Nose-picking on the Internet

Methods for expelling mucus (Wiki commons)

You know how a person will pick his or her nose while driving a car, convinced that it is private space and no one can see the disgusting habit that entices all of us from time to time?

Just so on the Internet; people who are bone-deep cads seem to think that behaving in caddish ways on the Internet is fine. Cad is defined as, "An ill-bred man, especially one who behaves in a dishonorable or irresponsible way toward women" by Dictionary.com.

It is an archaic British word, but one I think needs to be resurrected and also expanded to apply to women who act in equally dishonourable and boorish ways toward others. (I think boor works, also: "A person with rude, clumsy manners and little refinement: a peasant." But cad includes the dishonourable part, and so is preferred.) Yesterday, I mentioned in response to a call for comments about the travesty of the conduct of the Zimmerman case that the Florida jurors were ignorant. OF COURSE they were ignorant, based on several cogent probabilities.

Support for calling Zimmerman jurors ignorant

First, they were in Florida, a state with a racial problem second to none. Oh, sure, it hides it well under the patina of opening its arms to Cuban refugees (with the exception of Elian Gonzales, but of course Bush's gormless Feds had something to do with that disaster), and under the fact that much of south Florida was built by New Yorkers, Ohioans and Canadians as a place to retire their snow-brittled bones. Having a visible population of northerners gives Florida a soupcon of race relation respectability, except, of course, not every northerner is free of racial prejudice, not by a long shot. 

Second, it pays to recall that of all the states involved in the Supreme Court's ultimate selection of George W. Bush to be the first moron president of the United States, Florida led the pack, captained by Katharine Harris who was subsequently handsomely rewarded for her misconduct, and from which the state's current governor learned how to manipulate the vote without the public drama. He simply purged the voter rolls of every voter who could possibly have been black. No hanging chads; hell, Florida has just about got over hanging Chads...and Willies*. (My apologies to at least two very intelligent and decent Floridians, but they already know I'm not talking about them, but rather about the lowest common denominators of that state's population.)

Third, Florida rants in the low average column for education in half a dozen surveys I've seen.

Fourth, the defense in this case--knowing it had a vicious reprobate as a client--would have dismissed any juror showing the least glimmer of intellect or decency. It appears the defense, taking a page from the OJ Simpson Book of Courtroom Idiocy, did not reject those rejects.

Fifth, the prosecution was as dim-witted as Marcia Clark and Chris Darden. As they failed to easily refute the bloody glove defense in the OJ case (duh...people...leather shrinks after being soaked in liquid. Blood is a liquid), so the prosecution in this case failed to shrink-wrap the defense notion of a bit of pavement being a weapon for Trayvon Martin. No, Martin had not picked up a chunk of it to USE as a weapon; he was holding Zimmerman down on a long stretch of pavement. Was he hitting Zimmerman's head against it? Who knows? We were not there. Zimmerman was, but he has had so many untoward incidents in his past, it would hardly be prudent to take his testimony without a grain of salt. I doubt he much feared a perjury charge. 

Can we teach everyone the basics of intellectual argument, PLEASE?

OK. Now back to my cad experience. 

So, after my opinion that the Florida jury was ignorant, The Cad--rather than supplying facts to cause me to rethink my contention--simply implied that I was a profound idiot...which in itself is idiocy because, if I were, I could hardly have managed a relatively lengthy post on Facebook. Later, he claimed he hadn't called me an idiot, he had merely said what I wrote was idiocy. It is impossible to sever writer from writing (no, I do not produce this stuff by automatic writing delivered gratis from the spirit world). Had he wished to do anything other than call me names, he might have written, "I find your contention regarding Florida jurors to be without merit because....XYZ."

Worse, The Cad claims to have taught at-risk Florida students. Oh, boy. I guess he didn't instruct them in avoiding ad hominem attacks and in how to construc logical arguments. But then, to teach it, you first have to know it.

Nor did he back off when I verbally slapped his face, and told him that I would have done so in the flesh and not in words if he had attacked me that way in person. He STILL didn't back off, so, a second time, I told him his face needed a good slapping. I broke off contact as it was apparent that he is incapable of realizing that part of being a fully functioning adult human being includes logical discourse, not playground rank-outs. Maybe he's been with the kids too long. But I suspect he thinks he is safe on the Internet, and possibly he is. I am not going to post his name here; I don't relish as bogus lawsuit from him. So yes, he is safe as far as that goes. He can pick his mental nose until the cows come home, but he can't pick mine.

But The Cad is also unethical, unconscionable, ill-bred, uneducated and vicious as ascertained by a look at his actions. Precisely as, I expect, Zimmerman might turn out to be if he were to attempt a debate on an issue. He couldn't subdue Trayvon Martin without killing him, if the young man even needed subduing which it appears he didn't, or at least hadn't until Zimmerman baselessly stalked him. Just so, The Cad would probably not be able to endure a 'back off' order like the one Zimmerman received regarding Martin, and would doubtless attempt to subdue this uppity woman with some sort of nuclear flyswatter or other. 

I hasten to add, I have been called names by women for my opinions on Facebook, as well, especially when my opinion included my displeasure in the currently popular methods of displaying one's cool, an opinion I'm certainly entitled to hold and express, considering that the current display of "cool" is in itself a personal expression. I guess I was the lobster trying to climb out of the boiling water, and lord knows American society can't tolerate THAT. I mean, look at how many people want Snowden lynched. Still, I wonder if it is simply coincidence that the worst offender among my experience of female cads also lives in Florida. Apparently, Floridians are all vigilantes now, since the Stand Your Ground law went into effect, and they have clearly established the Sunshine State Thought Police as well as Bozos Against Black Folk.

God help us.

* A very, very probably innocent black man hanged in Florida in the late 1980s, while I lived there. It was almost physically impossible--not just improbable--that he had killed a man, all known at the time of his execution. It was a horrific time to be in Florida...and even more horrific to be Willie Darden and his family.

Romney channels Bush; Vicious bully pulls wool over America's eyes

Romney, Bush II: A certain case of sheep and goats (Wiki Commons)

This is not what I planned to write today. But I find there is nothing that is more important than this: an explication of why Romney is a sterling successor to George W. Bush as the Republican Party's fair-haired boy.

Oh, sorry. Did I mention fair hair in the same sentence as Romney? Why yes, I did. I guess that is likely to put one in mind of the now well-documented physical assault by a young Mitt on another student at the private school they attended. The other student was presumed gay. Who knows, who cares? But it was very obvious that he had long blond hair, flopping nonchalantly over one eye. A sort of Beach-Boys-Go-Hippie look, one might suppose. Interesting. Unique. And isn't that what boys do in their teens, try to be unique?

Not the Suits-in-Waiting, apparently. It was simply too much for old card-carrying rich snot Republican bigwig wannabe junior master of the universe Mitt Romney. So he led a posse, pinned the blond-haired guy down and cut his hair off.

Excuse me, but that constitutes assault with a deadly weapon in my book.

But aside from that, it is probably actually a bit worse--although not much--than Dubya's so-called prank of stuffing firecrackers into frogs' mouths, lighting the firecracker and tossing the frog into the air to see it explode. Not worse, though, than another of Dubya's tricks, branding frat pledges with a coat hanger. Again, that seems like assault with a deadly weapon to me. But in an article about the hanger business, one of the victims said it was almost a relief after the beating he'd taken earlier from his putative "brothers."

What was Romney's excuse for his youthful assault on another student (which he ludicrously referred to as hijinks), I wonder? TV kids' shows when G. Porgie was a boy were not nearly as violent as they got later, and adult TV was pretty tame, too. So it would be hard to blame the influence of the media for their sadistic tendencies. Same for Mitzi.

Oh, my. I am SOOOOO sorry. I punned on Romney's name in a way that could be construed as, well, gay.

I would spend some time wondering how anyone, even a Teapublican, could fail to see that electing vicious men, who had been vicious boys, to the presidency is a bad idea. But there's no need to ponder just how vicious Romney's predecessor in unwarranted aggression was; a quick look at just today's headlines from a few publications reveals that viciousness is the heart and soul of the Republican mindset.

Here's a brief roundup of things currently favored by Republicans:

•  Capital punishment.

• Rounding up, detaining and exporting starving South Americans who will do anything to try to provide for their families, including sneaking into a nation they can see is as hostile as it used to be wealthy.
• Keeping tabs on citizens who simply want a responsive government, such as the Occupiers, and beating them up at will.
• Tossing society's watchdogs, the journalists, into jails in larger numbers than ever before.
• Cutting essential humanitarian services instead of taxing the idle rich...even when one of the richest pleads to be taxed.
• Allowing virtually unchecked gun purchases for any reason by any person, sane or not--criminal or not.
• Demanding that all sexuality in the nation be performed as if by Puritan missionaries.
• Ensuring that the vast knowledge of the globe on which we live is parceled out according to the beliefs of terrified fundamentalists boobs, or denied altogether.
• Reversing such few bona fide attempts at government-backed equality between the sexes as there are.
• Taking control by fiat of women's health.
• Ensuring that more babies are born to mothers who cannot feed them by denying birth-control information and services.
• Consigning, in some states, victims of rape to the position of bearing their attacker's young.
• Destroying such few unions as are left, the only slim glimmer of salvation from virtual serfdom for working Americans.
• Demonizing anyone who uses the word socialism.
• Making heroes of unconscionable reprobates like Rush Limbaugh.
• And on and on.

And you'll notice I didn't even mention Afghanistan or Iraq, or the death and misery dealt there and the insupportable destruction of young Americans sent to fight and/or be maimed for little Georgie's vendetta against a dictator his father failed to bring down, and the ludicrous search for Bin Laden, whose whereabouts were probably known higher up the Washington food chain than anyone really cares to consider.

In the face of all of the above, or even half of the above, or even a quarter of the above, is it possible to understand how any decent human being could cast a vote for George W. Bush or Mitt Romney? No, it is not. A vote for Dubya was...and a vote for Romney is...tantamount to condoning any sort of viciousness of which mankind is capable. And frankly, a few kinds that were added when the Bush-Cheney Cabal seized power and are now therefore in the arsenal of the Republican governance machine.

Can anyone really imagine giving that power to Romney? He's just as vicious as Bush, and worse, he has the brains and comportment to hide it a bit better. A bit. If you ask me, his intent is written all over him. You don't even have to listen to whatever he mumbles about now; his character and pathway through the universe were set in the hallway of a private school when he viciously led an attack--and assault with a deadly weapon--on another student who was different from Romney and Co.

Viciousness, need one say, should not be the major emotional component of any sitting president, except possibly in Russia, and I figure they've got that all right.

Making hash of hashtags

Your brain (Wiki Commons)

Your brain on Twitter (Bird's Nest Soup, Wiki Commons)

I don't understand Twitter. I don't want to use Twitter. I don't want to read Twitter...mainly because there is nothing to read on Twitter. I prefer the back of a nice big bottle of hair spray; lots of words there and at least some of them, unlike the words on Twitter, are understandable. Fragrance, for instance. But what the hell does #atozchallenge mean when it's at home?

I didn't understand Friends, either. Not the relationship; the show. A bunch of less than normally attractive twenty-somethings hanging out in each other's aesthetically challenged apartments doing the dumbest things since the TV commercials that gave the world "Wassup?" Example: Two of the Friends gormless dorks--and this was a scene chosen for a promo--install a big screen TV, sit down in matching recliner chairs like my father used to have, assume an even more vacant expression than they started with, and make some sort of mewling sound that would cause even Mother Theresa to kick them if she thought the sound came from a cat.

Before that, I didn't understand Seinfeld. It was a show about nothing. It said so. OK. I'll grant you that.

From Cheers to maternity

Before Seinfeld and the ping pong ball innards of shows that came after it, I understood television. There were actual shows on television about something. Cheers followed the lives of customers of a pub; some were likeable, some not. Some were accomplished, some not. None was as useless as the empty t-shirts and blonde bimbos on Friends.

Murphy Brown was about a woman journalist, a high-caliber woman journalist, and the bevy of character types who would be found in such a person's orbit. Each show set up a problem or task, and in 22 minutes, it was solved. Even Murphy's baby was born in 22 minutes.

It was a witty, clever show about people who had achieved something, not about Generation Sleaze layabouts who had no past, no future and an amount of present (or presence, depending on how you would like to parse that thought) equal to their past and future.

Facebook v. Twitter v. The Void

I understand Facebook. You can make contact with all your friends; those who have time to spare and/or something to say will engage. I regard it as sort of the broadcast version of email, which I admit is somewhat more useful in today's world than the telephone or snail mail. Although I still do really like sending and receiving snail mail. I, for one, can still handle a pen; I wonder if most people today actually are unable to write...that is, engage in penmanship to express thoughts, simple thoughts such a Thank You.

But Twitter? Twitter for crying out loud? On an average day, my Twitter page collects 215 tweets per hour, 99 percent of which I don't read. Of the one percent I do read, I wish I hadn't read 99 percent of those. That leaves precious little value there. It is a time waster. It is useless, except perhaps for convincing empty barrels that they are not empty after all. I mean, who the heck cares what Katie Couric thinks about anything, or whether she has had this year's televised internal inspection of her bowels? Oh, sure. Her late husband died of intestinal cancer. We KNOW that already.

Terminal nose picking vs. the void

But it does raise another question: Why do people, and even celebrities (who may or may not be people), champion a cause someone they know has died from? What if you had a close relative who died from picking his nose after gardening and a tiny slug larva got up there and crawled into his brain and had babies and croaked him? Would you then be duty bound to find or found an organization dedicated to preventing needless deaths by Finger-borne Garden Larva Cerebral Parasitism? I don't think so.

Why can't these people pick something they believe in to support--education, arts, gardening, space travel, any sport but football (which no one can believe in, anymore than one can believe in slow, fat men with broken teeth bashing each other for millions of dollars)? But no. They pick deadly things, cancer and heart attacks and suchlike, and then throw tons of their waking moments at it. OF COURSE cancer and heart attacks increase; you would expand, too, if most of the world was paying you rapt attention and spending its hard-earned income on you. You don't think so? You think these organizations are about cures? About as much as a pit bull is about cuddlywuddlykissypoo. It isn't the American Anti-Cancer Society or the American Anti-Heart Disease Foundation, after all. The money gives them power to make sure the disease--not the cure--is the only thing we think about. And fear. The words are used to induce fear, which induces us to part with cash, which, as noted, just breeds more fear. Yes, there is power in words.

Obama knows words; George...not so much

Don't believe that either? Think about it. Barack Obama won the White House by using words. If Al Gore had had words as good as Obama's--words more powerful than Bush's money--Gore would have won. If Gore's freaking lawyers had had words as good as the lying words of Bush's lawyers, Gore would have won. There would have been no hanging chads, no fascination with the sub-tropical Elvira known as Katherine Harris. No Iraq. No meltdown. And global warming would be accorded the significance--as something that will kill off future generations--it deserves. "Mission Accomplished" would still be a viable phrase, and not an instant joke whenever it is used.

Twitter is a word. It means the incomprehensible sounds made by birds. You might perhaps have heard the word birdbrain. Maybe you even know the definition.

I rest my case.

Using the Hannibal Lecter Principle to understand the Republican candidates

Two female Mormon cannibal crickets  feeding on a third (Wiki Commons)

I used to write a “lowly paid” column about ethics for a nominally unaligned online newspaper that turned out to be right of Genghis Khan’s center. In short order, the “opportunity” had turned into a nightmare in which I had to field excessive and abusive commentary from that organization’ core constituency, right-wing zealots who make Ann Coulter look sane and balanced, and some of the more gormless right-wing writers on the site itself.

No matter. Perhaps those articles have enlightened someone, which was my intention to begin with, not―lord knows―getting rich on the internet via pay-per-click.

In those columns, I dealt with ethical concepts, one of which was touched upon by Matt Taibbi in his recent Rolling Stone article about his first glimpse of a presidential wannabe, Rick Perry: The Best Little Whore in Texas. Wrote Taibbi:

…voters who want to know who Rick Perry really is would do well to remember the advice of noted political analyst Hannibal Lecter, who instructed Jodie Foster about the serial killer she was tracking in The Silence of the Lambs. What does he do, Lecter asked, this man you seek? He kills women? No, that is incidental. Don't look at what the man does, look at what he is.

That should be the AHA! moment in American politics. Taibbi looked hard at what Perry is, although I think we all know what he is from his escapades in governmentally sanctioned murder, that is, capital punishment with no more thought given to it than swatting a mosquito. Does one really need to know any more to decide that this man would not be a good leader for an ethical population, positing that there is still something of an ethical population left?

Think about it: We might all have known sooner what George W. Bush might do to the nation had we simply applied the Hannibal Lecter Principle early and often.

By their idiocy shalt thou know them
Dubya was famous for little except being the son of a one-term president, talking his friends into buying him a baseball team by trading on the accident of his birth, and for putting record numbers of inmates to death, as well as mocking one of them in public. This was a kid the righteous would have shunned in the school yard. This was a kid your parents would have told you to keep well away from. This was a kid the local cop on the beat, had Geroge been born into a working-class family, would have been keeping an eye peeled for and cracked over the head with his nightstick with some regularity. This wasn’t, however, the boy your parents warned you about; your parents wouldn’t have bothered, thinking he was so no-account that no self-respecting teenage girl would touch him with the proverbial ten-foot-pole despite his loot.

How did intelligent grownups miss this? Why did Americans not apply this rather simple ethical litmus test, the Hannibal Lecter Principle, to little George? A good question. But perhaps the answer is to be found in two things: human decency and America’s checkered past.

Human decency? How so? The same parents who might tell their kids to keep well away from troublemakers also often impart the necessity of giving the benefit of the doubt. That’s one possibility.

Another is that George was at pains to present himself as an ordinary guy. None of us ordinary guys wants to think we are as decidedly unempathetic, as vicious, as gormless as George certainly appeared to be. So we studiously ignored all that. Still, the smirk should have been a clue. Various online dictionaries define the expression as, “An affected, often offensively self-satisfied smile,” or, “a smile expressing scorn, smugness, etc., rather than pleasure.” That’s George. And we didn’t get it. Republicans still don’t get it, except those who DO get it. Those who do? Mainly, they’re named Koch. Or Rove. Or Cheney. Or they are the great untutored, a/k/a the Teabaggers, so blind they will not see, so fearful they dare not look in a mirror.

Goat or sheep?
But that’s water under the bridge. More to the point: How can we quickly get to the heart of who the current Republican front-runners might be? Simple. Assess them for who they are, not who they say they are.

Perry is easy. He’s got a squinty smile that reminds me of nothing more than a guy on the Strip in Vegas trying to cajole people into a casino where he promises a lot for virtually nothing. In short, a sleazoid. Scummy. Probably washes his jockey shorts once or twice a year whether they need it or not…just so he has a loud silk tie to set himself off with.

Romney. Who knows? Who cares? He comes out of the Mormon tradition of straight-laced, unforgiving followers of the greatest manmade religion (well, they ALL are, but you know what I mean…it doesn’t say Latter Day Saints for nothing) until EST. Trust him? Not bloody likely. First, he’s too rich to be normal. Second, he flip-flops almost daily. Third, did you know neither women nor blacks can be full members of his native church? Enough said.

Bachmann. Derivative, without the Alaskan creds. Dismissed.

Who’s left? Well, that is, who remains on the right as a viable candidate? Santorum?
 
The most interesting thing about Santorum is his name. Except of course that business of Mr. and Mrs. Santorum bringing home their premature stillborn child to introduce the poor dead wee thing to the living children, and then sleeping with the stillborn overnight. Creepy. At best.

There’s the Intelligent Design thing he’s fond of, speaking of oxymorons.

And there’s the dodgy bit about in-state or out-of-state tuition for his kids at college, and maybe his claiming a false residence…all of which perfectly fits him to ring in on immigration, since he has been involved in living in one place and reaping benefits from another. The only difference between him and the Mexicans seeking a better life, the ones he wants to fence out or shoot? Money, and crossing state, rather than national, boundaries. In short, no difference to speak of. A hypocrite.

Leave our history in the dust, please
Leaving the fascinating subject of assessing political candidates’ aberrant psychology via the Lechter method, there’s still America’s checkered past to bring to the discussion, however, as a way to explain how Americans can be so foolish about whom they elect.

America was settled by the following groups:

• Puritans, whose fundamentalism knew no bounds (you may recall that they determined whether a woman was a witch by dunking her, head and all, into a pond. If she drowned, she wasn’t a witch);
• Criminals, sent by His Majesty to the colonies where they could serve out their terms in misery and then be let loose to populate a captive land mass, and:
• Adventurers, out for gold regardless of how they got it, mainly by raping virgin forest, killing native inhabitants, wiping out herds of valuable beasts and finally being granted large tracts of that wilderness by a monarch or two grateful for the riches they sent home in tribute.

Can spirit trump genetics and history?
And therein lies our national inability to see the unethical forest for the immoral trees; we are not too many generations removed from those who pillaged the nation to create it. At some level, perhaps, we realize we are one with them, one with either the criminals sent to the Georgia penal colony, or the patroons that gobbled up the Hudson Valley, later morphing into Robber Barons of a different sort. Or Puritans who begrudged every human any joy and regarded all compassion as weakness, and had a few squirrelly concepts about cause and effect as well. Seem to fit?

There were a few decent folk―the founding fathers, for the most part―among them. But too few to make a dent in the gene pool of the populations enumerated above and change the character of most of their descendants. Many of us understand that, while we carry those unfortunate genes, the world―physically, spiritually―has advanced and it is no longer necessary to act in accordance with our unfortunate history, but rather in accord with the ways in which a decent, compassionate, brave and free people would want to behave.

Until we do this―until we elevate whatever innate decency somehow survived our brutalized and brutalizing history―we will remain ill-equipped to practice the Hannibal Lecter Principle and recognize perfidy and worse when we see it. Unless we surmount our history of vicious individualism and trade up to benign individuality, we will be doomed to deal with the George Bushes the gene pool pops out so disgustingly often.

One insult too far: America’s class war, one prole at a time

Bush as Moronic Scion of the Moneyed Class

All through the 2000 campaign and up to Sept. 11, 2001, the corporate media depicted Bush as an affable, tongue-tied bumbler — the kind of guy Joe Six-pack would like to have a beer with — turning a blind eye to his dark underside. It mattered not that he stocked his illicit administration with the worst of the worst: John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Gale Norton, Paul O'Neill, Harvey Pitt, Thomas White, John Negroponte, Otto Reich and convicted Iran-contra felon Elliot Abrams who received a 1992 Christmas Eve pardon from George W.'s father. Click here for whole story. (Bev Conover, Online Journal)

For many of us raised in lower middle-class families, our aspirations to more―more wealth, more recognition, more luxury, more acceptance by the upper class―were sated somewhat during the nation’s economic good times. We were able, for a minute, to forget that we really were one pay check or contract from the streets, as our parents might have been but for unions. We were able, for a minute, to pretend to be part of the beautiful people, however we defined the term.

This, friends, is another mea culpa which I hope will be instructive to those who fail to support OWS (Occupy Wall Street) in every possible way. I am, I think, very much an Everywoman in this, or if not Every, at least Verymanywoman.

Heady times on the East Side

As much as I hate to admit it, we attended church in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and not just any church, THE Episcopal Church in Manhattan, St. Thomas. It is beautiful, a French Gothic cathedral nestled amongst the international boutiques of Fifth Avenue. We lived nearby, on the WEST side. Still, it was only an eight-minute walk. (Later, we moved on up to the East Side, still one contract―we were freelancers―away from living in a packing crate over a warm, if odiferous, sewer grate, like the wheezing fat woman who slept in hers beneath the buttresses of OUR church.)

We loved the church. It was hard not to. The Rector was a supremely well-educated, well-connected and absolutely rigorous Englishman who seemed to appreciate our slightly off-kilter reactions to things, our willingness to serve, and our ability to use the proper fork.  He appointed us to all sorts of things―us being me and my second husband. We were happy; it seemed we had been accepted, and all we had to do was genuflect and contribute.

The music was world-class, too. What a church! And there, we met one of the many clergy on staff and his family. They lived on the East Side, a bit farther from the church, and light years away from living in a packing crate over the sewer grates at St. Thomas. We became friends, spent Christmases together, visited each other’s houses when we moved out to Darien, CT….still one contract away from living in a tent on the Goodwives River, which flows amongst mansions of historic value and stunning beauty. 

We were renting one of those places, a falling-down one. You could see ground if you were vacuuming in the ground-floor sitting room and got close to where the walls met the ancient floorboards. Beetle damage, we later learned. We might be able to afford to buy the house at its fire-sale price, about $250,000, but repairing it to livable standard would cost twice that. We could live in this historic home in frozen misery, but could never have afforded to bring it up to snuff. So we moved on. One frozen winter in the epicenter of American snobbery was sufficient, and the promise of Reagan’s trickle-down economy seemed to have frozen in the pipes.

Ashes to ashes

Years and years and years passed. And behold, a dim-witted psychopathic son of one of the nation’s self-proclaimed best families became president. And I became seriously annoyed. No, incensed. I decided the least I could do was include one of Dimwit’s many blunders as a sort of mini-bio at the end of my emails. I lost a couple of clients over it, but then, I really didn’t want to write stuff for insurance companies…although I was a lot less than a whole contract away from living under the trees on smelly Western Run in Baltimore, the skunky trickle that passed for a river behind the formerly luxury apartments I lived in, alone.

One day I got an email from the clergyman. It said that he could well understand how “you people” could disdain the heroic president but if I cared to continue to be “childish,” I needn’t correspond with him in future.

Oh dear. What had happened to our friendship? They had moved, too, to the far West and rented out their Manhattan townhouse to pay the death duties on the $6.5 mil it was worth, as it wasn’t theirs: they had been freeloading on a parent for decades.

It took me precisely 4 seconds to figure out what had happened. We had been no more than amusing house pets to our rich friends. The Rector had once remarked to my husband that he was glad we were friends with the rich couple. We didn’t understand it at the time; in retrospect, we decided it was so that they could be kept in touch with normal people, people who couldn’t sell a priceless Ashcan School painting they didn’t like to pay private school tuition for their kids. This beat working, you see, because―anyway―they really didn’t know how to actually work.

So I wrote back, immediately. I can’t recall exactly what I said, but I can tell you, it was not apologetic. I basically torched the sucker, verbally, which was the least I could do after a few decades of being the house pet of the moneyed class, now that I understood. My friends, of course, applauded my action. We had a lot of fun for a while with the word childish, bandied about at odd moments, and with the phrase you people as well.

Trickle-down blew up in my face

How did all this happen? If I had written best-sellers instead of being a journeyman journalist, would I have appended the moronic statements of George W. Bush to my emails as I did? Would I have felt differently if I were a resident of the aeries of the rich and not a late royalty check away from living outdoors beneath the spires of a church that served the moneyed classes of New York so very, very well?  My emails were a possibly pathetic attempt to convince at least one more person of Bush’s unsuitability to lead so much as a walk down the street, never mind a huge, rich, populous nation into endless, lower-class-eating wars.

George W. Bush was deemed suitable because he was of the class of my former friends, those who don’t need to work, which is a good thing, because they don’t know how. And a good part of the rest of the nation was fooled by him, attracted by the thought of being one with him by voting for him, and not realizing that in actuality, they were house pets. 

But this rich owner, unlike the people I allowed to keep me in ignorance for too long, was abusive. After a small taste of fresh milk, Americans of every class but upper were to be treated not only to the toe of a boot, but to the added abuse of all Bush’s cronies, conspiring together because, suddenly, they didn’t need the house pets anymore. House pets became expendable, more trouble than they were worth. And so, now, those house pets are camped by the river, looking for a way to regain a place even in the shadow of the house, somewhat protected from the elements, if not the coveted place at the rich man’s fire.

It is pitiful. It is as pitiful as my supposed friendship with the Swell Family was. The swells of every stripe have revealed themselves as false friends, as those who will kick the house pet out into traffic as soon as the house pets become troublesome, think for themselves, or understand that there is not one single thing their government has done since George W. Bush moved into the mansion that was not insulting and designed to make everyone not of his lofty strata live in sewers and eat shit.

Frank Rich penned a recent, well-reseached and lengthy column in the New York Times about class warfare. Read it here.

If he did it

Bush, blowing his own horn, at Ground Zero. Take it as you will. (Wiki Commons)

There is little doubt in many minds that the book If I did it by O.J. Simpson was in fact a boast by a tortured mentality--an ego of global proportions, enhanced further by successfully playing the diametrically opposed race card simultaneously. It can hardly be considered a denial; rather, it is a most profound mea culpa dressed up like the doggy's dinner.

Not long after that book came out, O.J.--high on what he doubtless perceived as another wool-over-eyes coup--was arrested for a stupid crime. A crime an imbecilic high school footballer has been might have done. Idiocy.

What does this have to do with September 11, 2001 and the major player in that game, George W. Bush?

Everything. The only reason we don't have an "If I did it" book concerning the take-down of the Twin Towers by George W. Bush is that he wrote his book in blood on sand instead of ink on paper. He expiated his failure (I'm not going to deal at length here with whether he was actively responsible, but he was at least passively culpable) by embarking on a 'book tour' of the Middle East, loudly proclaiming that he/his nation had been wronged "If I did it"-style, and demanding that others pay attention.

Bush's behavior is so like O.J.'s after he was found out, it's scary. O.J. went on his "slow speed" chase. Bush went walkabout on Air Force One. O.J. made his jail cell into Party Central; Bush partied whenever he could--more than any president in history, even those who served in less perilous times--at his ranch or Camp David.

You doubt it? Today, in his column for the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman applied the party idea to everything Bush did in office. He wrote: "...rather than use 9/11 to summon us to nation-building at home, Bush used it as an excuse to party — to double down on a radical tax-cutting agenda for the rich that not only did not spur rising living standards for most Americans but has now left us with a huge ball and chain around our ankle."

The appearance of truth can be bought and paid for
O.J. spent his fortune on the trickiest lawyers money could buy, and counted on them to intimidate the mere functionaries in the D.A.'s office who had never prosecuted such a high profile case before. He also managed to get two highly respected lawyers to work for him, F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz, lending an air of respectability to OJ's side of the courtroom.

Bush surrounded himself with the greatest number of glib scoundrels he could amass--Rove, Rumsfeld, Yoo--and counted on them to dazzle a public whose sight was dimmed with the tears of a recent unfathomable tragedy. He also prevailed upon a man of good character, Colin Powell, to carry the Bush message--all lies though it was--abroad in the universe, via an equally duped United Nations.

In the years after each man's involvement in murder--for whether one believes Bush orchestrated the events of 9/11 or not, he most certainly killed thousands of Afghans, Iraqis and US soldiers--that man continued to live pretty much the life he had lived before, except for the odd inconvenient snub by those who believed they were guilty and wanted nothing to do with them as a result. Each man enjoyed the unconscionable good will of those who had something to gain from continuing the friendship. With OJ, it was other ex-football players and Hollywood hangers on. With Bush, it was the authoritarian, knee-jerk Christian dry-drunk apologists of the neo-con movement.

In each case, the man is known by the company he keeps. As for me, I'm waiting for Bush to over-reach as OJ did, to attempt another high-profile crime of some sort, for which he can be caught, tried and, if found guilty, convicted. I imagine there is a reason Bush hasn't traveled to some European nations, though; some of them were reportedly unwilling to wait for a second instalment in the Bush saga of global criminal acts to arrest him, although the Washington Post reported a few months ago that his arrest is more possible in theory than in actuality, global alliances being what they are.

But no one ever failed to accuse Bush of being a coward, least of all me.

9/11 and the Sway of Fear

Popular sentiment in England: Could America benefit from a bit of it? (Wiki Commons)

There is little doubt that the events of 9/11 were fearsome. Until the past ten years, the longest period in US history marked by fear was the lead-up to and duration of  World War II.  Amazingly enough, civilians were less frightened and more willing to pitch in during WWII than they are now. There are abundant very logical reasons for this difference. Most would cite the fact that, back then, the fighting and dying was all done on foreign shores, even if US GIs were dying, too, fighting for Europe's freedom.

Back then, the US government, in demanding sacrifices of consumer goods to support the war effort, rewarded the population with as much support as it could muster: “Feel good” movies were produced, rewards for heroic acts at home were bestowed, the opportunity to assist as plane spotters was created to involve everyone in the endeavor, and so on. 

In the current “fright theater,” the deaths that caused the problem were on US soil, but the government reacted in ways that made the horror even worse. This time, rather than demanding sensible sacrifices by civilians, the government simply ramped up the tax bite on the many and lowered it on the few―always grand for morale. With the money--and more--it invaded sovereign states in the name of protecting America. This was the precise opposite of WWII, in which US GIs attempted to save sovereign states already invaded by a dastardly rogue government. In short, this time, instead of fighting to save others from fascism, the US acted like a fascist state and invaded for one simple reason; because its leader wanted to. Like Hitler. (The collusion between the Bush family and Hitler's Germany has been well chronicled by others; a simple googling of Bush-Hitler will give you more information than you can digest.)

Rather than giving the population work to do, such as WWII's plane spotting (a useful task in those days with those planes), it made the US into a nation of snitches and quaking whiners who feared a murderous Muslim lurked around every corner. “Report suspicious activity” flashed from overhead signs on every highway, making some of us who are at least casual students of history cringe at how reminiscent that was of the old USSR; students of literature knew that the ersatz world of Orwellian fiction had come to pass.

Bush: A decade of insufferably inferior leadership

The difference between the 1940s and the first decade of the 21^st century resides first and foremost in who was sailing the ship of state. In 1941, it was a man who had faced a debilitating disease, polio, and coped with it before he won the presidency. He was wealthy, which no doubt made all things easier. But he was no stranger to pain, and no shirker of the hard choices and the difficult tasks. He was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 2001, the putative leader was a man who had faced nothing in his entire life, George W. Bush. Bush was coddled through school, and passed on for his MBA despite lacking the intellectual rigor and basic honesty to earn the degree, according to his major professor. Yoshi Tsurumi, one of Bush’s professors at Harvard when Bush was shoehorned into Dad’s school’s MBA program, said Bush “showed pathological lying habits and was in denial when challenged on his prejudices and biases. He would even deny saying something he just said 30 seconds ago. He was famous for that. Students jumped on him; I challenged him.” 

(Aside: One has to wonder why no one in Congress challenged him. One need not wonder why Cheney did not challenge him; in Bush, Cheney’s pathology had found a perfect mouthpiece for Cheney’s own dark compulsions and biases. Bush famously said, in his Harvard class, that poor people need not be bothered with because they were lazy. Such intellectual laziness itself, and such incautious speech and cavalier attitudes alone, should have been enough to warn all and sundry that this was no fit person to led the free world. Unless one were equally unfit…and several―Cheney, Rove, Yoo, Rumsfeld―were.)

Bush sat out his National Guard service god knows where―anywhere but on a military post―while so many young men and women were suffering and dying in southeast Asia. The closest he had ever come to death was pushing the button on a record number of executions when he was governor of Texas, a state that illogically elected him despite his rather dubious dealings with sports club ownership in that state.

Fear explains it all

There is little doubt that when Bush wasn’t presenting the world with a vacant stare. When (we are told) Bush was informed by an aide of the Twin Towers disaster while he visited a second-grade class in a “safe place” for him--his governor brother’s state, Florida―he was whipping the nation into a frenzy of illogic based on a surfeit of fear. It is hard to think straight when you’re terrified out of your shoes. Bush’s every action post-incident was calculated to lead to an increase of the nation’s fears. A man with the agenda carried by the Bush family and supported by intelligent, rapacious, unscrupulous hangers on like Cheney and Rove would need a population frightened into witlessness to get away with it all, despite his well-documented ability to claim he hadn’t said what he said not 30 seconds earlier.

What he did spoke louder than what he said; it always does

At the moment, there is a catchphrase in England that should have been the motto for the reaction of the US post-9/11. That catchphrase is “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Did Bush suggest anything of the sort? Not at all. Rather, he instituted a nerve-wracking system of colorful alerts, with red naturally being “Jeez, god, the Muslims are at the freakin’ door.” All the while, of course, Bush’s lips were moving like the proverbial lying lawyer’s, telling the world how tough America was even as he made it weaker. Bush was busy telling the rest of the world how tough America was as we failed over and over at bringing American justice to other cultures that had little, if anything, to do with what happened on 9/11. Unless, of course, American justice has descended to globally shooting and asking questions later. That's the hallmark of Texas justice, of course. So perhaps it is no surprise after all.

Bush apparently heeded well the words of a world-class crooner, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra quoted, in The Way You Wear Your Hat, as saying, “Fear is the enemy of logic.” Bush could not afford to have a thinking electorate, one to whom logic was as natural as turning on the stove to cook a meal. He needed an electorate so busy looking for the gas knobs and some sort of instruction manual, their heads down and getting hungrier by the minute, that they wouldn't notice that nothing Bush did made the slightest sense for the nation as a whole, but only for the small cadre of oligarchs whose aberrant psychology was in charge.

The second mistake

Thus misled and purposely confused, Americans followed the lead of a man in control of only one thing, his own escape from responsibility. If Bush simply instituted a system of alerts, his minions could post them without his interference and he could get on the plane to his ranch with a light heart and a goofy grin. And so it was. And so it became apparent rather quickly, despite the compromise of so much of the nation's intelligence by fear.

An excellent question: Why?

But why did we allow fear to continue to hold sway?  Because the Master Chef of Unreasoning Terror was not finished with the feast yet. He was cooking up more treats to deflect our knowledge of what was happening.

First, of course, there was the anthrax attack. That was fear-inducing….and it went on and on and on with swamps drained and a man under suspicion, but no resolution. Finally, supposedly, the man who did it committed suicide in 2008. The original suspect? He was exonerated, but the bugle wasn’t loudly sounded. If he was the culprit, then why was another man found to have killed himself over it?

Everything….EVERYTHING…about the anthrax scare suggests, in fact, that that is precisely what it was, a scare, and no perpetrator need ever have been identified as long as the population became more afraid. The first suspect, Dr. Steven Hatfill, was awarded huge monetary damages by the Justice Department, when charges against him were dropped. The award was so huge that neither he nor his heirs will ever have to work again, possibly an adequate payoff for the suffering and ruined reputation. 

Dr. Bruce Ivins, identified finally as the perpetrator, killed himself. Did he do it? Or did he react that way to being informed of an investigation by the Justice Department? Who can know?  But it doesn't matter. However the anthrax incident was contrived, it had the desired effect. The population was terrorized. To quote George W. Bush, mission accomplished.

“To him who is in fear everything rustles.”

SOPHOCLES

While it was OK, after the suicide of the putative perpetrator, to give up the unreasoning fear of anthrax, how to keep the population afraid so that another fear-mongering Republican could be elected? The population's terror of anthrax was kept alive for seven years via the occasional announcement in the press about this or that additional finding, despite no additional biological attacks. But that fear had abated, and the popularity of the president could be measured most accurately in its absence.

A new flash point for fear had to be found. It wouldn't be terrorists, or at least not so much, because that would give the lie to all the extreme measures taken that the administration claimed kept the US safe from terror.

What to do?

AHA!  People with no stable employment are easily made fearful, aren’t they?

CONTINUES with What to do about the fear.

Do you really believe in coincidence? It will be difficult to, if you read this and think even half of it might be true.

Post 9-11: What to do about the fear

FDR: Fireside chat (Wiki Commons)

 (Read the companion piece to this article here.)

What to do about the fear

AHA!  People with no stable employment are easily made fearful, aren’t they?

And whose homes are being snatched out from under them? How much worse could that fear be if they were effectively prevented even from declaring bankruptcy in Bush’s land of the corporate serf, or at least, not without signing the rest of their natural life away to do so. (Please read Republican Tortures for the Middle Class for more information.) Unlike corporations, of course, which can go bankrupt totally, at will, leaving the employees empty-handed.

It’s no wonder the population was still scared seven years after 9/11 when it quakingly elected a man they thought perhaps, just maybe, could bring some sanity and safety back to their lives. Because deep down, they KNEW they were not safe. They knew that everything they had ever planned, hoped and dreamed was more at risk in Bush’s America than at any time in US history. Even their superstitions had failed to provide solace for their misery.

Never mind religion; There’s a new opiate for the masses

No less than Bertrand Russell, one of the philosophical giants of the 20^th century, noted that, “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom. (An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish)

Superstitiously, restaurant had owners changed French Fries to Freedom Fries in the months after 9/11. Why? Because the French government refused to join Bush’s juggernaut against the entire Arab world. The restaurateurs thought casting the French symbolically out of the ignominy of the rancid fat in the deep-fryer and into oblivion would keep them safe. Their customers ate it up.

Superstition was responsible for that minor cruelty, a mere stupidity in the run of human events, but it was emblematic of many much, much larger ones to follow. For example, suddenly Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown, despite his antipathy toward Al Qaeda, which the same agencies that failed to warn of an attack had miraculously identified as the perpetrator of 9/11. 

They had help ignoring the warning signs, of course. And there was the impenetrable fug of Bush’s mind to cope with, and the hubris of the leaders of the agencies involved in public safety and, not to put too fine a point on it, the likelihood that Cheney’s once and future connections with the likes of Halliburton stood to gain mightily from any protracted military action the US was involved in.

But Hussein was an Arab, providing reason enough for the superstitious mind to want to destroy him. Destroying him would bring peace. Wouldn’t it?

Daddy Bush and Baby Bush

For Bush, destroying Hussein held more magic still.  Bush’s father had failed to destroy Hussein; what the man failed to do, the boy attempted and so very unfortunately succeeded. Not that Saddam was a saint. He was a horror show. But he was his own nation’s horror show, not ours. And toppling him led Bush to superstitiously believe that Bush and Co. could do no wrong, and worse, could get away with just about anything. They had lied to get the US into the war. They would be out of office before anyone had to tell the truth and get the military out. They would be busy with their revisionist memoirs when…if…the nations they invaded and destroyed got busy resurrecting whatever could be salvaged of a culture, an infrastructure, and any belief system except despair.

One has to wonder if somewhere, sometime, the misfiring synapses in Bush’s pickled brain ever suggested to Bush that what he had done was wrong. He had taken apart a nation and killed its leader by constructing a not-totally-credible lie about WMDs, and further, caused some of those who followed him to lie as well. 

An officer and a gentleman
Colin Powell, a decent human being and honorable man, did not have the devious constitution to understand that the man leading the free world would lie to him, and get him to lie, to achieve ends that were wildly less than sterling. As much as anyone, Powell was the victim of the Bush government. Luckily, Powell’s strength of mind has outlasted most of the damage done to his reputation. But his public service is probably a closed book because of the way he was duped, on a world stage, by Bush & Co.

Cruelty is not gratuitous

Fear is the parent of cruelty, wrote James Anthony Froude in Short Studies on Great Subjects. Cruelty cannot be said, thus, to be without explanation, nor can cruelties be done for no reason at all. Cruelty is in thrall to fear, is part and parcel of fear―its very offspring―and must, therefore, follow fear absolutely.

From their fear of the demonized Iraqi population and the terrorists they were told were hiding behind every tree*, American military personnel tortured and degraded prisoners in wild contravention of the Geneva Conventions, rules that were written by wiser, calmer men to grapple with the natural fear that combatants feel in a war.

Some of the American military in Iraq chose to ignore their own humanity, in a superstitious belief that if they sufficiently degraded and dehumanized their prisoners, they themselves would be more than they thought they were, forced into a meaningless war by gormless politicians who exposed them not only to enemy fire but to vitriol from those at home who saw the truth. Not that many doves castigated the servicemen and women. Indeed, in Bush’s wars, the home front was at pains to honor the service of the soldiers but agitate against the decisions of the politicians. So at least the Bush-era GIs were spared some of the demoralization  faced by GIs in the Vietnam era. However, not being idiots, those very servicemen had to suspect something was not right and they were part of it. They had a hard time figuring out how officers and gentlemen (and women) had become tools of a craven mentality that cared no more for them than for the copperhead he killed last night at the ranch.

George Bush wielded more power than anyone lacking empathy or a conscience should ever wield in the universe. He is an opportunist for all the worst reasons ―supremacy, not having to be accountable, acquisition of toys and of undeserved honors. Indeed, if he has not earned the honors, he is completely capable of wearing the badge anyway, as he did whenever he donned flight togs, gave a victory salute, and attempted to ingratiate himself with bona fide officers and gentlemen. He is corrupt to the bottom of his soul, and, as Prof. Tsurumi noted, he is a pathological liar.

Power corrupts, but it gets worse

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it,” wrote Aung San Suu Kyi in Freedom from Fear.

The fear-based psychology of America’s leader at its most vulnerable moment was the start of a superstitious period in which ordinary people clutched at absurdities, like renaming French Fries, as a way to protect themselves. It was also the start of a level of corruption rarely seen in human history. 

The corruption has so pervaded America that ordinary people believe that the two percent of the population that controls fifty percent of the wealth will help them up the ladder. They have become Teabaggers, a name they chose themselves unwittingly. It refers to a gross sexual act. They thought it cunningly described the ludicrous hats they constructed when they began protesting against universal health care, at the same time demanding that Medicare―no more than universal health care for the old and unwell, and therefore infinitely more costly than truly universal care which would save money on the young and healthy―not be touched. They demand, now, to be called Tea Partiers, but they are not hosting an event any sane person would wish to attend. The Tea Bag nation celebrates half-truths, lionizes stinginess, and exhibits the same pathology as any garden-variety sociopath.

It is easy to be corrupt and to foster corruption when it is so easy to control others by instilling fear; it is easy to become corrupted when one fears what those in control might do. One will likely believe any lies―that is, subscribe to any superstition (Horatio Alger gone mad, too broke for health care, no way to create a healthy economy for everyone, etc.) in order to be exempt from the very conditions the fear has induced.

It may well be that there is no antidote for the gut-wrenching terror most Americans find themselves living in. I’ve experienced a recent dose of it myself, although I gave up living in America a while back. America still has a long reach, and unfortunately can export its own brand of greed and hubris worldwide.

I was spending all my time conditioning myself to cope with the frightening and suddenly headlong dissolution of both the institutions of government and population of a nation based on a great idea, freedom and liberty for all. Then for some. Now, sadly, for almost none.

Something has to change.

It is time for a new Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is time for America to come to grips with its fear; possibly, it will take putting the architects of that fear on trial. Bush, Cheney, Rove, Yoo, Ashcroft, et al. At least, they must be marginalized, forgotten as thoroughly as Rutherford B. Hayes (who?). It is time for someone, anyone, to begin convincing the quaking mass of disheartened Americans of the thought by which Roosevelt dragged/pushed/cajoled America through the Great Depression and through World War II:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”―

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1933

What a different world we would be living in today if FDR had been in the White House on September 11, 2001.

---

In Iraq, terrorists were and are hiding behind every tree. But the problem is, of course, that destroying a nation gratuitously is likely to make its people eager to remove the invader however they can. In short, US military presence has created most of the terror they are facing. 

How do you get people who volunteered to fight for their nation's honor and safety--US military--to fight when it is obvious they are engaged in an unjust war? Here are some clues: brutalization by their own command (see Abu Ghraib), the knowledge that there are no jobs at home, and treacherous re-deployment when a combatant's psychological reserves are diminished. All of these have been factors the military has faced for the entire recent past.

9/11’s tenth anniversary remembrances: Day One

Twin Towers, Apr. 15, 2001 (Galvin Costello;Wiki images)

September 1, 2011

The New Yorker is publishing the memories of its writers concerning September 11, 2001. Where they were, what they were doing, how their lives have changed since that date. Not surprisingly, the first memoir I read was by Jane Mayer, who wrote an amazing book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, that I took with me on vacation a couple of years ago, and devoured. In Key West.

I’ll grant that it is unusual to take a heavily political book on a beach vacation. But any trip to Key West, was―for me―a drinking vacation as well. Open-air bars abound, so one can amuse one’s self by getting some fresh air while lubricating one’s brain cells and watching the passing parade.

What of the rest of us, though? What of those of us who were not, like Mayer and other New Yorker writers, immersed in the middle of the seminal event of probably all of our lifetimes?

Where were we when?

I was alive when JFK was killed, and when his brother was killed. And when Martin Luther King was killed. And when the Iranian hostages were taken. And when the Berlin Wall fell. And when Russia was opened up for criminal activity not associated with the Kremlin.

September 11, 2001 was far more life-changing than any of those events, or even all of them combined. Here’s how it unfolded in my small corner of the world.

***

I had the habit of bathing, making breakfast and watching some of the Today show while eating. I generally turned the TV off before nine, so I could be in my home office working, or at least preparing to work, by then. That day, I needed to phone a friend about riding our horses together that afternoon.

About five after nine, I tried to call. Her office was less than 30 miles from my apartment, but I kept getting a message, “All circuits are busy.”  How odd.

A phone glitch gets serious
About 20 minutes later, I decided to call a friend who lived in the same apartment complex and leave him a message about an event coming up, as he generally left for work by 7:30 a.m.  But he answered the phone. Was he home sick?

“Didn’t you know?” he asked. “The World Trade Center has been attacked so we were sent home.”

None of that made sense. We lived in Baltimore. OK. There was a building called the World Trade Center in Baltimore, but it wasn’t THE World Trade Center, and Don worked miles and miles away from it. Why would he be sent home if that was attacked?

I couldn’t get it straight, until finally he realized what page I was on and turned to it. “No, the World Trade Center in New York.”

My knees buckled. Like all native New Yorkers, I had both loved and loathed that building. But I had to admit, when I had taken Don’s two sons to NYC a couple of years earlier, that I had loved the way the towers shimmered on a hot summer day as we rode toward them on the Staten Island Ferry. His sons had bought me an NYC shot glass for my collection; on it were the Twin Towers. I’ll have to put that away, I thought to myself, the memories of Scott and Sean and our brilliant day-trip flooding in along with the realization that as many as 50,000 people might die.

“Come on over,” Don said. “Jeffrey and I are watching the coverage and drinking coffee. There isn’t much else to do, and it’s pretty horrible. You don’t want to be watching alone.”

No, I didn’t. Don and Jeffrey were two of my best friends. It would be good to share tears with them.

As I walked through the end-of-summer breeze, under the maple trees dappling the path between my building and theirs, I thought, “Ah, it wasn’t nine o’clock yet when it happened. New Yorkers don’t go to work early. Indeed, most arrive sometime between 9:30 and 10.” New Yorkers work late in the evening, though, and they’ll work hard and work Saturdays. But they avoid morning rush hour if they can.

I was proved right. The only people in the building were building workers themselves, financial types who are there before the stock market opens and their support teams, and some restaurant workers from Windows on the World. Not a full complement in all the offices or the retail space underground. Thank goodness.

Hijackers: Ignorance or planning?

I wondered, then, if the hijackers were ignorant of New York’s working hours and thought that they’d do extensive killing, like the Oklahoma bomber did by arriving early. Or perhaps they didn’t want to kill as many as they would have killed by flying later, and so they chose early flights to hijack. The first theory held more water if they were really ignorant hijackers, hired only to wreak havoc and not for their ability to assess a culture and a target.

The latter theory held more water if whoever had organized the operation wanted more to make a statement or to change the course of history than to actually kill people.

I was leaning toward one of those conclusions as early as that first morning.

But mainly, I felt sad and oddly disconnected. Everyone felt oddly disconnected, I suspect. But my feelings of disconnection had also to do with the fact that I felt I should have been there, should have been in MY city with my peers witnessing and suffering through this worst of all global terror attacks in history. I felt I had made a cheap escape by living elsewhere, when my heart belonged in the Big Apple, my spiritual, and often my physical, home during much of my life.

New York would recover. I never doubted that. But as the day wore on, what I doubted was that any nation that had elected George W. Bush as president could deal effectively with whatever it was that had wreaked havoc that morning. By that time, it was clear to anyone with one scintilla of common sense that George W. Bush was too common to cope with a multi-faceted disaster, a fact that crystallized more profoundly later on as he failed during Katrina as well, and during the financial meltdown. 

Being kind to Bush

Using the term failed is a kindness; what I mean now―and probably had inklings of then―was that Bush was responsible in large part for the terror attack (whether by omission or commission will be debated in some circles for decades), the ineffectual―even cruel―response to Hurricane Katrina, and the execrable trashing of the American economy by his leadership or lack thereof until the financial meltdown and his handling of it as he left office.

Did I know all that then? I’ve been a journalist for a long, long time. My instincts were kicking in, alerted by the stench. And on the morning of September 11, 2001, there was a lot more stench in the air than that of jet fuel and crumbling glass, steel and mortar. There was a stench of negligence at best, complicity at worst. It’s a stench that lingers still, as the posturing buffoons of Bush’s dunderheaded government continue to spew their filth onto the population they served so ill.