digital-priest.com: View From the 27th Floor

STILL WAVING: THE PROFITS AND LOSS OF 9/11

wave this flag or else

A year later, my views on 9|11 haven't really changed. Amid the really very good coalescing of America there is the sharpening of division between the haves and have-nots, the races and the religions. It is both cold and eerily quiet and the TV is non-stop Ground Zero, with dozens if not hundreds of images of exploding towers and mayhem and all of those kinds of things. I shudder to think how much money is being spent, worldwide, to, I guess, commemorate the attacks (or, more accurately, honor the victims), and I shudder even harder to think of how much money is being made off of this coverage. We've spent hundred of billions as a result of the attacks. Those hundred of billions went somewhere, into somebody's pocket.

This reminds me of when Princess Diana died, and there was all of this coverage and magazines and videos and tee shirts and we were all too distraught to stop and think of who the beneficiaries of all of that great clamor were. Today, who is getting the bin Laden dividend? The billions spent today alone, on added security and ceremonies and travel costs and, well, everything.

I live in walking distance of NORAD, the air defense station for the U.S. and Canada. The Olympic training center is here in town. We have a couple of fleets of fighter jets at two air bases and the U.S. Air Force Academy is at the north end of town. I'm used to seeing squads of attack fighters banking overhead (sometimes to my real annoyance). Today, they have a more ominous reverberation: not just of possible jihad, but of the greater obscenity of rich people getting richer off of the tragic losses this country has suffered. And the great WASP moral right taking center stage to corral Reagan-ish "American" values that echo a kind of "Love It Or Leave It" injunctive demand.

"With Us Or Against Us," Bush said. But who's "us"? Enron perp-walks and Saddam saber-rattling notwithstanding, this is a government of the rich white people, by the rich white people, and for the rich white people. These are people who cannot fathom the intrinsic threat the word "Us" has when uttered by a Texas millionaire who has little or no idea who Nelly is. This is made all the more frightening by Bush's brazen, clumsy and childish attempt to turn our attention away from the economy and focus instead on regime change in Iraq, a tactic so baldly political, so ridiculous in it's obviousness, I am deeply chagrined to see how well it is working.

So as I shiver at my desk (more from the cold snap than the F-16's), I find my dread is more about this happy flag waving than about bin Laden, whom I figure is either dead or captured (we'd never admit we had him, after all). And if we really are just that gullible to not see "we," whomever "we" are, are spending billions of dollars today in an all-day commercial for Dubya's pathetic Iraq initiative (itself more an obscene sales campaign for the 2002 mid-term elections), then this country is in far more danger than bin Laden could have ever conceived of.

Christopher J. Priest
September 11, 2002