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’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.