The first photo, the one in color, is probably in thousands of photo albums in one form or another. I shot it from the boat to the Statue of Liberty on Halloween weekend of 1993, eight months after the first radical Islamic attack on the World Trade Center. The second photo at the bottom of this post, the black-and-white one, was taken about three weeks after the second attack on the building on Sept. 11, 2001. It's not that great, but you can see the wreckage of the World Trade Center at the dark end of the street. Mayor Guiliani had urged tourists to return to New York, and we had months earlier purchased tickets to see "The Producers" so we did. They weren't letting people like us very close to the wreckage, for obvious safety reasons, but I do remember the familiar smell of damp, burned buildings. And dust-covered cars in the parking garages nearby, unclaimed by their dead owners. I thought I had a picture of those, but couldn't find it.
Another memory of that time is the kickoff for the capital campaign for St. Stephen's Episcopal School that was held at the Harrisburg Civic Club on the Susquehanna River on Sunday, Sept. 9. It was a beautiful day, and so was Sept. 11. I was in Baltimore for a software conference. Mid-morning, someone from the hotel staff told everyone that TVs were set up in the lobby. We went outside and saw the now-familiar images of the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. I decided that downtown Baltimore was probably not the best place to be, so got in my car and drove back to Harrisburg. The usual road out of the Inner Harbor area was blocked because it went past the main police station, but I found my way out. When I got closer to Harrisburg, I remember one of the local radio stations reporting that the area around Three Mile Island was NOT being evacuated. I've wondered ever since what prompted that. Was United Airlines Flight 93, the one that crashed near Shanksville, Pa., really supposed to hit Three Mile Island instead of the U.S. Capitol? Unlikely, but an interesting topic for speculation nonetheless. There was a lot of confusion that day.
I watched the film "United 93" on DVD yesterday afternoon. It has been widely and deservedly praised for telling a gripping, tragic story of American heroism in the face of death without resorting to nearly any of the usual Hollywood melodramatic tactics. No snakes, for instance, and only one, whiny, appeasement-minded foreigner with an English accent. The rest of the story comes from the official investigation, which was helped immeasurably by the details passengers and flight attendants on the doomed flight relayed to loved ones or authorities on the ground via their seatback Airfones or personal cellphones. It is a measure of the director's skill, or perhaps our eternal optimism, that despite knowing the outcome of the desperate attempt by the passengers to take back the plane from the Al-Qaeda hijackers we still hope for a different ending.
I came out of "United 93" full of anger against the murderous Al-Qaeda and the distorted Islamic culture in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere that gave birth to these madmen. But the film also directs anger at the U.S. government, i.e., the Bush Administration, for allowing this to happen. The film details the chaotic government response and the inability of key officials to reach Bush (who had finally finished reading "The Pet Goat" to a class of Florida schoolchildren and had hustled off to Air Force One and an undisclosed location, perhaps wishing he had read "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the United States," the report he was handed in early August 2001. Air Force jets were scrambled too late to intercept the hijacked jets before they crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Shooting them down, while horrible to contemplate, would have saved many lives.
In the run-up to the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 we have seen two apparent rightwing smears. The first came in late August when the New York Post printed a story that musician Bruce Springsteen was divorcing his wife to marry one of the Sept. 11 widows he met at a fundraiser. Not true, said the Boss. As a smear, this one accomplished two things: punishing Springsteen for his anti-Bush activities and tarnishing the halo of the Sept. 11 widows who have persistently criticized the Bush Administration for its failure to stop the terrorist attacks. The despicable Ann Coulter has gone after the 9/11 widows, especially the four known as the "Jersey Girls. The Springsteen story quickly died, but not before inflicting the sort of pain the far right dearly loves.
More pernicious still is the ABC fantasy movie "Path to 9/11." The first part aired last night and the second part will air tonight, interrupted midway by a speech by President Bush. This so-called "docudrama" has been widely criticized for its blatant innacuracies, which seem aimed at pinning the blame for the terrorist attacks on that favorite rightwing whipping boy, President Bill Clinton. One of the worst of its fantasy falsehoods is a scene (if it wasn't cut at the last minute) in which the Clinton Administration denies permission to an Afghan warlord to "take out" Osama bin Laden. The director of "Path to 9/11," David Cunningham, has ties to a Christian group that is trying to plant young evangelicals in the film industry. He is also a friend of Rush Limbaugh.
By the way, there are no ads in this fictodrama, so there aren't any advertisers to complain to. Convenient. I would complain to Steve Jobs at Apple Computer. Jobs is a major shareholder in Disney, which owns ABC, and used to host President Clinton and Hillary at his Woodside, California home when they went to visit daughter Chelsea at Stanford University. I can't imagine Jobs is very happy about "Path to 9/11."
This is all part and parcel of what we have come to expect in the five years since Sept. 11, 2001. George W. Bush and his minions have perfected "fear and smear" as the road to political power. With the Bush government heading for a massive electoral defeat in November, when voters are expected to express their anger against the administration for the disastrous Iraq War, the Katrinia disaster, and a host of other incompetent actions large and small, the American right is trying desperately to hold onto power. Short of "fear and smear" tactics yet unknown, or massive vote fraud, I don't think that is going to happen.
Liberals, including myself, sometimes make the mistake of succumbing to their own daydream fantasies. Here's a popular one: Bush leaves office in disgrace, the Congress is safely returned to Democratic hands, and we party like it's 1935, or 1965. Much as I hate to say it, the liberal golden age is unlikely to return anytime soon. Assuming Democrats retake the government, they face years, perhaps decades of struggle to consolidate their restoration. The Christian fundamentalists in the South and elsewhere who form the backbone of the modern Republican Party are unlikely to crawl back into their hole anytime soon.
But Democrats shouldn't shy from a good fight. Or even a dirty one. The future of the U.S.A. depends on restoring government that cares about all its people and taxes sufficiently to pay for the programs that a modern, progressive country needs. There is no free lunch. We can be a progressive social democracy like Canada or Germany or France, or we can be a socially stratified country with a few rich, a tiny, struggling middle class, and many poor, like Argentina or Peru or Mexico. The gulf is wide, but it is purely our choice to make.
