25 September 2001
What if the terrorist team on UA93 had completed its mission? It would have been the coup de grace. And how DID that plane crash, anyway?
It’s not a holy war, but it is a cultural war. Will the western myth, The Hero Story, be sufficient to allow the West to understand the present, or will we continue to miss the point?
I laughed at a TV commercial, then wondered at my own cruelty. Being the strong one isn't easy.
I heard that the terrorists on one plane bought one-way tickets for first class, totaling $14,000. My first thought was, “What did the airline do with the money?” Airlines, hotels, flight schools, and car rental agencies are holding money that has the blood of innocent people on it, paid to them by terrorists who appeared innocent and respectable, right before they went to their jobs guiding missiles and butchering flight attendants. I’ll come back to the airlines in a moment for special attention, but first I want to say that it’s not likely that landlords, flight schools, hotels and car rental companies knew what they were doing. I understand that and accept it. Still, I challenge them to wash their hands of it. What can you do with that stuff? If I lost a spouse in the WTC, and you offered me the money, I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t want to touch it. I’m not sure that it’s possible to create good with blood money.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38092-2001Sep15.html (link now broken) shows how the airlines have resisted past efforts to improve security. The objection is usually cost. This is such a bad excuse. The cost of good security per ticket is a few pennies. Passengers would pay for it if they knew they were getting value. Instead of selling security to travelers, airlines sold out to cold-blooded murderers. They should make a symbolic act to purify themselves.
I searched the web for a method of disposal of blood money. I found nothing. This must be harder than it looks.
A portion of the blame for lax security must go to the travelers. We can tell jokes about how the low bidder builds the space shuttle, but the point is that you get what you pay for. We have been very low bidders, as plane travelers. Customers should ask for what they want. Suppliers will often sell it to them.
While we’re blaming people … I’m one American who is embarrassed by the foreign policy of my country some times. It’s clear that we trained, armed, and supported the mujahadeen in the 80’s as a cold war operation. When the Soviets left, we left and we took our money with us. Okay, I know that we’re not the world’s police, but nation building is good for everybody. The past ten years have been hell on earth for the people of Afghanistan. It’s as if we left them all at WalMart with tanks and RPGs. We could have sent them a billion dollars a year for less than we will spend to bail out the airlines. It’s our pit bull and we should have kept it on a leash.
I’m equally embarrassed about the way we treated the Kurds in Iraq. Most of what I know I saw played out in the movie Three Kings. We told people that we’d protect them if they rose up against their dictators, and then we let them die when Saddam dropped the hammer on them. I feel like I see a pattern of American foreign policy where we try to limit our involvement, where we almost commit to something, where we almost stand for something, where we don’t follow through or finish the job. I don’t like that when it’s someone painting my house, and I don’t like that when people die because they trusted the American government to keep its word. How hard would it be for us to be honest with the rest of the world? I would like that.
Is it too late for me to say that I'm reluctant to
give the airlines the $15 billion yet? They've sent 100,000 Americans home
already.
It appears to me that the plan for the 911 Attack went something like this:
One of the more cruel tactics in terror is to use the 1-2 punch. The first event draws the police and fire to the scene; the second kills or maims them. It leads to a very gut-wrenching moment of decision for deploying relief. The police and fire commanders have to wonder if they should let innocent people suffer, or risk life and limb by giving them immediate attention. I’m certain that the next time that they go into harm’s way, their lives, and those of the helpless victims, will be changed by this realization.
This was, simply, a plan to damage and hopefully destroy at least those four buildings, within 90 minutes of each other. It looks like the old one-two in NY and then in Washington. I’m just wondering about it all here, I don’t have any information that hasn’t been on TV or the web. The last plane was in the air for two hours, burning a lot of its fuel. I wonder if the terrorists were late getting control, or if they felt like they could do the job with less explosive power than the other flights.
I wonder if they thought that anyone would still be inside that late.
|
Flight |
Takeoff |
Hijack |
Result |
Aftermath |
|
AA11 |
759am ET, Logan |
828am ET, veers south. Flight controller hears conversation. |
845am ET, flies into North Tower. Flight attendant calls Dallas. |
1028am ET, North Tower collapses |
|
UA175 |
814am ET, Logan |
|
903am ET, flies into South Tower |
1005am ET, South Tower collapses |
|
AA77 |
810am ET, Dulles |
|
943am ET, flies into Pentagon |
1010am ET, portion of building collapses |
|
UA93 |
801am ET, Newark |
958am ET, phone call to dispatcher |
1010am ET, crashes in PA |
|
Beyond the giant smoking piles of gravel, beyond the new awareness of danger to police and fire, the biggest point of the attack was to scare Americans. Hide-under-the-bed, get-in-the-back-of-the-closet, never-leave-the-house scared. “What have we been spending all the anti-terrorism money on” scared. “Who can protect us” scared. “What’s going to be next?” scared. I don’t see how people can avoid questioning things. It’s a new world and we have to re-think everything. We took a blow to the body, and we don’t know exactly what to fight for and how. We need some time to wonder about it. The first punch was a piano falling from the sky, and we need to get our heads clear.
To the completely wild imagination I’ve already got, I’ve added this mystery. Why don’t we hear a transcript of the UA93 cockpit voice recorder? Why don’t government officials flatly deny the involvement of American fighter planes? I’m wondering because of 1) when it happened, because the alarm was out; 2) the size of the little pieces; 3) the report of an explosion before the crash; and 4) the story that the president issued a shoot down order – was that hypothetical or was there a fighter pilot with a tone lock? I’m horrified at the prospect of a series of events that includes George Bush ordering the plane shot down and then recognizing Lisa Beamer in the joint session of congress. I want to dismiss this thought but it won’t go away until I see some evidence that dispels it. I’m even considering the possibility that fighters appeared on the scene, leading to the ditching of the plane. Of course the wrestling, scuffling story might have produced the same outcome, but I’m not used to seeing such small pieces. I said it was a cluttered mind and I meant it.
American culture is celebrated, and encapsulated, in our art. Our most vibrant art form is storytelling, most clearly in movies and their little brother, television. We are trapped in our cultural myths. Almost every movie has a variation on The Hero Story. The question I’m asking today is, can we think outside our myth? Can we possibly stretch it enough to discover a realistic path to the future? Do cultures die when their myths stop sustaining them?
There are several variations of The Hero Story, but I’ll borrow from Syd Field and say that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end (three acts). There’s a point where the beginning becomes the middle, and a point where the middle becomes the end. The hero has a character flaw, like all of us. At the beginning, he is in an environment where the flaw doesn’t hurt him or his friends. At the end of the first act, something bad happens and the hero’s flaw controls his reaction. That’s usually a form of going from the frying pan into the fire. Then he suffers throughout the middle act, when he is constantly in danger of losing the jihad, the war within, between himself and his flaw. At the end of the second act, he confronts his opponent and either wins or loses. I loved George B Cohan’s summary: “a movie has three parts: first you put your main character up a tree, then you throw rocks at him, then you get him out of the tree. If the main character is still alive, it's a comedy; if dead, it's a tragedy.”
We have seen the overture. We are entering the First Act and frankly, I think that we are missing the point. I think that Americans, in their defiance and loss, are not asking themselves the right questions about why others might hate us. Instead of returning to the good old bi-polar world where the Soviets are replaced by Islamic Extremist Terror Cells, could we not ask ourselves if we could do something to get along better? I’m in favor of security, of walking softly and carrying a big stick. I just don’t think we ever walked softly in some parts of the world. Look, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, but couldn’t we go really far trying to understand the ones that we don’t please? The alternative is to dehumanize them – to turn them into cardboard cutouts of people. We have always found it easy to treat uncivilized hordes badly, starting with the original inhabitants of this great land. Could we recognize that mistake, and at least stop making it over and over? Let’s put a face, a human face, on our enemy. Let’s understand him as if he were a complete human being. If Osama bin Laden is not rational, surely at least one of his followers must be. How could a rational person come to hate America? If we blow this question off, there will always be an Us against Them on this planet.
It’s really hard to even make a movie that doesn’t follow the formula, because people might not get the story. We superimpose this structure on everything that happens to everyone, in movies and in real life. It’s how we understand the world. What I wonder today is, “Does it help us understand, or does it keep us ignorant?” I feel like we’re standing by the smoking ruins saying, “Who’s the hero? What’s the back-story? Who’s going to believe this?”
I laughed out loud. It was a TV commercial for the yellow pages. A smart-mouthed kid was playing with a computer and ignoring his father, who stood in the door to his room and asked him to do his chores. “Your Grandma Nana is on the phone.” “She’s YOUR mother.” That kind of thing. Then, out of nowhere, a phone book flies into the picture and whacks the kid in the head. He grunts in surprise, and he and his chair fall backward to the floor. The book lands opened to Military Schools. I laughed every time the book flew into his head.
It wasn’t funny. A child was hit in the head with a thrown book. How unfunny can you get? I wondered why I laughed. I realized that I wanted the brat to be punished for his impudence, to get a swift and unambiguous message about what would happen to him if he stepped off the narrow path of righteousness. I wanted it because it was good for him, and me, and everyone – staying on the path. I wanted it because actions like his disrespect called for a slap on the head when I was a kid.
I realize that I feel the same way about the peoples around the world who smart off to our military power. I get that same narrow knee jerk reaction where I want to see them whacked with a phone book. I want to see them get up and apologize and resolve to be better people afterward. Clearly, I’ve seen too much TV for my own good. I want respect for my superpower status, and I don’t want to have to ask for it.
When I was a child, my parents took great comfort in corporal punishment. As an adult, with small children, I tried it but soon realized that I would have to look deeper for a way to lead my family. I couldn’t just beat them up when I didn’t like what they did. By this point my dad had formulated a corollary to the Golden Rule, maybe it's the Tin Rule, saying, "You shouldn't do anything to someone else that they can't do back to you." I remember a time when Bailey wouldn’t stop crying. She was 1 year old, and couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I tried giving her the bottle, I tried holding her. She was bawling loudly and people from 50 countries were looking. I could hear their thoughts – “Look, a white trash Texan who can’t keep his children from crying in public.” She was broadcasting my inadequacy to the whole world. We were at the observation deck of the World Trade Towers. I wanted to throw her off. Parenting isn’t easy, because the parents are a lot stronger than the children and it’s so tempting to use strength to maintain order. I’ve had a dickens of a time learning to restrain myself in this life, but I’m happy to say that I’m sure that there are ways for people to get through this life without having to beat each other up. I'm pleased to say that in the years since, she struck me breathless with joy many times.