So exactly a week after my plea to preachers, politicians and military men to stop taking the names of the dead in vain, the 9/11 rhetoric has ratcheted up to levels we've not seen since last summer's Republican Convention. And the newest, most blatant, and most obscene offender is Karl Rove, who previous to placing his protege in the White House rarely left Texas. While writing this, I learn that the Families of September 11 have risen to rebuke him:
As families whose relatives were victims of the 9/11 terror attacks, we believe it is an outrage that any Democrat, any Republican, any conservative, or any liberal stakes a "high ground" position based upon the September 11th death and destruction. Doing so assumes that all those who died and their loved ones would agree. In truth, some would and some would not. By definition the conduct is divisive and, because it is intended to be self-serving and politicizes 9/11, it is offensive. We are calling on Karl Rove to resist his temptations and stop trying to reap political gain in the tragic misfortune of others. His comments are not welcome.
Such calm, measured words: I can onlyapplaud them. And, perhaps, help voice the rage they've suppressed in order to get results.
Like the clown with the bullhorn, whose White House jumped to defend his words yesterday, Rove used the image of the flaming towers to assert that the simplistic worldview he's been so busy selling now reigns supreme:
"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.
Citing calls by progressive groups to respond carefully to the attacks, Mr. Rove said to the applause of several hundred audience members, "I don't know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble."
And reading that makes me angry all over again. On September 11, Rove wasn't watching the Towers crumble, except in TV replays. He was on Air Force One, flying all over the South after the "My Pet Goat" fiasco, and that morning may have been the first time he, who'd rarely left Texas before placing his pet in the White House, spoke of New York except in scorn. He didn't stand, as I did, on First Avenue and watch the plume of smoke from above my head suddenly drop to my feet, didn't hear the shout - "The second tower's down!" He didn't spend time in the ER at Bellevue, as my roommate Dianne did (see comments on this post). It was all a movie to him, one in which he immediately thought to star his boy, who had so far been tanking in the polls. Restraint was not what he felt. But neither, at bottom, was grief or even rage.
I'll bet he's quite correct that not everyone's first response was to send the Marines. But to haul out rhetoric recycled from the election and call it a "philosophical comment" and behave as if the sentence has any meaning, any context, is a commedia all its own.
If anyone has made sure 11 September turned into and remained a sentimentalized, rhetorical, politicized bit of fiction, it has been Rove. One in which he now, no doubt, deeply believes -- even as he uses it in a way that defaces their memory.
Both the White House endorsement and the statement by Ken Mehlman make it evident, as John Aravosis points out,
that Rove's speech was no set of insider's loose lips. I won't try to
do the kind of complex political analysis that others, from Steve Gilliard to Oliver Willis to Digby to Shakespeare's Sister and the Kos crew, manage so adroitly, Each points out that the speech has every mark of last year's Swift Boat lies, of the Schiavo case -- a political fiction rolled out to distract from bad news for Bush at every turn.
I will add instead to the voices who note that this bad news includes a blackening scene from Iraq. See the useful summary of same offered by our friend Pepe Escobar:
Even the Central Intelligence Agency now admits that Iraq is the new Afghanistan - breeding a new, lethal generation of jihadis. Iraq has also been the new Vietnam since the day the resistance was born, April 18, 2003, in front of the Abu Hanifa mosque in Baghdad. Iraq as the new Vietnam replays - in a new setting - the movie of a superpower being subdued by a guerrilla war. Remember former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz's famous words before the invasion: "Let the desert be our jungles."
A mini-Tet offensive happened in Baghdad on Monday. In a city allegedly under the control of American and American-trained Iraqi forces, more than 100 guerrillas mounted a devastating attack on Baya'a, the biggest police station in Baghdad - employing successive waves of mortars, explosions, rocket-launcher attacks, hand grenades, sophisticated diversionary tactics and the sinister icing on the lethal cake, car bombings. Hi al-Elam, the neighborhood around the police station, was turned into a smoldering disaster zone. The guerrillas retreated after two hours, having lost dozens of men. But just like the Tet offensive, the message was clear: the writing, scrawled in graffiti, was literally on the walls of Hi al-Elam - "We'll be back."
Three days after this mini-battle in Baghdad, the Pentagon top brass had to face the fact that the writing on the wall is now becoming increasingly visible not only to tens of millions of Americans (60%, according to the latest polls) but to the cowed, Bush administration-intimidated Congress as well. Nevertheless, during eight hours of back-to-back testimony to House and Senate committees in Washington, the Pentagon still refused to abandon the rhetoric of "steady progress" and "victory is certain".
Read the rest: it's worth it, and a worthy counter to Cheney's "last throes."
Mahablog may say best what New Yorkers feel.
I'd like to ask Karl and his puppies to stand anywhere in the vincinity of Ground Zero and repeat Karl's fatuous, lying remarks to a crowd of New Yorkers.
Whole lotta liberals in New York. Whole lotta those liberal New Yorkers lost someone in the towers. Whole lotta liberal New Yorkers who lost someone in the towers might want to break Karl's jaw today. Karl would be well advised to keep his sorry ass out of New York from now on.
Junior got less than a quarter of the New York City vote last November, as I recall. Yeah, the people most closely affected by 9/11, who are most intimate with it, are less than impressed with Junior and his war on terra. [...]
That karma wheel keeps turnin' children. Take care.
I'll stand with my plea from last week, which hit some of the same notes:
The September 11 dead aren't real to any of them, certainly not to Rep. Cunningham in his overpriced Southern California mansions, or to General Hemingway, the way they are to us. To those of us who breathed remains for three months after, to my dear friends who lost dozens of colleagues on that day, to my brother-in-law the Philly firefighter who can't shake his memories of what he saw. (I just deleted an image from him that haunts me, lest I repeat the offense.
I want to issue a plea to not just the general, not just the president - but to all the preachers and politicians, even to all my relatives who send endless emails running images of smoky stone. Disconnect that easy trigger. Stop turning my neighbors' deaths into kitsch for your political ends.
The ghosts are watching.
As my title suggests, methinks the ghosts are about to do more than that. While their survivors and others, including our mayor, stake a politically neutral outrage, I dream the ghosts are going to act. They're donning black hoodies, like the ones in this video, and marching on the White House. Till they do, they're counting on us not to let Rove's movie run.
Karl Rove was also not in the Bellevue ER on 9/11/01. He didn't see and hear a woman crying in pain from burns, injuries, and shock. He didn't see a man sitting with an oxygen mask and a look of devestation, trying to take in what had happened--and probably failing. Neither he nor his pet came to NYC in time to smell the burning building-barbeque smell that came out of the towers for long after the collapse. He didn't risk his life to try to save others as Guliani and any number of police and fire fighters did.
My response to the attacks was to think that they were a very bad thing. Such a bad thing that they should not happen again. Anywhere. To anyone. Not because I felt any sympathy for the attackers or even because I want to forgo revenge--I could see dropping bin Laden in a Pakastani neighborhood and letting his co-religionists decide if they're grateful for his defense of Islam or not, for example--but because the majority of people hurt and killed in a bombing or war are going to be innocent. And I don't see how the damage done can ever be worth it, no matter how good the goal.
Posted by: Dianne | June 25, 2005 at 10:12 AM