Sherry Chandler

DK at the Talking Points Memo:

…we’re engaged in this utterly surreal dance where the morally blind are leading the ignorant. We still don’t know what has been done in our names. Were it up to them, we would never know. But trust us, they say, we did what we had to to protect you…

The President would have us believe that he would do anything, bear any burden, to protect this country, even strap on the flight suit himself and land on an aircraft carrier. But in a day and age when the Commander in Chief is not required to literally stand in harm’s way, the only burden he must actually bear is to uphold the Constitution and see that the laws are faithfully executed.

It is a significant burden–not the burden of soldier in Anbar, to be sure–yet a real burden nonetheless. But much as he did in the National Guard as a callow young man, the President, having failed in his duty, is trying to wriggle out of any accountability for his failure.

Gary Hart in The Huffington Post:

It should come as no surprise if the Bush Administration undertakes a preemptive war against Iran sometime before the November election.

Were these more normal times, this would be a stunning possibility, quickly dismissed by thoughtful people as dangerous, unprovoked, and out of keeping with our national character. But we do not live in normal times.

And we do not have a government much concerned with our national character. If anything, our current Administration is out to remake our national character into something it has never been.

Historian Kate Brown in Harper’s:

The President’s broad new powers in the signing statements that enable him to override Congress have corroded the American system of checks and balances. American law enforcement agencies can now wiretap American civilians and detain citizens and permanent residents without charges, and consequently without evidence. Last week the House passed legislation to build a 700-mile Israeli-style fence on the U.S.–Mexico border and to deploy there many of the surveillance technologies tested in Iraq. Perhaps the domestic installation of wartime technologies and military surveillance in civilian settings has become acceptable to us because we have become accustomed, as Soviet citizens did during the endless Stalinist purges, to open-ended wars—wars with no opening salvo and no concluding treaty. Whether or not one agrees that American detention centers and secret prisons are the “Gulag of our time,” the comparison deserves serious consideration. It might help us shine a torch into the dark corners of repression, where the totalitarian qualities of our own society lurk, before the scale of violence ascends to Gulag dimensions.

— is a phrase used by Keith Gesson on the Radio Open Source program After the Fall, the Rise of 9/11 Literature, broadcast on September 7.

I have been wont to use the term pornography to describe our appetite for cheap sentiment, especially patriotism, and the thrill of watching disaster unfold. Kitsch may in fact be more appropriate.

It’s first use is attributed to Philip Roth in an interview in the British Independent in September 2004. That interview has “disappeared from the web” but Christopher Lyden read from it on the program and I found the transcript below at The Citizens

…as a novelist. September 11th is not something I can draw on at an imaginative level. The only story I can take from it is the kitsch in all its horror—not the horror in what happened, but the great distortion of what happened. It’s almost embarrassing, the kitschification of 3,000 people’s deaths. Other cities have experienced far worse catastrophes. America itself has inflicted some in its past, even if it was for the right reasons. I am not a pacifist. One wouldn’t dream of slighting these people, it is awful, but we need to keep a sense of proportion about these things. What we’ve been witnessing since 9/11 is an orgy of national narcissism and a gratuitous sense of victimization that is repellant and it doesn’t stop. Even now it is impossible to watch a baseball game without having to listen to “God Bless America” before hand or without being asked to remember our heroes. I feel like saying,”Stop. Dignity demands that you stop it.”

The Open Source discussion of 9/11 literature included Gesson, an editor of n+1, Dennis Loy Johnson of MobyLives and edtior of the anthology Poetry After 9/11, and Art Spiegelman.

I found it very refreshing to listen to this conversation among artists who are not buying in to any of it the hype, who see in our whole September 11 myth a kind of national pathology. Who see the dirty trick that’s been played on us.

Spiegelman:

What’ve we’ve done to September 11…unprocessed information got fossilized into a club to beat us into cowering marching submission. It’s such a dirty trick.

I’ve been very slow to talk about this broadcast but it has not gone stale in the interim. And it’s still there for download on the Open Source web page. Listen to it. It’ll make you feel better.