For a long time I’ve felt that America has been living in a kind of 9/11-induced dream. I lived in that dream for a long time, too. I’d say I woke up sometime in 2003. It’s hard to explain what I mean by ‘I woke up’ but, at its base, it involved a kind of epiphany that reality had no connection to what I was seeing on my television. And, I don’t mean in the sense that this has always been true. I mean something more.
The realization came in drips in drabs until it finally broke like a dam. The government was issuing terror alert warnings that were phony. The vice-president was saying things that were demonstrably untrue. The press was calling the resistance in Iraq ‘Al-Qaeda’. I had never seen, nor thought possible, that the government would lie so brazenly and that the press would go along with it and even catalyze (or catapult) the propaganda.
Suddenly the country was operating along completely fictional lines…our debates were not real debates…our enemies were not real enemies…our victories were not real victories…
There was one person that never fell asleep…never fell for the dream. Writing on September 12, 2001, Hunter S. Thompson knew already what it would take me and most of the nation 2 or more years to learn.
The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now — with somebody — and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive “figurehead” — or even dead, for all we know — but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.
Nothing — even George Bush’s $350 billion “Star Wars” missile defense system — could have prevented Tuesday’s attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.
We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.
This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed — for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won’t hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.
Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job — armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.
OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.
The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.
The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don’t say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.
If America has been living in a dream, no one personifies that dream more than Rudolf Guiliani. On 9/10 Giuliani’s reign was sputtering to a messy and embarrassing close. The attacks actually canceled the mayoral election to choose his successor. Yet, the events of 9/11 (particularly the scared rabbit behavior of the commander-in-chief) catapulted the mayor of New York into a national hero. And, for the most part, the honor was well deserved. But proving himself under fire didn’t change the basic facts about Rudy Giuliani. He was a thug and a crook and without much dispute…a scoundrel. Watching the nation find that out is part of the larger process of watching the nation awake from its collective dream.
We must conquer the fear.
Rudy’s woes have the potential to help open the path for Mitt and Mike. Since I’m old fashioned enough to expect our political leaders will keep their religious views out of public policy decisions, neither possibility does much to ease my concern regarding the fall 08 race for the White house. The Dems better pick their nominee very carefully. My fear (that I must overcome) is that they won’t.
thanks very much BooMan!
I liked the introduction… and then you started quoting HST! Swoon! He was 110% right about this, wasn’t he? No wonder he couldn’t stand to live in BushWorld any more 🙁
but I’m not convinced the repub voters will give up on Rudy just because he’s a lying adulterer. That was important when Bill Clinton did it, but now IOKIYAR.
The media will try to give him a pass, but the other Republicans are unlikely to comply.
It’s Giuliani.
thx.
I’ve tried to explain this to Americans and foreigners alike. Usually what I would say is that we had post-tramatic stress disorder and that we were only slowly waking up from it. I would put the date that a majority of people were finally awake as some time early in 2005.
It was painful to visit my home country or to look at it from overseas and see a nation that was so profoundly affected by fear and grief unable to deal with the world as it was. Even worse to have leadership that deliberately took advantage of that and exacerbated the problem.
I have my best converstations on world events only with people I detect have an accent. They are not as contaminated by years upon years of an American Pravda propaganda press and the ensuing subliminal and overt re-education of American societal “norms”.
Rudy most assuredly had his hand on the detonator of WTC building seven and mainstream media confirmed allowed rescue workers into a toxic waste zone. I will also not bring up the practice of filling potholes with 911 debris, complete with unidentified American body parts.
Stellar human being Rudy is, just fucking stellar.
This is not a uniquely American problem. It is true all over the world. The bias is that folks who travel overseas, especially for long lengths of time have their eyes open to other ways of seeing things. For me that both made me more aware of our flaws, but also made me love America more for her good qualities.
I too had a moment of revelation… actually two of them.
The first was My Pet Goat (need I say more?)
The second was that spew out of Bush’s mouth after the buildings fell down about get out and go shopping???
I’m tellin’ ya, my blood ran cold. As an old Berkeley anti-war protester and a lifelong enemy of Republicans and most presidents, this guy was breaking new ground.
Wow, I just opened “Kingdom of Fear” again today to re-read it for the nth time and read that very passage at lunchtime. The other corker from that book is “Jesus Hated Bald Pussy.”
A few weeks ago I re-read Thompson’s last piece, the endorsement of Kerry in Rolling Stone. Guess I’m just in the mood for gonzo these days.
Well, I think overkill applies but it was an awakening that was bound to happen. We are the inspiration for this new global economy and cultures are changing because of it. Rapid change brings on anger and mistrust especially if it is your son or daughter bringing home some nut that they want to join the family. Afghanistan and Pakistan and probably many other off the beaten path types of places are not so fond of being driven by global agreements that they aren’t a part of. However, illegal drugs seem to be bringing them into the network.
I think we have to prepared for the worst and worst would be nuclear. That would stop the global economy on a dime and kill more than we can imagine. So, overkill, might be what has to be done. I’d go for diplomacy and a huge club – maybe being unpredictable has its benefits.
Hunter Thompson was a brilliant man, but he was not alone. Many of us saw the horror we faced when the Supreme Court decided our election for us and the media greased the skids for the bush cabal to seize power.
It was easy for most of us to just sit quiet and watch as they built the numbers of young lives to be sacrificed to our hunger for oil. Hunter did his job bravely – he was a true journalist.
We are now left with his legacy of fearlessness. We must learn his lessons of living (and dying) with honesty and courage.
The awakening we need is that we’re all in this together, and we need to help each other get through it.
may lie in cult de-programming techniques. For me at least salvation came in the form of an expat assignement. The removal from the matrix of American corpo-media really does wonders for a person’s perception and return to reality.
You mean important person? Person you listened too?
Someone you know personally did these in late 2001 – early 2003.
Full tinfoil hat credit!
Strange thing about 9/11. The face of America’s leadership that day was Karen Hughes. America’s president was in hiding. Only thanks to that ill prepared, weak leadership did the cameras turn to Rudy, pathetically roaming the streets of his city-without a command center. For the world to see, at that moment American leadership was rudderless. Now we see Rudy re-writing an extraordinarily weak historical moment into a presidential platform. As Ed Koch said this morning, the day before 9/11 Rudy wouldn’t have been elected dogcatcher.
Then there’s the lesson of Ken Lay telling his employees right up to the last minute that Enron was solvent. Has the Bush admin taken a page from Lay’s doctrine (4.9% growth my foot) and extended their bluff right into the actual economy of this nation? The only thing left to believe is the lie.