Whose Lives Matter?

A meditation on 9/11, war and political assassinations.

Today is September 11. As has happened on every anniversary since 2001, people will gather at the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan to remember the nearly 3,000 who were killed that day. Survivors will take turns reading their names. It is happening now as I write. If you, like me, are from the tri-state area, you probably know people who died that day. I will think of William McGinn, a firefighter who lived near us in Riverdale, whose young son was friends with ours, and who ran into the Towers as everyone else was fleeting. I still remember him telling me how they had traveled to Washington DC with their kids and how much he enjoyed showing them the national monuments. And I will think of Tatiana Ryjova, a Russian immigrant who had recently taken a job as a meeting coordinator for Regus Business Centres on the 93^rd floor of the south tower. We weren’t close, but she was an avid swimmer in a lake upstate that my family also spends time by, and her loss shattered her family.

Sunset at the South Pool of the 9-11 memorial, December 22, 2012, originally posted to Flickr by DMZ111 at https://www.flickr.com/photos/34388261@N08/8306069668

Though, like many New Yorkers, including survivors, who would like the annual ceremony to be downsized because the reading of the names revives the trauma and makes it harder to move forward, I understand why this civic ceremony exists. And I appreciate that it’s one of the rare events where political leaders from our hyper-polarized nation choose to stand side-by-side. I also appreciate that the memorial ceremony is relatively apolitical compared to the 9/11 Museum, which makes a half-billion dollars a year in ticket sales, and which takes visitors through a gruesome reconstruction of the day.

As critic David Klion wrote in New York Magazine on the occasion of the 20^th anniversary, the museum does many unhelpful things to its visitors. “Minute by minute, visitors are effectively re-traumatized as we are taken through the events of the day and how they were experienced in real time….The explanatory text throughout this section is anodyne, but presenting a day of mass destruction and terror — of heroic cops and firefighters and stoic leadership from the likes of Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani — is not a neutral act; it cannot help but replicate the jingoism that was so pervasive after 9/11 for those of us old enough to remember it.” He notes, for example, that visitors are not told about the CIA’s role in backing the Afghan mujahadeen who incubated al Qaeda, or that there are differences between the terrorist group’s Islamist ideology and the religion practiced by more than a billion people worldwide. A clip of comedian Jon Stewart from his first Daily Show appearance after the attack is shown, but “nothing about his subsequent efforts to shame Congress into providing health care for first responders.”

Like everything else, how we process and make meaning of real historical events is political.

Do Black Lives Matter? Do All Lives Matter?

On September 1, the US Navy struck a boat from Venezuela, killing all eleven on board. Our government says they were drug smugglers, but we’ll never know for sure because the Trump regime wants to demonstrate to the world that international law governing how nations are supposed to interdict hostile vessels in international waters doesn’t apply to us. Israel, America’s close ally in the Middle East, tried to kill a group of senior Hamas officials in Qatar on September 9, blowing up chances for any kind of US-brokered peace deal. The White House is said to be “furious” about Israel’s unilateral action, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Trump to hold Netanyahu to account. Meanwhile, six Israeli civilians were murdered by Palestinian gunmen in Jerusalem, while famine stalked Gaza and Israel continued to bomb its way into strangling Gaza City.

And then yesterday conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to a college audience in Utah. I’ve noticed some people on the liberal-left complaining that choosing to use that word is wrong, because it wasn’t applied to Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman after she was killed by a rightwing lunatic three months ago, but it is appropriate to both cases. When people engaged in the political arena are deliberately targeted and killed, “assassination” – a word that summons up all kinds of political connotations—is the right word to use.

We’re now in the process of making meaning of Kirk’s life and death. Hopefully, that’s all we will fight over.

A year and a half ago, the Democracy Fund released the findings of an in-depth study of American attitudes towards democracy, with close attention to the topic of political violence. Its findings ought to have been reassuring. “A substantial majority of Americans, whether Democrats, Republicans, or independents, rejected sending threatening messages to leaders of the other party, harassing members of another party online, and using violence to advance political goals.” Only 2% of Democrats and 4% of Republicans consistently justified the use of political violence against people or politicians they disagreed with.

Right now, people on the right who liked or loved Charlie Kirk are angry. Some, including President Trump, are blaming the left for inflammatory rhetoric that they believe incited someone to target Kirk. Trump has ordered flags be flown at half-mast, something he didn’t do for Melissa Hortman. In turn, some on the left are also getting angry, recalling that Kirk stirred up hatred against all kinds of vulnerable groups, declared that some gun deaths—while unfortunate—were worth the cost of gun freedom, and attacked Jews for being “some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes.”

Now is one of those times when it’s important to be smart, and not only be right. Kirk was a human being with a family. The way to defeat bad ideas and movements is with better ideas and movements, not assassinations. The vast majority of us want to live in a country we can disagree with each other without fear of arrest or a bullet. And if you want that to be true, it has to apply to people you really disagree with. Let’s hope that the people on the other side agree.

And as the writer Jeff Sharlet, who has journeyed deep into the heart of darkness that is our country’s slow civil war, just wrote, “I’m begging you to not pour gasoline on a fire.”

Reading Recommendations

--The one thing to read about conservative columnist Bari Weiss’ “remarkably successful shell game,” now that she’s about to leap from running her Free Press newsite to running CBS News, by Jay Michaelson.

--The one thing to read about how too many mainstream journalists are falling in line behind the Trump regime’s framing of its use of the National Guard to “fight crime” rather than reporting how they’re misrepresenting the truth, with some deep history on how this has afflicted the profession since the days of the Gulag and the Cold War, by Andrea Pitzer.

--The one thing to read about shifting the “No Kings” strategy from protests to power-building, by political strategist Will Robinson.

--The one thing to read about shifting how we talk about authoritarianism to language that works without requiring prior assumptions or knowledge, by Rynn Reed and Ravi Mangla.

Keeping Tabs

—Gotta love this website: HandsOffChicago.com (and so far, it’s working!).

—Not loving this new one: AmericaByDesign.gov.

—But it inspired this hilarious response: AmericaByDesign.fail.

—One smart way that US veterans are responding to the National Guard deployment in DC.

End Times:

Remember when we were all talking about this? Good times.