I have written here on previous 9/11 anniversaries that the day ought to be called something like the “National Day of Delusion.” I thought this year I would refrain from marking the day, but driving home from Mass this morning and listening to the radio I again got a burr under my saddle about all the falsehoods being propounded over the airwaves. Let us leave aside the fake grief that the media manufactures on each 9/11, and look rather at phrases such as “the terrorists were unable to change America,” “we have avenged the innocent that died in the attack,” “the new skyscrapers in New York City show America is stronger than ever,” and that old, but still reliably nauseating standby “we will never forget.”
Each phrase could be taken and commented on in turn, but the mass of ignorance, stupidity, and/or deceit they represent is so enormous that a few general correctives might be more in order.
- On this 9/11, Americans are marking an enormous U.S. military defeat delivered by an enemy who overwhelmed an incompetently led and politically correct U.S. military, as well as the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans whose lives remain unavenged, which is the only means of honoring wartime deaths. The time has come to stop treating U.S. general officers as demigods until they can prove they can win a war, or one or more of them are found to have enough integrity to resign and speak publicly about the cowardice they consistently display by silently leading their men and women into wars they know their president does not intend to win and under rules of engagement that make them targets not killers. I would propose that an appropriate way to mark future 9/11s would be to hang each of the service academies in black blunting to mark the manner in which their recent graduates have killed what General MacArthur described as their credo, “duty, honor, country.”
- The idea that the terrorists did not succeed in changing America can be shown to be a nonsense by the fact that every U.S. citizen has been, and will again become, the target of the national government’s electronic collection efforts, effectively invading their privacy and depriving them of the protections of the 4th Amendment. The reality that the terrorists have negated a part of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights — though not to the extent of the constitutional damage done by another terrorist named Obama — seems definable as an important change in the way Americans live.
- The new skyscrapers in New York City symbolize the widespread inability of Americans to face facts, a situation that is encouraged by their bipartisan political elite, which continues to ensure endless war by staging military interventions in the interests of Israel-First, Saudi Arabia,the elite democracy-crusaders in the United States and Europe, and now even Iran. The new buildings may well serve business interests, but they really symbolize nothing but a misunderstanding of the enemy. Does any sane person really think that the enemy regards those buildings as a sign that they cannot defeat America? Not a chance. They simply regard them as new targets, and probably are amused that so much more focus, effectiveness, and skill have been put into their construction, than have been directed against those who caused the necessity of reconstructing the buildings.
- The most important reality that we need to face and understand is that both U.S. political parties deliberately have created a new American underclass whose job is to die silently and uselessly. For twenty years and a month, the U.S. national government has profligately expended the talents, endurance, and, too often, the lives and limbs of U.S. military personnel — at the rank of lieutenant colonel and below, of course — and the officers of the U.S. intelligence community. All of the dead, wounded, and burned out from these organizations are much more the casualties of their own leaders’ actions and effeminacy, than they are of the enemy’s actions. These men and women have carried the burdens of war on their backs and in their minds, only to find that on this 9/11 their political and military leaders have deliberately lost two wars — in Iraq and Afghanistan — and have then used them to reintervene and lose a second time in each. They also find that during the past week U.S. military aircraft were attacking the enemy in six different countries, a fact that underlines the wanton manner in which the efforts and lives of U.S. military and intelligence officers have been wasted, and how much stronger and geographically dispersed the enemy is today than he was on the first 9/11.
If those who died on the first 9/11 are watching today, they will see a pathetic parade of notable personalities expressing faux grief and mock tears for them, declaring utterly groundless claims about America’s enduring strength, and spewing transparent lies about the nearing of U.S. victory over the victors of the battle on 9/11. They will also see the base wickedness of those political and military leaders who have since, the 9/11 attack, pontificated about how the dead of that day would never be forgotten, and how those who killed them would be destroyed.
At the close of this 9/11, then, those who fell on the day of the attack, and those who have since been killed, maimed, or made mentally distraught in wars never intended to be won, will know one thing for certain. They will know that their lives, limbs, and futures have been wasted because their national government, the two national political parties, and most of the academy and the media do not give a damn about them, save for the fact that their graves allow these grandees, on each 9/11, to continue lying about their intention to defend the republic, its constitution, and its citizens. The dead discussed herein may not be in the politicians’ “basket of deplorables,” but they clearly are in their “basket of expendables.” And, when you think about it, the two baskets probably are one and the same, together made up of those at times uncouth, always frankly spoken, hardworking, and hopelessly quaint Americans who tend to go MacArthur one better, by being willing to live and die in the name of duty, honor, country, and God.
