It started last week. Those beginning tributes to 9/11 on the news. The oral histories of people who were there or who had lost someone in the attacks. Then they started broadcasting the accounts of those who weren’t there, but were nearby. Then the accounts of those who were nowhere near the World Trade Center, but remember where they were that day and what they were doing. The minutiae of memories being collected and told and retold over and over again.
At first it was moving. After all, I too am a New Yorker (even if my day job is in Vermont). I too had a relationship to those buildings and those people, some of whom were friends. But the day in, day out remembrances starting two weeks before the actual anniversay added up and suddenly powerful story telling became as overplayed and over done as Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” “Rolling in the Deep” is also powerful story telling, but by the end of summer I had heard it so many times that it began to make my ears bleed.
Of course the memories of 9/11 are more than the noise of overplayed pop music. These remembrances are, most obviously, cultural work as we Americans try to figure out what, if anything, these events mean to us individually or as a culture. But even as we individual Americans try to figure it out, we are bombarded with the news stories about 9/11 and those stories are—whether they mean to be or not—a form of propaganda. The propaganda is trying to convince us of the need for American Empire and that there is a constant and incomprehensible threat to the security of the American people.
The way the propaganda works is fairly simple. We hear these stories and we believe that there is something unique and particularly horrifying about these acts (as opposed to U.S. military activities in Iraq or Afghanistan, for instance). We listeners begin to see ourselves and our country as uniquely victimized. And this belief in both the unparalleled horror of these events and our status as innocent victims creates a dangerous mix of propaganda and policy. Because the more we view 9/11 as a unique event and American deaths as uniquely tragic, the more likely we are to support U.S. wars of Empire.
As Noam Chomsky points out, by believing in the myth of 9/11, Americans can justify almost any act of military aggression.
Robert Fisk’s conclusion that the “horrendous crime” of 9/11 was committed with “wickedness and awesome cruelty” (is) an accurate judgment. It is useful to bear in mind that the crimes could have been even worse. Suppose, for example, that the attack had gone as far as bombing the White House, killing the president, imposing a brutal military dictatorship that killed thousands and tortured tens of thousands while establishing an international terror center that helped impose similar torture-and-terror states elsewhere and carried out an international assassination campaign; and as an extra fillip, brought in a team of economists—call them “the Kandahar boys”—who quickly drove the economy into one of the worst depressions in its history. That, plainly, would have been a lot worse than 9/11.
What is truly perverse about all this propaganda is not just that it gets most Americans to support U.S. wars of Empire, but that these wars are exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted. Indeed, bin Laden
repeatedly asserted that the only way to drive the U.S. from the Muslim world and defeat it ... was by drawing Americans into a series of small but expensive wars that would ultimately bankrupt them.
In Osama’s own words, these wars were a way of “bleeding the U.S.” to death. And I can’t help it. At this point, a full four days before the actual anniversary, I feel like my ears are bleeding. I just cannot listen to one more tribute, one more heart-wrenching and soulful story. I am rolling in the deep of 9/11 overload.