Americans in Denial about 9/11

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted September 14, 2006.

So, why did they hate us after all?

We sure blew off that question nicely. As with everything else in this country, our response to 9/11 was a heroic compendium of idiocy, cowardice, callow flag-waving, weepy sentimentality (coupled with an apparently bottomless capacity for self-pity), sloth, laziness, and partisan ignorance.

We dealt with 9/11 in many ways. We instantly dubbed everyone who died in the accident a hero and commissioned many millions (billions?) in mawkish elegiac art. We created a whole therapy industry to deal with our 9/11 -- related grief, made a few claustrophobic two-star Hollywood movies about the bombings, read Lisa Beamer's book and bought that DVD narrated by Rudy, watched Law and Order entertainments about sensational murders committed that morning and left for Jerry Orbach to solve, made bushels of quasi-religious references to "hallowed ground." We made many careers out of assigning blame for the attacks, with the right blaming Bill Clinton, Michael Moore blaming George Bush, and the clinically insane blaming those mysterious demolition experts who allegedly wired the bottoms of the towers with the explosives that "really" caused the tragedy. And we talked about 9/11 -- to death. We blathered on so much about the attacks and whined so hard about our "lost innocence" that the rest of the world, initially sympathetic, ended up staring at us in suicidally impatient agony, a can of kerosene overturned above its head, like the old lady sitting next to Robert Hays in Airplane!

We did just about everything except honestly ask ourselves what the hell really happened, and why.

That process of self-examination was flawed from the start. We were screwed the moment Fareed Zakaria wrote his infamous "The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?" essay for Newsweek a few weeks after the attacks. The question -- why do they hate us? -- was maybe the right question, but that was only if everyone could have agreed on what it meant. For what do we mean by they, and what do we mean by us? I for one am not entirely sure we're clear on these points, even now.

That we couldn't agree on who they were should be obvious by now. To the Bush administration the answers to the they/us questions were, respectively, "Foreigners" and "America." From the outset the Bush crew showed that they were both unwilling and unable to budge from the post-WWII political paradigm they'd all grown up under, and viewed the 9/11 events purely as an attack on the American nation-state by a belligerent foreign power. Their solution to the terrorism problem revolved entirely around a strategy for dealing with those foreign nation-states that were the "sponsors" of terrorism -- Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea. It was characteristic of the fourth-rate minds in this White House that they not only immediately got lost in the wrong political paradigm in response to the bombing, but picked the wrong country, Iraq, to punish for the crime. If we give them another ten years at it they'll probably end up introducing market reform to Antarctica as a backup plan.

Bush and his buddies grew up in the Cold War, an era where two countries dominated the world and even the scraggliest warlord in the central African jungle was usually a client of one or the other. It was a fun time for the overgrown Risk-playing nerds inhabiting America's think-tanks, who spent half a century describing all human life as an ongoing chess match between life-affirming American capitalism on the one hand and, on the other, the bloodsucking communist religion cruelly foisted upon the world by a conspiratorial bund of grubby German Jews (Hitler was eighty years too late!) and French homosexuals. That was what it came down to: world politics for half a century was a pissing match between two warring factions in the sociology department of the international University of Well-Fed White People. Things were so simple, even George Bush could understand them.

Well, things have changed since then. The operating conflict on earth now is no longer capitalism vs. communism, but one pitting organization vs. anarchy. All over the world, the borders of nation-states are blurring and becoming more and more meaningless. From the north Indian subcontinent, to the jungles of the Amazon basin, to the Middle East, and especially to west and central Africa, nations are fast losing their integrity while local warlords and gangs are taking over.

In some places in the world, authority changes more from block to block than nation to nation. In countries like Pakistan, which last week was forced to sign a humiliating peace accord with belligerents on its own territory of Waziristan, a tribal leader can twist the nipples of a nuclear power and not only keep his neck but come out ahead of the game afterward. In the late '80s and early '90s the Risk nerds squealed with delight over the supposedly unipolar world created by the fall of the Berlin Wall, but actually the change was from bipolar to apolar. There was anarchy and a crisis of international identity on the other side of that wall. Our pole, one might say, turned out to be a lot smaller than we thought it was.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »