'9/11' - the mere mention of it trumps all reason. A mixture of fear and sentimentality prevails over any fact on the ground. The date itself has acquired an apocalyptic significance. Just what the events of that day reveal, beyond the horror of utopian fantasies and the predictability of evil, is anybody's guess. Pay that no never mind - we can justify any war, any act of torture by the mere mention of 9/11. Speak that magic incantation, and people will surrender all their liberties, degrade themselves, and buy anything that seems to offer safety.
The events of that day have indeed left us traumatized, but not because of the obvious outrage of the attacks themselves. No, once again, our putative innocence was lost; once again, we were brought face to face with history, that inescapable saeculum we all share. For America, history is the temporal realm of The Fall, and by definition the US is such a novum, its founding such an eschatological watershed ushering in a New World Order no less, that anything that reminds us that we are, you know, folks emmeshed in fallen history and subject to all its shocks and terrors, seems to cause what I can only call a collective fugue state. That the attacks of 9/11 were the climactic acts of an enemy with whom we had been at war for nearly a decade; that the attackers were helped by insiders who brought the weapons aboard ahead of time; that the attack was the result, not of a failure of airport security, but of incompetence and a criminal lack of cooperation amongst the CIA, NSA, and the FBI; all of that gets lost in a fog of sentiment. We surround the sites of our trauma with shrines of kitsch, and stifle all argument with manipulative, and tearful, recollections of the victims. Just so we conspire to hide the hard meaninglessness of that day's violence.
The violence of 9/11 was, and is, an outrage. It should not have happened. Those who took those planes and flew 'em into those buildings committed great evils. Thousands died simply to satisfy the fantasies of a group of well-funded, uselessly intelligent nihilists. It was in fact a skirmish of sorts in a global war that started years before and that has cost millions of lives in Africa and Asia, a war that has seen millions of others enslaved by a new wave of fascist nihilism that is all the more virulent than that of the 20th century for being decentralized and mobile. Given the scope and persistence of that war - which ramifies throughout Oceania, Asia, Africa, and perhaps even Mexico with it's current war - that there has not been a repeat of 9/11 on these shores is likely due to thousands of hours of painstaking work by wonkish analysts and spies and the like, and for that we should be grateful.
All the same, we cannot pretend any longer, if we ever could, that we are exempt from history's terrors. That isn't a reason for resignation or timidity, but a summons to risk and bold action in the name of the Good, knowing that all things in this world will end, and that we can only do many goods in approximation and yearning for that Good. We must, finally, remember that history is the theater, if you will, wherein God accomplished all that was necessary for us and for our salvation. We have nothing to fear from fallen history, or from the repetitive emptiness of evil, for he brought all newness in bringing himself.
So, forget the false eschatology of the American Myth, put aside the kitsch and the shrines and the dreams of safety, and look the enemy in the eye, facing the uncomfortable truth that we both inhabit a small planet emmeshed in a common history. And above all, don't be afraid.
Peace out.
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