by Qutb » Sat Sep 23, 2006 7:18 am
by JoAnn Wypijewski in <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/jw09222006.html" target="top">CounterPunch</a><!--EZCODE LINK END-->.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>There was one positive side-effect of 9/11/01, and it was that people in New York actually talked to one another, and not just about pain and suffering. Those were sharp, but the whole grief machine has been grossly overplayed. This last anniversary of 9/11 there were almost no New Yorkers at the ritual sob-fest at Ground Zero beyond families and friends of the dead, security forces and conspiracy peddlers, conspicuous in black T-shirts emblazoned, "Investigate 911". There were some curiosity seekers, like me, and a lot of tourists consulting their maps of Manhattan. Otherwise the day's commemoration was a sideshow for New York, demanding little or no comment.<br><br>After that first September 11, though, New Yorkers did talk, and they talked about US foreign policy, and the place of America in the world across the past 50 years, and Israel-Palestine, and why the hell people "hate us" so much. These were raucous conversations -- in Union Square, in Washington Square, in local bars and coffee shops. I got into more passionate discussions, and edgy discussions, amid the stink and the smoke than I ever have in this city and than I fear I ever will.<br><br>Five years on, what was the rump of discussion? Not US foreign policy, not America's role in the world, not capitalism, not even oil, which always was too easy, and surely not Palestine. It was NORAD and Building 7 and "scrambling" and demolition charges. The only oppositional presence at Ground Zero were the people in the black T-shirts. And you have to hand it to them; they did organize. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>But their presence in the absence of anything else spelled just how far we've fallen. The peace movement, nowhere. The justice movement, nowhere. Any tendency toward a humanistic, liberated future, nowhere. There was one frowning woman carrying a rainbow flag with the tedious slogan, cobbled up by UFPJ for the 2004 Republican Convention -- along the lines of "We say no to the Bush agenda" -- and a monk or two. Meanwhile, the people in black T- shirts were busy handing out fliers, handing out DVDs, urging people to go to their computers, to "Do the research yourselves..."<br><br>Here was the ultimate failure of politics, translated, Go to your room, alone, immerse yourself in ephemera, alone, meet others just like yourselves so you can talk endlessly about this or that loose end lately discovered in your hours of isolation in front of the screen.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>(...)<br><br>They have absolute confidence in the machinery of state to do WHAT IT MUST DO to protect "us". I haven't heard such paeans to the power of NORAD since I talked to military flaks for Space Command while researching the technological absurdity that is missile defense.<br><br>(...)<br><br>Maybe this is all a distraction? A South Asian chap joined me in this line of argument. "A distraction from what?" the black T-shirt asked. "From US foreign policy", the fellow replied. He too was verbally pummeled with data from Professor Griffin, and assurances that once people really tapped into this they'd "see" how this is just one lie, the biggest lie, on top of a whole lot of other lies that constitute US foreign policy. Why not just start with US foreign policy? Because this is the biggest lie. This is what crystallizes everything. Round and round we go.<br><br>(...)<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>It was like religion, and profoundly sad. At one point one of the black T-shirts confessed that there's nothing people can do in the face of such evil, because they killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and they'll have no compunction to kill their critics if they need to. What a starting point for politics, and the best argument for why people might as well go to their computer screens and just stay there. But the truth! We need to know the truth! It's a truth of fools, simple in the extreme, requiring no more than the memorization of the "unexplained" events of that day, the eye-witness anecdotes and quick-fire repetition of same to others. It's also the politics of the schoolroom, akin to the argument that if every American just sent in a dollar, we'd have $350 million to fight poverty. If every American just does the research, just demands the truth, the truth will come out, the columns will tremble, the temples fall</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
