaum finden. Wie schwerer konnte es auf Deutsch sein? Lass uns über Flugzeuge und grosse Gebaüde reden, ja, selbst über das Turkenproblem (and I note that my old German-English dictionary has no entries for Moslems or Islam). Es klingt ferner, wie Dresden oder Auschwitz oder der Heimatssicherheitsdienst (Ach! Das war nicht in der Vergangenheit, sondern in der Zukunft.)
Shortly thereafter, the University sent us all home. And the RTA made us leave the Rapid at E. 34th, to get on busses to sit on Public Square forever so that, in that hypothetical moment when the plane hit the Terminal Tower, only half of it would fall on our heads. And finally home, to the deafening silence of an nearby airport with no planes (and the stark terror three days later when I heard the first one fly over), to the TV that I couldn't watch and couldn't turn off.
In days after, I checked friends in NYC. The composer Jeff Harrington saw the smoke from his office. My old love Beth Marker was working as a toxicologist for NYC, and was stressed. As I later learned, baritone Stephen Poulos, a schoolmate at University of Michigan (though I didn't know him) had decided there was more money in computers than in singing, and was in one of the towers.
It hasn't happened again. Does this mean the government has done a good job? I haven't flown since then either, since I don't care to be treated as a criminal. On 9/10/01, we weren't discussing NAIS, or Real ID, or a hundred other assaults on liberty only tangentially connected to radicals hot for their 72 Virginians. It was the day that we as a culture learned how to fear, and we ran towards anything that would promise safety. Judged by that, it was the most successful terrorist act in history.
My colleague Mano Singham sees all the commemoration as false sentimentality. Not here. I don't, can't in any real sense mourn 3000 people I never knew. The only difference between them and any other random sample of people is that they died earlier and more unpleasantly. I mourn the free country I grew up in, freedom that has been going downhill for years but which was given a good kick downward 5 years ago today.
Comments
Posted by: James Quick
Posted on: September 11, 2006 09:20 PM
A comment from the Quick nearer dead. I do not understand the supposed loss of freedom caused by 9/11/1. If you were a young man during any of our past wars as I was and were conscripted into the military you would have cause to know what loss of freedom really was.
True we are losing some freedom due to our esteemed Judges failing to comply with our constitution. You have lost the freedom of owning your own home without the worry that some
petty politician could take it and give it to someone else. The right to to free speach has been breached by Hate crime laws. Your right to own and carry a firearm have been underfire for years. Your right to drive without a seat belt or in the case of motorcyclists a helmet. The right to buy an auto equiped the way you would like it. The right to sell or give away the product of your cow and a myrid of other lost freedoms. But none of these were caused by 9/11.
Jimbo
Posted by: James Quick
Posted on: September 11, 2006 09:20 PM
A comment from the Quick nearer dead. I do not understand the supposed loss of freedom caused by 9/11/1. If you were a young man during any of our past wars as I was and were conscripted into the military you would have cause to know what loss of freedom really was.
True we are losing some freedom due to our esteemed Judges failing to comply with our constitution. You have lost the freedom of owning your own home without the worry that some
petty politician could take it and give it to someone else. The right to to free speach has been breached by Hate crime laws. Your right to own and carry a firearm have been underfire for years. Your right to drive without a seat belt or in the case of motorcyclists a helmet. The right to buy an auto equiped the way you would like it. The right to sell or give away the product of your cow and a myrid of other lost freedoms. But none of these were caused by 9/11.
Jimbo
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: September 12, 2006 09:01 AM
You are doubtless correct that the draft and rationing combined were a far more egregious loss of freedom than what we've experienced, and we got over it. And we haven't rounded up Arabs into interment camps (yet). Under violations attributable to the War on Terror I would include the militarization of the police (with all that "free" Federal money), TSA, NAIS, Real ID, the destruction of model rocketry as a hobby, restrictions on hazmat endorsements for truckers. Some of this may have been necessary. But we've entered into a state of permanent war, and how will we know when we can cancel these things, as we cancelled the draft and rationing?
Posted by: J
Posted on: September 15, 2006 06:59 AM
Based on even political and government analysis, a democratic republic cannot handle the rigors of war for such a long time. World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, and Persian Gulf Wars, brought about a different reaction from the civilian population. How many more billions of our taxpayer money should be spent on fighting an endless war? The USA will declare bankruptcy before the terrorists can be defeated. That goes along the lines of justifying cutting more taxes for the people (always a good thing), but if you are fighting a conflict, and you do not have enough government resources, then what is the end result? Raising an emergency tax or continue to deficit-spend?
The attempt to re-define Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions shows how far the US will commit unilateraly to suit its own purposes without regard for the other 192 countries (oh wait, they're all the enemy, except for Israel, fanatical Pakistan, opium-riddled Afghanistan, China blocking access to Wikipedia!...and so on). Even some Republicans see the error of Bush's attempt. Who knows if the current administration declares martial law in light of the emergency against the terror.
I'll get off my soapbox.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: September 15, 2006 09:33 AM
I'm sold on the War on Terror; I don't have any choice in the matter. I am not sold on using the conventional military to fight it. The advantage of asymmetric war is its asymmetry, an advantage the terrorists would lose if we fought them using a modification of their methods. The modification involves pissing off as few noncombatants as possible.
But no, we can't fight eternal war.