And now it's 20 years. Same shit, different angry men

It seems that every year, the annual ratings grab of 9/11 coverage starts earlier. Before we can turn around, it'll be a whole season. Maybe it'll start at the Summer Solstice, but more likely, as with this year, it'll start around Labor Day, which is the unofficial start of fall. Maybe eventually it'll be a shopping season. Who knows? 

A year is really just an arbitrary designation of time passing, though it seems that the "fives" and "zeroes" have special meaning. As I sit here on the sixth of September, 2021, which this year doubles as Labor Day, I've already noted that CNN has rebroadcast the excellent Naudet brothers documentary that was supposed to be about a probationary fireman in New York, but turned out to be a gripping and horrifying documentation of that terrible day. It's also run a discussion with the now-adult school children to whom George W. Bush was reading "My Pet Goat."  One of the premium channels is running Paul Greenglass' film United 93, a movie I could never bring myself to watch. Spike Lee's HBO docuseries NYC Epicenters 9/11 —> 2021½ is in heavy rotation.

Lee is no stranger to controversy, and much has been made of his excision of most, but not all, of the "9/11 Truther" content n the series. My own relationship with 9/11 Trutherism is complicated, especially in the context of the direct line from that particular movement down into the QAnon/deep state/2020 election was rigged/etc. lunacy that has received far too much oxygen and still thrives. 

Let me explain:  I have freely admitted to my belief in what was then known as LIHOP ("let it happen on purpose"). My belief was constructed from the following facts:  1) that a Newsweek article had just hit newsstands and mailboxes detailing the events leading up to the Supreme Court decision that made George W. Bush president; 2) Bush's already-dropping poll numbers; and 3) his aides' clearly known desire for a war with Iraq.

Bush, another president with an interesting psychological family dynamic in which he'd been the Designated Family Shithead(TM), had inherited the Iraq Liberation Act from Bill Clinton, had surrounded himself with neoconservative warmongers like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, and a war with Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein would both impress his father and at the same time outdo him. 

So when the infamous August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" was ignored, and 9/11 happened, it served Bush's interest in all three of the above. The information that was coming out about the 2000 election no longer mattered. A war president ALWAYS has improved approval ratings. And his aides got what they wanted. It was all just too convenient.

Do I believe 9/11 was an inside job? No. And I don't believe ANYONE banked on the magnitude of what happened. But I do believe that that something along the lines of the 1993 bombing was expected -- something that would serve the purpose, but with a manageable body count. In a case like that, the cost/benefit ratio may have been deemed to be acceptable (when you're talking about cynical people like the Axis of Cheney). But then it all went to hell, and at least in the short run, served their purpose perfectly.

I can't help but feel that over the last twenty years, Muslims in the US have felt like Jews at Eastertime -- in a cringe position, waiting for that day every September when everyone Brings All That Up Again. Where I live now, there are many groups doing great work to pave the path for about 1000 Afghan refugees -- long-term indirect casualties of the Bush Bungle in Afghanistan -- to resettle here. Yes, there is some bleating from white supremacists like Tucker Carlson, and of course the Jesus of Mar-a-Lago, about these people coming here, but the virulent anti-Muslim sentiment in the mainstream seems to have calmed down, at least somewhat.

After all, it's kind of hard for American Angry White men to have any kind of moral authority about religion-based terrorism when your own political agenda consists of setting up a Dominionist theocracy -- an evangelical Christian state implementing their interpretation of Old Testament law combined with enforced belief in Yeshua of Nazareth as the literal son of the Old Testament deity -- by force if necessary. So in the wake of the January 6 attack by white Americans, mostly male worshippers of Jesus of Mar-a-Lago, Americans contemplating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 need to consider the broader context. Because now, the word "terrorism" no longer has the cold face of a well-trained religious zealot ready to face his own annihilation in the name of his delusion. The face of American terrorism is now the face of the very same people who went nuts in the flyover states after 9/11, convinced that Muslim terrorists were going to fly planes into the local Dollar General. It's now a face that's pasty-white except for the pink gin blossoms on the nose and cheeks, twisted with unfocused rage and hate, hiding the soul of a two-year-old who didn't get what he wanted for Christmas.

I've been writing about 9/11 on and around the anniversary for a decade and a half, in 2005. 2006,  2007, 2009, and 2010, and that's just what I wrote around the anniversary. I've been pondering the long-term implications and yes, some truthing, for as long. Most years, I'm of the "Enough already" school of thought. Not that the day should be forgotten, but there comes a time when it's about death porn, not about any kind of solemn remembrance. Too many cynical politicians have made too much political hay over the last twenty years by using 9/11 as a cudgel with which to beat people they don't agree with for it to be solemn, at this point.

And yet...

Last night I watched part of the Naudets' film. I'd seen it when it first came out in 2015, but I'd avoided any 9/11 coverage over the last few years, except for my annual reflections on whether it's time to stop the big observance. There's something to be said, though, for watching it now, after Joe Biden has finally, belatedly said "Enough" to the money-gobbling meatgrinder known as Afghanistan (and been pilloried by the press for it. ,

There's something to be said about watching it happen after years of avoiding it. It reminded me of just how utterly sickening that day was and how a sure way of life no longer seemed sure -- and the guy in charge was a dimwit. There's something to be said for revisiting it after four years of Donald Trump's Muslim-baiting. It's worth revisiting the fear and unsettling sense of the world being tilted off its axis that we felt in those days as we look at the GOP having morphed from a party of just greed and war into one of outright lunatic fascism. If we'd been paying attention after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; if the press hadn't pilloried Barack Obama's Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano for a report detailing the growing threat of white nationalism; if we hadn't been 100% focused on what people who pray differently and wear clothing unfamiliar to white Christians were doing; if the press hadn't joined the pile-on and bought into the idea that the guys cosplaying as soldiers with huge caches of weaponry were somehow "patriots" while people who wanted universal health care and a better life for all were just dirty fucking hippies; if we'd been honest about these angry white men, perhaps January 6 might not have happened.

The days surrounding 9/11 are fraught for me, for different reasons. Eight years ago on 9/11, Mr. Brilliant was just ten days away from the stroke that would end up taking his life. I know what those early days of widowhood are like, so I've always had empathy for those who lost loved ones that day. But as I am finally BEGINNING to emerge from the hideous tape loop that's been repeating itself in my head endlessly for eight years that consists of nothing but the last three weeks of Mr. B's life, I can't even imagine what it must be like after twenty years for the widows, those now elderly who lost their children, the now-grown children who hardly or don't remember their fathers or mothers, to have their loss replayed on national television year after year after year. I can shut out my tape loop after eight years with some effort of will. They have to pretty much just close the blinds and unplug for two weeks if they don't want the reminder.

Max Giaccone, whose father died that day, was 10 years old at the time. He says: 

“I don’t watch video of the buildings from that day. I’ve seen it all enough for it to be engrained in my psyche. Sometimes people just putting those things in articles makes me mad. I appreciate the argument that by showing history we are helping not repeat it, but I don’t know besides sensationalism what value it brings. I also try and stay away from are images of people jumping from the building. It has always been one of my biggest fears, and probably plays into my fear of heights....”

The Oklahoma City bombing survivors don't have to endure the replays. The Sandy Hook Elementary School parents and relatives don't have to endure the replays. The Survivors of the Pulse shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors don't have to deal with this. Their losses are no less profound, and are no less a symbol of Things That Changed Us just because the body count is lower and it didn't play out on national television.

Thanks to Joe Biden, the 9/11 era in foreign policy is over. The lives of those left behind -- the 9/11 families, the families of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- will never be the same. So what do we owe them? We owe them the gift of having learned something about terrorism and about who we are as a nation. But it appears we have learned the wrong lesson, for once the dust was cleared, we showed that we have learned nothing.

Phil Schaap (1951-2021)

 When I lived in New Jersey, especially after Mr. Brilliant died, there were two evening radio shows I listened to frequently. One of them was Rich Conaty's Big Broadcast on WFUV on Sunday evenings, and the other was Phil Schaap's Traditions in Swing on Saturdays on WKCR, the Columbia University station. Conaty's show was about ALL popular music from the 1920s and 30s, while Schaap was all about jazz. And on Saturday nights, he'd go into the roots of the music that characterized the Big Band era. It used to make Mr. Brilliant crazy when I'd listen to either one of them, because he had that particular disease that so many in my generation had of hating the music our parents listened to, and his father was one of those WWII vets who thought Glenn Miller was the ne plus ultra of musicians for all time.  (Fun anecdote:  Years later, when Mr. B. would talk about the Grateful Dead in similar terms, I would occasionally remind him of this.)

I've loved 1920s jazz for a long time. I could go into my whole thing about how I believe that the feeling of "coming home" that I have when I listen to the Hot Fives, the Hot Sevens, Bix Beiderbecke, and others, is a past-life memory, but I'll spare you all that. Suffice it to say that everything I know about early jazz and swing, I learned from listening to Phil Schaap on Saturday evenings. I learned about Bix and Tram (Frankie Trumbauer) and everything about Louis Armstrong's early music, and people I wouldn't have heard otherwise, like Ben Webster and Sidney Bechet and Stuff Smith and Bunny Berrigan. The man was a walking, living encyclopedia of jazz music and jazz musicians and had more anecdotes about them than could be stored in a million books or tapes.

Rich Conaty died in 2016.  Phil Schaap died yesterday after a four-year battle with cancer.

When it comes to the complete, comprehensive history of jazz, it was all stored in Phil Schaap's brain. His death is the 20th century music equivalent of the Library of Alexandria burning to the ground.

 

And yet another one: Remembering Peter Hochstein (The New York Crank)

 This blog reboot doesn't get much traffic, but when I look at my stats, I always see referrals from The New York Crank. It occurred to me this morning that I hadn't checked out the Crank in a while, so when I clicked over there and found that nothing had been posted since March, I kind of already knew why.

The New York Crank was the nom-de-blog of one Peter Hochstein, a prolific and peripatetic author of books and (his words) "corporate histories, personal and corporate biographies, book-length premiums, brochures of substance, and other long copy projects that others find too daunting." He was also a book author with a penchant for catchy titles, such as Up From Seltzer: A Handy Guide to 4 Jewish Generations, Heiress Strangled in Molten Chocolate At Nazi Sex Orgy: A Memoir and No Biz Like It: from gofer to producer in just 57 years.

Peter first contacted me in 2010 to thank me for linking to a post on his blog. Every time I linked to his blog, he emailed me to thank me. In November 2013, after Mr. Brilliant's death, we began an intermittent correspondence, because it seemed we had something in common other than political leanings: Both of us had lost our partners in the same neuro ICU in the same hospital.  I was far more confident about Mr. B's care than he was of the care his love, Roberta, had received three years earlier, but we shared the same doubts, wondering, and having had to make The Decision No One Should Have To Make.

Peter would check in about once a year and occasionally he'd comment on something I posted on Facebook, under his Facebook-specific nom-de-Facebook, Etoain Shrdlu. In 2018, he checked in after I started this new blog, revealing that he had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma  (yet something else we had in common, since a) my father had died from NHL just three years earlier; and b) I had been working on NHL studies before retiring earlier that year). He said then that he didn't expect, nor did he want to be, around for much longer, though at that time he didn't yet know if his was an aggressive or indolent form.  About the latter, he said "I love that word," indolent," as if the medical community is chiding it for not taking its victims out a bit more industriously." 

How I wish he'd done a chronicle of his journey through his illness. There is something about Jewish fatalism that makes us get funny at times of crisis, and in his last months, the Crank went pretty gonzo. 

Last Thanksgiving I held a "family and friends" Zoom to which I invited him. He emailed me the next day that he'd been unable to connect to the link. I wish I knew why, and I wish he'd been able to attend.

Peter is one of the few bloggers who have left us whom I actually knew as a person, however peripherally. I feel badly that I didn't know about his death until now, but given that his last blog entry was March 17 of this year and he died on April 9, I take some comfort in knowing that however bad his last days may have been, there weren't many of them. And I hope that as he wished, he exited the way his father did -- by simply going to sleep and never waking up.

Peter was a terrific writer, an entertaining blogger, and for me, a good online friend at a time when I needed people who truly understood what I was going through was like. I'm saddened by his death out of all proportion to his role in my life, and I feel badly that it took me this long to check in and find this news. We may not have been close, but it was nice to know he was there.

I'll leave you with Peter's own words, from his Amazon page:

I became a writer because that was the only thing I ever learned how to do. In retrospect, it's amazing I could even do that, given the focused-on-failure mindset of my immediate family. They were nuts. On the outside they seemed, well, merely a bit uptight. But trust me, my parents, and especially my mother, were batshit crazy.

Evidently it ran in the family. I learned only recently, years after my mother's death, that my mother had a sister who had been sent away to a state insane asylum before my birth. The poor woman was never mentioned in front of me. After a lot of prying I learned recently that her name was Gussie, short for Augusta. She was the real life equivalent of the fictional crazy aunt locked up in the attic.

You want an example of crazy? My mother was terrified that I would do something, or say something, or live someplace that would reflect badly on her. And her standards of what reflects badly were indecipherable. That may explain why, wherever I lived, she wept bitterly. She wept bitterly at my first apartment, a small townhouse studio in Greenwich Village, looking out on a charming flagstone courtyard. Later, she wept about an apartment on a high floor with sweeping city views. Still later, she wept when I bought and moved with my now ex-wife and child into a large two-bedroom apartment with a chichi Park Avenue address.

Nor was the problem that she hated city living. I spent nine years as a suburbanite, in a big house with a large back yard and beach rights - and that, too, brought her to paroxysms of tear-gushing grief.

But I was talking about writing. I became a newspaper reporter when I was 18. I sold my first book - thank God under a pseudonym! - when I was 22. I got out of the journalism business for a very long stretch and went into advertising, at the age of 23, because it paid better than journalism.

These days I do almost anything that involves putting my fingers on a keyboard and wiggling them. I still write TV spots, and brochures, and junk mail. I report and write occasionally for business publications. And I turn out books. I ghostwrite autobiographies. I write biographies on commission. Of course, I also write my own stuff. Why?

Because it's fun. And I've always figured that if I'm having fun writing, people will have fun reading my stuff. So please do order my books and have a few laughs before it's too late. Remember, nobody's getting out of here alive.

Pregnancy as Punishment and the Misguided Worship of Motherhood

 I have never in my life wanted children. I never played with baby dolls. I never wanted a baby doll. My dolls were Madame Alexanders, and later, Barbie, who was a stewardess and a nightclub singer and a nurse. Yes, all of Barbie's careers were "acceptable" female careers, but my Barbie never had children.

In college I wrote a paper for a "Marriage and the Family" class called "Voluntary Childlessness in Marriage." The professor was a former pastor, and I expected a bad grade, but instead I got an A-minus, the minus only because he wrote "Well-researched, well-argued. I do hope you will change your mind someday." 

I never did. Oh, there were times when I assumed I would have children someday because it was what people did, but my vision of parenthood was sitting in a rocking chair in the dead of night trying to settle a colicky baby. I ha

I don't know why I never wanted children. It could be just that I'm wired differently. It wasn't that I was what we then called a "tomboy." I was lousy at sports, I hated playing outside, I hated getting my hands dirty, I was afraid of everything. But I wanted a Kenner Bridge and Tunnel Building Set more than I wanted a new doll. At the same time, I loved fashion. I made paper dolls with clothes copied from the fashion spreads in Life and Look magazines. I made dollhouse furniture out of construction paper but had little interest in putting actual dolls in the houses. The indications that motherhood was not in my future were always there.

I don't know how much my own mother had to do with it. She always told me that she'd really wanted babies, but I never felt she particularly enjoyed motherhood. It's clear when I look at old photos that not only was my parents' marriage already pretty much over by the time I arrived, but that she was not exactly nuts about the homely, cranky baby that had come out of her the second time around. She always told me that I'd screamed nonstop until I was four, but I have to wonder who exactly was doing the screaming, because my early childhood memories are not of fun times with Mom, but of parental fights and my mother drinking endless cups of coffee and smoking endless cigarettes. 

Mom worked as a legal secretary for as long as I could remember. It's not that she loved being a secretary, but she was good at it and liked feeling competent at something. I think she knew that she was lacking something in the mothering department, for all that she always defended herself later on as being better than most mothers (which if true is kind of scary). In some ways she suffered from 1950s young adult woman syndrome, but she was also a victim of her own mother's lack of mothering skills.

Mr. Brilliant, who apparently came from a similarly dysfunctional home, also never wanted children, and for 30 years, 27 of them married, we had a satisfying life without children. After he died, some people (showing the customary tactlessness people use with the bereaved) asked me if I now regretted that I hadn't had children. Of course my answer was "No," and it was the truth. I would have been a terrible parent, and so would Mr. Brilliant. We both would have passed on our own baggage onto yet another generation, and it is a blessing for the world and for the children that never happened that we did not. I have had to live in my head for 66 years, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, never mind my own children.

I've never understood, or even cared to understand, why I'm missing that motherhood thing. I'm capable of deep love and caring for pets, but I have NO patience for children. Perhaps it's because pets are animals and I don't expect them to be rational, but as I saw my friends have children and deal with their tantrums and their screaming that the same soup they eat for lunch every day was somehow different today, I realized that children are not rational and I do not have the patience for them.

I'm not a "childfree" activist, for all that I DID resent that the workplace is far more forgiving of the needs of pregnant people and new parents than it is of someone who has to care for a sick spouse. I'm fine with paying taxes for schools because it's part of being in a community. I don't have to prove that my decision is right for everyone, unlike those who need to write articles about how many parents regret having had children or that some would tell their friends who are on the fence not to bother. I know I'm an outlier.

I'm all for people who want children and have the emotional tools to parent them well to have them. I know some of these people and they amaze me. But I can tell you from experience that a life lived as the product of someone not equipped to be a good parent can be pretty damn hellish. Yes, there is therapy, but that doesn't get rid of that critical parent for whom you were never pretty enough, talented enough, good enough. You can grow up and know it's because that parent was so damaged, but you're left to survey the wreckage and try to rebuild yourself as an adult as best you can, with every day being a battle to keep that long-dead voice from taking over your head. 

We need to trust women who do not want children to know what they're doing. And while we're on the subject, having children so  you have someone to care for you in your old age is a terrible reason to have children. Imagine having to live up to a contract you never even had a chance to read, but that someone forged your signature on. I can't imagine anything more selfish than doing that to a child. I at least have to be a cold, hard realist and recognize that unless I am phenomenally lucky, I will be cared for by strangers in my final days, and my hope is that I will be kind to them, and they to me. I don't have the luxury of deluding myself that I will die beautifully in a cozy bed, surrounded by people who have uncomplicated love for me. It doesn't always work that way.

I regret nothing, at least not where that's concerned.

I remember the years before Roe v. Wade. I remember the girls in high school who developed poochy bellies and were suddenly "visiting grandma for a while." They'd come back with flat bellies 9-10 months later and never talked about it. I remember the crying college girls bargaining with God to please let their periods come. And this was in the days when even small colleges had clinics where the women could go to get free condoms, contraceptive foam, and diaphragms. Women of reproductive age don't remember the days when girls "had to get married," or went through a pregnancy and then gave their babies up for adoption, because being a teen mom meant dropping out of school and a ruined life. I remember around 30 years ago, during one of the many challenges to Roe that have come up over the years, seeing a young woman on the news blithely say, "Oh, they'll NEVER make it illegal again." Well, here we are. Except now it's going to be worse.

At least in my lifetime, for all that abortions were illegal, women who were fortunate enough to have one done by a medical practitioner weren't prosecuted. The doctors weren't prosecuted as long as they were discreet. Abortion happened but no one talked about it. Even when women without access to underground "safe" abortions ended up crouched dead on the floor bleeding out with a coat hanger still protruding from their vaginas, it wasn't talked about. My own mother had one before she was married. It was done by a physician and my father's mother cared for her afterward. Today, if it were Texas, my grandmother could have been sued by any Christofascist freak who wanted to. 

That is just one reason why today is different. Abortion has always been with us. Perhaps the relative lack of availability of safe abortions and the corresponding likelihood of women who have them, or attempt to self-abort, being "punished" by injury or death, made these pre-Roe "under the table" abortions acceptable.

Roe allowed for the availability of safe abortions and codified a woman's right to full, complete personhood, with the rights of the fetus only coming into play at such point as it is no longer dependent on being in the uterus to survive. As vague and even sometimes increasingly problematic as this is, given advances in neonatal technology, it at least attempted to strike a balance without ever turning women into mere vessels. 

You need not dig very far to realize that the evangelical-dominated anti-abortion movement has NEVER been about the sanctity of human life. Randall Balmer wrote in Politico in 2014 about how the evangelicals didn't fuss about Roe until Jimmy Carter sought re-election in 1979, promising an expansion of school desegregation. As with just about everything that causes conflict in this country, even the fetophile movement (which is what I call them), stripped away of all its veneers, has as its origin story the Fear of a Black Planet, and as its core, misogyny and theocracy. Frank Schaeffer, whose father was a founder of the Christian right, warned us of this just the other night:

This week, Texas passed two laws, both of which are fundamentally at odds with the so-called "sanctity of human life." One of them allows anyone to carry any kind of gun in public without a permit or even training, and the other one puts bounties on the heads of women who dare to seek to end a pregnancy via threat of lawsuits of anyone who even talks to them about how to do it. And this in a state where the governor who signed both into law has opposed ALL efforts to control the spread of COVID-19. Can there be any doubt that race and misogyny are at play here, and the relentless march of old white men towards a theocracy that will entrench patriarchy in our society and government forever?

The right to choose not to have children, whether a permanent choice as mine was, or a temporary choice because one is only ten years old, or was raped, or was simply not ready for a child, or another child, is a vital part of every woman's life. ANY law which says that a woman ceases to be a human being with the human right of self-determination at ANY point in her life is an existential threat to ALL women.