Idiot Joy Showland

Today’s media is, of course, dominated by those four catastrophic characters, in an orgiastic display of symbolic fetishisation, as if the date were more important than the dead. The regurgitation of traumatic memories, the pseudo-sagacious surveys of the past decade, the groundless arrests of suspicious-looking Muslims, bring out the bunting, it’s an anniversary!

I will say this, though: the biggest lie about 9/11 is that it changed everything. The greatest tragedy about 9/11 is that it changed nothing. All it did was give certain people an excuse to do what they had always been doing. There is not, nor has there ever been, a War Against Islam, despite the fantasies of cultural essentialists on both sides, and the insistences of otherwise level-headed leftists. The United States is doing in the Middle East exactly what it has always done: defending its interests, acting with idiotically myopic pragmatism. The myth of American invulnerability may have been briefly punctured, but it’s not as if that hasn’t happened before – remember our little adventures in Indochina? And the security of American existence has always produced a kind of paranoia: millennialism, reds under the bed, Geronimo on the warpath, gangs invading the suburbs.

Not that 9/11 didn’t have its political and cultural ramifications. But when it comes to assessing its impact, our focus should be, if anything, narrowed: it should be on those who died on the planes and in the towers, and those that survive them. Politically, 9/11 is an empty signifier: its pathetic impact was so broad that now it can be used to advance any idea; it has become functionally meaningless. As a human tragedy, it is still very real – but it is not our tragedy, it belongs to its victims (victims who have been, it must be noted, sickeningly ill-treated in person while being canonised as political symbols). Everything is political, yes, but 9/11 has become saturated with politics. Perhaps it is time to return it to the human. Perhaps the most dignified and sensitive way to commemorate it would be to not commemorate it at all.

P.S.: As it seems to be impossible to talk about 9/11 without delving into the chthonic lairs of the conspiracy theorists, has anyone considered that Bush or Cheney might have been Iranian sleeper agents? In the last ten years the United States has all but acted out Iranian foreign policy: it has toppled Saddam Hussein, Iran’s most indefatigable enemy, and in his place installed a Shi’ite procedural democracy that is for all intents and purposes an Iranian vassal state; it has replaced the impenetrably monolithic fanaticism of the Afghan Taliban with a seedily pragmatic government entirely open to a bit of mutual back-scratching. Wake up, sheeple! Cauterise your eyes, bleach your skin, rend your clothes, VEVAK is running the whole charade.