Boldt Words & Images: History’s Rhymes 9/11/73

Convergences

By Bob Boldt

[Appeared here originally four years ago today, on November 30, 2017.]

The poem below comes from a portfolio of poems that I submitted during fall semester for the “Poetry Workshop” at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. I hope in the coming months to publish a few more of these poems on Moristotle & Co.
    As a frame for today’s poem, I have adapted from the essay that accompanied the portfolio some hopefully relevant reflections on poetry and a poet.

Boldt Words & Images: History’s Rhymes 9/11/73

Convergences

By Bob Boldt

[The poem below comes from a portfolio of poems that I submitted during fall semester for the “Poetry Workshop” at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. I hope in the coming months to publish a few more of these poems on Moristotle & Co.
    As a frame for today’s poem, I have adapted from the essay that accompanied the portfolio some hopefully relevant reflections on poetry and a poet.]

Correspondence: Under the influence

Edited by Moristotle

I drank beer last weekend with a guy in a red baseball cap. At some point, I asked him what he liked about Trump, and what the slogan on his cap meant to him. After as many beers as he had drunk, he was quite forthcoming:

Boldt Words & Images: 9/11 (a poem)

By Bob Boldt

[Editor’s Note: Published on the 15th of the month in recognition of this September’s being the 15th anniversary of that 9/11.]

United Airlines Flight 175 passengers knew they were heading toward
meaning, madness, Mecca or mayhem, but they knew not which.

Boldt Words & Images: On the anniversary of 9/11

The first airplane hit 15 year ago, at precisely 8:46:40 a.m.

Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Contributing Editor
motomynd

9/11: Would we be better off to have ignored it?

Even the bush people living an aboriginal hunter-gatherer lifestyle in Africa know what happened 11 years ago today. Planes flying into buildings did not directly affect their daily roaming search for food, but the U.S. response did. Africa is the emerging front of the war against terrorism, and life there, like so many other places in the world, has gotten more dangerous and challenging these past 11 years. Even for people at the very bottom of the Third World scale, who were already subsisting on what few roots, berries, and grubs they could find.

Was Osama bin Laden the ultimate suicide bomber?

Apparently Osama bin Laden's confederates balked at his vision of an attack on the Twin Towers. "It would be the end of our organization," one of them is said to have said (in Arabic, of course).

"Piffle," Osama (is said to have) replied. "It would make the ultimate recruitment poster. Recruiting jihadists would become easier than pie."

"Bah!" his confederates cried in unison. "Do not do this, Osama."

The question for the United States and other Western nations is: How effective are we being in making Osama wrong and his nay-saying confederates right? Will Osama's recruitment vision fade and his own violent death serve as a symbolic warning for other potential jihadists?

I’m not encouraged by reports coming out of Afghanistan or Iraq or, frankly, anywhere else in the Near East. In Syria, al-Qaeda is apparently playing a larger and larger role in opposing President Bashar al-Assad (“Al Qaeda Taking Deadly New Role in Syria’s Conflict,” published in the New York Times on July 24). For example.

But if the 9/11 Truthers are right, and Osama wasn’t even responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers, and it was instead a plot carried out by a cabal in our own government to provoke taxpayers’ dollars’ going to “the military-industrial complex,” then the question for the United States would seem to be—

Or, rather, the answer would seem to be: "Damn, it worked!"

Ten years later, and 89 years, 4 months, & 26 days before that

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, I share a striking comparison from Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, between a horror of that occasion and one of a much earlier incident [April 15, 1912]:

There was something else from the "Devil's Decade" of the 1930s that I was struggling to remember and soon enough it came to me. Remembering the last moments of the Titanic, George Orwell had written that:

In all the long list of horrors the one that most impressed me was that at the last the Titanic suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than three hundred feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel. Nothing in the [First World] War ever quite gave me that sensation.

"Look, teacher," the New York Times reported a child shrilling as the Twin Towers were becoming pyres: "the birds are on fire." Here was a sweet, infantile rationalization of an uncommon sight: human beings who had hesitated too long between the alternatives of jumping to their deaths or being burned alive, and who were thus jumping and burning, and from much more than three hundred feet. Nothing that I have witnessed since, including Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and various scenes in Afghanistan and Iraq, has erased those initial images of the deep and sick relationship between murder and suicide, or of the wolfish faces of those who gloated over the horror....[pp. 246-247]

An irony for 9/11 Truthers

Bush reads to children at
Emma E. Booker Elementary

9/11 Truthers don't accept that Osama bin Laden and the nineteen Saudies were fully responsible for the 9/11 attacks¹. They even have a website.
    As he was on hand for most everything else, Christopher Hitchens was also on hand to observe reactions around the world and in America to the 9/11 attacks:

Gore Vidal could hardly wait to go slumming². He took the earliest opportunity of claiming that, while Osama bin Laden had not been proved to be the evil genius of the attacks, it was by no means too early to allege that the Bush administration had played a hidden hand in them. Or at least, if it had not actually instigated the assault, it had (as with Roosevelt at Pearl Harbor!) seen it coming and welcomed it as a pretext for engorging the defense budget and seizing the oilfields of the southern Caucasus. His articles featured half-baked citations from the most dismal, ignorant paranoids.[Hitch-22, p. 245]

The irony for 9/11 Truthers who share Vidal's view is that

President Bush had evidently forewarned himself of the air piracy in order that he could seize the chance to look like a craven, whey-faced ignoramus on worldwide TV. [ibid]

    Or in order to be photographed reading a book upside down? Or were those photographs and reports fabricated by a conspiracy of untruthers skilled in the use of Photoshop? Or...?
    We're in the tenth-anniversary month of the attacks. The calendar at 911truth.org of course "includes events in commemoration of 10th Anniversary."
_______________

1. Notwithstanding President Clinton's assessment: "Nine-eleven was NOT an inside job, it was an Osama Bin Laden job with 19 people from Saudi Arabia, they murdered 3,000 Americans and other foreigners including Muslims." ["Bill Clinton Undeterred by 9/11 Hecklers." ABC News. January 31, 2008. Retrieved September 3, 2011.
2. The blurb from Gore Vidal on the back cover of Hitch-22 reads: "I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens."
       The blurb has been cleverly X'd out in red and annotated by hand: "No, CH."

Thoughts on watching United 93 last night

The young hijackers [portrayed in the 9/11 film of 2006, United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass] are possibly as frightened as the passengers and crew; they continually mutter prayers to their god, just as some of the passengers begin to mutter to theirs as they realize they're about to die. The same god presumably; everyone who's praying seems to be an adherent of one of the Abrahamaic religions—the hijackers Islamic, the passengers Judaic or Christian. Isn't that ironic? What is really at issue here?
    None of the authorities has any effective means of dealing with the situation! The air controllers, suspicious of American Airlines 11 from Boston, at first think it must have been the first plane to fly into the first World Trade Tower (after they dismiss initial reports that it was a "light aircraft"), then learn that it's apparently still aloft, now presumably on its way to Washington. (It actually had crashed, into the North Tower.)
    At least one of the military commanders seems willing to shoot down a subsequent airliner presumed hijacked and on its way to Washington, but no one with the authority to approve it can be reached. Nor, apparently, can the military aircraft be "scrambled" into play. Confusion reigns, a sort of chaos.
    Chaotic on board too, emotions high and magical thinking rampant (understandably). One man is sure that everything will be all right if they just cooperate and "don't do anything." Never mind the dead pilots and the passengers lying bleeding or dead in the aisles, mostly from knife wounds to their necks. Finally, the passengers and flight attendants assemble a plan, attack the two hijackers in the cabin, and batter through the cockpit door to get at the other two, seconds before crashing into the Pennsylvania countryside.
    How might I have behaved if I had been a passenger on United 93?

Movie "Religulous" demands new rating category

Since I began posting a rating for each movie I watch (about two years ago), I've twice had to create a new category to accommodate the latest movie. First there was UBOO, for the Unwatchably Bad or Otherwise Offputting movie "Bordertown," then EO for the ExtraOrdinary movie "Lars and the Real Girl." Now, for Bill Maher's 2008 documentary, "Religulous" (directed by Larry Charles), I've had to create MS, or Must See. "Religulous" is, in my opinion, a movie you must see. MS is paired with one of the other, more traditionally "quality" ratings—E (for Excellent) in the case of "Religulous."
    The obvious reason for the MS rating is the film's urgent call to grow up and abandon religion in order that humans might have a better chance of avoiding self-destuction. In this, "Religulous" adds Maher's voice to that of the writer Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Religion and Letter to a Christian Nation, whom Maher interviewed recently. (In that interview, Harris, perhaps jokingly, admitted that he'd probably stolen a few lines from Maher.)
    The movie viewers and book readers who most need to see the movie and read the book of course won't do so, even if ideally they would watch and read and consequently throw off religion. These include primarily (for Maher, I'd say) Muslims, whose militancy and the militancy of their book, the Qur'an, are emphasized in the movie, but also Christians, Mormons, religious (as opposed to merely ethnic) Jews, and, of course, the odd assortment of religious kooks of one sort or another whom Maher encountered for shockingly entertaining effect: self-styled messiahs, hallucinogenized nirvanans, and recipients of messages from gods or extraterrestrials.
    But at least the indifferently irreligious might be willing to watch "Religulous" and (one hopes) become less indifferent to, if not actively critical of religion.
    And everyone already in the know about religion will enjoy Maher, the collage of clips from old movies about the Israelites or the Crucifixion or warring Mohometans, the visit to the Crucifixion theme park in Orlando, and especially his nearly incredible interview subjects. (However, Maher's interview of Francis Collins, famous Christian scientist and President Obama's chosen director of the National Institutes of Health, seemed perfunctory and inconsequential.)
    "Religulous" is funny, informative, and alarming. A Must See movie. Because of the reason for that rating, it is most appropriate that I watched the movie on the eighth anniversary of the Muslim attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and (unsuccessfully) the Capitol or the White House.

Another striking feature of "Religulous," especially for those who have seen Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" and "Brüno" (both also directed by Larry Charles; I haven't seen the latter yet but am familiar with it), is the way Maher engages his subjects, so unlike Cohen's. Maher presents himself as himself, skeptical, courteously (if assertively) good-natured, and surprisingly respectful for the most part. Cohen submerges himself in outrageous roles and manipulates his subjects mercilessly.

To see the list of my recently viewed movies (temporarily expanded to the last fifty or so) here's a direct link to the spot on my sidebar.