So my kid is in First Grade at a nice progressive public school, and today, his teachers commemorated 9/11 by reading a book about the ancient fireboat John J. Harvey, which was un-retired to fight the fires in lower Manhattan that day. A nice feelgood introduction to the topic, I thought, one that echoes great works of children’s lit like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. But they told the kids that the men that attacked the towers did so because they “didn’t believe in this country’s freedoms,” a line which, for me, brought back all the Bush Era idiocy about how “They hate us for our freedoms” and “They’re jealous of our success.”
Well, reaching for rah-rah nationalism bugs me on 9/11. Especially on 9/11. And not just because I hate America and our freedoms. I mean, I don't hate America or our freedoms. I just think making it all about US is wrong and feeds misunderstandings about the attacks and all the stupid stuff that flowed from them. I guess it’s a subtle quibble, but it got me thinking about what I think motivated the hijackers and why that matters.
At the time of the attacks and for a couple years thereafter, there was a lot of cable news shadow boxing pitting Bushian Clash of Civilizations bromides about Our Freedoms and Their Hatred against The Left’s position, a kind of Marxist-materialist reduction, never mouthed by an actual leftist but rather attributed by pundits or reporters to the hippy hivemind. The Marxist sock puppet read of the situation – they hate us because we’re rich and they’re not – was an obvious loser because a number of the hijackers and most of the Qaeda high command were rich petro-politans. They didn’t have a problem with income disparities. They had a problem with power disparities – namely, we were the reigning global hegemon of the day, and they wanted to run shit instead. Hell, I think Bin Laden’s war was, until the 9/11 attacks proved so successful, really more about Saudi politics than any nonsense about restoring the Caliphate. All of their swatting at the hornet’s nest was basically intended to destabilize the House of Saud and, ultimately, put Osama in charge. He didn’t really give a rat’s ass what the infidels did across the sea – until he graduated from small time pain to terrorist mastermind, with a movement on his hands and a target on his back.
It’s not incorrect to say that “they hated our freedoms,” I guess. They hated our sexual freedoms, certainly, from women’s reproductive choice (not available in all states) to our freedom to have sex with whomever we choose, provided it’s consensual. They were probably all for the right to bear arms. Not so hot on freedom of speech and religion.
But that’s not what motivated those dudes. From everything I’ve read about the attacks in the 11 years since, it seems like mostly they came to Al Qaeda kind of lost, angry, longing for a group identity and drawn to absolutes. Not much different than, say, your average white supremacist thug or weirdo cultist. And then they killed a shit-ton of people. Fuckers.
So what I’ve told my kid is this: some crazy religious assholes, really evil dudes, crashed some planes into the towers. They did it basically because they were nuts and full of hatred. It was pretty senseless. A lot of people died in a pretty horrible way. It made a lot of people crazy.
It was senseless. That’s the most fucked up thing about 9/11. For all the asshole pols and pundits that rushed in to fill that void where the towers had stood with masturbatory epic-heroic bullshit demagoguery about Us and Them, it was really just an organized cadre of nutjobs that turned a few planes into flying bombs. And our own cadre of nuts and sharpies in government and the punditocracy seized the opportunity to sell a pet war, a raft of regressive policies and a presidential election on the smoking mass grave downtown.
That, I think, is a much less reassuring way to look at the events of that day than “Bad guys hated our freedoms and we sure showed them.” But it’s the truth.