2002-09-12 - 3:26 p.m.

Well, I'm a dollar short and a day late for 9/11 rememberances. But what the hell, I'll give it a shot.

Yesterday, I spent as little time as possible watching TV, or listening to the radio, because I wanted to avoid as much of the 9/11 festivities, and I use that word deliberately, as I could. The radio played endless snips of 'everyday' people's quotes, such as 'we're all united now', and 'we have to get them first, because it's their children or ours'. The radio is mad. Clearchannel, the media conglomerate, is behind the broadcasts, which are nearly all the same on every station they own, whether the contemporary Hard-Rock (if you want to call it that), or the classic rock, or the fifties oldies pop, the main difference being how many overtly military themes and sounds they used. The Hard-Rock station used military drum beats to accentuate the point. What strikes me as most odd about that, is that Hard Rock is the most whiney, cry-baby, pseudo-masculine drivel on the air-waves. Think about it: Fred Durst's Mission Impossible song has lyrics like 'Now I know why you wanna hate me' delivered right through the nose, and his 'My Way' has the wonderful bit 'One more fight about your leadership, and I will straight out leave your shit ... this time its my way, my way or the highway'. The whiney bitch hasn't left yet, but he swears he will if he doesn't get his way this time. That is NOT manly. Then there's the song 'Down with the sickness' which spins off on a slightly embarassing rant about mother beating him up. Or the song with the line 'All your insults make me feel like I'm not a person'. It is, almost entirely, music for wimpy poseurs. No one has to saber-rattle harder than a man with no saber.

But the real sign of the apocalypse is the martial drum beating and blood lust on the classic rock station. Classic Rock is not, for the most part a very political genre. When it did dabble, it was to protest the Vietnam war. For God's sake, they're playing Ozzie's WarPigs as background for their messages. Clearchannel is the same company that 'suggested' that it's serf-stations not play songs like Imagine after 9/11.

CNN has been joining the ranks of the Chicken-Hawks, declaring Scott Ritter, the ex-marine who fought in the first Gulf War and led the team of weapons Inspectors afterwards, to be a traitor and a coward. And in the meantime, Osama is still alive and well. Not that his death would mean anything, al-Qaeda would still operate and be a danger, but it sure would make me feel a bit better, and God damn it, Bush said he'd at least do that, and he's failed pretty fucking terribly, hasn't he? All we've done is turn the world against us, and lose the support of our allies, and support Sharon's murder of a couple hundred innocent Palestinian civilians (this does not count the militants who got killed too, they knew the risks when they signed up, like any soldier), and cut back on our civil liberties, and threaten to invade another country with no causus belli. We haven't caught anyone important, we haven't dismantled anything of consequence, we haven't even increased the security system at the airports, for God's sake.

This year has been a fucking disaster.

So I tried to avoid as much hoopla as possible. Not because I'm not affected, not because I don't care, but because I feel it dishonors the dead to use the anniversary or their massacre to drum up support for a needless and dangerous invasion to kill even more innocents who had nothing to do with 9/11.

But I did go to a 9/11 service at my recently ex-girlfriend Maryann's Presbyterian Church. And in that service, I tried to deal with my anger, and disbelief, and fear and pain and rage and grief. I hadn't grieved over 9/11. It was too political, it meant too much, and it was hijacked almost immediately by the right wing to justify their blood-lust and Christian Supremacy. I couldn't react to the event, I reacted to the reaction. So I never cried, and I never screamed, and even when I finally visited ground zero it was nothing to me but a clapboard fence with a viewing tower I really didn't have time to try to get on. The day had been tainted, our grief converted to propaganda, and so I simply didn't grieve. I had civil rights to worry about.Tears would have meant anger, anger would have called out for vengeance, and vengeance would have meant becoming a part of the madness that's sweeping over us all. Who can afford to lose control in a Hurricane? You need all your strength to hold on, you can't afford to grieve.

But last night, at a service, I grieved. I wept, I shook, and I called out to God, I prayed for the dead and the dying, and I looked around a small room, with a small man at the head of it, trying to make sense of it all, and do some small justice for the innocents taken. And I saw good people, not propaganda, not clapboards, not blood-lust. I saw pain, and a peculiarly human way of dealing with it: calling out to that Other who may remember what it is all to human to forget. Surrender, not to an armed host, but to God. Loss of control in a sanctuary. Recognizing that we never had control to begin with, but that doesn't mean the worst will happen. It often doesn't. That's what faith is: seeing the hurricane which threatens, knowing there is nothing we can do to stop it, and knowing that joining it will do no earthly good either. Religion can not take pain away, it channels it into something usefull.

Release.

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