Nineteen Years Later

It was a clear Tuesday morning. Driving towards another day in my second year of law school, I turned on talk radio as I sometimes did back then. In between discussion about things I can’t remember, they kept referring to an airplane which had struck one of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. The reference was almost light-hearted. They mentioned it was a smaller plane. They correctly recalled that, back in the Forties, a wayward B-25 bomber had lodged itself in the Empire State Building. I was interested but didn’t accord the event too much import.

All of that changed, soon after, with breaking news of a second plane hitting the other Tower. Perhaps you too remember the event. What you were doing and where you were. How you received the news.

I didn’t need W to stop entertaining school children and tell me, though he did anyway. A flying machine hitting a tall building is a possibility. A second occurrence within minutes is an attack.

My drive ended concurrently with 43’s short remarks and with my entry into a graduate parking lot. The very first person I saw and spoke with was a real Tom Ironsides character. I won’t say that “he knew,” but he did know a lot. Though at the time I didn’t connect the dots, the morning’s televised news synched with, if it did not confirm, his knowledge or suspicions. 

Nineteen years later, we have more suspicions than knowledge. 

A little over two months after the event that changed America’s nascent Twenty-first Century, I flew up to Washington on a 767 that I essentially had to myself. There, in the Yankee Capital, I met with and heard from some of the authors of the newly-enacted Patriot Act. During all the bluster, bragging, and war-whooping, they failed to disclose that the Act was drafted well before 9/11. Funny, that.

A little over a week after my DC excursion, I again flew north, to Boston. Over New York, exactly like the scene from THE SUBSTITUTE, the clouds parted, and I beheld lower Manhattan, still-smoldering rubble and all. The sight, smoke column aside, was pretty clear. Less lucent was why they, at the time so busy removing hundreds of thousands of tons of wrecked steel and concrete, carted all of it away for immediate smelting and destruction. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best forensic procedure. No mind. 

Back then, we’d only heard the barest mention of the many friendly foreign nationals being spirited away home, regardless of the conditions of their apprehension. Come to think of it, today we have heard little more.

We did hear much about the “new normal.” Sound recently familiar? We heard that things would never be the same again. We also got a load of civil liberty and general societal disruption not rivaled until the arrival of the hoax-ish Invisible Enemy, which was just as likely as not unleashed by the same people who helped take down WTC 1, 2, & 7. So many went along because it felt patriotic. It felt right. It took the focus off of the Anthrax hoaxes. It obfuscated lingering fears of the tech recession, now erased from official reports. There was more to occupy a frightened mind.

We heard plenty about war. War! War! Forevermore! And we got it. Them. Plural. Still in-progress after nearly two decades. In an event simply stiff with Israelis and Saudis, nineteen alleged attackers from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, operating in America, after transiting through Europe were blamed. Naturally, we attacked … Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, there is a notable failure of logic in this entire episode. 

A few years after THAT DAY, I had lunch with a senior judge, an older, wiser man. We ate at the greasiest, and therefore best burger joint in town. The conversation turned to the war(s). He wondered out loud what was one positive thing America had gained from the adventures. A fine question, then and now. Let’s see. Trillions in fake debt money wasted? Americans maimed and killed by the thousands? Foreigners annihilated by the country-load? Complete loss of international order? Domestic police state? Blow-back attacks and migration invasion? What? But, again, no mind.

Much of this, or most of this, is, after so much time, forgotten. We have always taken our shoes off at the airport. We have always been at war with Syria. We have always submitted to credit checks at the bank. We have always obstructed investigations and concluded the same with a giant question mark. We have always blithely ignored comprehensive engineering reports. We have always wasted lives and money. And. So. On.

WTC, NYC, circa 1990. (Fuzzy) Picture by Perrin Lovett.

Next year will mark the twentieth anniversary of that great, horrific turning-point in Imperial history. Not that I’ll watch, but I expect the government and their media pets will pay homage to the austere meaning – of which most cannot truly imagine and only the insidious few truly understand. I’ll certainly have my say, such as it shall be. Nevertheless, the history of the fading United States shortens. Maybe someday, someone else will suspect less and know more. They might finally discover and explain. But, separated by time, they will not remember. Even now, do you?

Perrin Lovett is a right-wing Christian nationalist writer and author in the American South. He would like to concentrate more on fiction, and he would really like to see Western Civilization survive. He also has no use for the luciferian idiocy at Facebergbook.