I want to thank TOhioLiberal for posting Jon Stewart's
post-September 11 monologue here. I heard about this at the time from friends who were already watching the show and found it moving and inspiring, but I don't have cable and YouTube wasn't yet a household word (at least not in my household). It's all right, because I think I learned a lot from watching it now, almost six years later.
Watching it now, it's easy to see how Stewart might come across as over the top and emoting. The choking up, the frequent breaks to try to take himself in hand, the shaking voice, all these things are tricks that we've seen used often enough by actors or politicians to manipulate us. We so seldom see media figures just plain fail to keep it together in front of a camera; we're used to the idea that everything we see is scripted, calculated, prepared with great care. So watching it now, in one sense, it's hard to believe all that emotion is real.
But I came to this realization a couple minutes into it: Yes, this was all real. It was part of the reality into which we were all plunged in the days and weeks after September 11, 2001, and if it seems strange to me now, that's only because during the past six years we have been pushed farther and farther away from that reality. Because the assholes in charge have been so relentless about reminding us to remember September 11, I hadn't realized that in fact, they have been working equally hard to make us *forget* what that September was really like. And until I watched that monologue, I guess they had sort of succeeded.
If you can remember what it was like watching television after the attack, you probably remember, as I do, that there were a lot of cracks in the facade. In a way that made it all more frightening. Many of the anchors, correspondents, and other media talking heads could not keep their poker faces on. Even less under control were the witnesses who were chased down and interviewed in the streets in the hours after the attack. Aware that they were probably going to wind up on national television, they still could not compose themselves. They cried, they shook their heads, they just plain shook, they said "oh my God" over and over. Nobody who saw this happen could keep it together. Neither could a lot of the people who reported on it; neither could many of the people who responded to it in public; neither could those of us watching at home. We were all unprepared for what this would to do us emotionally. None of us had lived through anything like it.
The catastrophe released things in all of us that we could not control and which we might not ever have known were there. As we have seen, there was an ugly side to that. But what Stewart talks about in his monologue--and this is another thing that we have been encouraged to forget--is that there was a decent side too. Fear, hatred, revenge-hunger, and lust for security at all costs were *not* the only things that emerged in the wake of September 11. What happened first, after we felt the shock and the grief, was that everyone wanted to help.
I remember we went out looking for somewhere to give blood. So did people all over the country, though it soon became clear that there would be no wounded survivors to treat, that people either escaped before the collapse or they died in it. People headed to New York from all over, trying to do something. My partner told me that one of the guys her firm was suing--an exploitative, unscrupulous contractor who had done his utmost to cheat his own workers out of their benefits--got into his truck and drove out to NYC because he had construction equipment that he figured they could use. No matter where you were on the road to sainthood, no matter how the right-wing enforcers who sit in judgment on these things would rate your patriotism or your Americanness, you felt the enormity of the crisis and you wanted to help. No matter how alienated you had become or how radical your politics were, you were aware suddenly that yes, you were an American, and you had to do something for your stricken people.
Out of the ashes and the death and the grief rose, along with everything else, a spirit of cooperation, a willingness to work and to help if only we could figure out how. And of course, those who didn't know any better--and that was, at the time, about 91% of those polled--looked to our leaders and especially our president to tell them what they should do with this spirit and this willingness and this desire to make it better. They wanted someone in charge to tell them something they could do for their country and for their fellow-Americans.
And here's what they were told: Shop. Spend money. Keep our economy afloat. And soon afterward: Be afraid. Be very afraid. Be so afraid that when I get up before Congress and tell you that we need to declare a war on terror, you don't ask yourself how this war is defined or who we're fighting or how we will know when we've won or lost it or what it will cost or even when or how it will ever end. Give up liberty to get security. Be more afraid. Become so afraid that you will believe me when I tell you we need to invade a country that had nothing to do with the attack. And later: Support our troops. Believe that "support our troops" means blindly accepting an unnecessary war prosecuted with criminal incompetence by an idiot president's morally insane cabinet. Don't trust yourself. Need our approval before you can believe that you are either good or an American. Don't trust each other. View any expression of dissent as incipient treachery. Relinquish any attachment you had to the idea of human rights or the rule of law. Accept torture.
If time is a river, then on September 11, 2001 we went over the falls. In those first days, nobody knew anything about the future we were hurtling toward except that it would hurt. Stewart's monologue reminded me of what that free fall was like. It's painful to watch, it's uncomfortable, it brings back all the anxiety that comes with not knowing what you're going to walk into when you get up tomorrow morning. At the same time, there was the sense that anything was possible--anything bad, but also maybe anything good. We were going to have to become something other than what we were. And it could have been something better. The will, the desire, the need to heal the place we lived in and the people we shared it with was there. Yes, that monologue was sincere. In the days after September 11, everyone was sincere.
Everyone except for the people in charge.
For six years, Bush and Cheney and their crowd made it their business to corrupt and pervert the public response to September 11. They nurtured our worst feelings and attacked our best ones. They made sure that they did not have to try to govern a country that was in fact united in something other than terror and hatred, that was responding to the attack something stronger and more constructive than fear. Because that country, after all, wouldn't have any use for them--or for the bogus war that they immediately went to work on starting.
It is startling to look at this monologue and remember how different everything was in the days after the attack, before our six-year process of initiation into the horror that is Bush and Cheney's new American century. It brought out the best in us, as well as the worst. No law says that we *had* to follow the one and not the other. At the time Stewart recorded that monologue, there were still so many futures that we could have had. We didn't *have* to get here from there. We were brought here by six years of cynical, corrupt, expert manipulation from the people that we were supposed to be able to trust to lead us in a time of crisis. To have turned what we offered them into what we are drowning in now is one of the worst crimes they ever committed. This is something I know every day, but watching that clip made me *feel* it in a way that I hadn't, for a long time.
:argh:
The Plaid Adder
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