This Present Darkness...Part One (American Revelation, One Shots, 9/11 Edition.)

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. 

I turn this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke. 

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

It's September 11th.

And the first thing I saw when I logged on to Twitter after work this morning was this.

Let me tell you what I saw that day, Mr. Krugman. I was a college student at a small community college in Northern Michigan at the time.

Americans did not take even one damn thing on that day "pretty calmly." If they looked calm, it was because most things very quickly shut down for the day, or didn't open at all, including the college. I had to work because one of my two jobs was working in the school cafeteria and students gotta eat, and everybody was glued to the two TV's we had on and even my Mom stopped by to check on me, her own classes in Traverse City having also been canceled for the day.

 That morning I was arguing with my ex-wife on Yahoo Messenger when all the sudden she starts freaking out. Right around that time, I get a knock at the door, my neighbor Ali, an international student from Saudi Arabia, stopping by to ask if he can bum a smoke for the walk to class.

I invite him in, and grab two cigarettes from the pack sitting on top of my Dorm-sized refrigerator. Salaam, brother. Also, because my ex-wife is demanding in ALL CAPS that I turn on the TV, I do exactly that. It's set to CNN. I see a view of the World Trade Center in New York City, one of the twin towers is burning. Why this is so does not yet have time to register. My neighbor and I watch in mute horror as a Boeing 767, apparently aimed deliberately, like a missile, crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

He says something in Arabic that I don't catch, and looks me right in the face and says "Please God, brother, let it not be Muslims that did this."

My friend was part of a small group of Muslim international students, in the 2001-2002 school year they were from Egypt, a couple of the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Just kids, most of them, A few into their 20's a bit. One of the two Egyptians was older and had served two years in the Egyptian Army. They were part of a few dozen overall foreign students, others were from places as diverse as India, Latvia, Nigeria and South Korea.

A lot of those kids...and not just the Muslims either...were understandably nervous.

Some of them asked the older students, their white friends and those of us that were veterans to go with them when they went off campus or to go grocery shopping or whatever. That year, there were three veterans including me, and a currently-serving Army Reservist in the dorms. We, and those others that these kids asked went out with them when we could. Truth is, a lot of them would ask for rides and stuff anyway because many of them didn't have cars, so it kinda followed that we might accompany them. It wasn't a big deal, it was the right thing to do.

It's not just a matter of religion. Imagine being young and far from home and the country you're in gets attacked. Imagine being from one of the countries that is, or is seen as, being responsible. That can be a dangerous space to be in. For most it wasn't, but for a few it was.

The two Turkish girls in the Muslim student group asked me the following Saturday morning if I could take them to Walmart to go grocery shopping. Now, neither of these two was at the time particularly religious, they for the most part dressed the same as most Americans do, and these two were very much the shorts-and-T-shirt type anyway...much to the frustration of some of the more religious of their friends. They'd probably be Okay on their own, I thought. But I kinda needed some stuff myself, and I didn't have anything to do and didn't have to work that day. So said alright, let's go. In the car I put in one of my Michael Jackson CD's and we were off.

One of the girls kept getting dirty looks and judgmental stares at the store...all from the same basic type of white people...and it took us a second to realize why. She was wearing a red and white T-shirt that was for some Association Football team where she was from in Turkey, and it had a large Turkish flag right on the back and a fair amount of Turkish writing I didn't understand. This wasn't some kind of a statement...this was her normal clothes, stuff she wore every day being that she was a rabid Football (COUGH...I mean Soccer) fan anyway, and that was her team. If she'd been wearing MJ's number 23 jersey and a Chicago Bulls cap on backwards nobody would have so much as noticed. But here we were.

I was wearing my ratty old woodland-pattern camouflage BDU jacket, a school T-shirt and jeans. I took off my jacket and put it on her, and put my arms around her so she'd feel safe, and we just walked around the store that way, again suddenly two anonymous twenty-somethings out grocery shopping with their other buddy on a Saturday morning and no one cared. My jacket was like a tent on her small frame, she leaned into me like a long-lost lover and you can just imagine what it must have been like for her, to be far away from home and suddenly in a fairly intimate sort of space with a man she'd mostly just said "What's up" to in the hall, ordered food from in the cafeteria and traded some rap albums back and forth with or sat next to in the pit watching the Big Screen. 

Not only that, but in this space and feeling whatever she was feeling while wrapped in the military symbolism of and part of the uniform of and wearing the flag of a country that is a de facto and de jure ally, but one with which her country and her culture was often seen as being in conflict with. And all this to avoid the judgment of fools she'd never know, who'd never care about her.

She was, kind of understandably, stuck on me for awhile after that and we became very close friends...close enough that some of the Muslim dudes and a couple of our Christian friends from more traditional cultures joked...or said honestly and with varying degrees of earnestness...that we should get married. It was just her reacting to the situation, though, and me being a man even if it was with good intentions. We weren't even dating, officially, and it never "officially" rose to that level and we liked it that way.

My ex-wife, however, heard things, and angrily assumed I had a new girlfriend and took it out on me accordingly. Worse, she'd had a class with this girl the previous semester and they didn't get along.

My ex-wife was Pentecostal, and caught up in the religious craziness of the immediate aftermath to 9/11, which those people saw as part of the run-up to the End Times, because after all, what isn't?

Because that's what they do. The world is ending, why should we give a shit. Send me $20 and I'll give you the Truth!

You may, if you like, imagine how well that went for me. These are people who see demons in every shadow, behind every act outside of their narrow space of holiness, and who write books to that effect.

Yeah, Bush tried to help, I'll grant him...and Krugman...that. A vast swath of American culture and learning and media, even capitalism itself did too. The Bible Thumpers and the rednecks simply ignored it all, because it wasn't what they wanted to see.

My ex-wife, and those like her? Bush wasn't their guy. Hell, I had to damned near yell at her about it to even get her to pay attention, let alone vote. Hell, to a great extent Trump isn't even their guy, not even with Pence. They just like that he says racist shit and pisses off people they don't like. To her credit, my ex is not a Trump Supporter.

But my ex was all in for McCain/Palin in 2008, and she wanted Sarah, not Captain Queeg, and said as much many times. So she's perfectly fine with where all this crap started.

Today there is a wide stream of woo woo bullshit and various strands of hate all working their way through American life. It's beginning to be aggressively countered, finally, just as it was in the days after 9/11. But just as it was then it's completely ineffective against those who will not listen, who simply don't want to HEAR anything.

My ex, to my knowledge, never gave a fuck about one thing George W. Bush ever said.

Conservatives like George W. Bush, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney, or me, the ad guys like Rick Wilson, the philosophical motherfuckers like Bill Kristol or Max Boot, and the dedicated crew of the Lincoln Project...they're all based to one extent or another on facts, philosophy and reason. Sure, they might have a different view of things than liberals do...but if you peel back the layers of the onion far enough there's some kind of verifiable basis and baseline for what they'll do, or say, or how far they'll push something.

Hell, even Radical Islam can be said to be based on something greater than emotionalism and resentment.

My ex-wife, her beliefs, and the people like her are so removed from the writings of St. Augustine or Martin Luther or even any scholarly interpretation of the Word...or from Plato, Hayek, or even Rand...and so hopped up on apathy or outrage in turn, and on their Rama Rama Ding Ding bullshit that they might as well be Hare Krishnas, or even Atheistic Communists, for how much or how well their beliefs relate to what is actually in the canons of Christianity or Conservatism.

So where the hell do these people get off judging anybody else, anyway?

To people like my ex-wife, George W. Bush and every last one of the Never Trumpers might as well be Latte-drinking New York City liberals, or Martians, and people like my Turkish friend from college aren't even real unless they're seen as a threat in some way.

A majority of the people I deal with every day, on either side of the political fence, haven't the slightest who Paul Krugman is, nor he them, and it shows.

Nixon, Reagan and all those other guys, they didn't pay people like Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes to be the Chucklefuck whisperers. They paid them to stir up racism so Republicans could get elected, because that was one motherfucker of a lot easier than trying to explain macroeconomics to morons.

To a solid minority of us, one that's maybe even big enough to split this country and plunge us into chaos and war, this is what's real: If Trump says we're getting along very, very well with the Taliban, then by God and sonny Jesus they'll get along with the fucking Taliban. 

Call it malice or stupidity or vicious blind tribal loyalty, but these motherfuckers will at least pretend to feel more kinship with illiterate boy-raping, Opium-smoking drug running thugs that can't even read the serial numbers on their old ass Soviet-era Kalashnikovs and RPG-7's and that took money from the fucking Russians...their other blood enemies...to kill our troops, and who are hated even by most Muslims especially the ones who have to live around them, than they'll feel for most Americans, and all because of something that Trump said.

And they will feel it on this day, in this space. The next thing I saw after Krugman's post was an article about the famous "Falling Man" photograph. Think about that for a second.

Think about what kind of head-space you gotta be in to maybe see the white guy with the limp and the old Air Force BDU jacket and the chattering foreign college students as enemies, but maybe see the people that sheltered, supported and armed Osama Motherfucking Bin Laden as your friends.

And all because, like Paul Krugman, they can't or don't want to acknowledge that there are other people, with other perceptions, other stories...they only choose, and choose with malice aforethought at that, to refuse to see from an even worse perspective.

And they'll gladly be used by the ultra-rich, who won't care if the pawns die, so long as their hedge fund is up a couple of points. Burn down the world in so doing, and they'll call it a win if they're allowed by their masters to pretend to rule the ashes.

Think about that, on this day. I have been adamant for months about where this can and will go if it's not stopped, and stopped now, with sufficient finality and numbers that nobody gets any funny ideas.

As it looks now, to simply stop it, to vote Republicans and Trump out, to drive them from power in the Constitutionally prescribed manner is not a big lift. But it's what comes after that worries me, and there will most certainly be an after. We have to do more than simply stop it, or they will just break off a piece of America, downsizing, peace with honor, yo. Declare victory and start buying weapons from the fucking Russians and learning the arts of insurgency and war from the goddamned Taliban and then it will never end, except perhaps with sun-bright flashes in the vast sea of night.

We have to get these people out of power and we have to do it now, with what we have.

Or there's gonna be a lot more memorial walls and a whole hell of a lot more dead people.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; 

I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

~Facing It, by Yusef Komunyakaa, US Army Veteran  

Part Two.