Thoughts On 9/11

Fucking 9/11.

Soon to be known as National Acrimonious Religious Debate Day. Are we going to have to keep going through this shit every year? I've just engaged in an extended debate with someone I don't know in the comments section of a mutual acquaintance's facebook page on whether the Bible is a violent book or not. Despite my documentation of Old Testament passages demonstrating God's support of slavery, mass murder, and incest, I was assured that the REST of the Bible shows that He later changed his mind about having to do those awful things to people, and gave us His only son so that he...wouldn't have to do those awful things anymore. Or something to that effect. The logic didn't quite connect.

Things have changed, oh yes. Remember how it actually felt on the day, and the following days as it sunk in? It didn't feel quite real, at least not to me; if Jerry Bruckheimer had pitched the 9/11 attacks as a movie plot the day before, he probably would have been told that it was too over the top and far-fetched.

I went to Manhattan a few years ago. It was my first visit. I remember standing outside the WTC site and looking up the surrounding skyscrapers which are, by my usual standards, quite large buildings...and then looking at a diagram of the site before the attacks and realizing the towers had been two or three times as tall. Playing the tower collapses in my head, the sheer scale of destruction was terrifying.

America tried to turn the whole thing on its head in the following weeks, turn it into something emotional and inspiring, and it left a bad taste in my mouth even then. We heard tear-jerking stories about people on the flights calling family members, and inspiring stories of courage and how America stood up as one. You know, let's roll.

However, this is all basically bullshit. 9/11 was not, first and foremost, a day of tragedy or national unity. It was a day of horror. Horror is not a redeemable emotion. You can't turn horror into something appealing or inspiring. Listening to people scream in terror as a gigantic unreal fireball erupts from the side of a skyscraper, watching living, burning human bodies fall hundreds of feet to splatter on the concrete, watching the whole fucking gargantuan building full of more living, burning human bodies go down and knowing the other one was going to go with it...check out this page on the numbers for 9/11 statistics, and compare the death count with the total number of human body parts recovered during the cleanup. Try to write an inspiring tear-jerker about that shit, Alan Jackson.

So we moved away from horror, and turned to more media-friendly emotions which had become a bad joke by the time the Iraq war rolled around and we realized the tone the Bush Administration was going to take against criticism. Now we have moved on to arguing about whether all of Islam should be blamed for 9/11, and the tactics and arguments used by both sides have gotten positively hilarious. We have moved away from Bush-era self-righteousness...and I am afraid that we have moved too far.

Fucking Christ, did I actually just write that?

I'm certainly as pleased as anyone that the doofus Reverend Terry Jones has abandoned his plan to hold a massive Qur'an burning on 9/11. I have watched with amusement over the last few days as he has backpedaled from a self-righteousness firebrand calling for global denouncement of Islam as the Devil's seed, to trying to sound like he is involved in rational and mutually respectful debate with members of the Islamic community. The funniest part were the entreaties by the president, General Petraeus, and even Sarah Palin suggesting that the whole thing was...un-American and that it endangered our boys overseas. Gee, that must have really fucking stung.

Yesterday I watched an interview with Jones' increasingly irritated son assuring the crowd of reporters that "No, there will be no book burning tomorrow...Why do I have to keep saying it?" Hmmm...probably because your original intention was to make a huge, incendiary, well-publicized international event out it in the first place. It takes a while for these things to die down, you know.

However, as funny as it is to watch a conservative preacher being pilloried on patriotic rhetoric, and to see it actually having an effect on him, there are repercussions to consider. Essentially, Jones was browbeaten with the argument that aggravating Muslims will encourage them towards violence against Christians and Americans, and that it is better for him to not exercise his freedom of speech in order to prevent retaliation.

So...are we going to hear this same shit from the Obama and General Petraeus the next time Matt Stone and Trey Parker want to show Mohammad on South Park?

We're moving out onto a slippery slope here. I think it might have been better just to downplay the whole thing by emphasizing how ridiculous and pathetic it was; an expression of furious indignation that there were people in the world who would dare to believe in a different fable than Jones, and to point out that the burning wouldn't have actually accomplished anything. Islam will not magically evaporate if enough Qur'ans are burned. It would even have been all right to point out that the burning would create bad feelings, and hampered American diplomatic efforts overseas...but instead, Obama and Petraeus emphasized the threat of violence. The President of the United States has essentially told radical Islam that he will fear monger and discourage freedom of speech on its behalf. Our fault, please don't hurt us. I think Obama has fucked up, and big.

I don't think that we should fear Islam, at least in the long run...not if freedom, secularization, and standards of living generally improve globally. Once upon a time, western Christianity used to be just as violent and intolerant; impoverished people with shitty standards of living tend to hedge their bets on the afterlife. But western civilization is chilly chill these days, and Christians are not so willing to leave their comfortable materialistic lives to bring hellfire down on the infidel.

Like Christianity, Islam will (hopefully) temper down if its followers find themselves with more and more materialistic distractions. God didn't really mean all that shit about the House of War, its all about looooove. Call off the jihad, let's order pizza, smoke a joint, and watch some porn. The Qur'an is just...allegorical, man.

If it worked for the Old Testament, it can work for anything.

LNJ