I’ve been spending a lot of time digging through the blogospheric record of 9/11. And it’s brought back some of my memories of those tense days and weeks — less tense in San Francisco, certainly, than in New York, but jittery nonetheless.
And I can’t help thinking, again, as I have before — on the one-year anniversary of the attacks, and again at the five-year milestone — how miserably the U.S. has fared in pursuing its interests since the towers fell. President Bush had a good first couple weeks (after a bad first couple of days), followed by an awful rest of the decade.
In the days after 9/11, we didn’t know whether there were more attacks in line. There was anthrax in the mail and fear in the air.
But we also had a measure of political unity, unthinkable now; an outpouring of good will from around the world; and a national resolve to bring the 9/11 perpetrators to justice.
If you could somehow send a messenger from today back to that packed joint session of Congress that Bush addressed on Sept. 20, 2001, Joe Future would have to say something like this:
“I’m sorry to tell you that, nearly seven years later, you won’t have captured Osama bin Laden. You’re going to have a big scare about anthrax-tainted letters, but you’ll never find out who sent them. You’re going to depose the Taliban only to let them survive and prosper. You’re going to invade Iraq, commit America to a disastrous open-ended occupation, and give the Islamists a whole new banner to recruit under. You’re going to bankrupt the Treasury, trample the Constitution, and drag the name of the U.S. through the mud.”
Such a prospect would, of course, have been unfathomable.
UPDATE: I didn’t even realize when I posted this last night that today is the fifth anniversary of Bush’s hubris-laden “Mission Accomplished” stage show. Thanks to Amos in the comments for pointing out.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.
I couldn’t quite figure out what brought 9/11 to mind for you till I saw digby’s post at Hullabaloo about today being the anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” publicity stunt. digby describes the usual arrogance from a Bush White House Press Secretary where we’re petulantly told that the backdrop sign was supposedly a request from the crew of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and the “mission” that was accomplished was that of the carrier. Sure! The White House just happened to have hired a private company to make the banner and it just happened to have been placed specifically as a backdrop to the president’s televised speech that day, on a ship that was ordered to turn around and return to sea to avoid having San Diego as the background. We’re also repeatedly told that the line “mission accomplished” was never spoken by Bush, though even the phrase that was said, “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” has an incredibly hollow ring today.
The picture of Bush at Hullabaloo with the lower “bro” to “lift and compress” (a “Wonder Bro?”) did remind me of 9/11. It was on that day that Bush, on being informed of the SECOND plane striking the World Trade Center towers and the need for presidential action, literally froze like a deer in headlights. When he finally had his ass pried off the seat he was on he then proceeded to do a search for the deepest foxhole in America. The rest of the country was on its own. Maybe some of us were running because we couldn’t fly but Bush didn’t have that restriction. He certainly had the inclination. Which, in the stream of consciousness, brought me back to the strut scene on the air craft carrier. Bush was flown in to be seen in a fighter pilot’s uniform yet I remember reading that Bush dropped flying (his backdoor Vietnam War combat dodge) because he became too scared of landing a plane. It was no wonder that he restricted his piloting that day to a costumed strut routine.
And the strut then took me back again to 9/11, when Bush, after the all clear was sounded on the evening of 9/11, well after any sense of a threat was gone, finally returned to the White House. On return he was photographed doing a strut on the lawn from helicopter to building that John Travolta might have thought over the top for his opening 86th Street cock-of-the-walk stroll to Lenny’s Pizza in “Saturday Night Fever.”
A two dimensional “banner” Potemkin president has gone a long way to turning America into a Potemkin nation. America is being “drowned in the bathtub” while the phony cowards that wear flag pins on their lapels set up shop in the Cayman Islands and Bahrain.
I had a sense of dread after 9/11. Not with regard to terror but of a president whose actions had long since seemed saturated with an air of deception bordering on malevolence. The soon to be at the forefront need to invade Iraq only confirmed the dread. But at the time Bush was the only president America had and the only hope for a decent future.
Ironically I have a similar dread now with a Republican candidate for the presidency that has the pugnacious character of Bush and Cheney with Bush’s complete lack of interest in details and anything other than the superficial. The Democrats are only slightly better, with a feigning “progressive” whose most progressive quality is his skin color (same as Condoleeza Rice, whose shopping on Fifth Avenue while dead Americans were floating in the flood waters of New Orleans is proof enough for me that “progressive” should be more than skin deep) and another candidate who seems to be carrying on with the tradition established by her husband of putting everything secondary to personal gain.
And we’re here because of a press and media that have made fundamental national issues completely secondary to endless Muskie “Canuck” stories. Now, as then, only applied to Democrats. We’re rat-fucked.
I graduated from high school in 2000, so this is the United States that I’ve known for all of my adult life. It’s too depressing to even think about.
Don’t be too depressed. The level of revisionism in these accounts is very, very high.
Anan is particularly addicted to fantasy on the one hand and ignorance concerning procedures and protocol when the nation is under attack on the other.
Building 7, Building 7, Building 7, Building 7, Building 7
Building 7, Building 7, Building 7, Building 7, Building 7
Building 7, Building 7, Building 7, Building 7, Building 7
Then there’s this Welsh Rarebit wearing some brown underpants
About the shortage of grain in Hertfordshire
Everyone of them knew that as time went by
They’d get a little bit older and a litter slower but
It’s all the same thing, in this case manufactured by someone who’s always
Umpteen your father’s giving it diddly-i-dee
District was leaving, intended to pay for
In the spirit of the Gin Craze article, a little historical perspective is worthwhile. 7 years after WWII the US had just recently ended the Korean war, which had killed 36,000 US trips, in a much smaller US population. The US also found itself in the middle of a cold war with a nuclear armed Soviet Union, and was preparing school children for nuclear attack. McCarthy was trashing freedoms. Charlie Chaplin had to flee to Europe. etc. But economically…times were great.