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I don’t give a shit about 9-11. I don’t. Sorry. Or let me take that back and rephrase it, because I don’t want to seem callous or lacking empathy towards terrible human tragedy. It’s just, on a scale of 1 to 10 of human tragedies, with 1 being the tragedy that we still haven’t eliminated bad traffic and 10 being the tragedy of the Holocaust or the eruption at Pompeii, 9-11 rates maybe a… 5? 6?
And the existence of Lady Gaga is at least a 4.
Now I know a lot of people know folks that died in the attacks, so to them it is a much more personal loss than the tsunamis and hurricanes and earthquakes and ethnic cleansings that take place in other countries routinely. But I don’t know anyone that died, so my view is more detached and less emotional. And my view is this: that I don’t give a shit about 9-11. So I guess the only thing I would rephrase is the “sorry”. In the grand scheme of things, 9-11 was pretty insignificant. How many people died? Less than three thousand. That’s not as many as die from cancer in a year. In a month.
I mean breast cancer. I didn't mean to imply that other forms of cancer exist.
And sure, you can say that the difference between a hurricane destroying all of New Orleans and a plane destroying a skyscraper is, the hurricane was an act of nature and 9-11 was an act of humans. Well I am sorry to explain this to you, or sorry that I should need to, but human actions ARE actions of nature. We are just as much an extension of nature as any tree or insect or weather pattern or is. You can protest all you like about how human beings have intentions and free will — all I know is that dead is dead, regardless of the circumstances. There’s this great Zhuangzi line about how if a man is in a boat and another boat collides with his; if that boat is empty, he may grumble to himself; but that if that other boat has someone in it the man will curse them out. Zhuangzi recommends keeping the boat of your life unoccupied; I am saying that the unoccupied boat and the occupied boat are the same boat. If a falling piece of Skylab kills you, or a mugger with a switchblade, you are just as dead.
I like this picture more every time I use it.
Okay, I’m rambling. My point is, people try to make 9-11 into some huge thing and really it was pretty harmless. More people died of AIDS that year. More people died in automobile accidents. The 220,000 deaths in the Indonesian Tsunami 0f 2004 make the 2,900 deaths in the 9-11 attacks look like a fucking joke in comparison. Three thousand? That’s only as many as two Titanics. So why all the melodrama and phony memorializing? Because it happened in America, which had heretofore managed to live in a bubble where the explosive violence the rest of the world has faced just didn’t happen. Worst thing that happened to the U.S. in the 20th century? A naval base got bombed from the air in Hawaii. A government day care center was blown up in Oklahoma. Puff Daddy won a Grammy. Compared to these fiddlesticks 9-11 must have seemed like the end of the world, at least to all the safe and complacent bubble people. Me? I was relieved. I’d been expecting far worse when that particular shoe dropped. We’d been funding and training terror groups around the world for a half century; that eventually one or many of them would turn on us was mathematically inevitable.
"Chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad..."
Every culture has a myth about the man who makes a pact with a demon or unleashes a monster or lets loose a curse to achieve a victory, only to be destroyed by the evil forces he’s unleashed. Myths are part of our accumulated cultural knowledge. They are trying to tell us things, remind us of ancient lessons. Maybe someone should have listened. Fortunately, it turned out that the people bent on our destruction were only SLIGHTLY less incompetent and ineffectual than the people who were supposed to be protecting us. I mean, in retrospect it turns out that U.S. intelligence was caught with its pants down and its head up its ass. Can you imagine what damage an actual, dyed-in-the-wool Bond villain could have pulled off?
Thank god the terrorists were less like Blofeld and more like his cat... pussies.
Look. I’m really not trying to minimize it. A lot of people died horribly and in ways I would never want to go, ways no one should have to go. It was terrible. Truly a blight on human history, a stain. It’s just, human history is already so soaked in blood and atrocities that the stain of one more bad day, the stain of another 3000 unfair deaths, it’s kind of hard to notice in the big picture. Drowned out in a sea of massacre and cruelty. Boo the fuck hoo, America. You had a bad day. Everyone does. Now get over it.
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