On how 9/11 made me never go to bed angry

Being in love, from the get-go, has triggered a rash of terror in me. I’m not afraid of "letting go," I’m not afraid of being left (well, okay, a little). I’m primarily concerned with having my boyfriend be run over, mauled, abducted, whatever. September 11 simply added to my fantastical repertoire of terrifying fears.

Now that we’re living in New York and coming up on the anniversary of the attacks, I’m afraid his building will be bombed, that he will be in an ill-fated subway car, that — well, you name it — and my right brain has been working overtime dreaming up elaborate, sophisticated ways that he could be taken from me. I find myself in terror-ridden reveries, musing on how I’ll feel. I look at his shoes lined up neatly beside the bed and fantasize about how weighted with significance they’ll be when he’s gone. His shoes.

On September 11, I left the Phoenix offices paralyzed, like almost everyone else in this country. I was crying, numb, in shock. My co-worker Seth said goodbye that afternoon with a directive that has echoed through my mind over the past year: "Go home and spend some quality time with your boyfriend."

Roger.

— Nina Willdorf

From left to right

A year ago, I was locked in a boozy debate with my two hulking uncles — a recently retired Massachusetts state trooper and a Special Forces reservist. It was a scene we’d enacted many times: me, the liberal punk, as amusing quarry for a tag team of rock-ribbed conservatives — one who’s posted a lovingly framed photo of John Wayne on his wall, and another who relaxes to a cassette of artillery sound effects while driving his flag-emblazoned SUV.

I’ve never been the bellicose type. And I’d always disagreed, respectfully but vehemently, with my uncles’ reactionary beliefs. Even at 15, I clashed with them over the Gulf War, which I couldn’t believe George H.W. Bush rationalized so speciously. Their militaristic world-view was antithetical to mine. But something changed last September; by the end of that diabolical day, I agreed with Uncle Marine and Uncle Green Beret. I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt whoever did that just like they hurt us.

Of course, I was hardly the only theretofore-peaceable person who instinctively thirsted for a vicious retort. But I was surprised and a little embarrassed by my about-face. To me, bumper-sticker shibboleths like THESE COLORS DON’T RUN and MY COUNTRY, RIGHT OR WRONG had always been just that much mindless jingoism. Suddenly, though, I found myself agreeing with them in principle. I love sprawling, heterogeneous, fucked-up America. Right and wrong, this is my country.

Whatever lingering unease I felt about my sudden belligerence vanished when I began poring over the spirited, eloquent arguments put forth each week in the Nation and the Guardian by one of my favorite paragons of political integrity, expat Brit Christopher Hitchens. I’d always subscribed to his vigorous liberalism — a version that loathed phony Bill Clinton as much as I did while simultaneously skewering the inanities of the knee-jerk left. Hitchens’s polemics, mordantly funny and soaked in Johnnie Walker Black, were hugely affirming for me. The September 11 hijackers, he argued, weren’t acting on behalf of the world’s dispossessed, as some lefties would have it. Simply put, they were "fascists with an Islamic face." He couldn’t abide the propitiatory proclamations of the blame-America crowd, "the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals." Neither could I. Reading Hitchens’s railings in defense of his adopted nation bolstered my conviction that, for all its faults (and they are legion), America offers the world’s best example of openness and pluralism — and that it had to be defended perforce.

One year later, I’m still one of the "hawkish left," as it’s sometimes called by those who’d have us accept the immolation of more American civilians because Ronald Reagan’s reptilian Central American war games or Clinton’s repugnantly self-serving demolition of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant somehow mean we "deserve" it. But if I’m not as "liberal" as I once was, I’m hardly a conservative. Even if I initially, warily, supported the president, I’m now disgusted by how he’s gone on to cynically manipulate this crisis for his own political purposes. Same goes for Ashcroft’s Orwellian dictates. And I’m still on the fence about Iraq; even the "radical" rationale for invasion just put forth by Hitchens has me unconvinced. But I’ve never doubted that US soldiers are doing a necessary job in protecting this fine, flawed nation from the continuing threat of Islamic fascism.

This week my 43-year-old uncle leaves his wife and son and ships off with his fellow reservists for a year in Northern Afghanistan. As he does, I think of Hitchens’s writing in the Guardian last November: "It was obvious from the very start that the United States had no alternative but to do what it has done.... If, as the peaceniks like to moan, more bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many, many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again. And there are more of us and we are both smarter and nicer, as well as surprisingly insistent that our culture demands respect, too."

— Mike Miliard

Outside the mainstream

In the last year, I’ve learned that the customary "liberal" and "conservative" frameworks don’t work anymore. As someone on the left within the spectrum of gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender politics (whatever that means in the world of actual politics these days) I soon found myself, after September 11, having dense, ferocious, usually pointless fights with friends I’d rarely disagreed with before. Suddenly the oddest, but clearly decisive, political litmus tests were applied. For example, I once found myself discussing the complicated question of hate-crimes legislation with a reasonably close friend — I opposed the legislation as ineffective and something that would only increase the power of a corrupt corrections system — and he spit out, "Well, I’m not surprised. After all, you’re friends with Howard Zinn, and he’s in favor of terrorism." I had no answer, as I had only met Howard Zinn once, although he had blurbed my last book. And I do not believe he is in favor of terrorism.

I had the same almost-psychotic sensation of disconnection last week when I told a long-time friend that the program committee I chair, at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at City University of New York, was thinking of holding a panel on Islamic sexualities. He replied: "Islamic sexualities? And what’s that — getting off on killing queers?" While there is much to say about the relationship between any given religion and homosexuality, his immediate and deeply ignorant response to the panel suggestion was disheartening. It wasn’t just that the response was anti-Muslim (he actually knows something of the rich history of male-male erotic relationships in Islamic thought and society), but that he was uninterested in considering the possibility that such a discussion might prove fruitful in exploring ideas about homosexuality, a topic in which he is ostensibly quite interested.

I can appreciate that the world has changed, and I can even — albeit begrudgingly — make allowances for what I regard as people’s irrational panic. It is still deeply upsetting that these mostly irrational positions — they are hardly arguments — seem to have taken root. I can understand the spontaneous, if sentimental, gesture of rallying around gay heroes such as Mark Bingham and Father Mychal Judge — both of whom died in the September 11 attacks — and I can understand how the attacks instilled a sense of patriotism in lesbians and gay men who always feel like outsiders in mainstream US culture. But I fear that the anxieties of the post–September 11 world are causing many to keep looking to the past in fear, rather than to the future for a new vision.

Michael Bronski

9/11 24/7

June 12, 2002, was a day much like this past Labor Day — gray, rainy, and raw. I wasn’t in Boston that day. I was in Hamburg, Germany. I had persuaded my city guide to take me via subway (much like the Red Line from Boston to North Quincy) to the Harburg section of the city. We exited the station and took a taxi, driven by a surly immigrant, to 54 Marienstrasse — the "House of Followers" — which had been home to Mohamed Atta, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks.

I had expected to find a densely populated immigrant neighborhood with meat shops and mosques on every corner. To my surprise, I found a neighborhood bustling with students; the area looked and felt like Somerville — and a gentrified Somerville, at that. We took in the atmosphere with coffee and pastries from a Portuguese café and then caught a cab to Hamburg-Harburg Technical University. I ventured into the student-activities building and knocked on the door of room 10, which had been the Islamic Prayer Room. (It’s located across the hall from the Evangelical Christian group and down the hall from the Cameroon Students Society.) As I thought of the terrible events that had been planned on just the other side of the door, my heart raced and my hands trembled.

I was in Germany as a guest of the German government, which frequently invites journalists (and foots the bill for their travel) to tour the country. I ended up writing extensively on the post–September 11 uptick in anti-Semitism in Germany — one linked to the crisis in the Middle East (see "Heil Hate!", News and Features, June 28). In my travels, I found that what most distinguished me from my German hosts was not the fact that I was Jewish — the implications of which the Germans seemed fully to comprehend — but the fact that I was an American who felt the ramifications of September 11 all around me.

On one evening, I had dinner with four European acquaintances, one of whom was the daughter of a former Hungarian Communist apparatchik, from the student section of Berlin. For more than two hours, as my host opened first one and then another bottle of Moldavian rosé (far better than you would expect), we fully engaged in intense conversation about September 11, Afghanistan, and terrorism. Their central question boiled down to this: why does the US just want to bomb? I tried to lay down the arguments in favor of US involvement in Afghanistan and future involvement in Iraq. In return, I heard much about globalism, neo-colonialism, and unilateralism. (Based on their questions, it became obvious to me that the Bush administration had not done a good job of explaining our actions to our allies. Which was no surprise. Do they make things clear to us?) The one point I made again and again is that Americans were attacked that day; I even mentioned that my landlord was a pilot for one of the hijacked planes and was killed. Therefore, the issue for me wasn’t so much what we were doing to the rest of the world, but what the rest of the world had already done to us. I reminded them about the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the August 1998 African embassy bombings — events that had barely scratched the surface of their consciousnesses. The dinner ended with goodwill on all sides, and I felt I had done something of at least partial value by articulating the American point of view.

That night, more or less, symbolizes what my life has become since that terrible day in September. I’ve become an even closer student of US foreign policy than I was before the attacks. And I use my position as an online columnist for this paper to write about US policy and explain why — contrary to the views of my European friends — the war against terrorism actually makes sense.

— Seth Gitell