by Jean Allen
On August 9th, Michael Larosa, Democratic strategist and former spokesperson to the Biden administration, answered a question about why he opposed Abdul El-Sayed.
“The problem with ‘Vote Blue No Matter Who’, the who still matters. At least it matters to me. I come from a time when I watched people jumping out of windows on 9/11, 70 miles from where the towers were falling and burning for 3 months, we could smell it where I was from in Pennsylvania where the wind blew.”
This is a part of a long-running denial of the humanity of Arab and Muslim peoples and has come up more and more as leftist Muslims run for and attain office. This language, which seemingly blames a man who would be 16 at the time for an oddly personal trauma narrative, is as sanctimonious as it is ridiculous and hateful, but it’s not the only narrative that Americans have about 9/11 anymore.
A few weeks ago, I was commiserating about how difficult it’s been to buy a house with my local deli owner. The man, an Italian American roughly in his 30s, said “Well look, don’t worry. With this war going on, it’s a matter of time before some disaster like 9/11 happens that’ll lower the interest rates again.” I stared, slack jawed. At that moment, I remembered something a friend said months ago: even the most radical boomer would never joke about Pearl Harbor the way the average millennial or zoomer jokes about 9/11
I also remembered my own experience of 9/11, as a 6th grader in the computer lab. I was sitting next to someone I had a crush on, trying to say something, when our principal interrupted to tell us what was happening. He always had a sad sort of voice, so every PSA after that, every time the principal informed us a blue Subaru had its lights on, my heart sipped like he was announcing another terrorist attack. My father worked in NYC at the time, and I was deeply worried about him as I heard my peers talking about who did it, what they were gonna do next, and who we were gonna invade. My brother-in-law, living in Grand Junction, CO, was surrounded by people swearing the next target would be the Grand Junction clock tower.
The 9/11 attacks were a deeply traumatic event to everyone; this was the first time we felt the experiences previously saved for those who lived in the ‘third world’ countries our military lingers in. Our buildings – the symbol of New York, of international finance and capitalism–were destroyed as if they were nothing. That personal trauma was then transformed into a proudly ignorant patriotism. Censors decided to remove everything from Rage Against the Machine to Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot”. Anyone who opposed the war we immediately got ourselves into, or the security measures strategically called the Patriot Act, was viewed as hateful UnAmericans, from the nation of France to the Dixie Chicks. My French name was used as a reason to suddenly other and bully me, and I had the least of it. Arab and Muslim American communities found themselves infiltrated. People would be disappeared into the Guantanamo Bay detention center or any number of other CIA sites, where they would be sexually assaulted and tortured. Anarchists found that their spouses were actually deep undercover police. Police militarization proceeded rapidly. Every dang time you got on an airplane you had to take off your shoes and belt so that the TSA agents could scan your genitals to make sure you weren’t a terrorist. At the top of it all was that idiot, George W. Bush, lord of the malapropism, who seemed intentionally foolish as he led our country into wars which cost millions of lives.
Seven years and change later, I sat with my parents watching Will Ferrell parody Bush. It was the day before Obama’s inauguration and it seemed that everything would get better, that the period of militarism Bush represented was over. Having marched in the 2003 protest against Iraq and volunteered for Kids for Kerry, I was tremendously excited to have cast my first vote for a man who seemed to be the repudiation of everything Bush stood for.
And then Obama took office and Guantanamo didn’t close. And the Iraq War went on, some might argue to this day. The War in Afghanistan continued, for another 13 years after W Bush was repudiated. You get in an airport and you still have to take off your shoes (or DONT TAKE OFF YOUR SHOES) and take off your belt (OR DONT) and get ordered around by a TSA agent in the name of preventing another disaster like the one that happened 25 years ago and killed more than 3,000 people. At the same time you’ll be asked to remove your face mask, which prevents the spread of a disease which has killed between 15 and 35 million people in the last 6 years, so your face can be more accurately scanned
I don’t remember when I started making 9/11 jokes. I was sensitive to it for quite a bit, and I do recall criticizing those jokes sometime in 2013. What changed? The security state Bush used sanctimonious patriotism to build outlived its ideological justification. More and more Americans do not see ourselves in the US imperial project or see it as meaningfully ours. Decades after the well choreographed and developed justification for the ‘dumb’ war in Iraq, Trump continued the ‘global war on terror’ with a venture into Iran which began with the double tapping of a girls school. A double tap attack is when you attack some form of infrastructure, wait for medical professionals to arrive, and attack again. All this, ‘against terrorism’, and then after our personal trauma has been used to ignite a whole region, we are still expected to treat the personal trauma of someone who was a mere 70 miles from Manhattan on that day with grave seriousness.
So, why do we joke about 9/11? Part of it is our dark humor, sure. But more of it is lashing out against feeling utterly powerless. The US citizen has voted, again and again, for candidates who claimed to bring peace. We are reminded, again and again, that this political system can only continue war, can only continue dominating us with things done ‘for our safety’. And so, being infantilized, we act infantile. We make edgy jokes and feel some sense of empowerment or at least contentment with the way things are, in an empire that seems to be careening out of control. Hundreds of thousands of people have been needlessly killed in wars started by US presidents in the last twenty five years, and until we, the working class, take the reigns I see only more arms races, more wars, more needless death and destruction.
All this, as 9/11 turns old enough to get its own pilot’s license.
OH NO 9/11 IS CRASHING ITS PLANE INT-