Tuesday’s Gone: September 11th Ten Years On.

[Note: My loathing for Lynyrd Skynyrd is legendary, but something about this song always made me feel nostalgic, the pain of an old wound. It wasn’t exactly clear what that pain was, though I had, up until ten years or so ago, thought of the end of high school, and the scene in Dazed and Confused where, after the intellectual Mike Newhouse (Adam Goldberg) gets his ass kicked by tough rocker Clint Bruno (Nicky Katt).  As the combatants are separated, and a tearful Mike Newhouse declares that he’ll kill Clint before be helped away, Linklater rolls this song, indicating not only that the party is over, but that something else in the world of the characters, is over as well. Paradise lost, perhaps.

After that Tuesday, the song took on another significance, and I give them the band their due for this great and poignant song. After all, the sun has to shine on dog’s ass once in a while.]

Dripping wet, grumbling about working the circulation counter after a long weekend, I switched on the TV and began looking for my Camels, making coffee. Drying my hair, I looked at the television.  Something was going terribly, terribly wrong.  New York…was being hit with planes?

What would emerge in the endless, eternal minutes bleeding together were fiery visions of burning sky scrapers, people running everywhere, office works leaping from the fireball, police and fire fighters leaping into the fireball.  I sat, in my father’s kitchen, dumbstruck, asking aloud “What the fuck is happening?” My shift began at noon at the small city library I worked at in Indiana, and for the next two or so hours, full of existential dread, smoking in the sunny morning, lighting cigarette after cigarette, drinking only one coffee

The drive into work only increased my dread; certainly, we know libraries as a community center, an information repository, but what would that mean today, when this terrible thing has happened?   How can I possibly help anyone find answers when I can’t even fathom the questions?  Surely, most people will stay home, watching the news like I wish I could, and try to come to terms: “What the fuck is happening?”

Apparently, we are under attack?  Under attack?  Terrorists, they say?  Arabs or something?  Details were sketchy…

The library was a strange murmuring tomb, the kind of whispering that occurs during a funeral service by people unable to stifle their narcissistic desire to comment on everything. My co-workers took turns on a radio in the office, listening to news.   One of our circulation stations, equipped with the internet, was a comfort for the reasonably updated news and information it provided.  The information, was not:  Maybe 10000 dead they say?  “What the fuck is happening?”

As the afternoon wore on, Sartre’s admonition that hell is other people became agonizingly real; patrons trickled in, agitated, wanting to copies of the Bible, Prophesies of Nostradamus, books on survivalism.   Rumors, terrible rumors: the Indian pediatrician in town had been jumped, an Israeli had been beaten in Covington, where I had been partying the previous weekend, there was an invasion through Mexico.  Gas Stations price gouging, fuel shortages, Kroger’s a madhouse.  Casually vicious racist pronouncements.  Calls for Nuke strikes in Central Asia. Families checking out every mother fucking copy of the Left Behind series, with one patron informing me that I should have taken her advice and read these, because she was cramming for the rapture, and she wouldn’t see me later.  “Christ…who needs a drink?”, I gravely muttered, wondering what this all meant.

At nine-or a little before, to confess my sins, we closed the library, exhausted. We all needed a drink, but nobody felt like going out after work, just home.   And home I went, where I walked in, and there was my Dad, drinking a Diet Coke, smoking, watching horror—and heroism, on TV.  My dad listened to my litany, grabbed a Samuel Adams from the fridge, handed it to me and said “It’ll be ok. The sun will rise tomorrow, and so will we.”  He bid me goodnight.

And for fleeting minute, he was right.  The nation was unified.  The president didn’t seem like such a doofus, and his calls to end the anti-Muslim animus were applauded (this would be the last time, unfortunately, I would applaud him), gave a rousing speech at Ground Zero.  The world was with us, keening for the dead, and I had hoped that, through dialogue, a new world would emerge. This was a heady time, in which everything edifying in the human spirit was on display as a reaction to this horror. Humanity seemed to be winning the day…

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Ten years on, humanity seems to be losing the day, and everything edifying in the human spirit has given way to the Sartre’s Hell of Other People I experienced on that day; led by the doofus in chief, the reaction and reality of the nauseatingly accurate “post-9/11 world” would be some variation of the patrons who trickled in that terrible afternoon and evening ten years, and the rumors they traded in.  Endless War, in which my loved ones were in harms’ way endlessly, is the reality. People have been beaten, humiliated, imprisoned, dehumanized  and killed as a matter of policy.  Immigrants are again fodder for paranoid speculation and racist reaction. There had been price gouging, the root of which is opportunism and greed, has come to define the decade as much as foreign adventurism, and both eventually crashed the country.   The casual, vicious, racist pronouncements became campaign slogans, the fear became reactionary politics.  Presidential hopefuls are still cramming for the rapture.

I am reminded that, while it is hasn’t been all bad since that day, there isn’t much good this day; ten years older, I am constantly affected by this singular event and it’s fallout.  That night, ten years ago, I decided it was time to continue my education; going to Xavier, getting my Masters in English, becoming faculty at UC, and separating from UC after a bitterly protracted attempt to keep my position in a political climate in which the reaction of that day has manifested in a limp economy, foreclosures, deficit spending, right wing nut-jobs running states, budget cuts to state institutions and the apartheid of higher education.  

I have many good memories of these years; teaching, my colleagues, my friends and family, my love, but they continue to be viewed through this sad lens.  The “post-9/11 world” , for most of us, is not a less safe future, but a dimmer one. For those of us who have lost loved ones, this is tragically obvious.   But we have all lost something, and we lost it when we surrendered to what is worst in us, not what is best.  We lost something when we allowed fear to rule the day. We lost something when we re-elected My Pet Goat…

As I sit here, uncertain of the future as I was that day, wondering what became of the hope of Obama, mired in the fear and baseness of that terrible day, wondering what would happen, I find myself afraid that the reality of the world since that day isn’t constant threat but a low level dread and ennui, humming in the background like white noise, a music which sings of lost futures and diminished expectations.