A screenshot from an album in The Sims which I made with real "missing" posters.
Some random and disconnected thoughts on this sad anniversary.
I was thinking of Marvin Bell's poems. He is a New York poet I heard give readings a number of times and was also once in one of his workshops long ago. He has a number of anti-war poems. Some you can hear him reading here:
This line from "I Didn't Sleep" seems particularly apt:
"The war went on. The silence at home was deafening."
Then
there's his "Bagram 2002". I happened to see this video posted by a poet
friend on Facebook some months ago and started writing about it but the
blog page crashed. It's about an Afghan dying in American custody.
Very few people have really made works of art involving protest against the Iraq or Afghan wars, much less very good works of art. Sure, there's a certain amount of forums ranting, and "Bush lied, people died" kneejerk thinking. But if you want to get people to think and empathize, you have to have good art, and I think Marvin Bell's poems work that way.
Right about that time I was re-reading his poems, I read this op-ed piece by a former Guantanamo prisoner -- and was reminded of it again with the news this week that another prisoner had died in Guantanamo.
Lakhdar Boumediene describes his Guantanamo nightmare in the Times. It indeed seemed awful and harrowing. Think Progress raged that America had locked up a humanitarian for seven years.
And if true, that's of course, awful. Yet you just have to get away from the lefty press over to the conservative press, and you find it challenged. The Weekly Standard says part of the story tracks, but then they say officials claim he had the telephone numbers of extremists in his pocket. Now, would this be possibly normal for a humanitarian, one who may have had to deal with tough customers to get convoys through and that sort of thing? Yes, but this was Bosnia. And the extremists were elsewhere and they claimed he was part of a jihad sort of network. How can we tell if it were true?
Certainly the man who died sounds like a brain-injury victim who should have been let out long ago. But who are these guys who arrange for him to get medical treatment in Pakistan related to Al Qaeda? And there's this: it's not responsible to send somebody back to Yemen where they might be tortured and killed out of expediency.
So I don't really come away with any convictions. Like any human rights advocate, I want Guantanamo to be closed because indeed prisoners have been subjected to inhuman treatment there. Was it torture by international UN standards? Indeed, it seems so.
But the main problem the Administration has with Gitmo is that they can't find places outside of the US willing to take them. And if we consider the track records -- a good share of them either went back to jihad or continue to spout jihad, what would you have them do?
As always on September 11, I think of Susan Sontag. Boy, did she get people mad with her invention at that time. I don't know why she didn't bother me. I don't agree with her, and I find it too "chickens coming home to roost", but I found myself actually reciting over and over again in those confusing days:
"Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together."
It just seemed right to me, somehow, along with this:
"A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in
Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence
and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign
policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a
smart program of military defense."
Well, sure. But it's awful
easy to Monday-morning-quarterback on this. I found it atrocious that
the Times had to gin up a piece a thread shy of a truther rant claiming
that Bush knew the attack was coming and didn't do anything.
But Jesus Christ, there's a big difference between being told an attack is coming, and stopping it. How? Who were the agents? Where were they? One was sent back. What was Bush supposed to do? Intern all immigrants? ID check all Muslims? Ground all airplanes? It's insane. Those claiming there was negligence have to point out the actual path of action, not just fume and whine that we had all this intel and didn't do anything.
Remember this very clairvoyant piece in The Atlantic by a former CIA agent? He said our intelligence will never catch bin Ladn, who was already a problem then from other attacks, remember? And the reason? Pakistani intelligence. A problem in July 2001; still a problem through March 2011 until Obama ordered the SEALS to go around it. And still a problem in the aftermath.
Did you know my namesake, often the subject of enormous speculation about me in Second Life, because some people thought because we had the same name, we were the same person, has also written about 9/11, which she witnessed even more up close than I did -- she saw the buildings collapse and the bodies of the jumpers falling. I only talked to haggard, hollow-eyed people who had seen the jumpers themselves but I was busy picking up my own kids and the child of someone who couldn't get across the Brooklyn bridge to go down and look at the scene, which was soon blocked off anyway.
I wrote quite a long blog in 2008 about my experience that day.
And I wrote an essay about the "missing" posters that is now included inthe official archive at the Library of Congress.
If
someday they build a memorial, I hope it will have some elements in its
design that reflect those posters, billowing in the wind, tattered and
covered with that strange gray silt that covered everything in New York
City in the days after 911, which we touched and smoothed out countless
times on the wall to try to see the faces of our fellow New Yorkers who
were obliterated in a matter of hours.
I have to say, I don't like the memorials. I saw the big light beam last night, and I thought, no, I don't want a big light beam rending the sky, it's too dramatic, or too... something.
And the buildings they're doing -- well, I just don't like them. Too modern. Too pretentious. Too something. But, I have to say, that few war memorials or atrocity memorials I've seen around the world really ever work. They are always too dramatic or too kitsch or insufficient. The World War II monument in Riga that the Soviets built, as explained by a Soviet guide, where the flagstone steps around it were uneven and forced you to step unevenly, was effective because the guide said the uneven steps were supposed to make you think of human suffering, refugees fleeing and so on.
If you want to think of an example of people being stupid together, think of that hideously stupid film ridiculing Muslims and the Prophet, which has now so angered Egyptians that they killed a State Department official. Yes, the film, funded by a Jewish real estate agent who will be endlessly vilified now, along with Jews as a whole community, is awful, and stupid. Few in the US take it seriously and it only gets views as it becomes a scandal. There is never any need, whatever your beef is with terrorists, to denigrate religious beliefs and culture in this way, or make a caricature of complex issues.
But wait a minute, you get to kill a man over your outrage over an insensitive and stupid film like this? Why? What's wrong with you? Is this religion? Or merely machismo, out of "male humiliation, the cut that will not heal"? Nothing justifies killing somebody, even if your religion is mocked. Say, do these people have some help getting incited like this?
I suppose the only hope for this is education. People putting up offensive, idiotic videos like that -- could education, context, meaning ever have any effect on them? And those insensed into murderous rage by such idiocy -- would education ever work quell their rage?
Mark Zuckerberg had this immature belief that if only people connect, they will be less angry -- he spoke of would-be jihadists in Lebanon making friends on Facebook and not following the jihadist path or people protesting the FARC on Facebook and this making a difference. Really? If anything, the problem is that social media is too connected, so that an idiotic movie that might never have gotten out of its own narrow circle gets on Youtube and gets lots of views and reaches people insulted by it on Youtube and they have lots of opportunity to accelerate and amplify their rage.
The answer isn't to take down the video but to make other videos. And it will be hard to make good art out of a cause like that. So read Marvin Bell's quiet little poems and think about what might be done.
