Let's forget 9/11

موضوع: Let's forget 9/11 2011-09-11, 6:33 pm

1
World Trade Center, previously known as Freedom Tower, will be the
United States' tallest building when completed [GALLO/GETTY]

Let's bag it.

I'm
talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything
that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the
tolling of bells, the honouring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence. The works.

Let's just can it all. Shut down Ground Zero. Lock out thetourists. Close "Reflecting Absence", the memorial built in the "footprints" of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls
before it can be unveiled this Sunday. Discontinue work on the
underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012. Tear down
the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our "freedom"
wars went awry), 102 stories of "the most expensive skyscraper ever
constructed in the United States". (Estimated price tag:
$3.3bn.) Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776
feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W Bush and soaring
into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future
terrorists. Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11bn
government-sponsored construction programme. Let's get rid of it all.
If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate
to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.

Ask
yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven't we had enough
of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency
left, isn't it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11
from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks
to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror.
No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national
security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to
justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the
surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and
strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

The
attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific
acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal
monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious
remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 -
who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used -
as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors
we've visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.

Isn't
it finally time to go cold turkey? To let go of the dead? Why keep
repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion,
when we've proven that we, as a nation, can't handle it - and worse yet,
that we don't deserve it?

We
would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion,
forgetting it all if only we could. We can't, of course. But we could stop the anniversary remembrances. We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later. We could
stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we
are. We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard
look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.

Ceremonies of hubris

Within 24 hours of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the first newspaper
had already labelled the site in New York as "Ground Zero". If anyone
needed a sign that we were about to run off the rails, as a
mismindessment of what had actually occurred that should have been
enough. Previously, the phrase "ground zero" had only one meaning: It
was the spot where a nuclear explosion had occurred.

The facts of 9/11 are, in this sense, simple enough. It was not a nuclear attack. It was not apocalyptic. The cloud of smoke where the towers stood was no mushroom cloud. It was not potentially civilisation-ending. It did not
endanger the existence of our country - or even of New York City.
Spectacular as it looked and staggering as the casualty figures were,
the operation was hardly more technologically advanced than the failed attack on a single tower of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Islamists using a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives.

A
second irreality went with the first. Almost immediately, key
Republicans like Senator John McCain, followed by George W Bush, top
figures in his administration, and soon after, in a drumbeat of
agreement, the mainstream media declared that we were "at war". This was, Bush would say only three days after the attacks, "the first war of the twenty-first century".

Only problem: It wasn't. Despite the screaming headlines, Ground Zero wasn't Pearl Harbor. Al-Qaeda wasn't Japan, nor was it Nazi Germany. It wasn't
the Soviet Union. It had no army, nor finances to speak of, and
possessed no state (though it had the minimalist protection of a hapless
government in Afghanistan, one of the most backward, poverty-stricken
lands on the planet).

And
yet - another sign of where we were heading - anyone who suggested that
this wasn't war, that it was a criminal act and some sort of
international police action was in order, was simply laughed (or derided
or insulted) out of the American room. And so the empire prepared to
strike back (just as Osama bin Laden hoped it would) in an apocalyptic,
planet-wide "war" for domination that masqueraded as a war for survival.

In
the meantime, the populace was mustered through repetitive, nationwide
9/11 rites emphasising that we Americans were the greatest victims,
greatest survivors, and greatest dominators on planet Earth. It was in
this cause that the dead of 9/11 were turned into potent recruiting
agents for a revitalised American way of war.

Click for more Al Jazeera 9/11 coverage

From all this, in the brief mission-accomplished months after Kabul
and then Baghdad fell, American hubris seemed to know no bounds - and it
was this moment, not 9/11 itself, from which the true inspiration for
the gargantuan "Freedom Tower" and the then-billion-dollar project
for a memorial on the site of the New York attacks would materialise.
It was this sense of hubris that those gargantuan projects were intended
to memorialise.

On
the tenth anniversary of 9/11, for an imperial power that is distinctly
tattered, visibly in decline, teetering at the edge of financial
disaster, and battered by never-ending wars, political paralysis,
terrible economic times, disintegrating infrastructure, and weird
weather, all of this should be simple and obvious. That it's not tells
us much about the kind of shock therapy we still need.

Burying the worst urges in American life

It's commonplace, even today, to speak of Ground Zero as "hallowed ground".
How untrue. Ten years later, it is defiled ground and it is we who have
defiled it. It could have been different. The 9/11 attacks could have
been like the Blitz in London in World War II. Something to remember
forever with grim pride, stiff upper lip and all.

And
if it were only the reactions of those in New York City that we had to
remember, both the dead and the living, the first responders and the
last responders, the people who created impromptu memorials to the dead
and message centres for the missing in Manhattan, we might recall 9/11
with similar pride. Generally speaking, New Yorkers were respectful,
heartfelt, thoughtful, and not vengeful. They didn't have prior plans
that, on September 12, 2001, they were ready to rally those nearly 3,000
dead to support. They weren't prepared at the moment of the catastrophe
to - as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld so classically said - "Go mmindive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

Unfortunately,
they were not the measure of the moment. As a result, the uses of 9/11
in the decade since have added up to a profile in cowardice, not
courage, and if we let it be used that way in the next decade, we will
go down in history as a nation of cowards.

There
is little on this planet of the living more important, or more human,
than the burial and remembrance of the dead. Even Neanderthals buried
their dead, possibly with flowers, and tens of thousands of years ago, the earliest humans, the Cro-Magnon, were already burying their dead elaborately, in one case
in clothing onto which more than 3,000 ivory beads had been sewn,
perhaps as objects of reverence and even remembrance. Much of what we
know of human prehistory and the earliest eras of our history comes from
graves and tombs where the dead were provided for.

And
surely it's our duty in this world of loss to remember the dead, those
close to us and those more removed who mattered in our national or even
planetary lives. Many of those who loved and were close to the victims
of 9/11 are undoubtedly attached to the yearly ceremonies that surround
their deceased wives, husbands, lovers, children, mothers, fathers,
brothers, sisters. For the nightmare of 9/11, they deserve a memorial.
But we don't.

If September 11 was indeed a nightmare, 9/11 as a memorial and Ground
Zero as a "consecrated" place has turned out to be a blank check for
the American war state, funding an endless trip to hell. They have
helped lead us into fields of carnage that put the dead of 9/11 to
shame.

Every
dead person will, of course, be forgotten sooner or later, no matter
how tightly we clasp their memories or what memorials we build. In my
mind, I have a private memorial to my own dead parents. Whenever I leaf
through my mother's childhood photo album and recognise just about no
one but her among all the faces, however, I'm also aware that there is
no one left on this planet to ask about any of them. And when I die, my
little memorial to them will go with me.

This
will be the fate, sooner or later, of everyone who on September 11,
2001, was murdered in those buildings in New York, in that field in
Pennsylvania, and in the Pentagon, as well as those who sacrificed their
lives in rescue attempts, or may now be dying as a result. Under such circumstances, who would not want to remember them all in a special way?

It's
a terrible thing to ask those still missing the dead of 9/11 to forgo
the public spectacle that accompanies their memory, but worse is what we
have: repeated solemn ceremonies to the ongoing health of the American
war state and the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden.

Memory
is usually so important, but in this case we would have been better off
with oblivion. It's time to truly inter not the dead, but the worst
urges in American life since 9/11 and the ceremonies which, for a
decade, have gone with them. Better to bury all of that at sea with bin
Laden and then mourn the dead, each in our own way, in silence and,
above all, in peace.