Body Parts

A Jewish Reflection on 9/11

A wonderful long-view perspective on 9/11 and American exceptionalism. Quite moving.

 

Click this link to a Chabad newsletter with the video embedded.

http://www.jewishriverside.com/library/article_cdo/aid/1612147/jewish/The-Covenant.htm

My Post-9/11 Political Journey

After 9/11, I shifted in political allegiance from social liberalism, believing in big government and enlarging the public sector and welfare, to conservativism, believing in individualism, enlarging personal liberty and the free markets, wanting to reduce the reach and power of big government. I had reasons, not just motivations, for this shift in philosophies, but I expressed the shift primarily in political verse, not in disquisitions of political philosophy.

I wrote several long plays, and a third, left yet unfinished, to provide the vehicles for political verse. I wanted to write poems of public rhetoric, Shakespearean in inspiration, for recitation in public assembly.

The results are several long poems, below. I think I successfully conveyed the political chaos, e.g., riots in the streets by welfare dependents in Europe, that has come to pass.

Sarah and Louise's How and When Speech

From "Restoration (Tractor)"

The play is set in rural West Virginia, where evacuees from New York City have been sent by the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist nuclear strike on New York. The nation's politics are in chaos. Sarah and Louise, both young women, become political leaders. They successfully enlist the support a club of middle aged men who restore steam locomotives, convincing them that America needs a new government built on a new society. The club members ask, who are the persons to undertake such a profound mission and when is the right moment to do so. The speeches answer these questions. The speeches interweave quotations by Thomas Jefferson (stanzas followed by asterisks) with speeches composed by the playwright. (Some stage direction and conversations are omitted.) Sarah leads off:

SARAH
How might a government end,
Should all its officers resign of necessity,
Or the solvent of disorder melt it in adversity?
What becomes of the powers it exercised then?

LOUISE
Necessities which dissolve a government, do not convey its authority
To an oligarchy or monarchy.
They throw back, into the hands of the people,
The powers they had delegated and leave them
As individuals to shift for themselves.*

SARAH
Who shall constitute a new government?
Who are best suited in virtue and sentiment?

LOUISE
Those who labor in the earth
Are God’s chosen people,
Whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit
For substantial and genuine virtue.*

SARAH
It is the focus in which He keeps alive that sacred fire,
Which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.
Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators
Is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation
Has furnished an example.*

SARAH
Who shall constitute a new government?
Who are best suited in virtue and sentiment?

LOUISE
I think we shall be so, as long as agriculture is our principal object,
Which will be the case, while there remains vacant lands in any part of America.
When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe,
We shall become corrupt as in Europe,
And go to eating one another as they do there.*
The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government,
As sores do to the strength of the human body.*

SARAH
Every man, and every body of men on earth, possesses the right of self-government.
They receive it with their being from the hand of nature.*

Where does it begin, the spontaneity of majority rule?
Self-government cannot be taught in books and school,
Or arise by itself in the frontier’s rude clearing,
Or burst forth in city plazas filled with people fearing
To call a stranger ‘neighbor’ and ask neighbors for aid,
When no hand is extended for help but all to be paid.

It happens when we are doing something too big
For one person to build or his family to rig,
A bridge to span a river, a large home to please,
A dispute to settle, anything more than our expertise,
We incorporate others who consent of their will
For some of the reward to pay some of the bill.

Voluntary cooperation for projects, assent freely given,
Is how democracy begins and is prosperously driven.

LOUISE
Our natural rights are the gift of nature, but they grow in the soil
Of our labor in our land watered by the sweat of our toil.
Virtue is a tree that grows on our own property,
And wilts and dies when we live in dependency.
Our nation dissolves and we cannot set it right
Until our society is reborn within freeholders’ sight.

The mob’s clamorings for entitlements they claim to be owed
Are seeds of terror and murder broadcast and sowed.

We must earn back our country in this valley’s green space,
Giving to all who wish to labor a rightful place,
Giving birth to new politics on this hopeful ground,
And new government, founded again, free and sound.

Louise's Choose to Act Speech

From "Restoration (Tractor)"

The play from which Louise's speech is taken, "Restoration (Tractor)", concerns how evacuees from New York City, after a nuclear terrorist attack, cope with political chaos. In the monologue below, the character, Louise, a young, emerging political leader, seeks to rouse a group out of their political apathy into action. The group are older men who are restoring old railroad steam locomotives, hence the references in the last two stanzas to 'engines' and 'iron rails'. The setting is rural West Virginia, where the evacuees have been sent by the Department of Homeland Security. The monologue closes the play. Louise addresses the group:

To choose to act or live out phantom lives of virtual presence,
While about us order dissolves and the pulse of chaos quickens,
This is the choice history compels upon us.

The politics of democracy have collapsed into mockery,
Grand old parties spin like broken weather vanes on dilapidated barns,
While modern storm radars cannot see
The hurricanes raging in our streets.
The commons of our heritage is stolen
And sold in back-alley bargains by a thousand murderous gangs,
None swear fealty to any law but the lure of illegal gain.
The legacy of civility is torn by violence
And in its tattered tails no one can recognize our flag.
The battlements of personal property are besieged
By criminal regimes with no allegiance to our countryside,
No respect for privileges and rights, but beholden
Only to the treasuries of rogue leagues
Intent on national harm.

The horrors of mobs brawling and proud towers falling
Seem here like dim nightmares dreamed by someone else;
In our calm valley, it’s the date of first frost,
The prices of alfalfa and hay, and whether it will rain today,
That call upon us in the ‘Dawson Diner’ and ‘Food and Friends’;
But these semblances of local heritage are shadow play,
The northern lights of dreaming, the fraud of wish fulfilling,
A historical blink, some metaphysical wink of God,
That shall pass without notice into the future,
As unrecoverable as roadside signs for abandoned tourist sites,
Paint faded, words worn incomplete, unreadable.

Our country has to begin anew, here in this morn
With me and you, this inauspicious place of forgotten greatness,
Here, amidst giants of optimism, the fuel tenders
And silent engines of our confident past.
The rails of familiar institutions are torn up
And rights of way corrupted, but rebuilding must be begun.
In groups of five and ten, in unheated Autumn sheds and halls
Around the country, in fallow valleys, on misted hills,
In West Virginia, Colorado, old New England,
Wherever the land has a memory
And people remember how to come together
To reclaim in community their patrimony.

Let us be the first, my generation and yours;
Others will follow, and in a few years
When we put our ears to the iron rail
We will hear our nation pounding forward
With constructive life once again.

The Wound Is Deep and Wide, the Healing Is Thin

I've had difficulty grappling with 9/11 memories. The day was a horror for me and my family. As I have written on this blog, my daughter and son, living in New York City, were both at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Both walked out to Brooklyn before the towers collapsed and were safe, but both were scared and scarred. My daughter, working in the banking and finance industry, left New York and travelled around the world for three years. My son, attending college in New York, stayed in the city, but began his journey into Orthodox Judaism, discovering his Jewish heritage, as an assertion of light against the forces of darkness. My daughter eventually returned to New York and the finance industry, and recently married and lives in Manhattan. My son married and moved, following his wife's career, to Seattle; but both of them yearn to return to New York.

My personal reaction to 9/11 involved my deepest fears of losing my children. I thank God I did not, but that long day dug a deep hole of empathy for the victims of the attack, who suffered prolonged and painful deaths, and the families and friends who lost them. The empathy is like a black hole at the center of my galaxy, silently and invisibly sucking life into its vortex when experiences venture too close to its rim. I steer my spaceship as far away from it as possible.

I deal with the wound by sequestering it. I'm like a child, when it's out of sight, it's out of mind. No ritualization to objectify it, no therapy to cope with it, no immersion in it to deprive it of energy, no display of the bloody shirt to strike a political posture, I have rather let it exist untreated and so deepen my experience of humanity, even at the distance it is kept. It provides a cosmic scale by which to measure the attitudes and experiences of other persons, such as public figures whom I observe, a metric for the universe of emotion in which we all exist.

I discovered one can, I can, live with a big wound and get on with life, without being crippled or disabled. A great wound, as long as you don't fall into it, can be a foundation for strengthening other structures of experience, for coping with everyday tragedies, for healing of lesser wounds, for enlivening ordinary happinesses, for receiving the blessing of each day, for perceiving the openness of the future, for nourishing gratitude.

As a lawyer, whom I engaged years ago to help me deal with a gang of thugs who viciously attacked me, would sign off each memo and letter to me: Onward! Onward, it is, as in onward, Christian soldier, warrior of faith. Onward.

Another 9-11 Movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btL1cp7G_4w

 

My 9-11 Movie

A Different World.

Does the "Arab Spring" and the Killing of Obama Mean that Islam Has Turned Away From Anti-Americanism and Anti-Westernism? No! Here's Why.

The experts are mounting a new  interpretation of contemporary history that is, because of its optimism that the Muslim world has turned a corner, gaining uncritical acceptance. Their notion is that the eruption of street protest democracy and demands for freedom in North Africa and the Middle East, along with the toppling of several anti-democratic regimes, indicates that the average Muslim, or, at least, the average young male Muslim, who represents the politically volatile element in Islam, has turned away from anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism as motivating ideologies. And the killing of bin Laden, though obviously only symbollic in political terms, promises that Jihadism and Islamism have begun to wane as a power in Islamic social movement.

The problem with this happy interpretation of events is that it ignores the basic religious character of Islam, which remains unchanged. And that character is supersessionism. Islam is based on the belief that God's convenant with ancient Israel and God's covenant with gentiles through Christ, have been abrogated and superceded by God's covenant with Mohammed. From the Muslim religious point of view, there can be no Islamic tolerance toward Jews and Christians, no toleration that accepts the basic claims of Judaism and Christianity, until Jews and Christians renounce their blasphemy, which is their claim that their covenants with God remain valid. From the Judaic and Christian point of view, God has only made another, separate covenant with the Muslims through Mohammed, without cancelling his earlier deals with Jews as God's People and Christians as saving of gentiles through Christ. There was a supersessionist element in early and Medieval Christianity, but modern Christians reject it. Islam has not and shows no signs of rejecting its supersessionist ideology. As a consequence, Islam remains hostile to toward those societies--Europeanized West and the United States--which are Christian. That supersessionist hostility is like a store of gun powder, always ready for the lighted match. 

Further, while the supersessionist passion might otherwise abate in the breast of Islam, as Islamic societies mature, it will not, because the most dynamic religious force in the World today is Christian, specifically Pentacostalism. Pentacostalism challenges Islam for religious allegience precisely in the marginal societies of the world, which are unsettled by the social shift to modernity, from rural to urban social arrangements, from agricultural to industrial work. Hence we see the flash points of religious violence meted out by Muslims in Africa and Southeast Asia, where Pentacostalism is most vibrant.

Only when Islam begins the modernizing task of critically interpreting its foundational religious text, as the West did in the nineteenth century in the intellectual movement known as historical criticism, and renounces supersessionism as a historical mistake will Islam end its anti-Westernism and its anti-Americanism. There is no evidence that Islam is ready for this task. To the contrary, the Arab Spring is providing the opportunity for a profoundly fundamentalist and stridently ignorant religious party, the Society of Muslim Brothers, aka the Muslim Brotherhood, to obtain political power to mobilize Muslim states for its avowed purpose. It's putative renunciation of violence to achieve its aim does not mean that it will not seize the power of the state to achieve it. Watch for the Arab Spring to lead eventually to the further spread of anti-semitism. Violence will follow. And watch for the Arab Spring to lead eventually to more anti-Christian violence, especially in Africa, geographically close to influence from the Middle Eastern home of Mohammedanism. 

Pakistani Intelligence Had To Have Known of UBL's Residence in Pakistan

For 5 years, UBL has lived in a large, walled, fortified town north of Islamabad. Of course, the Pakistani intelligence services, military, and highest political officials knew. And tolerated it. Lots of pointed questions need to be asked in Pakistan.

Rot in Hell, UBL! Those Bullets That Killed You Were For My Children, And All, Who Were at WTC on 9/11

My children who lived, who evacuated Manhattan on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge, who have been shaped and haunted by the mass murders and horror of that day. UBL is dead! May the rest of Al Qaeda follow him to their graves. Carry on, American troops and security.

Opposition to Security Checks Is Fallacious Thinking on the Basis of Memory Failure

Complaints about TSA security checks upon airline passengers is now rampant, with suggestions that it is a violation of dignity, perhaps of civil liberties, without significant improvement in security? Without improvement in security? Do you read the newspapers about aborted and thwarted efforts to bomb airplanes out of the sky? As for me, having been scanned with a wand and patted down chest to groin by a TSA agent, I say, hooray for security. I rather be so searched, and all my fellow passengers so searched, and my baggage and freight searched, than die in an midair explosion or be atomized in a nosedive crash in a field somewhere. Get real, people. Do you want security, or do you want to spend the rest of your lives wondering if your children who died in the next bombing, because TSA refused to pat down a frocked fake nun with a belt of explosives, suffered in their last minutes, begging God for mercy to end their suffering? No one expects you to remember Lockerbie, but surely you must remember 9-11.

Why Is The Proposed Ground Zero Mosque Named "Park 51" When Park 51 Would Not Be It's Address?

Well, well, well, it pays to pay attention to names. The Park 51 reference is to passages in the Koran--passages about conquest. See the explication at The Astute Bloggers, which quotes Infidel Bloggers Alliance.