Awash as we are in mass-media memorializations of 9/11, all tied in propagandistic fashion to the never-ending War on Terror, it’s surprising to find a mass-market sports magazine, Sports Illustrated, providing one of the most incisive and subversive takes on the construction of national identity, myth, and memory.
In an extraordinary article titled Remember His Name, which appeared in the September 11, 2006 issue of SI, Gary Smith recounts the life of death of Pat Tillman, the iconoclastic football player, Army Ranger, and thrill-seeker who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan.
Smith sets out to breathe life and personality back into the myth of Pat Tillman. He also provides a story about a story, a cautionary tale about the ways in which the political need to make Pat Tillman’s death fit the imperial narrative of martial sacrifice demeaned the ideals for which the man himself strived.
Thanks to the members of his family, who have refused to be silenced by military brass, most of us have known the truth behind Tillman’s death for some time. But what makes this piece remarkable is its ability to convey that truth — and Tillman’s fiercely independent personality — to a wider audience. As Smith points out in the last paragraphs of the story, facing Tillman’s death, and his life, honestly is about the least we can do to honor his service.
Although the piece is in some ways apolitical, its implications are obvious. The piece casts deserved blame on the Bush Administration and the U.S. military for their repeated cover-ups of the real cause of Tillman’s death, but also points toward larger problems with our political speech that have been very much on view in recent days during our nation’s remembrances of 9/11.
If Pat Tillman’s story teaches us anything, it’s that the symbols being used so callously by politicians of all stripes — but most often and most callously by the current administration — to promote war and extend political power represent a contemptible misuse of human lives that borders, in the end, on fascist propaganda. Whether the subjects at hand are Pat Tillman, Private Lynch, or the victims of the 9/11 attacks, we need to find a way to deconstruct the political mythology driving our country deeper into this endless, losing war.
This article, in a mass-market sports magazine, is a start. But there is a long way to go.
Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band’s performance of “My City of Ruins” during the televised “Tribute to Heroes” remains the single most moving memorialization of 9/11 that I have seen.
I don’t have cable television at home, a doleful economic fact that has often been a source of sadness for me. But, on a day like this, when the cable news stations parade rank speculation as sure knowledge, I’m more than willing to live without my MTV.
Fate is cruel, however, and so I spent part of my morning in the waiting room of a medical office, watching CNN anchors who seemed to have spent entirely too much time looking up synonyms for terror. When a nurse finally called my name, I fairly jumped at whatever private terrors the good doctor had in store for me — they could not have been more painful than the mind-numbing broadcasts I had just witnessed.
As I sat in that waiting room, my reaction to the news of the latest threat to our collective safety was not one of fear, anxiety, or dread; instead, I felt skeptical and angry: skeptical that this latest terror bonanza would turn out to be any less fake than the last one, and angry to see the television networks again fanning the flames of fear with so much enthusiasm.
I’m far from alone in having that that reaction. And how could I be, considering the number of times the Bush Administration has cried wolf on terror?
No, as sad as it is to say so, I and many others greet terror warnings, and news of alleged terror plots, with distrust. That’s because, as Buzzflash notes, when it comes to such warnings, the Bush Administration and its allies have precision timing:
The pattern continues. A terrorist plot is uncovered just as the masses start to question national security strategy. The day after Senate Democrats brought a vote to pull out of Iraq, we catch a few idiots in Miami who were supposedly trying to blow up the Sears Tower, despite the fact that they lacked the means and ability to do so. Then there were the guys busted for supposedly plotting to blow up a New York subway exactly a year after the London bus bombings. Today, a few men in England were arrested for a plan to blow up planes flying to America, just a day after Connecticut voters flatly rejected Joe Lieberman and the war in Iraq.
We certainly can’t deny that there may have indeed been plans to commit these acts. But the timings of the arrest announcements are awfully suspicious. All three were still in the works and had been monitored for several months by very capable intelligence agencies. While the exact nature of today’s arrests is still unclear, none of the plans seemed to have been immediate or imminent threats. The decision of when to intervene has been arbitrary, making the coincidental timings pretty convenient. (And the question of whether some of them are “real threats,” such as the Liberty City “Insane Clown Posse” remain to be seen.)
The accumulated evidence has made it clear that the Bush Administration uses terror warnings politically, in the most cynical way possible. But, even so, a worried CNN viewer might counter, aren’t we safer knowing about these threats?
That is exactly question addressed in a new report, A False Sense of Insecurity (pdf), that the Cato Institute released on Monday. A old friend of mine pointed it out to me; he had found the link on Boing Boing. There, Cory Doctorow introduced the report with these words:
In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University’s John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism’s risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage — this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I’ve read since September 11th, 2001.
The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.
One need only turn on the television today to see the truth of that last statement.
The Cato report (pdf) is definitely worth a read; here are a few excerpts:
Until 2001, far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning, and almost none of those terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.
[. . .]
HYPERBOLIC OVERREACTION For example, there is at present a great and understandable concern about what would happen if terrorists were to shoot down an American airliner or two, perhaps with shoulder-fired missiles. Obviously, that would be a major tragedy. But the ensuing public reaction to it, many fear, could come close to destroying the industry. Accordingly, it would seem to be reasonable for those in charge of our safety to inform the public about how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile. It turns out that someone has made that calculation: University of Michigan transportation researches Michael Sivak and Michael Flannegan, in an article last year in American Scientist wrote that they determined there would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out. More generally, they calculate than an American’s chance of being killed in one nonstop airline flight is about one in 13 million (even taking the September 11 crashes into account). To reach that same level of risk when driving on America’s safest roads — rural interstate highways — one would have to travel a mere 11.2 miles.
So: yes, let’s hear about those terror plots, but let’s put them into a realistic context, and treat them with the same sense of bravery we find within ourselves when we get in the car for a Sunday drive, dig into a bowl of peanuts, or wander outside during a thunderstorm. Perhaps, then, we will find it within ourselves to temper our fear with bravery, if not indifference.
Made using “.999 pure Ground Zero recovery silver content,” these coins are sure to please the dim-witted jingoist in your household. A whopping $5 of every $30 order will be donated to 9/11 charities.
That’s 17%, for those of you counting at home. The National Collector’s Mint would have increased that percentage, but a shyster’s gotta live, you know?
The website claims that “these commemoratives may well be among the most historically meaningful collectibles you will ever own.” Sadly, that statement is likely to hold true for anyone crass enough to buy one of these coins.
Guest blogging can plunge one into strange waters. Wanting to live up to Matt, I decided to take advantage of an opportunity to hear David Ray Griffin, a well-known process theologian (no, I didn’t know what that was until I looked up) who is currently better known for his book The New Pearl Harbor and his work with the 9/11 Truth Movement .
The 9/11 Truth Movement could be said to embrace everyone who still has questions about what really happened on 9/11 (which includes me and almost everyone I know), so I found this article helpful in surveying the range of beliefs and the disagreements within the movement. I went to the speech believing that we don’t know everything about 9/11, and that there are legitimate questions still to be answered. I had not seen much in Dr. Griffin’s interviews or comments that convinced me his approach was likely to yield reliable information, but since many articles said he was a persuasive speaker, I thought hearing him “live” might be fascinating or at least challenging. I was disappointed.
My original plan was to respond, not so much to Dr. Griffin’s theories as to his thinking process in arriving at those theories (though he often claims not to have a theory, but just questions). I can’t do it. He spoke for an hour and a quarter, and practically every other sentence involved a reasoning error. He concentrated on one topic (and one certainly worth further investigation): how was it that none of the four hijacked planes was intercepted on 9/11? His conclusion – that NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) had to have been ordered either to stand down or “slow down” in order to permit the 9/11 attacks to occur was based largely on the rather shaky premise that the FAA and NORAD regularly function at such high levels of efficiency and cooperation that the errors and confusions documented simply could not have occurred in the absence of such an order.
I agree that failing to intercept even one of four hijacked flights within a span of a few hours, in a relatively limited geographical area, on a single day, is astonishing, disgraceful, and worthy of further investigation. What I can’t rely on is the belief that only an extraordinary order could cause confusion, inefficiency and error among many people in different government agencies. Dr. Griffin, let me murmur two words in your ear: Hurricane Katrina. (Yes, I am indeed truncating Dr. Griffin’s lengthy arguments, but I am also truncating what would have been my equally lengthy responses. Be thankful. Be very thankful.)
No, this post isn’t really about Dr. Griffin’s work or the larger issue of exposing all the truths about 9/11. I left Dr. Griffin’s speech feeling that he was a distraction – seductive, glittering, and convoluted – from the sad, repetitive truth about the all too obvious crimes of the Bush administration. We know this administration could and should have known enough to prevent much, if not all, of what happened on 9/11. We know that someone, possibly several someones, leaked the name of a CIA agent – endangering her, and everyone she had contact with in her work abroad. We know intelligence was “fixed” to lead a shamefully compliant Congress to support an illogical and illegal war. We know there was never a credible plan for that war past its initial attacks. We know that the money to provide health care, education, housing and food to many who desperately need all these things has been sucked up by the war. We know our economy is foundering on an incredible deficit built on the theory that “to [them] that hath, more shall be given.” We know that four years, a new cabinet-level agency, and huge amounts of money after 9/11, our government could not manage the most basic tasks in response to a long-anticipated natural disaster – even with a week’s notice. And we know that all these crimes – whether of omission or commission – are the result of a corrupt response to the contract our government makes with us: that our officials, and the people they put in positions of power and responsibility are here to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”
Elaborate conspiracy theories are compelling: they involve our creative thinking and mine our deep fears. Corruption is boring: it happens so often, on so many levels, for such tawdry reasons. We are tired of vigilance, investigation, the slow process of the judicial system and the indifference of the mainstream media. Why not focus on something that really grabs attention?
We have forgotten the oldest meaning of corruption: “decomposition as a consequence of death.” Matt posted disturbing pictures of Katrina’s dead to remind us. The results of the illegal, unethical, immoral actions of this administration — the cronyism that gives the incompetent and uncaring the power to let helpless people die — the eagerness to “drown in a bathtub” the governmental services promised to protect us? Thousands of rotting bodies. A mound of putrefaction. An ineradicable stench of death. And it’s not over.
We will not — we cannot — get an unfettered investigation of 9/11 while George W. Bush or any of his cohort hold power. Surely our first obligation, our focus now, must be to arrest the death and destruction caused by this indifferent, incompetent and malevolent administration. Yes, I want to know what happened on 9/11. But first I want to be sure that our government is not still sending more victims to join those already sacrificed.
We now have proof: while rescue workers in New York continued to sift through the rubble of the World Trade Center, and while President Bush promised the nation that he would capture Osama bin Laden dead or alive, his administration neglected the War on Terrorism and concentrated instead on settling old scores.
I ask every person whose life was directly affected by September 11, but who has continued to support the President’s War in Iraq: how do you feel now, knowing for certain that less than a month after that day, Bush had already lost sight of Public Enemy #1?
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