Facing 9/11:
Believe it or not, children, there was a time when 9/11 was a tragedy of unbearable ache, a wound on the psyche of a country that felt so smugly secure, an assault that left a scar on Manhattan that no amount of cosmetic building will cover. There was a time when the unspeakable nature of the violence was not used as a political tool. There was a time when the 3000 dead were more than props. The Rude Pundit remembers walking onto the platform overlooking the World Trade Center site in the months after 9/11 -it was a cold, misty 8 a.m. and the cops just waved him in. He remembers talking to people there. There was a couple from Israel, and the Rude Pundit asked, "Why do you need to see this? You deal with this every day." But not like this, they responded, not like this.

Now tourists line the sidewalks around the site, a large construction zone outside the Millenium Hilton. They take photos of loved ones smiling in front of the gate, people making bunny ears with their fingers behind the heads of brothers or sisters or whoever and giggling over the image on the digital camera screen. Street vendors hawk every imaginable item with images of the Twin Towers, pre-9/11 and exploding. The worst, the most vile scum of the pool of putrescence that is the pursuit of profit, are the (primarily) young men walking around with small photo albums showing you the real images of what happened that day - the burning, falling bodies. Here's a hint: the human body is mostly liquid, a water balloon. When it hits the ground after falling from such a high point as, say, the 90th floor of a skyscraper, it simply pops, explodes, leaving a bloody flower on the sidewalk or pavement. You can buy those photo albums. And, if you do, you can go fuck yourself.

To face 9/11 is to face realities that won't quench the national rage, a neverending search for violent vengeance fueled by the power-mad warmongers in the White House and Congress. Sure, we know that 9/11 was a fuck-up of monumental proportions, but, despite Dick Cheney's best efforts to mock the idea, 9/11 was a crime and not an act of war. This is not a new or stunning statement. But once we declared "war" on the terrorists, we elevated Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda to the level of a leader and a nation. The United States gave more credibility to Bin Laden at that moment than years of bloody action.

The reality is that 9/11 was a James Bond villain's plot that James Bond didn't stop at the last moment. The clock on the bomb finally ticked down to zero. What is SPECTRE in the Bond books and films but a terrorist organization with cells all over the world, a group prepared to use extraordinary amounts of violence, including biological weapons, to achieve global domination? Headed by a madman who demands complete obeisance? An enterprise that, even when decimated, fills its ranks quickly with devotees? This is not to be glib; this is not to "diminish the magnitude" of the tragedy. It is, however, an effort to diminish the magnitude of the criminal acts committed on 9/11. These are the sorts of "plots" we expect our intelligence agencies to stop. And the Rude Pundit is sure that the CIA and FBI, stumblefucks though they may be, have stopped more than one terrorist act. But, again, what would have happened if James Bond didn't, at the right time, stumble upon the nuclear missle and disable it?

We have to change the language with which we even talk about 9/11. And it's the fault of the Bush adminstration and a prostrate Congress in the days and weeks after 9/11 that we now face endless war. And this was calculated, to use 9/11 and the ensuing war for a couple of purposes: to distract from Saudi complicity and to provide grounds to go into Iraq. James Carroll of the Boston Globe actually pissed off Al Franken on Franken's Air America show by suggesting that we didn't have to go to war at all, in Afghanistan or Iraq. But the nauseating truth is that we didn't have to have a "war" in Afghanistan, especially not the way this one's been run, in order to catch Bin Laden and try to create chaos in al-Qaeda. (The war in Afghanistan is always the convenient cover for liberals searching for credibility when they oppose the Iraq War, a kind of "look at me, I can be bloodthirsty, too" effect.)

And once we went to "war" on terror (a name that the 9/11 Commission report says is wrongheaded, at the very least), we were committed to toppling nations and committing acts of aggression in pursuit of what should have been the goals of a massive manhunt. See, the word "war" makes people rally around its leaders in an unquestioning way - that's part of the 9/11 effect on Bush, the fucked-up notion that we should "trust our leaders" in a "time of war." But if it works for Bush in America, why wouldn't it work for Osama Bin Laden, elevated to the status of the leader of a nation by the very language that tries to condemn him, and his followers around the world? If the Republican Party can declare that only it can keep America safe, that its ideology is the one that will lead us to "victory," why wouldn't the radical Islamists believe that about their ideology?

Most of the people who leaped out of windows and were instantly incinerated or horribly burned or died in the collapse on 9/11 were not "heroes." That name should be reserved for the real heroes, the fire fighters, the cops, the brave people who tried to help others escape. They were all "victims," though. They were victims of a crime, a mass murder, as surely as all the victims of the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. We may as well be filling the footprints of the World Trade Center with the bodies of all the soldiers killed in this misguided sham of a war. They are victims of a crime as surely as those who did face 9/11.