September 1–10
George W. Bush’s vacation ended on Labor Day in Detroit. He’d been invited there to attend a picnic by Teamsters president James Hoffa Jr., a man whose integrity is less likely ever to be discovered than the whereabouts of his missing father.
John Joslin and Kevin Mackey, two rank-and-file members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, were disturbed by the invitation of such an obvious enemy of labor to labor’s hometown on Labor Day. So, at the spot where the building-trades portion of Motown’s massive Labor Day parade formed, Joslin and Mackey put up a stage and sound system. Then they put me on the stage. As each union marched in place waiting to round the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, I suggested to the workers just how insulting and cynical Bush’s visit was. And then Joslin, Mackey, and a host of activists handed out signs that articulated the many ways Bush and his cronies harm working Americans and their families.
Bush’s photo op was co-opted by thousands of real working Americans. Carrying signs and chanting insults, union members made it clear that Bush was no more welcome in Detroit on Labor Day than they would be at a clambake at Bush’s country club. It was the last wonderful day we would have for a long time.
September 11 and 12
On September 11, the whole world changed — except for large portions of Europe, Asia, and Africa, several island nations, and those parts of the world where terrorism, whether state-sponsored or rogue, was already part of everyday life. Okay, on September 11 life in the US began to resemble, just slightly, life elsewhere.
The court-appointed prez was addressing elementary-school children in Florida when the attacks occurred. (Somehow it’s always Florida.) He quickly headed to Louisiana and then into a game room in Omaha.
I might have given Bush a pass on going Barney Fife that morning except for a few things. During a time when even Rudolph Giuliani rose above venal political considerations (albeit briefly), the Bush administration’s apparent top priority was to propagate alibis about why the president headed for the Grain Belt while the Northeast Corridor burned. This included telling us about a call to the Secret Service stating that the president was in imminent danger. Problem is, no such call was received. Bush was supposed to be a hard-ass Texas Republican naturally inclined to fly to DC, climb to the roof of the White House, and wave pearl-handled revolvers, yelling, " Try me, motherfuckers! " Instead, the Incredible President Limpet headed for a bunker in the Central Time Zone.
On September 12, while people lay trapped and dying under piles of rubble, several administration officials spent the morning telling us about the mythical phone threat, along with other prevarications that must have taken much of September 11 to prepare.
They also said the assault on the Pentagon was sort of a coincidence because the terrorists were really aiming for the White House. They called the Pentagon a " secondary target. "
Even if the Pentagon had been a terrorist afterthought (and of course it wasn’t), why bring it up while people were still dead and dying in its wreckage? Because the cheesy people who operate the marionette that occupies the Oval Office value political viability over human life, that’s why. This episode is important to recall as we watch the Bush administration seize this crisis to further its entire agenda. SDI, oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic Wildlife Refuge, destroying the federal judiciary, and yet another tax break for the rich — all have suddenly become essential weapons in the War on Terrorism. Yeah, and W. will be joining Mensa soon, too.
September 13–30
Within days, even skeptics were convinced that Osama bin Laden was behind the terrorist attacks. The US vowed to bring him to justice. All searches should include probes into the curdled milk of human kindness — a sure sign he’s nearby. If that doesn’t work, go to Jerry Falwell and take a slight right. If you get to Ann Coulter, you’ve gone too far.
The nation and the mainstream media universally embraced Junior for rising to the occasion. Such a delusion arose from the fact that September 11 created exactly what everyone feared: a life-and-death struggle that forced us to look to this rather dim bulb to think on his feet.
To be fair, after his weak start, Bush did have a good night of being TelePrompTed before Congress on September 20. His address promoted his basic dinosaur-brained good-versus-evil rap in terms speechwriters sufficiently airbrushed to make him seem almost eloquent. But once Jimmy Breslin busted him for recycling his father’s dead-cop-badge gambit, we quickly returned to the frosty truth that we had a president and Jingo was his name-o.
Bush spoke of " evildoers " and " crusades. " They have a jihad; he gave us a GOPhad. We needed a president, and the guy who does the voice-overs for Underdog showed up.
Americans cautiously returned to airports to face many inconveniences. The new rule of thumb for airline passengers is to allow yourself as much time as it would take to walk to your destination.
October
Around October 7, the US " officially " began military action in Afghanistan. These were tough days for hungry Afghans who couldn’t differentiate between a yellow cluster bomb and a yellow food packet. Even if they found a food packet, there was a decent chance it had landed in the middle of a minefield. In the meantime, US military action brought legitimate humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan to a standstill.
Congress rewarded the airline industry for staffing its security checkpoints with minimum-wage employees who didn’t realize that McDonald’s offered better career options by coughing up a $15 billion bailout package. Damned welfare scofflaws!
In a classic example of becoming what you resist, the new Office of Homeland Security, headed by Pennsylvania’s Tom Rigid, opened. Rigid’s familiarity with Pennsylvania-Dutch/South African customs should be a real plus on the war’s domestic front.
The country was by now awash in the kind of demonstrative patriotism that is best left to used-car dealerships. Flags were everywhere — particularly in Third World sweatshops where they couldn’t keep up with the demand for Old Glory. Flag price-gouging was reported across the country. Now ain’t that America?
Throughout the delayed post-season, by the fourth inning of any baseball game the entire Irving Berlin songbook had been exhausted. At around the same time, someone decided that all motor vehicles should enter a General-Patton-staff-car look-alike contest. The fiercest competition was among sport-utility vehicles. Americans, involved in a war that’s in no small part related to dependence on Middle Eastern oil, managed to make obscenely fuel-inefficient SUVs that much worse with the addition of red, white, and blue wind resistance.
I had no flag at all until a homeless vet sold me a small one, the kind that goes on Fourth of July cupcakes. Now I can proudly point to it majestically flapping atop the bird feeder. It’s a nice reminder that when the veterans of this war come home, feeling destitute and forgotten, there will always be flags for them to sell.
Since September 11, the flag has become a perverse and undemocratic symbol of blind obedience to the edicts of the unelected son of a former chief of the CIA, an organization that helped school Osama bin Laden in terrorism.
Nazi Germany had a lot of flags and no Bill of Rights. That’s exactly where we are headed if we roll over for the likes of Kaiser Ashcroft and his full frontal attack on our civil liberties.
Osama bin Laden assaulted our way of life, but John Ashcroft and George W. Bush are destroying it. January 20, 2001, may end up much more a Day of Infamy than September 11. This does not make me proud to be an American.
I am willing to live with the slightly heightened danger of terrorist attack rather than the guaranteed oppression of a police state. I am willing to risk my life to remain free. Are you?
On October 30, the FBI sounded a new terrorism alert just in time for Halloween — or perhaps just in time to spook Americans into accepting the idea of carpet-bombing Afghanistan on October 31.
November–December
It wasn’t hard watching the hateful Taliban fall from power. These crackpots executed " improperly attired " women. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan became a fashion-police state. But when they faced true adversity, the Taliband of Brothers were routed from Afghan cities in less than two months.
I really can’t sort November from December, or December from October, for that matter, but while time got fuzzy over the past months, some things came into focus.
W.’s " With us or against us " cant doesn’t cut it. Every one of our lives is at stake, so we all need to get literate about the world in which we live. Though we’ll never cave in to the barbarous Al Qaeda network, we must stop making the world fertile ground for its violent lunacy.
We have to look at certain issues — even if they are found on known terrorists’ lists of grievances — because we don’t want there to be more terrorists. For instance, it’s time to face what over a decade of sanctions and bombing has done to the poor people of Iraq. And we must let the people of Israel know that we cannot truck the direction their nation has taken under the vicious Ariel Sharon. Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, the Hamas leader whose November 23 assassination sparked the recent terrorist attacks on Israel, was freed from a Palestinian jail under cover of mayhem caused when Israeli troops bombed it in a May attempt to kill Hanoud.
We can’t afford to celebrate driving a fifth-rate dictatorship from power in Afghanistan — particularly when the vacuum it leaves will be filled by the Northern Alliance, a collection of drug- and weapons-dealing misogynists with nary a democratic inclination among them. So far, all that has happened is the US has driven a bunch of terrorists from the cities and into the weeds. Terrorists like weeds and can strike at will from them.
What will America do when that starts happening? Send in Ashcroft to organize a round-up of all the people who appear to be Middle Eastern in Afghanistan?
Further, we can’t afford to ask with affected naïveté how anyone in the world could hate us enough to bomb us when we have bombed unoffending people more often than any other nation. There is a reason the US coined the term " collateral damage, " and now that we understand just how profane it is, we have to speak up against it — here, there, and everywhere.
Another reason we are hated is that we always get so much more than our share of the worldwide pie. Only in America would anyone suggest running up credit-card debt as a way of helping the nation recover from tragedy.
THE OTHER night, after watching a news anchor pull off the amazing feat of correctly pronouncing several difficult Afghan names while simultaneously fellating the entire US military-industrial complex, I flicked off the TV and reached for Mark Twain’s Notebook. In it, Sam Clemens demonstrated once again that he was light-years ahead of his — or, apparently, our — era. Twain wrote:
There are two kinds of patriotism — monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case, the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism: in the other, neither government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The Gospel of Monarchical Patriotism is: " The King can do no wrong. " We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: " Our country, right or wrong! "
We have thrown away the most valuable asset we have — the individual right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he by himself) believes them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it all away: and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.
Were Twain alive today, he could expect a visit from the Office of Homeland Security.
To keep up with Barry Crimmins’s thoughts as they occur — and not just annually — check out his Web site at http://www.barrycrimmins.com/.
