An Unremarkable Massacre

by Anthony Schiappa

What else can be said about the attack on Boston? For all its carnage, it just confirmed what we already knew.

It reminded us that real legacy of the Bush years is very much alive, namely that the distinction between war and peace has disintegrated and will eventually become meaningless. For over eleven years now we’ve been fighting a war with no clearly defined enemies or objectives or battlefields. In many cases there are no obvious weapons—instead, we now have pressure cookers, ball bearings, and airliners. War is always happening and it is everywhere, a fact we are continuously absorbing into our everyday lives. And we’ll keep on getting used to it. Eventually it will become mundane. 

Within twenty years, Boston-like massacres followed by a martial lockdown will become little more than a nuisance, slightly more inconvenient than a traffic jam. 

Of course, this kind of violence has been a fact of life for millions of people for decades on end; the only thing new is that this violence is now happening in America. The history of the global role of the United States in the postwar years is well-known and no longer controversial. Even the most reactionary right-wingers accept these bland truths. The Long War, to borrow Rumsfeld’s ingenious phrase, has been raging on the periphery for years. On 9/11 it came home, becoming visible on our turf. Nothing more, nothing less.   

And it’s here to stay.

Without a strong, organized, and truly unapologetic Left, there is no reason to expect things to ever be different. What we have instead is more pleading from liberals for tolerance of Muslims and immigrants, and reminders of continuing horrors abroad. Many find it impossible to critique such a sentiment that on its face seems like a well-meaning message of understanding, but we must do so, because ultimately these sentiments miss the point. They reveal a tacit acceptance of an intolerable situation—namely the infinite violence engendered by the exercise and expansion of power through the marketplace—simply wishing to manage this repugnant, unholy state of affairs in a more human, multicultural way. We’re not exhorted to resist but admonished into superficial empathy.

It is easy enough to discern the familiar motivation behind the liberal reminders of the world’s ongoing horrors. It seems to come not from a genuine solidarity with the victims but from a desire to shame our fellow Big Dumb Americans for their narcissistic compassion. It’s a group surely worthy of scorn, but I have my doubts that anyone really cares about the Syrians, the Afghans, the Iraqis, or any of the other groups routinely blown to bloody smithereens, either by us or our donated weapons, but plenty of people are happy to use those same victims to embarrass Uncle Sam, the fat, ignorant maroon that he is, and the Diet Coke-guzzling, church-going, gun-fanatic proles that love him. This is not radical emancipatory politics, it is snobbery. The rancid class-prejudice Orwell identified way back in the 1930s still permeates the coddled and comfortable Left, a whole generation that has never had to put anything on the line for its alleged ideals.

This is why I harp so much on Left. It’s not around when we need it the most.

So it continues: a fearful and vain population more completely subsumed into the world of postmodern, everyday warfare of the “network,” endless power games waged across our bodies in ball bearings and shrapnel, on and on, until there's no more money to burn.

The Abominable Season: Remembering 9/11 Ten Years Later

-Mike Ferraro

And of course this week the posts come pouring in. You people make me sick with your pep talk tributes and jingoistic profile pictures commemorating those twin dildos of American enterprise that once blighted the New York City sky.

And forget about your tear-jerking ‘morning of’ anecdotes, full of empty slogans and Hallmark sentimentality. Is there not an ounce of imagination among you? How about a braincell? Rest assured, what you lack in imagination you make up tenfold in slavish compliance and obsequity.

But perhaps I am being too harsh. It is after all a sensitive subject. And besides, conformity’s the only game in town, right?

Yet I stand firm in my pronouncements.

Let’s get one thing clear, panegyrists: Unless you were one of the chosen stuck in an incinerator of shattering steel and exploding flesh, who the fuck cares where you were the morning of 9/11? And even then, who gives a shit anyway, really?

And since we’re sharing ourselves so completely this abominable season, you want to know where I was that fateful morning? In bed, dead asleep. That’s right, our great national crisis and I slept right through it. Until the phone rang that is. My mother, calling to report that the Pentagon was on fire. (Her exact words, I remember. How could I forget them?) Then: How was I? Was I OK, was I safe?

And how did I respond to this news? I told her not to worry, that I was fine, and put the receiver down. Then I laughed my ass off, rolled over, and went back to bed.

It’s OK, I can say such things. See, my father worked on the 88th floor of both towers during their construction, when they were just scaffolding swaying in the wind. He’s a plumber, and a good one too, but quit the job after a few weeks because of the height. Since then he’s always felt a connection to those buildings. Nearly thirty years later, as a plumbing supervisor for the Newark Board of Education, my father watched his beloved towers burn and eventually collapse on his way to work.

Does this sketch lend my voice a more sympathetic note, does it somehow authenticate my perspective? Is the acerbity of my earlier remarks tempered by this knowledge that my father saw the towers go up and watched them come down, an entire landscape--both emotional and physical--displaced along the way, the measure of a man and his life hijacked in the span of a few hours?

Yet none of this changes the fundamental reality of our situation. Let’s not mince words: Don’t cry to me about the great tragedy of 9/11, how we'll never forget the events and inestimable loss of that terrible day. Don't tell me that everything’s changed. Get the shit outta your ears: Nothing’s changed, suckers. Unless, of course, you count the endless war profiteering, unparalleled national deficit and expenditures, and erosion of civil liberties racked up since that day, all of which were on the table long before the time of great tragedy struck. 9/11 was no catalyst--it was merely the excuse proffered to implement the dirty deeds of the corporate technocrats and militarists. It was, as they say in Washington, bizness as usual.

Such long term plans for global hegemony go back at least as far as World War II. That said, as cursorily reported by the least cowed members of the lapdog press, what we have in the latest US invasion of Iraq is something more primordial, and therefore more relatable: namely, a good old-fashioned blood feud. According to this theory, W’s ousting of our old ally Saddam was payback for Saddam’s bungled hit on pappy, itself an act of retribution for Gulf War I. Seen in this light, as flagrantly irresponsible and wrong-headed as it is, at least this war policy connects on a visceral level, which is more than can be said for the rest of W’s presidency.

If such tantrums seem like the pathological behavior of a spoiled, petulant child, that’s because they are. An unmitigated disaster politically and policy-wise--expanding with a vengeance Reagan’s abysmal borrow and spend legacy--W was, as far as zeitgeist barometers go, the best president around; the one we, as a nation, unequivocally deserved. The figure this president cut required no metaphoric gloss or interpretation outside the obvious--the caricatures themselves more than sufficed. Embodying in thought and action the US’s interests and stature in the world, here was a walking, talking, dick swinging horror show, a most unholy mix come terrifyingly to life: part cowboy gone off the range, part superhuman bully, rolled into one inarticulate, bumbling, coke-snortin-til-he-became-saved trust fund baby. Shit, he’s not even a real goddamn cowboy. In short, W was the kind of incorrigible frat boy we would most like to have a beer with, to invoke some idiot pollster’s enduring election time conceit. With one glaring exception of course: this fun-lovin’ joker’s loosey-goosey antics had dire consequences for an inestimable number of people the world over, of which the final toll and magnitude of suffering have yet to be realized.

Myself, I remember waking up the morning after the 2004 presidential election feeling violated. Not that I needed further corroboration on this front, I understood clearly, and not for the first time, that the system was hopelessly and irredeemably fucked, and that baring a full blown miracle we were all doomed. I mean, it’s not like Kerry was even warm shit in comparison to W’s cold. But what could you do?--those were the choices, little more than simple, indistinct variations on a theme. This then was the measure of our America: Elections were meaningless charades, our democracy a fraud and piss poor decoy for the thing it purported to be. Were things ever any different? If so, it’s virtually impossible to imagine that time now.

These were not completely demoralizing and unsatisfactory realizations however. They were, in fact, deeply liberating. For example, that morning I knew I’d never vote again. And I haven’t. Like a newly baptized AA member, I'm proud to say the urge to take another hit of the old Jesus juice never once returned--black president be damned.

Yet such sentiments are commonplace, and the knowledge of the transgressions of government power passe, to the point of both seeming hopelessly irrelevant. What is clear, however, is that in an age where the public dwells in a ‘post-ironic’ fugue--where the incontestable assumption that the emperor has no clothes is a foregone conclusion, as the lack of surprise or even outrage over the Wiki-leaks scandal illustrates--this deep cynicism serves to further re-inscribe the values and practices of our broke and downward spiraling system. And in turn such blind acceptance and complete desensitized tolerance of the status quo work to condone these routine and egregious abuses of power and the overall functioning of a toxic and perennially mismanaged system. In this way, then, and in a manner unlike any before thanks to the over-saturation of information through digital media platforms, we are all unanimously complicit in the principal objective and operation of everyday life, namely the sanctification of power through capital.

In this respect no one is off the hook. Ten years ago today, for the first time in recent memory, the bully got punched back. To ignore this obvious reality embraces a total ignorance of historical fact.

Doesn't matter if it was ten years ago or ten minutes--as long as people are fighting for basic survival under the iron-fisted rule of capital, the real tragedy is happening the same place it always has: out in the streets.

Yes, it’s all happening right outside your window, whether you choose to admit it or not. Take a good look sometime if you don't believe me. Or better yet, go to the mirror. Open your fucking eyes and look carefully. Think about what the fuck it is that is making you so fucking miserable. Can you still see that view outside your window? Good. Look back and forth between mirror and street as needed to make the necessary connections, till it registers what the fuck the problem really is. Stare in the face, if just this once, the things that are making you so miserable and alienated and be done with it. Be honest with yourself. For once in your miserable fucking life.

And today instead of crying over the dead in sanctimonious and false eulogy, why don’t you go out and live a little while you still can? It’s the only honorable thing to do, the only decent commemoration of the dead to be made on this solemn day or any other.
Take heed: For once I know what the fuck I’m talking about. Do you?

The Reichstag Is Still Burning: 9/11 and the Conspiracy Theory of History

“… we live and die at the confluence of innumerable mysteries.” 

-Guy Debord

The intervening decade since 9/11 certainly lends credence to the air conspiracy surrounding those events. Before the dust had settled and dead were buried, and without any of the usual pretense to debate, the federal government, through legislation such as the Patriot Act, empowered itself to strip any person of their “civil liberties,” a quaint term indeed in these times, and invested law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels with Stasi-like authority. President Bush assumed emergency powers, declaring a permanent state of emergency that made the exception to the law the rule of law, and reserved the right to freely monitor the citizenry while stripping “detainees” from around the globe of their very status as humans beings in the grotesque carnivals of Abu Grahib and Guantánamo Bay, and in the process rendered the distinction between war and peace impossible, becoming the closest the world has seen in to a modern day sovereign. Two wars were launched in areas of the globe most hostile of American interests and which also hold the largest and most important reserves of fossil fuels, the very fuel of the economy, in what turned out to be a hare-brained attempt to control those regions and by extension the world. Of course, defense contractors and investment firms of all stripes made an absolute killing in the process. Meanwhile, we the bewildered herd clung to cheap sentiment, feigned outrage, and showed our resolve by merchandising in the face of tragedy, with all the FDNY/NYPD hats, t-shirts and bumper stickers you can imagine. The government was assured of no pesky pushback from the masses.

No one disputes these facts, they only attempt to apologize for or justify them to varying degrees. These explanations and justifications need not be reasonable if they are the only ones on offer. Considering these events, if you don’t view the events of 9/11 with a certain skepticism, you might indeed be the one who is crazy.

And it would be far from the first time this had happened. On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Hitler had become Chancellor, Marinus van der Lubbe, a mentally unstable bricklayer and council communist from the Netherlands, was arrested for setting fire to the Reichstag, the parliament building of the German government in Berlin. Hitler subsequently assumed emergency powers, suspended civil liberties and crushed the left opposition to the Nazis. The circumstances surrounding this event remain murky, but no one seriously believes van der Lubbe simply acted alone.

In 1978, Italian politician Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades at a time when communist and anarchist groups were gaining ground politically in Italy. After the events, as the state was able to justify stricter control measures, this radical high tide broke and receded. Years later, the findings of the Italian government itself would find that the Brigades had been manipulated in some way by a faction within the state apparatus.

The 1990s saw the emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements throughout the world, culminating in the 1999 Seattle riots, which shook the assumptions of the final victory of American capitalism around the world after the fall of the USSR. In this case, the actual deficiencies of this movement are irrelevant – all that matters is how they would have been perceived by the state. Two years later, the specter of terrorism not only made the US appear as a paradise in comparison to the seeming chaos outside its borders, but it also dramatically increased the already incredible power and influence of that state. Any nascent left-wing movement was thoroughly trounced and is still in absentia: the 2008 “financial crisis” created as ripe conditions for revolution as most of us have seen in our lifetime and without so much as a peep from any group that might seriously challenge to the normal state of affairs. And in this sense, the state capitalized on terrorism as a kind of preemptive counter-revolution.

The "conspiracy theory of history" may have at once been a ridiculous belief, but the times have breathed new life into it. The “9/11 Truth movement” itself, however, focuses on what we might call “Wile E. Coyote” logic in its obsession with physics: how come a plane crashing into the Pentagon doesn’t leave plane-shaped hole in the building, like a cartoon character running through a doorway? Indeed, they act like such belligerent buffoons and make such obviously spurious claims that it is impossible to take them seriously. And since anyone who questions the events associated with 9/11 is lumped in with them, its as though they themselves serve as unwitting disinformation agents. These dupes ultimately reinforce the legitimacy of the very government they allege to question, and the fantasy they cling to is one in which bad people do bad things who must be punished, just like in the movies. They see only people, not systems. But the ease with which they manipulate and conceal information ultimately demonstrates their fundamental unity with the world of the global spectacle.

Indeed, so many groups – from terrorist organizations to the most repressive regimes on the planet – took advantage of the events of 9/11 that the most basic question we could ask - “cui bono?” - becomes utterly meaningless. Who is the prime suspect when everyone benefits? (Everyone in power, that is.)

As Malcolm X, that voice we so desperately need in these ominous times, would have been compelled to reiterate had he lived, 9/11 was indeed a case of the chickens coming home to roost. But the power of the state was ultimately reinforced and expanded. The American government may have had its nose bloodied, but when the bully becomes the victim, he is freer than ever to do as he pleases. And the insignificant masses of this world are ground into dust more easily and more quickly than ever before.