This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

On September 11, 2001, for the first time since the War of 1812 and to the collective shock of a nation high on the ideological amyl nitrate of the End of History, America bottomed. It hurt, like it always does when you’re out of practice. Violation, penetration, powerlessness: the words we use to describe that day seemed richly, darkly sexual to me even in eighth grade, when Mrs. Yancey’s first period Earth Sciences class was cut short and the students of Jarrett Middle School forgot, briefly, the misery of puberty to watch riveted as two big and sinful cities on a coast far away from Springfield, Missouri burned.

Ten years later, a quarter-million civilian casualties and 1.2 trillion dollars blown, deep inside a country we’ve never declared war on, directed by a president whose polite egghead imperialism betrayed his political base and then his country, a few Americans broke into a house and shot dead the man whose fault that day was. A spray of hot, excited lead right to the face. Double tapped. A counterterrrorism moneyshot. We do the fucking around here said the Empire imperiously tensing its collective sphincter, and millions of Americans took to the streets with signs, beers, and hard-ons.

Now I live in one of those big coastal cities, trying my hardest to contribute my fair share of sin to the moral economy and disappointed that the burning that happened last decade wasn’t scary or widespread enough to make DC rent any cheaper. I got last Sunday’s news by text message from my mom back in the Midwest: “u dwn @ WH? Got BL. Lv u” read the endearing idiosyncracy of Baby Boomer keypad slang. Shelving a book of political theory and a bottle of lube – two things that, in some combination, all young American men owe themselves at the end of a weekend – I fired up the internet to see what, if anything, was going dwn @ WH, and whether or not “BL” was motherly shorthand for medication I should expect in the mail soon.

Whatever I felt seeing so many people, and young ones, and friends, cheering boozily in Lafayette Square, it was not disgust. The chorus of pious liberal schoolmarms calling us to humility and moderation are the ones who’ve earned that. Bloodlust, like the other, sexual kind, is a nobly, robustly, electrically animal kind of thing. Like sweat and odor and body hair, its is a feral beauty that reminds us of our own wonderful broken stinking primatology. The real danger is denying it, giving up the bestial existential thrill of a body for an infinitely more hateful and life-denying kind of spiritual anorexia (Nietzsche at his best, for those of you keeping score.) Machete-hacked slaver bodies on the gore-rusted flint of Bleeding Kansas, the saccharine aristocratic ichor of the Ancien Regime flowing from guillotined-forested public squares and into the basements of Paris, the warm invasive saline spattered over the bedrooms of British colonialists throttled too late out of malarial nightmares – these are beautiful visions, sanguine poetry that should excite us to outright sensuality, not just because they are violent but because they are violently just. In these and other scenes like them, we see human beings claiming their dignity for the first time, not in the politely empty gesture of a raised arm in a polling place or a handshake in the market square, but with fists and nails and teeth possessed by a restless demonic democratic hunger for equal recognition and the pure nuclear flame of justice.

But Sunday night didn’t make for that kind of scene. Sunday night made for something far more banal: tough, powerful bastards catching up with an equally tough, less powerful bastard, and having their way with him – the way most of history has worked so far. Nothing to celebrate, not because it was violent, but because it wasn’t the right kind of violence. Seeing the crowds in American cities was like watching children, drunk children with college degrees and important jobs, too enthusiastic about the end of a Disney movie their parents take them to to get their minds off the hunger dad’s layoff caused: You poor dupes. You really fell for this stuff. You cheer on the sidelines of the nationalist football game like you do every generation, blowing your load at a pep rally while the people getting rich by keeping your world from being a less fully human place look on and smile knowingly.

You think Osama bin Laden went out scared, pissing himself at the piercing eagle cry of American justice? You think there was a goddamned flicker of anxiety in that man’s eyes when the Navy Seals broke through his windows to blast him off to eternal celestial reward and abiding political fame across the developing world? He wasn’t some angry Cultural Studies major play-acting at tough-guy radicalism to be scared into a life of middle-class asphyxiation after his first run-in with the campus police   – the fucker had grit, actually believed the stuff, knew for more than a decade how things would have to end, and could get up in the morning and smile about it. (Seriously, best I can tell the guy never even furrowed a brow. Run the google image search yourself, pick any picture, and ask yourself if a single one of your friends looks that honestly, tranquilly, purposefully content in their facebook profiles. If they do it’s probably because their insurance plans cover generous Lexapro doses.) If you went out Sunday night high on a vindictive sense of emotional symmetry, if you think that the smallest fraction of the pain, confusion, and chaos we all felt on 9/11 was mirrored in the soul of the toughest, wiliest, most fanatically devoted insurgent this side of Hindu Kush, you just don’t get it. The man died like he wanted to, surrounded by family members in a cozy mountain resort town. Sure, bin Laden was “neutralized” as a strategic concern, and won’t be putting out any of those weirdly porny lo-fi cave videos again – but he never suffered existentially the way he made us suffer existentially. We were the kindly, gracious, cooperative Dr. Kevorkian to his assisted martyrdom. We all have to live with that.

We also all have to live with fact that, not in spite but because of the raid in Pakistan and operations like it, by their very own standard the terrorists are winning.  Some of the stupider and more craven of us have bought the line that Al Qaeda won’t rest until the thonged sandal of Islamism has crushed underfoot the pristine lily of Western liberal democracy and keffiyehs are worn on American streets even outside of Brooklyn. It’s not the story bin Laden himself was buying, at least back in 2004 when Al-Jazeera aired one of the first authenticated videotape messages to America (seriously read the whole transcript):

All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.

And race, suffer, collapse, and lose we have, in a decade that’s seen  a crescendo of failed meatgrinding resource wars, a high-tide of justified anti-Americanism abroad, and the greatest wealth transfer away from the American middle and working classes ever. These Afghan guys know exactly what they’re doing, bleeding dry a military Leviathan they could never draw out with the fish hook of conventional warfare – it’s exactly what they did to break the Soviet army, and then the Soviet Union in general, back in the 80s. And, just like in the Russian case, they’re betting that most regular folks will be too mean, petty, crass, and dumb to stop their governing class from waging a war that only benefits the people in charge: “… the policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations - whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction - has helped al-Qaida to achieve these enormous results” said a tauntingly prescient bin Laden seven years ago. So far, in the main, they’ve been right.

Early Tuesday morning, a California neo-Nazi was shot dead by his ten-year old son. When I found out I drank a beer, right then in the middle of the day. When the war in Afghanistan, the longest and most transparently aimless in our country’s history, finally comes to an end, I will bring a keg to Lafayette Square. And when the last bankster criminal is thrown into federal prison to be forcibly sodomized with the kind of distending vehemence that makes American History X look like a Butt Magazine shoot, I will blow the meager beginnings of my grad school savings on enough Johnnie Walker to burn another hole through Christopher Hitchens’ esophagus. But god damn it if I’ll waste one smile or drop of alcohol when some trust-funded Wahabi Terror Inc. retiree gets a few rounds of imperial hubris through his skull. I’m not in middle school anymore, and I pay close enough attention to know that the real threat to this country isn’t a band of swarthy tribal goatherds in central Asia. The class of people who’ve bribed and cheated and murdered and lied enough to get what they want at the expense of everyone else, to convince decent people who just want to be left alone that it’s in their interest to drone-bomb other decent people who just want to be left alone halfway across the world, to perpetrate the worst income inequality in modern American history, to make imperial terrorists look like heroes and heroic anti-imperialists look like terrorists, to make it seem perfectly unremarkable that a military casualty should occasion an impromptu national drinking holiday – these are the people to watch out for, the men and women who were cackling heartily from the National Chamber of Commerce offices overlooking the patriotic frathouse orgy on Lafayette Square Sunday night.  The day my facebook feed is red with pixelated photos of the cracked and puddling faces of the American power elite, I’ll head downtown to cheer and drink the hardest. Until then, the only shots I’ll bother caring about are the rail whiskey ones that come with a PBR drink special – if I’m going to be nauseous and depressed, I’d rather it be from too much cheap booze than from the political cowardice of my generation.

 

---

First time here? See what we're all about... Get involved... Send us a tip!...

---