If Your Glass Heart Should Crack

Most of us survived 9/11. There's no value judgment in any of that, it's just math. Depending on how old you are,* you felt the searing heat of panic, pain, a crippling overload of human sympathy to wobble the knees, fear, desperation... I'm supposed to end with "hope" and "resolve" or something, but in retrospect, those were more bolted on over the bent-ass chassis warped by the white-hot impotence of rage. I remember the flags and the singing and the quiet politesse of general social solidarity at the Starbucks or the CVS or whatever. I also remember the metallic thirst for a blood sacrifice. Not locally (we had plenty of gross volunteers to go out and super helpfully smash up Sikh-owned businesses) and most certainly not perpetuated by me, but I did really need to see something blow up that was a) not American and b) done in the sterile, televised way only a professional military force might do it. Terrorists blow shit up literally anywhere at any time. Very messy. Once an army gets involved, well, that's the type of Troubling Event that happens on television, very far away. Those are my preferred types.

Terrorists blow shit up for a reason, usually. The point is to be unsettling and unpredictable, which is why they usually claim responsibility for any act of public violence that happens while they're in the ascendence as far as recognition goes. Every time a goose gets sucked into a plane engine or a fireworks factory burns down, there's ISIS saying it was their idea all along. And before that it was al Qaeda, before that Hezbollah, or the IRA, whatever. The goal of asymmetrical warfare isn't to win militarily. If they could do that, they wouldn't fuck around stuffing ball bearing into pressure cookers in shitty apartments, trying as hard as they can not to buy accelerants from FBI plants. They'd just invade. No, the goal is either to expose or create a social or political weakness that can be exploited so a much stronger adversary will be forced to either acquiesce to whatever their fucked-up stated goal is** or compromise its resolve until it cripples itself. A terrorist attack has a lingering wave effect that can only be amplified by the conscious or unconscious participation of the attacked. I used to wonder if this had happened to us. And now as I look around at the Trumpian political dystopia we inhabit, there's less wonder.

It would be a demogogic rhetorical pivot here to start in wondering if hey, maybe al Qaeda actually won that day 17 years ago. From a practical point of view, that's a hard argument to actually sustain with Osama bin Laden scattered amongst the fishes in the Arabian Sea and all his lieutenants similarly dispatched or not really enjoying Cuba. The appetite for a pound of flesh I felt in 2001 has been more than satisfied, partly by the transience of the irrational, destructive impulse and partly by a gluttony of surface-to-surface missiles.

It would also definitely be a mistake to suggest we've shrugged 9/11 off a dozen and a half years on. It's a difficult thing to forget, especially when on the anniversary, all of social media literally screams at you NEVER FORGET. It's not the act that lingers with quite as much immediacy as before. The Pentagon was patched quite a ways back. The World Trade Center site has finished buildings and a haunting memorial for people to take inappropriately smiling selfies in. Just this past week or so in fact, the last bit of reconstruction actually finished at the site. So absent a visual or physical reminder, the recollection of the event is now released from the corporeal earth and into the weird ether of social memory.

And that's where things seem to have gotten a little less of a clear win. Don't misunderstand, we've run up the score in the resounding and meaningful way usually reserved for early-season college football. Where the terrorists are on the board, however, isn't with the act, it's what we've turned it into. The shocked calm of the days, weeks, months afterward, the collegial patriotism of the moment, has been forged into a cudgel to beat one another with. An ice-pick to jam into our countrymen's eyes. A massive fish with which to knock one another into a canal positively bursting with flowing jingoism. The stark line-drawing of Manichean absolutes of not only morality but loyalty, insisted on and tested by self-deputized patriotism hall-monitors checking all the door-handles in the corridors of men's souls. The suspicion and doubt fetishized to the level of shrieking life-or-death personal stakes, triggered by a person you've never met's response to a flag. It's been this fetid, stinking, rotting, amorphous ball of post-traumatic frenzy and fear made morphous and orange by sticking a stupid red hat on top of it.

Yeah, he's a doofus and a fool and an obvious criminal. But it would be wrong to say he doesn't represent a part of us. A part of us that we absolutely hate, to be sure. Like catching a glimpse of your gut in the mirror at the wrong angle in bad light right before you step into the shower. If an American hates another American, then it's logical to say the loathing we feel is self-loathing.

Maybe it was 9/11 that pushed us into this epoch of blood and soil rhetoric, security over liberty despite the Franklinian admonition. We've been driven naked to a place of existential self-examination and we've responded, partly correctly, with fear and trembling, but also manifesting oddly with a lot of television shouting and an inexplicable tolerance for the presence of Ted Cruz anywhere at all ever. It was in that moment we were forced to face each other and ourselves and reckon with who we are, who we could be and how much will we had to bend the future to match what we saw, damn any resistance.

Either that or it was facebook.

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*While I'm sure it still feels fresh and present for a lot of us, it's impossible to argue that we're not already a whole generation removed.

**Almost always some pompous bullshit about populism or liberation they know will get a great honking whack of the people they're supposed to be "liberating" killed in the inevitable terrorism-response struggle while the leadership waits out the drone strikes in a cave or, like, Monaco.