25 Years

25 years...

A quarter century. Half my life. Almost the entirety of the new millennium. It seems like a long time. It's about a third of the life expectancy of a human being in the US, though it's portion is growing as studies record the drop that's become the norm.

Innocence. There is going to be so much prattle written about innocence. It's tired and I'm tired of it. Innocence is a state of not knowing, and depending on the perspective, can as accurately be described as naïveté, confusion or ignorance. It's a word we use for children, because they're not expected to know much. They're not expected to have much experience with the world or the context to know what we might try to teach them beyond that limited experience. It's not a word that has any real accuracy where a nation of three hundred million or so is concerned. None of those words, innocence, naiveté, confusion or ignorance, could individually describe the people within that number, but all four do describe them collectively.

It's a word politicians, columnists and talking heads love to use to describe the state of the nation before the attack architected by Osama Bin Laden. One of the only things I might be more tired of than the association between 9/11 and innocence, is the degree to which we as a people still let politicians, pundits, consultants, apparatchiks and the emptiness of talking heads define the meaning and give context to anything.

There's an enormity to the last twenty-five years. I would say no single person could or even should, but with the pathetic state of what passes for the things like politics and everything it touches (which is everything), the responsibility passes to those of us who find our purpose in the record of history, and the hope that we might be better than the worst of it, that we might try to make the best of it less unusual.

The truth of it though, is looking at the last twenty-five years through the lens of 9/11, what those have culminated in as the present, we're giving Bin Laden everything he wanted.

A nation of three hundred million, an economic and geo-political empire like that of the United States at the end of the twentieth century, isn’t conquered by the deaths of three thousand people, the felling of two buildings and damage to another. Whatever other description of Bin Laden may be accurate, idiot is not. He's dead now, but his legacy is ever present. The trauma of watching three thousand people die live on television isn't even something that can be spoken or written of in terms of whether it’s excusable or right. It just is, like rain or oceans or the sun or the moon. Trauma is the word for it too, even as there are plenty who disdain it and its entrance into popular vernacular. As a nation, we watched three thousand people, our fellow Americans, die on live television and then were subjected to an ever present loop of the footage for months. When you're cut, you bleed. There's no right or wrong in it, and no matter how absurd it is, there are those among us today who'd say acknowledging the fact that trauma is, somehow embodies weakness. An odd, stupid, cruel choice. A denial of both humanity and reality.

Was the death of Osama Bin Laden at the hands of US forces justice? Was it revenge? Neither really. Justice would have been an accounting for the crime, a chance for victim and criminal to face each other, some attempt to put back together what had been rended, an attempt to create a new whole from the pieces of understanding that are the real benefit of justice. Revenge? Al Qaeda mutated into ISIS, more or less, and is still out there, waging its sadistic, power hungry schemes on the world, including but certainly not limited to Afghanistan. Consolation. That's the more accurate word for it. But like so many consolation prizes, it's hollow in retrospect. It was meant to console us, but the degree it did and has, clearly hasn't provided much solace.

It was also meant to send a message, "We will find anyone who attempts anything like this, no matter how long it takes." That message seems hollow now too, considering the state the nation is in. Our Secretary of Defense can only be counted on to find a bottle. The president can, for the moment, be counted on to find how he might profit from... anything and everything, though it seems soon he won't even be able to find the shit in his own diaper. He has the current Director of the FBI who won't miss it, considering how far up the president's ass his head is and his investigatory record suggests this is the only way he might find it. I wonder if he can see the president's colon, with those great, bulging, bug eyes? Would he even know that's what he was looking at? Hard to say. It's clear though, the six justices who hold the majority on the Supreme Court will proclaim it gold, and say it's legal for every institution the executive branch can reach to be smeared in it. The Republican Party will cheer and blow their noisemakers, like children discovering the cake is being delivered to the table. Pundits, columnists, consultants and the everyday citizens they can find to do so, will all report back that their taste tests have indeed proven the Supreme Court decision correct, and whatever illnesses result will be assailed as the result of food dyes or vaccines or a plot by an enemy within our borders. Commemorative piles of gold plated shit will be sold to the mass who so fervently clamor for that state of not knowing, and put their unrestrained faith in these people to deliver it. A self fulfilling prophecy, logical in the persistence of its absurdity. The products of empires most neurotic insecurities are now at its helm.

The pundits will pund. The columnists will column. The "opposition" will feign outrage, send strongly worded letters and a never ending string of fundraising emails and texts. The shit show must go on, after all.

Is this Bin Laden's fault? Maybe in part. He certainly knew what he was unleashing when he planned to commit this trauma against the empire he sought to topple. It was his goal, inducing self destruction, because the murder of three thousand people and destruction of a few buildings wasn't ever going to do it. It was theatrics, but it wasn't just theatrics. He understood his audience, and he understood the stories they'd tell about what they'd witnessed, what they'd take from it, how it would latch itself to their most self destructive and simple instincts.

There is a not insignificant number of people who think all the responsibility for fulfilling Bin Laden's deepest wishes can be laid at Trump's feet. It gives him far too much credit for my liking or to seem accurate, and accuracy is my preference, even when it isn't to my liking. No, Trump is just the beneficiary. His single talent is recognizing when the conditions are favorable for a con, and how to perform it. The Islamophobia that was unleashed on 9/11/2001, and despite how many people have a desperate desire to not know it continued on 9/12/2001 and since, was his pathway to a political career he'd otherwise have been denied. Like Bin Laden, he understood his audience and how to attach his motives to the most self destructive, simple instincts in them.

That same Islamophobia gave the white supremacist movement, its various sects and strains, their greatest opportunity in half a century. Its ideological splinters overcame the division that had plagued them to take advantage of it too. The most self destructive, violent ideological movement in the nation's history found a red carpet, and peacocked its way to power in the form of the Republican Party, which had been willing to flirt with them for the previous forty years, found itself strapped to the table, legs in the air, loving every second of it, and proclaiming its saviors found as loudly and often as it could find a camera or an audience.

The War on Drugs gave way to the War on Terror, and it would create an infrastructure whose levers are now under the control of the people who promised to restore the nation to the state of not knowing. That's been transmogrified to a surveillance state apparatus none of the many masters of utopian fiction even had the imagination to render in scope and invasiveness. Putting their greatest works together barely even comes close. To be fair, the daily assault on and detriment to our collective humanity and dignity probably isn't something that can be accurately rendered in words. It has to be experienced. At the time of its establishment, there was no shortage of jokes about the fascistic sound of the name Department of Homeland Security, and it's now under that agency masked men are snatching people off the street, beating and murdering those who intervene, with no consequence.

Maybe no consequence will be more far reaching than how well the state of not knowing is progressing. The entirety of our information environment, all of its mediums and landscapes have experienced a constriction of historic proportions in the last twenty five years. We've had both the digital revolution and what amounts to digital colonialization, in the last twenty five years. What promised to be a technology putting the collected treasure of the history of human knowledge at our fingertips tips has been bought, parceled, sold again, and what's left is a collection of barriers to knowledge, to understanding and knowing. Social media has become the dominant window into this vast trove of knowledge and expression, and it has meant we are ourselves products to be monetized, marketed and traded. It was, at a point, part of the pathway to revolutionary movements growth. The Arab Spring, then Occupy Wall Street which drew inspiration from it, were indebted to the ability for free expression and free association to be practiced and for people who had little or no power to organize, to share information and knowledge, to inspire. Black Lives Matter began its ascension to being the largest protest movement in US history, in part through the ability of people who had been actively denied access to power or who by the passivity of circumstance were rendered powerless in all but possession of their bodies and voices, and organized through social media and the tools of the digital revolution.

That's all passed now though. "The algorithm" now dictates all. The algorithm, this promise of the road to monetization, had already done no small amount of damage. The algorithm, once brought to bare on this new technology has made it a machine of cult recruitment and indoctrination. There has been a great deal made about "radicalization." I distrust this description though. To be radical is simply to be outside of the common belief and understanding, and in a nation with so fervent a desire to not know, the desire to know and it's products, are radical. One of the things I've come to learn in the twenty-five years since those towers fell and a hole was blown in the Pentagon, is that in a nation so desiring of a state of not knowing, to know is radical. The difference, if accurately described, between radical understanding and cult indoctrination, is the thirst to drink from the oasis of not knowing or the desire to know. The algorithm is nothing but a false consensus, a state of not knowing what the consensus is, by making each individual believe they are the consensus.

The "traditional" or "legacy" media has gone through this same process. Where it once existed in uneasy cooperation with capitalism, that uneasy cooperation wasn't enough, because too many are attracted to it for its power to illuminate, and this is always in conflict with the state of not knowing power prefers.

We say, "Well, you should take all the perspectives into account," and its a thing that sounds nice, but where we have again returned ourselves is that the perspectives available to you will only be those who can afford to show them to you or are acceptable to those who can afford to own the means by which they are presented to you.

I know this, by a coincidence of circumstance. I am, and have been raised and treated as male, white and straight, and this was the connection to being the target of this indoctrination machine. But I had already been fortunate enough to have had too wide an experience and exposure to the existence of the lives of people who are treated as if their existence is only to orbit whiteness, masculinity, and the wealth and power that have used law and violence to concentrate and collect. I was, by nature or nurture I've never been able to tell, too curious to restrict what I wanted to know and see, and by the time this machine of indoctrination reached out for me, I'd already been too often bathed in the beauty and love of my fellow human beings it wanted to indoctrinate me into a fear and hate of. More recently, I've come to understand my difference, a disability undiagnosed until a few years ago, also drove a sense of wanting to overcome what barriers stood between myself and my fellow human beings out of a desire to escape the sense of loneliness and fear that is the fruit of difference the soil of this culture produces. I have never had the luxury of deciding I would only accept the recognition of my humanity, the emotional and intellectual intimacy every human being needs, based on these barriers of race, gender, sexuality, religion or status and so on. To accept these barriers together, and add the results of this disability, would have been to choose to embrace isolation and loneliness, and I fought that inclination all my life. I was, if I'm honest, in equal measure, too afraid to be alone and too fascinated by the beauty I had witnessed and experienced in so many of the places the great, the righteous, the prosperous and comfortable scorn. I couldn't turn away from that warmth, and nothing could reduce my knowing of it. It is the magnificent scar I carry, in gratitude and pride, the understanding that there is no such thing as being worthy of it, there are only those of us who have experienced and been changed by it and who hasn't. It was a mistake, a coincidence of circumstance, nothing I did or am, just the attempting to be, where I was, when and with who I was. The great shame of our nation is how we have reified the institutions which have installed and maintained the conditions to insure how few are afforded that experience. This is, at the foundation of all these things, righteousness, prosperity, comfort, race, religion, the labels for sexuality, class, all of it, the lines drawn around how we decide what we want to not know, and power loves a people who don't want to know.

And this is what Bin Laden knew. He understood the nature of power, at least as the United States has always understood it. He was as much a monster as the empire he sought to overthrow, because his covetous of that same power was the desire to use it to similar ends. He just drew different lines about who was deserving of it, who was to be afforded the privileges it could bestow, and whether he knew it or not, he was as much a product of the desire to not know that allows empire's imagination for violence. His familiarity with it is what enabled him to predict what that empire would do to itself in response to the trauma he inflicted on it and the people within it.

A person or a people who are so intent on existing in a state of not knowing can learn nothing. Because of this, we are on the cusp of fulfilling Bin Laden's legacy, just a short twenty-five years after his grand opus achievement, the murder of three thousand people. The empire is crumbling, as it likely should. Whether or not a nation exists and thrives after, is up to us.