looking for the writing on the wall

"I vowed that I'm never going to forget the lessons of that day," G.W. Bush said at a 9/11 memorial event on Sunday, and he meant it. The lessons in question being that a weak joke of a president can exploit a national tragedy to reposition himself as a strong leader and be granted a free hand to pursue whatever insane schemes he desires to, as long as they’re parsed in terms of national security and delivered with the basest sort of fear mongering. Bush and his cabal have taken those lessons to heart, using the events of 9/11 to launch a global ideological crusade whose hubristic arrogance would make the most strident Trotskyite blanch.

I knew it would turn out this way the moment my wife told me about the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center. (I commuting to work on the MBTA when it happened, totally unaware of what was occurring.) Talking on the phone to my father that afternoon, I told him I thought we’d just witnessed the next Reichstag fire. He got angry with me, accusing me of not thinking of those killed. He was wrong. My thoughts at that moment were with the thousands of who died, but also with the billions who would have to live afterwards in a world where a cabal of militaristic, intellectual lightweights was in control of the world’s “only superpower”, and preparing to take full advantage of the American people’s rage and horror for their own ends.

They wasted no time in gutting our constitutional protections, pushing through legislation for a pliable congress to rubber stamp, most of which had less bearing on counterterrorism than affirming the unitary power of the executive branch. Dissenters found themselves drowned out by accusations of being “soft” on terrorists, of aiding the enemy, of treason. These charges were echoed by members of the right-wing punditocracy, who make their living pandering to the ugliest aspects of the populist impulse.

And the ringleaders of the criminal gang responsible for the events of that horrible Tuesday five years back? Still at large, lost in the shuffle while America pisses away its resources in a vain attempt to bring “democracy and freedom” to a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11, and has only become the front line of the “War on Terror” because of Bush’s reckless efforts at regime change.