NINE...
...you know the rest.
I write it in all caps because that’s how you’re supposed to say it and that’s how they say it on TV, and I write it in all caps mockingly because no one ever really knows why they’re adopting this faux-reverent tone. I suspect most people know - I mean, hopefully, at this point, after the whole Afghanistan thing - that it’s all bullshit. That it’s mendacious wooey hand-waving that allows us to pay some sort of polite society lip-service to the idea of “remembering” or “commemorating” without ever having to actually look at whatever it is we’re supposed to be not forgetting.
Every year, people get pissed at me for profaning the Sacred Anniversary with my flippant attitude and the fact that I just can’t keep my comments to myself. At least, I imagine that they do - most people stopped telling me when I offend them years ago. But I hope they do. I’ve been tired of this nonsense since like Year 2, and absolutely anyone who’s ever said “Never Forget” deserves to deal with me. Never forget what? One thing I never want anyone to forget, year on year, was how dead-on Hunter Thompson called the whole thing, within hours of the attacks themselves:
“The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives...We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.”
Never forget what, guys? Never forget that it’s messed up how a combination of religious fervor and anti-imperialist rebellion merged in the flying of passenger jets into the sides of buildings? Okay, sure - I guess I never really have forgotten that. But what does remembering that do? What lesson am I supposed to get from this? Yeah, that’s messed up and the world is scary, but to whatever extent I didn’t realize that yet, I surely would have figured it out some other way before long. None of us needed a demonstration of that; the real significance pretty obviously seems to lie somewhere in what’s unfolded since that demonstration.
Never forget that, like, people died? Look, I do take respect for the dead seriously. But a lot of people in a lot of places have died in a lot of tragic events since then, and without any irreverence intended, after twenty years, we ought to be far past the point where we see the significance of this thing in terms of the lives lost on the actual NINE ELEVEN.
Never forget something something the troops? I don’t know how anyone can remember the troops for more than five minutes without pondering the fact that we sent them god knows where to do god knows what, for god knows what reason, and after all this time, god knows what the hell to show for it. The troops? What we did to the troops is one of the things almost everyone forgets, because we have to, because it’s just too much of an unmitigated bummer. We forget all this so thoroughly that there hasn’t been even a noticeable antiwar movement in, what, ten years?
Slim Charles perfectly summed up the tragic, supremely bloody irrationality of all this. You can find it all just in that one thirty second clip.
Never forget? Hell, we forget everything important. That’s the Great Tradition of the Sacred Anniversary and we’re all gonna do it again this year, we’re gonna put on our star-spangled blinders, now for the twentieth time.
Remembering means looking at how bleak all of it is.
*
To be clear, I had no intention whatsoever of writing about NINE ELEVEN. I fucking hate talking about this. I wanted to talk about Dead & Company and Lammas and Labor Day and fun stuff like that. When it comes to NINE ELEVEN I stick to my caustic jokes because there’s rarely anything real that’s worth talking about. But then I saw this and I had to:
Just a tweet from some rando captured and shared by the inestimable (and all-too-frequently suspended) Facebook page I Acknowledge Psychedelic Class Warfare Exists. But talk about striking a chord.
(Naturally, I shared it to my own page, in response to which a friend relayed the news that the Blues Clues guy, like some kind of twisted, long-lost, older-Millennial messiah-figure, has suddenly returned, out of nowhere. What a time to be alive. There really is some kind of moment going on out there.)
But seriously, I can’t find it within myself to believe that anyone who remembers what 1999 was like wouldn’t want to go back. Anybody ever offers up that blue pill and people will line up for miles. 1999 was fucking great. These kids have no idea.
Ah, these kids. Something else I’m known for making mean but true jokes about is the Zoomers and how screwed they all are, doomed by crippled psyches (from technology and who knows what else), sad about bad times but far too scared to have good times, damned by their predecessors (us) who are twice as numerous and are likely to hold onto whatever crumbs of money and power we get far longer than even the Boomers are still trying to do now. But when it really comes down to it, woe be upon us, the older Millennials, the only ones to arrive on the cusp of coming of age able to see whatever remained of the Promised Land before it vanished in plumes of smoke and piles of toxic rubble one sunny September morning. On this score, it’s the Zoomers who are blessed, who have the luck of having never had to know what we know all too well, unburdened by the knowledge of how much goddamn better the end of the 20th century was in comparison with the 21st, unencumbered by the direct experience that whispers almost daily from the mists of the past, “Think about how it would be now if everything hadn’t totally gone to shit.”
Naturally, that would require a world in which things don’t constantly change and we don’t live in that world, and the truth is that back in 1999, or even the first ¾ of 2001, we didn’t know any of that either. We were angsty, hamstrung kids who never would have believed anybody who said “the 90s are awesome” until sometime halfway through the Bush administration when we could start to see what was already gone.
Did NINE ELEVEN cause all of this? I dunno, man. Did the death of three early rock musicians in a plane crash cause the 60s? Obviously not, but that doesn’t make Don McLean’s “day the music died” any less real. The big historical lines of demarcation that sometimes define our lives - when we’re born at the right or the wrong time - are not exactly built on rational facts, but our experience of life in this world is rarely based on rational facts, either. Can anyone who was there for NINE ELEVEN, particularly anyone who was between the ages of fifteen and twenty, really look me in the eye with a straight face and tell me that wasn’t the precise before-and-after point?
Like yeah, I remember where I was, just like you do. Mrs. Musselman’s journalism class - fitting, I guess. We turned on the wall-mounted TV sometime not that long after the second plane hit. A girl had shown up late to class, white in the face, having just witnessed that very thing on a TV in the library. I was 17. My good buddy Todd was there (funny enough, we’re gonna catch Lettuce at the Range together on NINE ELEVEN this year, which we didn’t plan on purpose). My high school sweetheart was there, too, two seats ahead of me and one row to the right. She would not turn around to look at me because that week we were temporarily broken up for the fourth or fifth time, but surely she could feel me looking at her, and she later told me about how she wanted to turn around and leap into my arms while all this was going on.
It’s what I had wanted too. Looking back at this from the vantage point of the prick I’ve become, my impulse is to wonder what good that would have done, but though you’ll never ever hear me cheerleading the supposed wisdom of children, there actually are some things that are better and more directly understood by the romantic young.
We wouldn’t be able to put it into words for years, maybe a decade, but most of us knew that day what was happening - not with our minds, but some other part of our perception, deep within. We could feel it.
We can still feel it better than we can think it, better than we can quantify it, just like I can feel that classroom still, see every corner, smell that weird distinct smell, even as the building that once housed it was reduced to rubble and replaced with an ugly monstrosity (and if that isn’t symbolic of the whole shit, I don’t know what is). But that’s why the whole whispered reverence don’t-forget-something-I-can’t-define thing is stupid. I would love to forget the two-decade slide down through mere decline and into the land of enthusiastic entropy, but it’s there staring me in the face every day when I wake up in the morning. It’s in my pocket all day on a magic screen.
What’s worth remembering is that tragic events don’t come with pretty little morals tacked onto the end. That “sacrifice” doesn’t always pay off, that perhaps more often than not it just represents unmitigated loss. That endings aren’t always happy, that outcomes very often straight-up just aren’t good, that even the strongest narratives are flimsy and can fade like vapor and fall like buildings.
It’s worth remembering - or, perhaps just acknowledging for the first time - that times seemed better and the world seemed better twenty years ago, and that perhaps even we ourselves were better. Because it’s important for us adults to understand that all trajectories aren’t upward, that all progression isn’t progress.
I don’t say this to be depressing or nihilistic or defeatist; I mean none of those things because I am none of those things. But until we look at things for what they actually are, look at ourselves for what we actually are, I don’t see how we are able in any way to act freely and consciously in anything that we do. And on this grand Sacred Anniversary, I say the most important thing that we should never forget is that we do yet retain the ability to live and to act, and that to do those things with conscious intent, freedom, and purpose, is what we’re here for and the only way that we, or any of this, can matter.