Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Saturday, September 11, 2021

A weird human proclivity

That would be anniversaries. It seems to be close to a cultural universal that people mark calendar dates that coincide with significant events that happened on the same date in some past year. When the number of years happens to be a multiple of ten, we make an even bigger deal out of it. If you think about it, this doesn't make any sense. The importance of the event is its relevance, if any, to whatever is going on at this moment, not the calendar date on which it happened. (That goes for my birthday, BTW.)


So anyway, today we're obliged to talk about the Sept. 11 2001 attack. It is quite relevant to stuff that's going on now, but it already was; we didn't need the coincidence of the calendar to make it so. If you're old enough to have had some political consciousness, or I should say some degree of sophistication, you know that the country went nuts. It was impermissible to try to say anything about why people would do this. Trying to understand or explain it was shouted down as excusing or justifying it. We weren't supposed to understand it, evil is ineffable. 


We also were not allowed to question what the Cheney administration said or did in response to it, or ostensibly in response. Osama bin Laden was in fact the best friend George W. Bush ever had. On Sept. 10, his approval was below water and he was widely perceived (quite correctly) as an idiot. When the attack happened, his approval rating shot up overnight to 90%. Truth! Even though he had been warned about it and he laughed it off. Imagine if a Democrat had been president. The reaction would have been the precise opposite.


The Taliban were actually willing to hand bin Laden over to the U.S., but they wanted evidence that bin Laden was really behind it, which the Bush administration refused to provide. Instead they invaded the country and deposed the government. But they let bin Laden flee to Pakistan, our ostensible ally. Pakistan also took in the Taliban leadership and continued to provide them with sanctuary throughout the ensuing 20 years. Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 attack were actually financed by members of the royal family of our other great ally, Saudi Arabia.

 

Therefore, the U.S. invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with it, meanwhile remaining in Afghanistan for reasons which were never explained. In both countries, U.S. forces committed innumerable war crimes. The U.S. also established a policy of torturing prisoners. The result of all this insanity was a catastrophe in Afghanistan and the Middle East, including millions of deaths, a tidal wave of refugees which has destabilized European governments, and the rise of Islamic State which committed atrocities in Europe, and on a much larger scale in Syria and Iraq. 


So today the war criminal George W. Bush is addressing the commemoration in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. That's right, the guy who is ultimately responsible for all this. Our hero.

4 comments:

Don Quixote said...

Of course, we know that George W. Bush was not in fact responsible for all of this. Now, if you want to talk about Dick Cheney being responsible for all of it, well, that’s another thing. George W. Bush was a party boy, a druggie, a bisexual sex addict who condemned gay marriage. a liar, and in some ways dumb as a door knob. I think his expression when finding out about the attacks says it all. He obviously was not in charge of anything that happened; he was a puppet while Uncle “Dick” and the rest of Nixon’s former stooges went about their evil.

Don Quixote said...

Almost forgot: for me, an anniversary is no weird human proclivity. We have seasons, the earth is in the same relative place in its orbit around the sun after 365.25 days have passed, and I think that the feelings and memories that come up for me on yearly anniversaries of loved ones’ deaths and other losses or no coincidence.

Cervantes said...

Chimpy may have been a stooge, but he went along with it. He's responsible.

Don Quixote said...

Of course, he is responsible as well. But I actually think he found out about it after the fact. I think he is a pathetic, hypocritical, lying, sociopathic stooge. The whole family is an abomination, including the mother. She was the one who said that she figured that Hurricane Katrina survivors were better off in the Houston Astrodome than they had been before. A family of racist, abominable assholes.