I almost didn’t open Jordan Hoffman’s Vanity Fair criticism of Spike Lee’s new HBO series on the September 11 attacks. The fact is, I generally won’t read or watch anything related to 9/11 because I have a physical revulsion to thinking about the topic. There is no way in hell, for example, that I would ever sit down at watch a program on 9/11, whether it be a multipart documentary or a fifteen minute explainer.
Hoffman’s criticism isn’t particularly interesting either, but it boils down to a concern that in a pre-final cut screening, Hoffman felt that too much credence was given to folks who subscribe to implausible conspiracy theories about why WTC7 collapsed. It seems likely that Lee will make some adjustments to that episode before the series is released, so I don’t much care.
It got me thinking about why I can’t think about 9/11 though, and it isn’t really related to the horror of the day itself.
Sometime shortly after the second tower collapsed a crowd assembled around my work space at the Sarnoff Corporation where I was working as a low level manager in an Integrated Circuit Lab. They knew I was pretty politically attuned, and they wanted to know what the government was going to do. I remember what I told them. I said that I hadn’t voted for the Bush administration and as Texas oilmen they were probably the worst possible people to have in charge at such a moment, but that we were going to have to trust them to get us through it. We had to pull together.
I stand by that. I told them we had to unite politically, but also that we shouldn’t think that the government would necessarily make good decisions. I wasn’t calling for blind trust, but more for giving them some leeway to deal with a very difficult situation.
That’s the seed of my present aversion to thinking about 9/11. All the wrong decisions were made. My good will wasn’t reciprocated. Even the person who performed most admirably on 9/11, Rudy Giuliani, has descended into criminal madness.
The current state of Iraq, Afghanistan, and our nation’s politics, is a testimony to the folly of trusting that anything would be handled correctly after the September 11 attacks.
I remember later that afternoon sitting alone in my living room watching the news coverage and having a profound sense of dread about what it going to do to our country. I’m talking about the reaction. I knew the reaction would be very bad and likely not go well. I could foresee things like making torture “acceptable” again and the Patriot Act and disproportionate uses of violence. I knew many of my countrymen would support these things and that, politically, little could stand in the way.
The reason 9/11 makes me sick is not because I can’t stand watching all those people die, but because it’s all tied up with my heartbreak about what it did to us as a people.
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I posted this elsewhere. If anybody can explain it reasonably – I’m all ears.
Regardless of what is presented, I will always question our response to 9/11. Why?
The rules of IFR aviation (Instrument flight reference – all airliners) have a response protocol. There are three things flights must have: 1 – A pilot who responds when called 2 – A working transponder (plane ID) that relays altitude and 3 – A predetermined flight plan to follow. By the rules – if a plane flying IFR loses any 2 of those 3 things – a military jet is scrambled to check it out. There is no decision too make, no debate.
For example, when golfer Payne Stewart’s plane veered off course and he didn’t answer when hailed – a jet was scrambled and they could see he was unconscious. That is a private 6-passenger jet and this is something that happens roughly once a week in the USA (scrambling jets to check out a plane). Our Air Force trains for this and jets are always ready to be airborne in 5-6 minutes.
Now – on 9/11, we had THREE AIRLINERS that were off course, unresponsive, AND the transponders were turned off AND NO JETS WERE SCRAMBLED in any fashion that mattered. After the first tower was hit, the 2nd jet was 15-20 minutes behind without being intercepted. The plane that hit the Pentagon was 40 minutes behind that and was not intercepted.
I don’t buy the “our military was just asleep that morning” bullshit.
I hesitate to correct you, Mark, because it won’t change your mind and you will have one fewer glaring error the next time you post, but: IFR stands for Instrument Flight Rules. Not reference. Your understanding of the ATC (look it up) system circa 2000 must not be very good if you don’t even know that. More to the point, IFR has nothing to do with scrambling military jets. IFR is what happens when VFR is not possible. BTW, weren’t there 4 airliners?
WOW Bob – that’s some picky bullshit.
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I was out doing last-minute errands that day because I was about to move to another country in (I thought) two days. The first tower got struck while I was showering, the second got hit about 15 minutes before I had to leave for a dental appointment, and both towers fell during my procedure there, the second one going down just as I was filling out the insurance paperwork at the desk before leaving (viewable on TVs here and there inside the dentist’s office).
I didn’t go home after that because there were more things to take care of, so I got onto I-35 northbound to OKC, which took about 5-10 minutes from the dentist’s office. Within a couple minutes of merging into traffic (which was light) I was passed on the left by a full-ton dualie pickup flying US flags from either side of the cab, with the words “KILL THEM ALL” written across the back windshield in white shoe polish.
Up to that point I had been a bit numb to the event because I had a checklist of essential tasks to keep me moving through the morning and to distract my brain from attempting to take in the enormity of what had just happened. But when I saw that truck, I got a sudden sinking sense of profound dread probably not unlike what you’ve shared here. It was like an entire, better future had just been irrevocably lost. In hindsight, that premonition has held up pretty well.
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On 9/11 I was working in Crystal City, VA. The guy in the office next to mine popped his head in my door and said “What’s going on over at the Pentagon?” Our office building was maybe 2 miles from the Pentagon. We didn’t have a clear line of sight to the Pentagon because there were a couple of mid-rise office buildings obstructing the view, but we could see huge, billowing clouds of black smoke rising from that direction. We ran down to the break room to turn on the TV (no streaming video back then) and we learned that the Twin Towers had also been hit.
A few hours later, I was driving home on I-395. Traffic was moving at a crawling pace and as I passed the Pentagon I got a good look at the huge, gaping hole in the side of the building. It was still smoldering and there was fire suppressing foam all over the place.
I remember saying to one of my colleagues, “I think our whole world just changed today.” It did, in a very bad way.
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Your disgust might also have to do something with the fact that the Republican Party spent decades humping 9/11 and couldn’t even be decent enough to wipe off their ball sweat.
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