'United 93' crashed into me yesterday. It hurt!
“Pull it up,” were the last recorded words by a passenger on United 93. Please, America, listen.
I cried re-watching ‘United 93’ yesterday. That never happened during ‘Under Siege’, ‘Con Air’ and ‘Blood Red Sky’, so I’m convinced I don’t have a weepy fetish for hijack movies. Reality, however, hurts.
That true 9/11 story, about the fourth plane, cleverly abandoned Hollywood gloss so that normal dialogue, drab scenery and inevitability became the crescendo of my fear and horror - those passengers could have been me and you.
I was watching live TV when the second plane slapped humans and concrete into a chili cheese bomb. I’d be rightfully convicted for not remembering where I was each time a suicide bomber made Arab spaghetti, yet that won’t stop 9/11 being a shared global terror. I was standing in a Durban surf shop. You know where you were.
Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, indirectly gave the best definition of politics when he said that “The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.” That explosive scene and falling stick figures became propaganda that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq, joining the millions sold for profit.
That United 93 was pushback for the U.S.A’s love of war doesn’t diminish my sympathy for the victims, but sympathy will never quell my disenchantment in America for not turning it into epiphany. Their biggest chance to improve was wasted.
Instead, Americans never punished their liars. They decided their God was best, and played July 4th parades and Superbowl’s on repeat to the soundtrack of the Pledge of Allegiance and the nationalism chomping of Big Macs with supersized Cokes. They supported their troops not because Uncle Sam told them to but because they are Uncle Sam. Nothing is more homegrown than fairy tales of exceptionalism and flags of war.
Many think that American apathy is the result of Machiavellian CEOs and politicians. That the majority are stupid, easily controlled, and dystopia is defence against apology.
I’ve done more than my share of banging against propaganda, but for how long can Orwell’s ‘1984’, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, and Neo’s red pill be excuses instead of fucking cliché?
The unoptionally retarded, and those too busy surviving, are forgiven. My distress is in believing that the rest are aware but too selfish, that they’d choose a bigger TV over saving a life, the same way they fight over which warmongering politician will be the best President, or whose imaginary god is more real.
There’s no need to protest because I’m preaching to the (thankfully) disturbed choir. But you’re the few, and it’s the majority that makes a culture, and they fight to preserve it.
American Culture is self-obsession and killing. Does that mean that the rest of the world doesn’t matter unless we’re a target?
9/11 is the marketing that sold The War on Terror. According to the Watson Institute at Brown University, the costs of that advert has been $8-trillion, counter-terrorism activities in 85 countries, 940,000 dead from direct war violence, 3,6-million indirect deaths, and 38 million refugees. It is the War OF terror.
“Pull it up,” were the last recorded words by a passenger on United 93. Please, America, listen.
The anniversary of 9/11 ironically begins in Guam, an island in between Japan and Australia, 10 long hours west of Washington D.C. That’s 4am my time which is when I posted this. Guamanians have been occupied by the USA military since 1898. They have American ‘citizenship’ and pay taxes, but are not represented in Congress. They are a colonial territory. They are the first reminder that the USA is, foremost, a War Empire.
NB: Don’t mistake ‘Flight 93’ for ‘United 93’. The latter is the one to grip your belly.
Recommended: ‘Peace, War and 9/11’.