Democracy for Vancouver

September 11, 2001, I woke up late (as usual) on that beautiful summer day. I was rushing around getting ready for work, trying to spend a little mama-time with 2-year-old L. (man, time flies) before bolting out the door. This was back before Air America, so the radio was always set to NPR, and while I was getting dressed Bob Edwards told me that a “commuter” plane had crashed into one of the two World Trade towers.

That was the first and last moment when we thought it was just some terrible accident.

I turned the TV on just in time to see the 2nd plane hit. All I wanted to do, from that point on, was stay home and hold on to L.

“Nothing’s going to happen here,” J. said.

I knew that. It wasn’t about what might or might not happen in Vancouver, Washington. It was about realizing, somehow for the first time, the depths of heartless cunning that exist in the world, willing and able to carry out something at once so brazen and so pointlessly destructive and cruel.

I did not want leave my son for one minute in that world without me.

I often found myself in those next weeks and months on the wrong end of arguments with friends and family: We were squatting in the Middle East - as Westerners have done for 500+ years - to protect our interests while helping to quash the will of the people throughout the region.

“What would our home grown Tim McVeighs and Randy Weavers and Eric Rudolphs do if the Chinese or the Saudis stationed troops on Wall Street and Washington, D.C. to protect their investment in U.S. Bonds?” I asked. Certainly Bush and Cheney, et al. would be the first to welcome our new Occidental Overlords, but at the very least the black helicopter crowd would be shouting “Wolverines,” lobbing pipebombs, setting IEDs and considering themselves the spiritual heirs of Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.

I was in a slim minority, and felt every ounce of that dislocation everywhere I went.

Yet despite the rage that boiled up and over in the U.S., “getting bin Laden” and routing the Taliban in Afghanistan was a surprisingly rational course. Of course, not many in the U.S. worried about civilian casualties or the human rights of those in the way of our hunt & kill operations, but for a few months there, we actually seemed to be learning about the wider world.

But we didn’t catch bin Laden, and bombing the hell out of a country that had barely entered the nineteenth century - much less the 21st - did not slake the national thirst for revenge. And just like that, the frontal lobe of the American body politic shut down, and we were right back to the lizard brain: kill the sand niggers and turn the Middle East into a sheet of glass, that’ll teach ‘em. We didn’t want to understand “Why They Hate Us.” We just wanted blood.

This wasn’t too shocking; I grew up in the South, after all. The only surprise was that we waited as long as we did after September 11 before we let the bombs fly. Having lived through the tail end of Vietnam, El Salvador, Nicaragua, our forays into Columbia and Chile, Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, etc., the U.S.’s grandiose ideas about its international Manifest Destiny and the rights granted by having the biggest dick on the block (in the form of the most monstrous military apparatus ever amassed) have been a source of embarrassment and frustration, but rarely surprise. And so, it was on to Iraq.

We finally seem to be waking a bit from our post-9/11 catatonia (most of us, anyway); I hope the remission is long and deep enough to get us out of Iraq and keep us out of Iran.

But I know now, better than ever, just how stupid and cruel people can be. So I will keep my loved ones close, hope for the best, and anticipate the worst.