President Bush addressed the nation that evening, calmly and resolutely:
It was a very fine speech except for one thing. That sentence about "they attacked us because America is a beacon of freedom and opportunity" is no explanation at all - it's mythology.
But I will say that he did an excellent job as Comforter-in-Chief in the dark days that followed. That was before he got completely off track and perverted our military response in the wrong direction.
And I will add that what goes around, comes around. No leader, no nation is so high and mighty that it cannot be brought low. Especially one that fights with its friends and cozies up to its enemies.
Your Head Trucker very much admires the forthright clear-headedness of conservative Catholic, Vietnam veteran, retired U.S. Army colonel, and Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, whose discussion of the Syrian crisis with Phil Donohue I posted last Sunday. Here, in a highly pertinent clip from 2008, Bacevich incisively dissects the hubris and failure of the Bush response to 9/11, which continues to shape today's events in the Middle East and American foreign policy, even under President Obama:
Bacevich continues his provocative argument in this clip about his 2009 book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism:
If you are interested in hearing a fuller exposition of his views - and I wish every member of Congress and of the Obama Administration could be required to do so - you can watch this dialogue between Bacevich and Massachusetts School of Law Dean Lawrence Velvel:
For what it's worth, former KGB officer and Russian President Vladimir Putin has written about American exceptionalism too, in a New York Times op-ed that was published today - and though Putin's remarks, coming from a foreign head of state engaged in a diplomatic contest with our government, must be weighed on a different scale from those of Bacevich, it is perhaps instructive to compare the two points of view. A rhetorically adroit excerpt:
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.” . . .
If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
Notice how smoothly he has turned the tables on us, with the oblique reference to our founding philosophy in the Declaration of Independence. Putin's remarks may or may not be insincere, but they do offer a window into how we are perceived abroad - a corrective to our own admiring gaze in the mirror, perhaps.
And isn't that one of the big things we castigated Bush and his cronies for - being utterly indifferent, if not actually blind and deaf, to America's standing and reputation in the eyes of the world? Putin is not an entirely trustworthy writer, but there is much food for thought here, if the bright boys in Obama's West Wing can digest it.
Your Head Trucker is glad to be back online after a loss of internet connection that began on Saturday; but sad to learn of the grievous attack in Libya that killed our ambassador, and the asshole film that provoked it. As one commentator has put it, this was a case of "some Christian fringe extremists provoking Muslim fringe extremists," and I have no respect for either kind, and neither variety deserves to be dignified with the name of religion - which is supposed to make men more just and more merciful, not less.
Also worth your time is this article by the New Yorker's Amy Davidson: How We Remember 9/11 Now. Just go read it; I have nothing to add to what she says.
A feature-length documentary has been made about Mark Bingham, the gay businessman and rugby player who died on Flight 93, and his mom, Alice Hoagland, who has turned his legacy into her life's work. Here's the trailer:
Excerpt of an interview with Hoagland last summer:
When my son first told me, my subconscious mind just rejected it. I acknowledged and believed it on an intellectual level but it took me a while to really come to grips with it and accept it. And when I did, in a matter of months, I guess, I became grateful then that Mark had enough confidence in me and love for me and thought enough of me that he wanted me to be one of the first people in his life to know something very fundamental and true about himself. Even though he knew that my attitudes towards gays was vague and not accurate. I would say that I was vaguely antigay –imbued with stereotypes. I’ve had to fight through that. I am one of those lucky human beings that has done an about face and rejected a lie and embraced the truth. But I wish I had had the courage and goodness of heart to do that on my own.
But it took my son to do that for me by acknowledging, by telling me – challenging my stereotypes and telling me, “Mom, I’m gay.” Because of him, I have gone on a different journey in my life. And with all the important things in my life – and all the accomplishments that I have – most of them have been because I had a little boy who grew up to be a man who set me on an important life’s quest.
It took months for this initial trauma to ebb, years for my psyche to regain its equilibrium. And it took me close to a decade to realize just how slickly Osama bin Laden had done his evil work, how insidiously his despicable performance art had reached into my mind and altered it, how carefully he had set the trap and how guilelessly I—we—had walked right into it.
We need to understand that 9/11 worked. It worked as a tactic to induce American self-destruction, even if it failed spectacularly as a strategy to advance Al Qaeda—and its heretical message of suicidal warfare—across the globe. It worked because this was not just another terror attack. The emblems were clear: the looming towers of Western capitalism in New York, the cradle of Western democracy in Washington. When the third plane crashed into the Pentagon and the fourth (United 93) was brought down by its passengers, the drama didn’t cease. We saw the symbol of America’s military preeminence lying with its side opened like a tin can. And we imagined the panic and courage in the air over Pennsylvania as people just like us finally found their bearings and fought back. . . .
The simplicity of the plot made it even scarier. On that day the West’s own airplanes, which had taken off peacefully, were transformed into makeshift weapons of mass destruction; the only actual weapons deployed were a handful of box cutters you could find in any office-supply store. The rest was merely human will and the advantage of surprise. More to the point, the people murdered that day, charred in the remains of the towers or jumping from windows in the sky only to thud onto the pavement below, had only that morning been just like us: settled complacently in airline seats or beginning their day at the office. At some point some of them must have looked out a window—in the plane or the World Trade Center—and saw what seemed like the apocalypse coming. There are times when I think of those people who saw, in their final seconds of life, the nose of an airplane hurtling toward them at inhuman speed. Their terror ended quickly. Ours had just begun.
3. Part I of a documentary about the "Saint of 9/11," the gay Franciscan priest and beloved FDNY chaplain, Father Mychal Judge. You can watch the rest of this deeply moving film on YouTube.
Today I stumbled across this very enlightening film, the result of a six-year project by the Gallup Poll:
Gallup researchers began by asking the questions on every American’s mind. Why is there so much anti-Americanism in the Muslim world? Who are the extremists and how do Muslims feel about them? What do Muslims like and dislike about the West? What do Muslim women really want?
Crucial policy decisions hang on these questions. They continue to generate passionate disagreements in the public square. Yet for all the heat and controversy, the actual views of the world’s Muslims have been conspicuously missing from this debate.
Now, we have the missing answers and statistics, gathered, parsed, and analyzed not by pundits but by professional researchers.
As part of this groundbreaking six-year project, Gallup conducted tens of thousands of interviews with residents in 35 predominantly Muslim nations, as well as smaller populations in Europe and the USA. The broad extent of the polling has delivered findings for the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims with a plus or minus accuracy of 3%
Focused on the issues of Gender Justice, Terrorism, and Democracy –the film presents this remarkable data deftly, showing how it challenges the popular notion that Muslims and the West are on a collision course. Like the research, the film highlights a shared relationship that is based on facts – not fear.
I've been wanting to find something like this ever since 9/11. It was produced in 2010, before the "Arab Spring" uprisings this year. You can watch the whole 58-minute film at Snag Films.
A personal note: I had a date one time years ago with a Muslim IT professional from North Africa; he was a sweet guy, very likeable. I knew some Muslim foreign students in college, and have occasionally met or worked with some other Muslims through the years since. Of course, none of them were monsters or terrorists.
But try telling that to all the proud ChristiansandAmericans here in small-town Texas. The analogy of the Ku Klux Klan versus ordinary peaceable Christians they don't even get; washes right over their heads.
Which of course is the same reaction as with any other group that is Not Our Kind. The old, old human story.
Keith Olbermann, in his inimitable way, gives a tour-de-force refutation of the hysterical right-wing claims about the proposed Islamic center; highly recommended if you want to see the reality of the situation there in lower Manhattan.
Well, okay, so he probably just felt like doing that, after this brilliant piece of batshittery: God sent the big earthquake yesterday to punish Haiti for signing up with the Devil more than 200 years ago.
Pat Robertson is filthy rich - damn, that preachin' stuff is a good business to be in - but did you hear him say one word about how much he was going to send to help people who are dying in the streets at this moment? I didn't either.
You do remember, don't you, that the day after 9/11, Robertson and Jerry Falwell jointly blamed that on the ACLU, abortion, feminists, pornography, and of course . . . the terrible, unholy gays.
Or two plane crashes, I should say to be more exact. A very good contrast was made on one of my Truckbuddies' blogs the other day, which I can't re-find now (you know who you are, holler at me), but it made the point about the 9/11 disaster near the start of Bush's presidency, with all the death and destruction; and then as Bush was getting ready for his farewell speech at the end of his presidency, the miraculous, non-disaster, everybody-saved crash last week on the Hudson River. Pure coincidence, of course; but what a metaphor to contemplate.
Check out this video of the crash and rescue on David Mixner's site, and notice how very, very quickly the rescue boats got there. Disaster averted, rejoicing not mourning; please God let this be a symbol of the next 8 years for America.
9/11 was a call, in my mind, to defend the Enlightenment from the nihilistic forces of murderous theocratic fanaticism. What it demanded was a rediscovery of secularism and freedom in a war against the forces of Islamism and despotism. I still believe that those who instinctively responded to the attacks by blaming America were morally lost. But I equally believe that those who showed they were willing to throw away America’s values in fighting Jihadism were wrong as well. And those who use religious extremism as a tool to get elected in America are pale reflections of the evil of Islamism - not the equivalent, as I have always insisted, but related. Christianism and Islamism are twin pincers against our freedom and against freely chosen, freely witnessed Christian and Muslim faith. Islamism is far more dangerous. But Islamism will never defeat America’s core values. Christianism has already made a dent.
A tribute to the memory of those who died, sung by Alan Jackson.
Even here, far out on the prairie in Texas, the utter horror of what was happening stunned the senses like a brick between the eyes. I was off work that day, sleeping late, when my partner woke me. "Something terrible has happened in New York, we've been attacked . . . " he said, or words to that effect. I bounded out of bed and into the computer room; we had no cable or satellite TV, so the only news we could get came in fitful, jerky images over our dial-up connection. The connection seemed slower than ever, as we jumped from one from news site to another, trying to piece together exactly what was happening. He'd been alerted by a call from his mother who said that someone on TV was saying 50,000 people were dead. In the first couple of hours, trying to squeeze the facts out of that little 15-inch monitor, it seemed all too possible.
Who? Why? What else was coming? A bulletin on the radio: all air traffic was grounded across the country, but six more planes were still unaccounted for. God only knew where they might be heading. At last, I thought, I know how people must have felt when the news of Pearl Harbor broke across an unsuspecting land. Only this attack was not on some remote island in the faraway ocean: it was New York and Washington, for God's sake. Unbelievable.
Unbelievable. The word kept echoing through my head all that long afternoon as I watched the news at the house of my partner's parents. The planes hitting the towers, clips endlessly repeated; sickening, stomach-turning stuff, but none of us could look away. The vast, sky-filling clouds of smoke and ash, the towers falling, the crowds of people walking, walking. The grim reporters, shocked and fearful like everyone else but struggling to keep a professional face on. The somber updates, new facts, new rumors, new images from someone's Kodak or videocam.
Unbelieveable was the only word that fit; the proof glaring at us from the TV screen, yet the mind recoiled, unable or unwilling to go along with the very, very bad joke. This can't be happening. It doesn't seem real. It's like a horror movie. We said these things out loud to one another, but the incredible, impossible reality stupefied us all: a bitter, numbing liquor.
Hours later, the nightmare still rolling across the screen in living color, someone thought of gasoline and shortages. I had a hundred-mile round-trip commute to drive the next day, so I knew I'd better go fill up while there was still gas to be had in our tiny town. No one knew if there would be any gasoline at all tomorrow, or what it might cost. Lots of others had the same thought; for probably the first time in that little whistlestop town, there were long lines at every gas station, drivers waiting patiently but determinedly to get what they could while they could. The line was slightly shorter at the premium pump, so I took my place there.
Later, my partner's father chided me for paying $1.87 a gallon to fill my tank, a very high price at the time; I reposted, better to pay that today than five dollars a gallon tomorrow. No one knew what would happen next; and I well recall that the sense of impending danger, imminent attack persisted in my mind for about the next six weeks before it slowly faded away. Not that I thought anyone, even a crazed terrorist, would bother with our remote village; but what about all the other big cities in the country?
Dallas was a two-hour drive away; the President was from Texas; who knew what twisted reasoning might make Big D the next target? And with what weapon? For weeks afterwards, driving across the bucolic Texas landscape to and from work, whenever my rearview mirror faced in the direction of the Metroplex, I would glance up at it, half-expecting, wondering, Would I see the mushroom cloud from this distance?
Then too, there was the feeling of utter helplessness; from so very far away, nothing at all to do of any practical, immediate help. Our hamlet was too small even to have a blood donation place, though great crowds of people lined up for hours in the Metroplex to give blood. All I could do was phone in a donation to the Red Cross; a hundred bucks, quite a little chunk for me at that time, finances being tight, but I did what I could. Had we been attacked by a particular country, as in WWII, I think Texans would have joined the colors en masse. But now in this strange, new time, the century barely begun, who was there to fight? An invisible, unknowable enemy, striking from nowhere at all.
To be sure, I saw a few bellicose displays, like the stern-faced young men driving a husky pickup with R E V E N G E spelled out across the front bumper. And, less warlike, overnight every other car on the highway sported an American flag in the window. Mine was no exception; I printed a small copy on my computer and taped it to the back windshield. Our local newspaper devoted the entire back page to a full-color print of Old Glory, which my partner and I dutifully cut out and pasted on the glass of our front door, like many another family. But with no enemy to fight, rage soon petered out and congealed into self-interest. Young men born long after Vietnam confessed their fear of being drafted and sent far away from home, their lives interrupted, perhaps lost; I heard of no one volunteering to join the armed services from our town.
Time has allayed the fears and wrapped the horrors of that day in the tissue paper of memory, blurred but not forgotten. Peace to all who mourn the ones they loved, lost without warning, without a chance, without a goodbye. When I got home at the end of that long day of horror, from the front porch I looked up in awe at one of the most breathtaking sunsets I have ever seen: rows on rows of lacy clouds filling the western sky, their serried ranks a Magnificat in brilliant pink and gold.
How strange, I thought: clouds of death and destruction in the east, yet in the west, glory; a benediction.
No American can but wish that everyone who participated in those monstrous attacks should be brought to justice and suffer the fullest penalty of the law. Some have, some have not. Whatever else Bush has or has not done, it must be said to his lasting credit that he did a superb job as the nation's Chief Mourner and comforter in those first dark hours and days, going from site to site, talking to the crowds and the individuals, hugging them, weeping with them, consoling them. That much, he did excellently.
But where is Osama? Seven years later, a period of time longer than the United States was engaged in World War I and World War II combined, why does no one seem to have any idea of where he is? With all our vast resources, technology, military might, and wealth, why has he not been brought to justice?
Why do neither our elected representatives, nor the press, nor the presidential candidates ever seem to ask this question? Did I miss a memo or bulletin somewhere? Or is there just something very, very wrong with this picture?
Why, after all these years, have we still not caught up with the man whom our President said was responsible for the crime of 9/11--the man who admitted, boasted about his guilt at least once on tape, as I recall--a crime not just against this country, but against all humanity?
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
Note, 9/15/26: For the past week, Blogger has not updated most of the posts in this sidebar. I don't know what to do about it. You can still access the websites below by clicking on the titles of each one.
