Where were you on 9/11, when two planes exploded into the World Trade Center and a third breached the Pentagon? I was in New York City, heading downtown from the Upper West Side on the subway to teach. It was a perfect sunny fall morning. The mood in the subway car was chill. When we stopped, and the car went dark, it seemed like a routine event. Then someone across from me told us there had been an accident: a plane had hit a skyscraper.
I am sorry for the pain so many continue to feel over 9-11. But for me today, melancholy arises from reflecting not on the shadow the past casts on the present, but on the shadow the present casts on the future. I am reflecting on what 8-22-2021 portends for 2024. Bret Stephens, in the NYT of September 7, pairs 9-11 with 8-22: we are “commemorating the first great jihadist victory over America” only days after “the second great jihadist victory over America.”
Americans made heroic efforts to elect Biden in 2020 in order to preserve democracy in America. But it is necessary to recall that Biden, in his actions as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was instrumental in deceiving the American people into embracing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He helped us exact revenge for a 9-11 against a third party that had nothing to do with it, but were instead guilty of being ethnically Middle Eastern. He was thus instrumental in creating the legacy of 9-11: the identification of the new enemy needed by the US military-industrial complex (Moslems, Arabs, and “terrorists,” meaning in practice anyone that somebody in the government chooses to call a “terrorist”); the end of habeas corpus; the legal determination that the President of the United States has the arbitrary power of life and death over every human being on the planet; the murder of civilians and citizens of countries around the world with which the US is not at war, based on serial guesses relayed to drone operators in Virginia in a game of “telephone,” and based on free-fire zones in which every murder victim is by definition a terrorist; extraordinary rendition; the normalization of torture; the normalization of federal officials lying to Congress; limitless secret powers both in surveillance and operations for our internal and external spy agencies; legally spying on and recording every moment in the life of every American; the enlarged expenditure of trillions of dollars to create the means of killing people and destroying their material civilization, while enriching Daddy Warbucks and impoverishing other Americans ; and on and on. That is to say, Donald Trump‘s wish list, bequeathed to him and perhaps Tucker Carlson or Josh Hawley, by Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.
The Biden-engineered debacle of 8-22, and his appalling defense of his incompetence and his willful ignorance of the realities in Afghanistan, has awakened the whole world from the dream that with Biden we were in reliable, safe hands, owing to competence derived from experience, temperament, and statesman-like judgment. His reliability was an illusion manufactured by the Democratic Party establishment, with the help of the corporate media, in its desperation to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic presidential nomination. His involvement in the catastrophes of 9-11 and 8-22 is emblematic of the fact that America inflicted both these catastrophes on itself. America largely created jihadis in Afghanistan because, as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said in the 1970s, we wanted to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Unions’ Vietnam (i.e., by turning it into a hell on earth, which we did extremely well). We went to war in Afghanistan under Bush for absolutely no reason except that it is in the nature of militaristic societies to wage war.
8-22 demonstrates that we were dreaming when we thought Biden was going to save American democracy. He pleasantly surprised us by telling us he was going to be the new FDR. He proposed huge new programs to benefit the American people instead of the oligarchy. He was going to raise the minimum-wage to $15 an hour. The criminals of 2016 to 2020 would be prosecuted and democratic norms and accountability would be restored to government. He was going to address the destruction of the global environment with programs adequate to the problem. He was going to protect voting rights. Thus he earned accolades from AOC and Bernie Sanders. But his programs, even if they were large enough, which they are not, are by design temporary palliatives, not Rooseveltian structural changes. As establishment Democrats always do, he has abandoned his progressive promises while blaming the Republicans for doing so. He is silently letting the $15 an hour minimum wage, the public option, and protecting voting rights slide into oblivion. Ending the filibuster and unpacking the obscenely perverted Supreme Court were never in the picture. The malefactors of 2016 to 2020 are free and gleefully planning their triumphal return in 2024.
In reality, Biden promised the fat cats before he was elected that nothing would fundamentally change. His history is that he was instrumental in helping Clinton pass the reactionary legislation that Reagan could not: de-regulating the financial sector (which enabled the crash of 2008, and vastly increased the banksters’ wealth and control over America); destroying the welfare system for the poor; creating the current version of the auction-block-to-cellblock pipeline for 1/4 of the worlds prison population (while creating dozens of new capital offenses for a good measure); militarizing the police; and as “Senator Credit Card” from Delaware, getting the bankruptcy bill passed (under Bush), which enabled credit card companies to squeeze every last penny out of America ‘s poor, whom the Establishment itself had turned into debtors by impoverishing them (legislation that enraged Elizabeth Warren so much that she decided to to enter politics). Margaret Thatcher said Tony Blair was her greatest creation; Clinton was Reagan’s greatest creation, and Biden is his clone. He is what he has always appeared to be: a not-very-smart, glad-handing, cynical, right-wing servant of the oligarchy.
Can anyone explain how Biden, who is now looking like a failed president (as in the title of Bret Stephens column) is going to keep the Republicans from winning the house in 2022 and stealing the presidency in 2024? When are we going to stop looking to (white male) political saviors? We now live under an “inverted fascism“: instead of a tyrannical political sphere controlling the economic sphere, as in the first half of the 20th century, a tyrannical economic sphere now controls the political sphere. This mode of “democracy” is the product of the “corporate coup In slow motion” that has been carried out with great skill and determination by a wide array of powerful and extremely wealthy reactionary forces since the 1970s, beginning in reaction against what they viewed as the “excess of democracy” of the 1960s.
Our government, the best government money can buy, will not save us. Tyranny requires perverting and degrading every aspect of social and individual life. The American and now global oligarchy has accomplished this perversion and degradation with consummate skill from the 1970s to now, and is on the verge of anointing itself as our deity in the person of a truly imperial ( which is to say, fascist) president. As in the 1930s, only mass organization, particularly by students and workers, with mass demonstrations and mass civil disobedience, can save us. But even if half the American people were not asleep and the other half were not out of their minds, this would take years and decades of mass education and preparation, (to say nothing of brutal government repression—see Standing Rock under our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president). These things cannot be done in time for 2022 and 2024.
Since Biden‘s inauguration I had mostly succeeded in avoiding spending endless hours doom-scrolling; 8-22 started me up again. Since 2016 I have been trying to understand the nightmare that has arrived in America (as I presume everyone who reads Lucid has). On 8-22 I realized that I have unconsciously begun resigning myself to the termination of American democracy in 2024. I am now thinking that instead of continuing to try to understand proto-fascism, I should begin trying to understand what happens after a fascist take-over. Perhaps Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, and Argentina under Pinochet would be good places to start. Despair is unthinkable (though my mood does indeed feel like despair). One must never give up; one must always refuse tyranny. But it appears that the terms of the engagement will soon change.
I apologize for the length of this comment. My heart is very heavy. When my mother got older, she would say from time to time, “I think I’ve lived too long.” I didn’t understand what she meant then. Now I do.
Thank you, Ruth, for this piece and for initiating this conversation.
My wife and I lived across the street from the World Trade Center. The towers soared up so high from our vantage point near their base you had to crane your neck out the windows to see the top. On that morning, my wife was 3 months pregnant. I was in my office near Union Sq. Before the next hour had passed, the world as we knew it would be changed. Smoke and fire were everywhere; people were hanging out of the windows on the upper floors, frantically waving; bodies were flying out of the buildings. I went out into the street just as the south tower fell. Given the proximity of our apartment to the trade center–a distance of a few hundred feet–if the tower toppled to the side even partially, I assumed our building, with my wife and unborn child in it, would surely be crushed. I had no idea if she were alive or among the thousands whose deaths so many of us had just witnessed. I ran as fast as I could down toward home. The north tower collapsed as I approached the perimeter of chaos. A couple of blocks north of what was about to become known as ground zero a phalanx of police officers finally stopped me. I stood there, in the still swirling grayish-white cloud, the vaporized remnants of buildings and lives, scanning every anguished face coming toward me, looking for one. Finally, much later that day, my cellphone rang and I heard her voice. She was safe and physically unharmed. She’d been chased out of the apartment by the torrential avalanche of debris which came crashing through our windows as the first tower collapsed. After bunkering in the basement with neighbors and other tenants during the fall of the second tower, she’d been evacuated by police boat. She was on Ellis Island.
We were much more fortunate than so many others; we were reunited and we lost only material things. But what we once called home was now covered in pulverized debris, and was locked-down behind military blockades in an ashen wasteland called the frozen zone. We embarked on what would be a harrowing 3-month odyssey before resettling in Brooklyn. We named that son Miles as an homage to the distance we traveled together before he was born. In my professional biography in my firm’s website, I describe the consultancy as: “founded in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.” This history is what that refers to. That moment and its aftermath altered and still informs the trajectory and focus of my career—to address leaders’ uses and abuses of power, authority, and influence, to mitigate both willfully malfeasant and unintended consequences to people, organizations and society by those in positions of responsibility.
There is, tragically, still so much work to be done.
Thanks for this difficult article in a difficult week of remembrance. I was in grad school in Germany on 9/11 and not a single person I worked with or knew there said a word about the events. Ever. It was a lonesome time to be abroad.
It was the first semester of my freshman year in college. I had an early recitation class, basically a TA-led review class, for Chinese language. One of my classmates came in late and said a plane had struck the World Trade Center. I honestly didn't know much about what the World Trade Center was at the time but vaguely remembered there had been a terrorist attack there some years before. Our instructor, a Chinese former journalist, was very diligent in her teaching - she said this would be a great time to learn the word for 'airplane'. That's stuck with me the whole time. Everyone left the class as quickly as we could when it ended and went to the big tvs in one of the schools. A huge crowd of students sat or stood around them, watching. We watched the towers collapse. It was surreal. People whispering it felt like a movie. People crying, sobbing. Some desperately trying to call people. I think I was there for a couple hours then went back to my dorm where I continued to watch on TV with some friends as we tried to figure out who could've been behind this.
You mention the silence on the Upper West Side. I wonder if there was a silence across America. The next day, the entire campus, tens of thousands of students, seemed muted. Some morning classes were cancelled. I went to my Econ 101 class and posed the question to the professor what the attacks would mean for the country. He dismissed the question and said nothing. I lost any respect I had for him there, and we've seen what it has cost the country, not only in dollars. The rest of our classes were cancelled for the day and possibly the following day...I can't recall now.
It's been weird to think of how pretty much my entire adult life has been defined and shaped around this singular event. How the fear and anxiety from that time has never been addressed but papered over or used and abused by politicians. I was in Madrid when they had their terrible terrorist attack, only block away from Atocha station. The difference between how their people reacted vs how we've spent the past 20 years was an example to me. Millions of people marched against terrorism, against violence of any sort. Yet our go to, whether it's in the Hindu Kush, on the Euphrates, or on our own streets, always seemed to be reach for violence and retribution, and in seemingly the most clumsy ways possible.
Everything is clearer in hindsight of course. It's been a growth experience for me as I enter middle age. And it troubles me that so many of the same politicians that were in power for the past 20-30 years are unable to do the same growing, and understanding.
I was an EMT at the time. I had been on my way to the NYU gym just as the first plane hit. I was standing on the steps of the Angelica theatre with about 15 other people looking down Mercer street up at the tower in amazement. Then we saw the second plane hit and I said to the person standing next to me that this was no accident this was terrorism and we are under attack. We ran into the NYU gym lobby and saw on the tv reports that a plane had flown into the pentagon. I ran down into the gym basement and found the pay phone and called my friend back in Brooklyn he was the clearing house for information for where everyone was. My wife was working on Wall Street at the time and should have been coming out of ther subway about the time the first plane hit. Luckily she was early that day and was already in the building at the end of wall steeet by the seaport. By the time I called Paul my wife had already been evacuated out of the building and had walked across the Brooklyn bridge and was home. We ran back out into the street and watched the south tower fall. There were shouts of oh my god and tears and hysterical crying. I had all of those but I also had the realization that firefighters I knew were probably at the bottom of the collapse. I walked back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan bridge, by then fighter jets were flying up and down the east river, a day late and a dollar short in my opinion. and my wife met me at the Brooklyn side with our car.
I got back home got my gear and headed back into Manhattan through the battery tunnel. On the Brooklyn side I was stopped at the tunnel by NYPD but I had my emergency light and my emt shield so they let me through and asked if I would take this officer with me back across. So he jumps in my car and we head into the tunnel. About midway through all the lights went out and all we could see was my headlights and thick smoke. We couldn't see if there was anything coming the other way. We emerged into the plaza south of the the collapsed into what I can only describe as nuclear winter. We met up with one FDNY engine, two squad cars and one ambulance.
There was no one to help or save. I saw things I can never unsee.
We sat there for hours until there was an air horn that Building 7 was coming down and we needed to move further south.
Around 9pm I decided to go home. It was about that time the bomb threats started and one by one the tunnels and bridges closed. I managed to get across the 59th street bridge before it closed and it was only my light and shield that got me into the BQE so I could get home. I was the only car on the BQE all the way back to Windsor Terrace.
I spent the next month with my volunteer ambulance company down on the pile doing stand byes to treat those workers who got injured on the pile. The FDNY EMTs were tasked with removing the remains of the victims.
Needless to say I have very strong feelings to this day about 9/11 and even more so about the fascists who used it to their own benefits.
That horrible day was the beginning of our horrible knowledge of blowback, as Chalmers Johnson called it-- blowback for our immense and dangerous meddling in other countries like Iran. We citizens were being made aware that our country could no longer mindlessly use its great military power however it wanted without suffering consequences.
It is still undetermined whether this thin awareness has matured into knowledge and understanding. I don't think so. Too many American minds were still of the opinion we should stay in Afghanistan, fighting on, even though after 20 years we had no clear strategic idea why.
This sort of conjunction between tremendous military power and thickness of mind is too terrifying to contemplate. And yet, it is what we have.
20 years later the memories are as fresh as an hour ago. September, change of seasons, fall routines, drying leaves, the quality of the morning light —- can sensorily clobber us with the pain and memories of that day.
In the days after 911, my sister, who lived in Maui, and traveled around the islands for H&R Block was also subjected to “(enhanced pat-downs, extra interrogations and luggage screening).” And her last name was Nixon (no relation).
It was all about Them working to keep us stupefied, disoriented, frightened and compliant. Just like now.
I offer my own tale as testament to things that happened that day that will never reach the history books.
I worked in downtown DC during 9/11. Living in the suburbs, I left my car at the end of the metro system and took the metro into DC. When I arrived at the client (who happened to have TVs throughout the building), one of the planes had struck about 10 minutes earlier. There were general comments about how bad the pilot must be to have hit a building, but no idea of anything larger.
Shortly after setting up my laptop for the day at the client site, the 2nd plane struck. I went over to another area to watch TV coverage where everyone was dumbfounded. We didn't know what to think but it was happening a long ways away from us, and we had work to do.
Then the Pentagon was struck, and everything started happening at once. I was able to reach my wife via land-line phone (cell phones were relatively uncommon still) for the first and last time that day letting her know that we were fine for now but were talking about what we should do next. Afterwards, land-lines and cell towers (I had a texting pager back then) were completely locked up as they couldn't handle everyone trying to call into and out of DC.
When I talked to my wife, she said that they were reporting that the metro was stopped and that some kind of gas attack happened in the metro tunnels. The media was also reporting that other bombs were going off at the National Mall. Watching TV at the office, the media was also reporting that the State Department had definitely been hit by a bomb. I watched as the streets of DC became grid-locked as people were trying to drive out of the city.
Since I was the most senior of the consultants at the site, the decision to stay or go rested with me. About an hour after the Pentagon was hit, I decided to tell my staff to head home. Since the metro was unavailable (to my knowledge), I walked with a co-worker over to GWU where he had a friend he talked to earlier who was going to try to find his girlfriend on campus and drive us all back.
I remember a few things on that walk. One was the sound of jet aircraft and wondering whether those were ours or someone elses...should I be worried or relieved? The other is that no matter how many times I tried, I couldn't get messages out even with that texting pager...the telecommunications infrastructure just couldn't handle it.
When we finally hooked up with my co-workers friends, we drove over the Potomac amazed at how much smoke was still rolling out of the Pentagon. I got my co-worker to drive me to where I parked my car.
I finally arrived home around 7:00 pm that day. Despite being pretty far away from DC, our ability to complete phone calls was still sporadic for the following 2 days.
While everyone will remember the planes hitting buildings and a field that day, it behoofs us to remember how bad reporting was that day. From gas attacks on the metro, to bombs going off at the National Mall, to the State Department being bombed. It isn't just a lesson from 9/11, but how our media continues to hastily jump onto so very many things without taking the time to perform due diligence...all for the clicks associated with being first.
I often wonder if that shadowy, illiberal world of murderous autocrats, traffickers, white collar criminals, defense contractors has become more powerful than the once dominate liberal order of western democratic countries? It seems the dark forces of corruption and autocracy are ascendant in this moment in world history?
I am sorry for the pain so many continue to feel over 9-11. But for me today, melancholy arises from reflecting not on the shadow the past casts on the present, but on the shadow the present casts on the future. I am reflecting on what 8-22-2021 portends for 2024. Bret Stephens, in the NYT of September 7, pairs 9-11 with 8-22: we are “commemorating the first great jihadist victory over America” only days after “the second great jihadist victory over America.”
Americans made heroic efforts to elect Biden in 2020 in order to preserve democracy in America. But it is necessary to recall that Biden, in his actions as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was instrumental in deceiving the American people into embracing the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He helped us exact revenge for a 9-11 against a third party that had nothing to do with it, but were instead guilty of being ethnically Middle Eastern. He was thus instrumental in creating the legacy of 9-11: the identification of the new enemy needed by the US military-industrial complex (Moslems, Arabs, and “terrorists,” meaning in practice anyone that somebody in the government chooses to call a “terrorist”); the end of habeas corpus; the legal determination that the President of the United States has the arbitrary power of life and death over every human being on the planet; the murder of civilians and citizens of countries around the world with which the US is not at war, based on serial guesses relayed to drone operators in Virginia in a game of “telephone,” and based on free-fire zones in which every murder victim is by definition a terrorist; extraordinary rendition; the normalization of torture; the normalization of federal officials lying to Congress; limitless secret powers both in surveillance and operations for our internal and external spy agencies; legally spying on and recording every moment in the life of every American; the enlarged expenditure of trillions of dollars to create the means of killing people and destroying their material civilization, while enriching Daddy Warbucks and impoverishing other Americans ; and on and on. That is to say, Donald Trump‘s wish list, bequeathed to him and perhaps Tucker Carlson or Josh Hawley, by Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden.
The Biden-engineered debacle of 8-22, and his appalling defense of his incompetence and his willful ignorance of the realities in Afghanistan, has awakened the whole world from the dream that with Biden we were in reliable, safe hands, owing to competence derived from experience, temperament, and statesman-like judgment. His reliability was an illusion manufactured by the Democratic Party establishment, with the help of the corporate media, in its desperation to keep Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic presidential nomination. His involvement in the catastrophes of 9-11 and 8-22 is emblematic of the fact that America inflicted both these catastrophes on itself. America largely created jihadis in Afghanistan because, as Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said in the 1970s, we wanted to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet Unions’ Vietnam (i.e., by turning it into a hell on earth, which we did extremely well). We went to war in Afghanistan under Bush for absolutely no reason except that it is in the nature of militaristic societies to wage war.
8-22 demonstrates that we were dreaming when we thought Biden was going to save American democracy. He pleasantly surprised us by telling us he was going to be the new FDR. He proposed huge new programs to benefit the American people instead of the oligarchy. He was going to raise the minimum-wage to $15 an hour. The criminals of 2016 to 2020 would be prosecuted and democratic norms and accountability would be restored to government. He was going to address the destruction of the global environment with programs adequate to the problem. He was going to protect voting rights. Thus he earned accolades from AOC and Bernie Sanders. But his programs, even if they were large enough, which they are not, are by design temporary palliatives, not Rooseveltian structural changes. As establishment Democrats always do, he has abandoned his progressive promises while blaming the Republicans for doing so. He is silently letting the $15 an hour minimum wage, the public option, and protecting voting rights slide into oblivion. Ending the filibuster and unpacking the obscenely perverted Supreme Court were never in the picture. The malefactors of 2016 to 2020 are free and gleefully planning their triumphal return in 2024.
In reality, Biden promised the fat cats before he was elected that nothing would fundamentally change. His history is that he was instrumental in helping Clinton pass the reactionary legislation that Reagan could not: de-regulating the financial sector (which enabled the crash of 2008, and vastly increased the banksters’ wealth and control over America); destroying the welfare system for the poor; creating the current version of the auction-block-to-cellblock pipeline for 1/4 of the worlds prison population (while creating dozens of new capital offenses for a good measure); militarizing the police; and as “Senator Credit Card” from Delaware, getting the bankruptcy bill passed (under Bush), which enabled credit card companies to squeeze every last penny out of America ‘s poor, whom the Establishment itself had turned into debtors by impoverishing them (legislation that enraged Elizabeth Warren so much that she decided to to enter politics). Margaret Thatcher said Tony Blair was her greatest creation; Clinton was Reagan’s greatest creation, and Biden is his clone. He is what he has always appeared to be: a not-very-smart, glad-handing, cynical, right-wing servant of the oligarchy.
Can anyone explain how Biden, who is now looking like a failed president (as in the title of Bret Stephens column) is going to keep the Republicans from winning the house in 2022 and stealing the presidency in 2024? When are we going to stop looking to (white male) political saviors? We now live under an “inverted fascism“: instead of a tyrannical political sphere controlling the economic sphere, as in the first half of the 20th century, a tyrannical economic sphere now controls the political sphere. This mode of “democracy” is the product of the “corporate coup In slow motion” that has been carried out with great skill and determination by a wide array of powerful and extremely wealthy reactionary forces since the 1970s, beginning in reaction against what they viewed as the “excess of democracy” of the 1960s.
Our government, the best government money can buy, will not save us. Tyranny requires perverting and degrading every aspect of social and individual life. The American and now global oligarchy has accomplished this perversion and degradation with consummate skill from the 1970s to now, and is on the verge of anointing itself as our deity in the person of a truly imperial ( which is to say, fascist) president. As in the 1930s, only mass organization, particularly by students and workers, with mass demonstrations and mass civil disobedience, can save us. But even if half the American people were not asleep and the other half were not out of their minds, this would take years and decades of mass education and preparation, (to say nothing of brutal government repression—see Standing Rock under our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president). These things cannot be done in time for 2022 and 2024.
Since Biden‘s inauguration I had mostly succeeded in avoiding spending endless hours doom-scrolling; 8-22 started me up again. Since 2016 I have been trying to understand the nightmare that has arrived in America (as I presume everyone who reads Lucid has). On 8-22 I realized that I have unconsciously begun resigning myself to the termination of American democracy in 2024. I am now thinking that instead of continuing to try to understand proto-fascism, I should begin trying to understand what happens after a fascist take-over. Perhaps Spain under Franco, Portugal under Salazar, and Argentina under Pinochet would be good places to start. Despair is unthinkable (though my mood does indeed feel like despair). One must never give up; one must always refuse tyranny. But it appears that the terms of the engagement will soon change.
I apologize for the length of this comment. My heart is very heavy. When my mother got older, she would say from time to time, “I think I’ve lived too long.” I didn’t understand what she meant then. Now I do.
Thank you, Ruth, for this piece and for initiating this conversation.
My wife and I lived across the street from the World Trade Center. The towers soared up so high from our vantage point near their base you had to crane your neck out the windows to see the top. On that morning, my wife was 3 months pregnant. I was in my office near Union Sq. Before the next hour had passed, the world as we knew it would be changed. Smoke and fire were everywhere; people were hanging out of the windows on the upper floors, frantically waving; bodies were flying out of the buildings. I went out into the street just as the south tower fell. Given the proximity of our apartment to the trade center–a distance of a few hundred feet–if the tower toppled to the side even partially, I assumed our building, with my wife and unborn child in it, would surely be crushed. I had no idea if she were alive or among the thousands whose deaths so many of us had just witnessed. I ran as fast as I could down toward home. The north tower collapsed as I approached the perimeter of chaos. A couple of blocks north of what was about to become known as ground zero a phalanx of police officers finally stopped me. I stood there, in the still swirling grayish-white cloud, the vaporized remnants of buildings and lives, scanning every anguished face coming toward me, looking for one. Finally, much later that day, my cellphone rang and I heard her voice. She was safe and physically unharmed. She’d been chased out of the apartment by the torrential avalanche of debris which came crashing through our windows as the first tower collapsed. After bunkering in the basement with neighbors and other tenants during the fall of the second tower, she’d been evacuated by police boat. She was on Ellis Island.
We were much more fortunate than so many others; we were reunited and we lost only material things. But what we once called home was now covered in pulverized debris, and was locked-down behind military blockades in an ashen wasteland called the frozen zone. We embarked on what would be a harrowing 3-month odyssey before resettling in Brooklyn. We named that son Miles as an homage to the distance we traveled together before he was born. In my professional biography in my firm’s website, I describe the consultancy as: “founded in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.” This history is what that refers to. That moment and its aftermath altered and still informs the trajectory and focus of my career—to address leaders’ uses and abuses of power, authority, and influence, to mitigate both willfully malfeasant and unintended consequences to people, organizations and society by those in positions of responsibility.
There is, tragically, still so much work to be done.
Thanks for this difficult article in a difficult week of remembrance. I was in grad school in Germany on 9/11 and not a single person I worked with or knew there said a word about the events. Ever. It was a lonesome time to be abroad.
It was the first semester of my freshman year in college. I had an early recitation class, basically a TA-led review class, for Chinese language. One of my classmates came in late and said a plane had struck the World Trade Center. I honestly didn't know much about what the World Trade Center was at the time but vaguely remembered there had been a terrorist attack there some years before. Our instructor, a Chinese former journalist, was very diligent in her teaching - she said this would be a great time to learn the word for 'airplane'. That's stuck with me the whole time. Everyone left the class as quickly as we could when it ended and went to the big tvs in one of the schools. A huge crowd of students sat or stood around them, watching. We watched the towers collapse. It was surreal. People whispering it felt like a movie. People crying, sobbing. Some desperately trying to call people. I think I was there for a couple hours then went back to my dorm where I continued to watch on TV with some friends as we tried to figure out who could've been behind this.
You mention the silence on the Upper West Side. I wonder if there was a silence across America. The next day, the entire campus, tens of thousands of students, seemed muted. Some morning classes were cancelled. I went to my Econ 101 class and posed the question to the professor what the attacks would mean for the country. He dismissed the question and said nothing. I lost any respect I had for him there, and we've seen what it has cost the country, not only in dollars. The rest of our classes were cancelled for the day and possibly the following day...I can't recall now.
It's been weird to think of how pretty much my entire adult life has been defined and shaped around this singular event. How the fear and anxiety from that time has never been addressed but papered over or used and abused by politicians. I was in Madrid when they had their terrible terrorist attack, only block away from Atocha station. The difference between how their people reacted vs how we've spent the past 20 years was an example to me. Millions of people marched against terrorism, against violence of any sort. Yet our go to, whether it's in the Hindu Kush, on the Euphrates, or on our own streets, always seemed to be reach for violence and retribution, and in seemingly the most clumsy ways possible.
Everything is clearer in hindsight of course. It's been a growth experience for me as I enter middle age. And it troubles me that so many of the same politicians that were in power for the past 20-30 years are unable to do the same growing, and understanding.
I was an EMT at the time. I had been on my way to the NYU gym just as the first plane hit. I was standing on the steps of the Angelica theatre with about 15 other people looking down Mercer street up at the tower in amazement. Then we saw the second plane hit and I said to the person standing next to me that this was no accident this was terrorism and we are under attack. We ran into the NYU gym lobby and saw on the tv reports that a plane had flown into the pentagon. I ran down into the gym basement and found the pay phone and called my friend back in Brooklyn he was the clearing house for information for where everyone was. My wife was working on Wall Street at the time and should have been coming out of ther subway about the time the first plane hit. Luckily she was early that day and was already in the building at the end of wall steeet by the seaport. By the time I called Paul my wife had already been evacuated out of the building and had walked across the Brooklyn bridge and was home. We ran back out into the street and watched the south tower fall. There were shouts of oh my god and tears and hysterical crying. I had all of those but I also had the realization that firefighters I knew were probably at the bottom of the collapse. I walked back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan bridge, by then fighter jets were flying up and down the east river, a day late and a dollar short in my opinion. and my wife met me at the Brooklyn side with our car.
I got back home got my gear and headed back into Manhattan through the battery tunnel. On the Brooklyn side I was stopped at the tunnel by NYPD but I had my emergency light and my emt shield so they let me through and asked if I would take this officer with me back across. So he jumps in my car and we head into the tunnel. About midway through all the lights went out and all we could see was my headlights and thick smoke. We couldn't see if there was anything coming the other way. We emerged into the plaza south of the the collapsed into what I can only describe as nuclear winter. We met up with one FDNY engine, two squad cars and one ambulance.
There was no one to help or save. I saw things I can never unsee.
We sat there for hours until there was an air horn that Building 7 was coming down and we needed to move further south.
Around 9pm I decided to go home. It was about that time the bomb threats started and one by one the tunnels and bridges closed. I managed to get across the 59th street bridge before it closed and it was only my light and shield that got me into the BQE so I could get home. I was the only car on the BQE all the way back to Windsor Terrace.
I spent the next month with my volunteer ambulance company down on the pile doing stand byes to treat those workers who got injured on the pile. The FDNY EMTs were tasked with removing the remains of the victims.
Needless to say I have very strong feelings to this day about 9/11 and even more so about the fascists who used it to their own benefits.
That horrible day was the beginning of our horrible knowledge of blowback, as Chalmers Johnson called it-- blowback for our immense and dangerous meddling in other countries like Iran. We citizens were being made aware that our country could no longer mindlessly use its great military power however it wanted without suffering consequences.
It is still undetermined whether this thin awareness has matured into knowledge and understanding. I don't think so. Too many American minds were still of the opinion we should stay in Afghanistan, fighting on, even though after 20 years we had no clear strategic idea why.
This sort of conjunction between tremendous military power and thickness of mind is too terrifying to contemplate. And yet, it is what we have.
20 years later the memories are as fresh as an hour ago. September, change of seasons, fall routines, drying leaves, the quality of the morning light —- can sensorily clobber us with the pain and memories of that day.
In the days after 911, my sister, who lived in Maui, and traveled around the islands for H&R Block was also subjected to “(enhanced pat-downs, extra interrogations and luggage screening).” And her last name was Nixon (no relation).
It was all about Them working to keep us stupefied, disoriented, frightened and compliant. Just like now.
I offer my own tale as testament to things that happened that day that will never reach the history books.
I worked in downtown DC during 9/11. Living in the suburbs, I left my car at the end of the metro system and took the metro into DC. When I arrived at the client (who happened to have TVs throughout the building), one of the planes had struck about 10 minutes earlier. There were general comments about how bad the pilot must be to have hit a building, but no idea of anything larger.
Shortly after setting up my laptop for the day at the client site, the 2nd plane struck. I went over to another area to watch TV coverage where everyone was dumbfounded. We didn't know what to think but it was happening a long ways away from us, and we had work to do.
Then the Pentagon was struck, and everything started happening at once. I was able to reach my wife via land-line phone (cell phones were relatively uncommon still) for the first and last time that day letting her know that we were fine for now but were talking about what we should do next. Afterwards, land-lines and cell towers (I had a texting pager back then) were completely locked up as they couldn't handle everyone trying to call into and out of DC.
When I talked to my wife, she said that they were reporting that the metro was stopped and that some kind of gas attack happened in the metro tunnels. The media was also reporting that other bombs were going off at the National Mall. Watching TV at the office, the media was also reporting that the State Department had definitely been hit by a bomb. I watched as the streets of DC became grid-locked as people were trying to drive out of the city.
Since I was the most senior of the consultants at the site, the decision to stay or go rested with me. About an hour after the Pentagon was hit, I decided to tell my staff to head home. Since the metro was unavailable (to my knowledge), I walked with a co-worker over to GWU where he had a friend he talked to earlier who was going to try to find his girlfriend on campus and drive us all back.
I remember a few things on that walk. One was the sound of jet aircraft and wondering whether those were ours or someone elses...should I be worried or relieved? The other is that no matter how many times I tried, I couldn't get messages out even with that texting pager...the telecommunications infrastructure just couldn't handle it.
When we finally hooked up with my co-workers friends, we drove over the Potomac amazed at how much smoke was still rolling out of the Pentagon. I got my co-worker to drive me to where I parked my car.
I finally arrived home around 7:00 pm that day. Despite being pretty far away from DC, our ability to complete phone calls was still sporadic for the following 2 days.
While everyone will remember the planes hitting buildings and a field that day, it behoofs us to remember how bad reporting was that day. From gas attacks on the metro, to bombs going off at the National Mall, to the State Department being bombed. It isn't just a lesson from 9/11, but how our media continues to hastily jump onto so very many things without taking the time to perform due diligence...all for the clicks associated with being first.
I often wonder if that shadowy, illiberal world of murderous autocrats, traffickers, white collar criminals, defense contractors has become more powerful than the once dominate liberal order of western democratic countries? It seems the dark forces of corruption and autocracy are ascendant in this moment in world history?
Thank you for that. We all need to be reminded of the last 20 years. Cynthia Miller-Idriss wrote a great article on the same topic. Perhaps you can invite her sometime? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-08-24/war-on-terror-911-jan6?utm_medium=promo_email&utm_source=lo_flows&utm_campaign=registered_user_welcome&utm_term=email_1&utm_content=20210825