THE TWO 9/11s

Posted at Legal Fiction by Publius
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I have a confession to make about 9/11. Despite my best efforts to repress these thoughts, I’ve been increasingly annoyed at 9/11 remembrances this year. I’ve also found myself getting angry at people on TV telling me to remember. I didn’t want to remember — I wanted to forget. I wanted it all to be over. I wanted the anniversary to come, go, and be gone. But these are bad thoughts. It is, after all, a day that should be remembered, both for its tragedy and its heroism.

But then I figured it out — there are actually two 9/11s. The first one is — the day. The attacks themselves with the lost lives and the tragic heroism and everything else we remember all too well. But that 9/11 no longer exists. Or more precisely, it’s been pushed aside by the second 9/11. And the second 9/11 is the political prop — a mangled, grotesque doppelganger of the first one that has been whored out on the political street for over four years now. The second 9/11 is the source of policies that have made the world far worse, and have killed many times the number of people who died in the Towers. And so, what’s truly tragic about the second 9/11 is that it threatens to forever stain the legacy of the first 9/11. Specifically, given the policies that have been (or will be) taken in its name, I fear that history may not care about what happened to us on the first 9/11, but will instead care only about what we did in response to the second one.

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But all that is gone now. The loss, the heroism, everything — it has all been replaced by the second 9/11. And the second 9/11 is not the day, but the concept of the day. And more precisely, it is the concept that has been tailored and mangled to fit the needs of the Republican Party. This cheap imitation of the day has been dressed up and whored out to justify Iraq, to justify torture, and to justify a political and policy agenda that has destroyed tens of thousand lives and made us reviled throughout the world.

And those are the reasons why I (like many liberals I suspect) have been annoyed with the 9/11 remembrances. We feel like we have to go along, but inside we resent the anniversary and want it to be over. Inside we’re coming to hate the day. But we shouldn’t. That’s because it’s not the day we hate, it’s the second 9/11. It’s the Frankenstein-like creation that Bush and Cheney and Rove created for political reasons.

And it’s perfectly rational to have animosity toward the second 9/11. Starting within months of the day, the second 9/11 was used and invoked only for naked political purposes — to elect Republicans, to defeat Democrats, and to enact policies that many progressives morally and philosophically reject at their most fundamental core.

Let’s start in 2002. Beginning in the fall, the second 9/11 was trotted out in the most cynical and political of ways to build up support for a war most liberals profoundly disagreed with. Even assuming there were good arguments for war, the Republican Party created a hysterical environment that ensured that no rational thinking about the war could take place. Unlike Bush I (whose superiority to the son increases with each passing year), the Republican Party scheduled the Iraq vote one month before midterm elections. In the run-up to the vote, they used the first 9/11 anniversary in the most cynical possible way. And it worked. America marched off to Iraq and the Democrats lost the Senate.

(Go here to read the entire post.)
Publius also references an excellent post on ObsidianWings.