Thoughts on 9/11

Here's a take on 9/11 from yours truly. Wrote this mostly to process, but I'd be delighted if anyone would like to read and comment:

9/11/2001, 19 members of tiny Islamist sect, an offshoot from an Islamist movement the US had previously backed in Afghanistan, killed 2,977 innocent American civilians. These fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, men, women, and children, suffering death at the hands of demons we'd created abroad, were given frantic seconds to close up their spiritual affairs. Some of them burned to death, some jumped from buildings, some died of smoke inhalation, some died in heroic self defense, some smashed into earth or building mid-way through texting their close family. The spectacle of their deaths, broadcast in wall-to-wall coverage, traumatized the country. Tens of millions of tears were shed. Neighbors wandered out into their driveways and embraced. Traffic stopped.

A village community would have spun myth and meaning out of the thousand tendrils of grief spreading out from this shock to time and space. Such myths incubate and transform into pearls that bond us with spirit. It's what our human communities have done since pre-history in collective grief. It's what Hannukah and Passover are about. It's what churches do when they lose parishioners. A militarist plutocracy such as our own, however, made a sick caricature of these communal reflexes; our regime made a myth that became a demon that reached out and, literally, wrought death and famine upon the world. It's not what humans do in our natural state. It's what militarist regimesof the wealthy do when they see the opportunity to feed anguish and tears into the steam engine of capital markets and geopolitical dominance.

In our regime, there are always two stories: the red meat the elite throw the population to enlist us in their military and economic projects, and the cold calculating logic of the think-tanks, boards of directors, and closed senatorial sessions in which real decisions get made. The red meat myth we've been handed, which has suffocated all competing narratives, is that a gang of demonic attackers, drawn from among the world's 1.6 billion suspect Muslims, appeared out of nowhere to wreak death and destruction on the American population at a monumental scale. The board-room analysis is that 9/11 was a "bank error in our favor" giving the military-industrial-capitalist complex the political capital necessary to bring defense spending back up to pre-Cold War levels and gain an unprecedented base of operations in the Levant and Central Asia.

For the board-room programme to be viable, Americans had to believe that 9/11's trauma was comparable in scale to the 20 million Russian war dead in World War II. Comparable in scale to the Holocaust. Comparable to what Kurds had experienced at the hands of Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Emanating from a geopolitical sphere large enough to encompass the entire Muslim world so that our military could operate freely throughout to "defend us." For the programme to be viable, our military had to become so politically sacrosanct that anything it does anywhere is cast as "keeping us safe." Whether it's drone striking cash-strapped militias in Pakistan or paying off corrupt Sunni governors in Iraq.

When pressed, intelligent people would never co-sign these falsities, but psychically and in the way the way 9/11 is mythologized 17 years later, they are absolutely there. How else could we have sustained the price we paid as a population? We spent $2.4 trillion on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For that price, we could have had a blossoming park and a beautiful library in every Black and Brown neighborhood. Every child could have had a first class arts education. We could have paid 1 million doctors $141,000 a year for the past 17 years. Or 2 million teachers half of that. How else do you convince an economically struggling population to forgo humanizing social services in favor of imperial war projects on the other side of the globe, other than by convincing them that their lives are as endangered as were Muscovites under Hitler's onslaught, however ridiculous the comparison when made conscious?

The major tragedy of 9/11, though, if we include everything that was done in its name, happened not at home but abroad. We killed thousands of civilians in drone strikes our soldiers called "bug splats." We started a war in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands. We took a tiny sectarian Islamic terrorism movement and turned it into a mass movement by forcing a population of Iraqis and Afghanistans to watch as their children, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers had body parts blown off by our bombs. We tore apart nations and created tens of millions of refugees. And we still can't even talk about it. We still can't even really talk about the crimes we committed, at least outside of dissident discourse on the fringes of our society.

I'm of the 9/11 generation. I was 19 when it happened and deeply involved in organizing against the mythology, and corresponding set of policies, that I've described above. I organized and attended protests. I read widely and deeply and encouraged others to do the same. I tried to create popular organizations of workers both on my own and as a professional labor organizer. I can say now that nothing that we did at the time had any real effect. A tidal wave of reaction and imperialism swallowed up our voices and killed hundreds of thousands directly and millions indirectly. It deprived children of basic rights. And it's still happening. Trump is still trading on the 9/11 myth.

At the same time, we still have the ability to speak out in this country. There's an insurgency in the Black community and a movement for a decent society, one in which we simply take care of each other, emanating from politicians like Bernie Sanders. There are lots and lots of folks challenging patriarchy and traditional constructions of gender. If I'm inspired to do anything today it's to find a new way to connect with the activism I did in my youth. It's hard. I'm a father, husband, and have a very public job. But I'm realizing how the myth keeps me sick if I don't. Because the myth is wrapped up in compartmentalizing, shutting out, ignoring others' pain in favor of our own. It's about lies that harm. It's about a constricted circle of concern that diminishes us. If I'm true to myself there's no alternative but to let the grief in and let the righteous indignation out if I want to live as a human.

Experiences with children's movies

Probably half the time I watch “Frozen” with M (we’ve probably watched it 20 times) I cry. When I’m driving and she’s holding my smartphone and watching it in the back seat and Elsa sings “Let It Go.” While I’m trying to take a nap on our frumpled bed and she’s sitting cross legged watching Hans betray Anna next to me. While I’m attempting to explain to her why Elsa needs to hide in her room in the palace so she doesn’t hurt Anna with her ice powers. It’s gotten to the point where we’ll be watching, M transfixed, and then she’ll look over and peer into my eyes to check on me, to see if tears are coming out. I'm a particularly emotional father; I always tell her that it's natural, when I'm crying.

Meanwhile, M is riding the dramatic waves in her own way. Exerting every ounce of cerebral muscle to square the narrative fragments she’s managed to grasp with a cloudy two and a half year old’s understanding of the overall plot. Weathering the turmoil of an angry Elsa attacking her sister Anna, the bleak loneliness of Elsa’s ice palace, the beyond understanding moment when the sisters lose their parents at sea. Her face bends, grimaces, and vegetates with the plot turns, the contrapuntal musical numbers, the expressions of the characters, the too-much-to-bear sad parts.

Frozen isn't an outlier for me. In my past year watching kids’ movies with M, I’ve cried at, I think, every movie we’ve watched. There’s a space for deeply felt, straightforward stories of love, hard won growth, and redemption in kids’ films that high culture, and Hollywood schlock, elides, with their focus on cleverness and spectacle. And there’s M's face, an intricate, unfiltered register of these stories’ affective cores; I’m so bonded to her newness to it all that she sharpens and deepens all of my own feelings. The set piece drama of the action scenes notwithstanding, these films are odes to what she and I have in common as human beings. It couldn't be any other way, with their underlying business model cashing in on with a resonance with intergenerational audiences from Vietnam to Latvia to Los Angeles. Also, I think young children are engaged in such powerful moment to moment waves of fear, sadness, joy and longing, that they can’t suffer anything less than straightforward emotional honesty.

In “Up,” the film we watched a hundred times over before getting into “Frozen,” a man who’s lost his wife drags his conjugal house, held aloft by balloons, through a magical realm in which he’s forced to defeat a now-deranged childhood hero, all while accompanied by an innocent boy who promises new love. M asks to watch the part where the villain, an ultra-masculine big game hunter, tries to burn the protagonist’s house down, over and over. She’s doing the work of coming to grips with it, asking, plaintively, why the man is mean. Sometimes I rub her back or hold her hand. Then, when our hero is ready to let his house go in the third act, it drifts off into the clouds, and M seems to work to understand a little bit about life transition as a death and a birth. “Where’s his house going?” she asks every time, sad, only partly relieved when I tell her it's for the best, M still wondering if he’ll be ok.

In “Monsters, Inc.,” which we watched before “Up,” a huggable but formidable sasquatch, voice-acted by John Goodman, comes to integrate his physical power and split-off caretaker energy into a newly mature whole, through an unlikely parental bond with a lost child. M is drawn in by the tension between the way he's both “scary” and “nice,” their need to say goodbye at the end, and their subsequent reunion. “Moana”, the first film we watched around the time she turned two, is about a Polynesian child breaking from her proscribed role as princess, voyaging into a world of fantasy and darkness in an act of righteous rebellion, and returning with new maturity. For us, I think, these films are secular churches, with the moral leakage that comes from organized religion transposed onto their status as corporate cash machines, but only viable, like institutional religion, because of their status as powerful rituals of emotional growth.

“Frozen” is special somehow. I'm feeling its power now, underneath the embarrassment that my politically radical self feels at loving a very white, conventionally gendered Disney movie. In the film, two princess sisters, Elsa and Anna, seem to form a split psychic unit. Elsa has a superpower: she can freeze things, make snow with her fingertips, shoot ice-rays, create imaginary snow creatures, conjure up frozen statues. Her parents lock her away, cover her magic hands with sterilizing gloves, and close the palace gates permanently to hide Elsa’s dangerous gift. They teach her not to feel, because feeling anything intensely brings out her powers.

Eventually Elsa retreats into the mountains, creates an ice palace, and abides there, liberated in isolation. In contrast with Elsa, Anna is an ordinary, sweet child who longs for connection with her sister, almost dying twice after her approaches to Elsa lead to accidental discharges of Elsa’s ice rays. Anna wilts in loneliness. The world freezes over, and then thaws, at the end, when the sisters embrace. Reunited, the sisters open the palace gates, and Elsa uses her powers to create a magical winter festival.

It all has the quality of a dream that Freud or Jung would have found particularly engaging. But I’m trying to get to why I find it so deeply affecting for me personally, and I know it has to do with something along these lines: a gift or talent that I weaponize to keep others away. Or, the way I disown and hate the best of myself. Something to do with how for years at a party, or a dinner, I hid behind intelligence as a way to prove to others that I was smarter than them, shamed myself for it, and then felt lonely. How as a child, amid family dysfunction, I played showy piano pieces as loud as possible, so my parents could hear, while my brother sat in the same room waiting for me to play video games with him, me knowing I was making a story where he was bad and I was good, knowing how bad that made me, and how lonely it made both of us. Knowing the praise I got for my playing was innocent to this whole drama, and knowing that I’d created this toxicity.

I will also say that the symbolic catharsis of “Frozen” is at work now, too, in writing this text, which I know is articulate, but which is also, actually, vulnerable and heartfelt. That’s new for me. And I think it’s new for me because of M. And before that, because of K, and G, and S, and F, who have helped me immeasurably in turning gifts I treated as swords and shields into mediums by which I may be able to offer something up to my community. There’s something so powerful, I’m realizing as a father, about attending to the mind and heart of a new soul, and in so doing, attending to my own tender places, my own potential for contribution to community, and my place in our collective fairytales. In this way and so many others, the need to do right by M while she reconciles herself to the world, tiptoes towards understanding loss, tragedy and redemption, is helping me to grow up.

Reflections on Christine Blasey Ford

I've been trying to get at why the the Christine Blasey Ford episode has touched me so deeply; here's some writing I did last night and this morning to try to make sense of it:
---

For me, incidents of physical abuse stand out against the nebulae of childhood memory as crisp points of light. These stars formed constellations as they were born, a zodiac of spiritual teachers, teaching me to stay safe. And they became secret tormentors, teaching me to stay small, wilted, like a kicked dog. Among their gifts, though, are their pristine recordings of memory. There’s no better time capsule from my Bush and Clinton-era school days than the vivid recall I have around what it felt like to breathe, to hold my body, to wear my face, when I was hit. I remember colors, the feeling of wind on my cheeks, the spread of clouds above.

Here are some memories. In 7th grade, a kid pale as notebook paper, Peter, hitting me on the head in a concrete handball court. Slamming me with rolled up paper in a crowded walkway, under an overcast sky pregnant with drizzle. The feeling of one of Peter’s surprise, hard hits from behind making me lose feeling halfway between the top of my head and my neck. Then the needling sting that hung around for longer. Or a kid named Thomas cornering me in a dark closet, my back squeezed against cool plaster, him pressing a hard comb against my throat, shouting, over and over, that he was going to kill me.

A kid named Mario in 6th grade tripping me to improve his position with a group of flannel clad cool kids while I walked alone and in front of them under a hazy sky. Mario laughing, the others mildly impressed, while I crawled on the grainy concrete in shorts my mom had bought me. Mario tripping me again once I’d gotten up. This by a ratty chain-link fence separating us from a row of suburban houses.

I also remember the face of the kid who pushed me down on a bridge on my walk home from the bus, on a day so beautiful, amidst hills so lush, and clouds so white, I could cry at its grace. Then, the color of the mucus the boy spat on my nerdy corduroy pants after I lay under him and his friends while noticing my bleeding leg. The mucus was white, thick, the shape of a slug. I remember the numb, broken feeling of struggling to get it off with a stick once he’d left. Walking home with a smear of it drying on me.

I also remember verbally abusing my 10th grade girlfriend. Calling her a bitch over and over again, half joking to exonerate myself, but calculating to hurt her in a way that was precision targeted to inflame her tender places. I remember agreeing to meet by some benches after school, not showing up, and then convincing her that we’d never agreed to meet. Telling her I couldn't care less about her as she clung to my shirt and quivered. I can only imagine how much I hurt her in those actions, and others, given the trauma she had experienced in early life and had leaned on me to help her with. I don’t remember whether the clouds were crisp or diffuse, or how the wind felt on my cheeks when I did these things. I don’t know what stars I burned into her firmament or what constellations they made.

I wasn't sexually assaulted. But I know what it’s like to be dominated physically to the point of helplessness. To be laughed at in an act of primal domination. What it’s like to carry that for decades later. To still find the most safety in slouching, because, in my animal body, I know that standing tall, and making strong eye contact, is an invitation to males to put me in my place. I am an expert at diminishing myself to avoid aggression borne of jealousy. At putting people at ease and reminding them that I'm not a threat to evade imaginary attacks. At playing through defending myself physically while in quiet conversation with someone who's quite clearly safe.

I've started to make new meanings of the constellations experience burned into my childhood sky, but they still sing their song of safety in invisibility and vigilance, like the hymns of a religion I was raised in, and that I reflexively believe in. My wilted child’s body is still there, encased like a Russian doll under my father persona, my boss persona, my scientist persona.

I’ve written all of this to try to get to why I feel so viscerally connected to Christine Blasey Ford. Here is a woman who had the courage to reveal one part of her private, sacred night sky to all of us, and to a powerful group of sneering men. I know so reflexively she is telling the truth, by the way she remembers the thump of the music at the party she describes, the feeling and the grace of the bathing suit that clung to her skin and protected her, the cackle of the two boys participating in her violation, her escape to the bathroom, the ping ponging of the boys off the walls as they left.

Many of us have a wilted, dejected child’s body underneath our put together adult personas. Or underneath fallen apart adult personas. Many of us had stars of abuse burned into our skies that became our private zodiacs, never not reminding us that our natural place is to be pinned beneath aggressive bodies, and that our natural protection is to stay vigilant, numb, angry, dejected, even in our adult kitchens and bedrooms. I’m thinking of Christine now, at that table, a thousand cameras fixed on her, and I'm crying. For the act of domination that those old, mainly men, mainly Republicans, repeated, with lying gazes, surrounding her like a pack of hyenas. I'm thinking of the new stars they might have burned into her sky. Of the girls watching who had just been raped. In the same room as the family TV.

What I've struggled to accept, but what I know, is that as adults, our days of being bullied are not over. “I am safe now,” my old therapy mantra, might not be true. We have a leader who is that schoolyard bully whose mucus I couldn't remove from my leg. Who, to our Muslim, Mexican, and Central American neighbors, whispers “I’m going to kill you." And there is his pack of lieutenants who laugh along with him. There are his gaggle of Fox News talking heads who justify and celebrate his every action. In 2018, coming of age is no fairytale where childhood demons fade into the well of memory. They're still here, on the most public platform in the land, in the most hallowed halls of our country, telling a brave woman, who stands in for all of us, to shut up.