September 11th - Then and Now

by Pa Rock
Cultural Historian

Eight years ago I was managing two county offices for the Missouri Children's Division and driving to Columbia, Missouri, from Noel, Missouri, two days a week to take graduate courses in social work. The trip was 270 miles each way, and I was doing two round trips a week. On September 11, 2001, I was sitting on the 7th floor of Clark Hall looking out over the University of Missouri campus when an ashen-faced classmate came in and told us that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. There were only a few of us in the class, and we were all shaken by the terrible "accident." A few minutes later we got the report that another plane had crashed into the other tower, and the thought of an "accident" was quickly replaced by abject terror. The professors set up a television out in the hall, and students from all of the classes stayed glued to the coverage.

Several things happened that morning as we followed the coverage. Word began to come out through the news services that the Taliban of Afghanistan might have been involved. (Nothing was even hinted at that indicated Iraq was involved.) Word went out that the local Red Cross was collecting blood, and several people left Clark Hall to go contribute.

Our small group of doctoral students had a pre-planned lunch with one of our professors, Dr. Marjorie Sable (she is now the Social Work Department Chair at MU), and we decided to go ahead and do the lunch. Margie suggested that we eat at a middle eastern place on 9th Street, ironically called "Osama's." My memory is that it was a very somber meal.

Driving back to McDonald County that afternoon, I couldn't help but notice the long lines at the gas stations. I got in line at a station near the Lake of the Ozarks, and waited half-an-hour to top off my tank. The price went up while I was waiting in line!

One of the things that I remember about that day and the days immediately following the attack was the vacant look on George Bush's face when he was informed of the attack while reading a book to elementary school children in Florida. Even without the commentary of any pundits, it was obvious that he was lost and had no clue what to do. He grew up pampered and cared for, and had no idea how to react in a crisis. I also thought it looked especially bad when Air Force One hop-scotched all over America like a scared rabbit before eventually getting the Commander in Chief back to the nation's capitol. Shouldn't our leader have said something like, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead." Isn't that what a real leader would have done?

I remember that former President Clinton was in Australia at the time of the attack, yet he was able to make it back to the United States and get himself to ground zero well before George Bush did his hardhat and megaphone piece of theatre.

And I remember Bush finally getting his bearings and declaring his wrath at Osama bin Laden - and going to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That war, it could be argued, had an element of moral imperative. The Bush administration soon abandoned that imperative as they confabulated a fiction to take us to war in Iraq, a move to secure oil export routes, oil field leases, and burnish the honor of the Bush family by capturing, humiliating, and killing Saddam Hussein, a man and a country that had no involvement in the 911 attack whatsoever.

In just a year or two our country went from a justified moral outrage to a sleazy Middle Eastern power grab and Christian fundamentalist religious jihad. Over the ensuing years, the Republican Party and other conservative elements in society have carefully created a fiction that 911 is a patriotic and religious symbol that belongs to them alone. They quickly moved to paint any and all opposition to the "War on Terror" as treasonous activity.

So anyone who spoke ill of George Bush, Dick Cheney, or Donald Rumsfield was publicly ridiculed as being un-American. (Remember Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks who dared to comment that she was ashamed of our President? The conservative press wanted blood - literally.)

The political culture of the United States seems to have gone into the crapper on the day Skippy Bush left office. Now it is perfectly fine to question the President - as it should have always been. But now that our new President has the audacity to not only be a Democrat, but to also be a mixed-race Democrat, it is suddenly okay, even glorified, to carry guns to Presidential speeches, yell down public officials as they attempt to answer questions and explain policy proposals, pull students out of school so they won't be exposed to the President encouraging them to set goals and work hard, and to scream at a President as he addresses a joint session of Congress.

Good manners need only be exercised when a white, conservative Republican (preferably male) is in charge of things, regardless of whether he is up to the job of leading or not. For anything less, send in the jackasses!

Arrest Cheney and Haul His Sorry Carcass to The Hague!

by Pa Rock
Public Citizen

Dick Cheney needs to crawl off into a hole and pull the hole in after him. One would assume that after eight years of systematically dismantling the Constitution of the United States and shaming his country as no other Vice-President has since the days of Aaron Burr, The Dick would have the decency to just shut up and go away. But one would be wrong.

This morning as I was getting ready to go paint, I had the CBS news program, Face the Nation, playing for background noise. Cheney was the guest, and he was in full attack mode.

The former Vice-President is very pissed that President Obama released the torture memos and shined a light on the crimes of the previous administration. Cheney is going at it hammer-and-tong trying to rewrite, or at least justify, the history of his glory days. He has very good reason to be in attack mode: he doesn't want to be the subject of civil suits that could put a dent in all of those Halliburton millions that he piled up while he was supposed to be serving America - and he doesn't want to go to prison - even one of the country club prisons frequented by Republicans and the business classes.

I used to agree with President Obama that nothing would be accomplished by dredging up the past and trying to punish the Bush administration officials for their stupid, dangerous, and treasonous acts. But that was then and his is now. If The Dick is insistent on flaunting himself in front of every available camera and microphone and bloviating about how much safer he made America, then I say let Congress, and the Courts, and the Spanish judges, and The Hague have him - and let the cow chips fall where they may!

America doesn't owe Dick Cheney squat, but he owes us for destroying our national pride and our reputation for fairness and honesty. Cheney and his minions managed to decrease our national integrity to a level comparable to that of North Korea in just eight short years. The Dick owes us for the deaths of over four thousand of our finest young people (and the senseless mangling of countless thousands of others) in a futile and needless war - while letting our true enemy, Osama bin Laden, a relative of Bush and Cheney's Saudi oil buddies, get away. He owes us every corrupt dollar that was funneled to Halliburton, Blackwater, and Kellogg, Brown, and Root for those scurrilous no-bid contracts. And lest we forget the thousands of dead and mutilated Iraqi children, their blood is on his hands as well. All of those bills need to be paid.

But, the former Vice President did not really come up with anything new or newsworthy until near the end of the interview when Bob Schieffer asked him about the leadership of the Republican Party, and, in particular, should the party be looking for leadership from a moderate like Colin Powell or a firebrand like Rush Limbaugh. Cheney took the bait and ran with it.

Cheney said, "If I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I'd go with Rush Limbaugh." He then went off on a mean little tirade about the renegade Powell supporting Barack Obama over McCain in the November election.

Translation: Colin Powell was a good nigra back when he was steppin' and fetchin' and carrying water for the Bush team - telling their lies to the United Nations with a straight face, but now that he has developed a spine - well...the Republican party doesn't need any nigras that have the ability to stand tall. Rush Limbaugh is a more representative face of the Grand Old Party.

How sad is that?

Thoughts on Terrorism

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

When we think of brazen acts of terrorism, September 11th is usually the first thing to come to mind. Middle easterners with dark skin hijacked four passenger planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. It was unimaginable that these madmen could get away with such an outrage inside the borders of the world's mightiest country!

In point of fact, however, September 11th was not the first attack by terrorists on the United States of America, nor was it the first to occur within our borders. As noted earlier in this blog, lynchings were still happening in this country fifty years ago. Some find it hard to let go of those "good old days." Earlier this week the Secret Service was investigating a sign that was posted on a tree in Vay, Idaho, with Barack Obama's name on it and the offer of a "free public hanging."

Idaho has a long history of being infested with terrorists. A white supremacist group headquartered near Coeur d'Alene called the Aryan Nations achieved notoriety a few years back when some drunken guards at their main compound opened fire on a car that had backfired. The inebriated fascists captured the lady and her son who had been in the car and held them at gunpoint while terrorizing them into near insensibility. The Southern Poverty Law Center and their founder, Morris Dees, sued that Aryan Nations on behalf of the two victims and won a $6.3 million settlement - which resulted in all of the group's property and assets being seized and turned over to the plaintiffs.

Today the Southern Poverty Law Center was in the news again. This time they brought suit against America's premier terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. Those stupid Klan bastards beat the hell out of a Panamanian/Native American youth (who was also an American citizen) named Jordan Gruver because they thought he was an illegal Latino immigrant. The incident occurred at a Kentucky county fair where the Klan was recruiting. They knocked the 16-year-old Gruver to the ground and proceeded to give him a severe kicking and beating that resulted in the boy having a broken jaw, broken arm, two cracked ribs, and assorted cuts and bruises. The SPLC and Mr. Dees won a judgement against the Imperial Klans of America and two of its leaders in the amount of $2.5 million. Kick that, morons!

Who says that Courts can't serve up justice?

These home grown terrorist groups conflate their idiot-ologies with religion, usually that of the angry Christian stripe. Take for instance, the case of Eric Robert Rudolph who roamed the American South bombing family planning clinics and also set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics.

But the king of all American terrorists has to be Timothy McVeigh - the man who brought down the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. His act of madness killed 168 people, including children who were in a daycare center on the premises, and wounded eight hundred others. McVeigh was one of the Posse Comitatus creatures who don't recognize any government above the county level. His anti-government beliefs were his undoing because he was picked up shortly after the bombing for driving his vehicle down the highway without license plates.

Our government went crazy after September 11th, quickly going to war in two countries, one of which had nothing to do with the attacks, but completely ignoring the home of most of the terrorists - Saudi Arabia. Nothing like that happened after McVeigh's attack on the Federal Building. There was no rounding up of crackpot militia members, no weapons seizures, no exhaustive investigations, no all-out war declared on Idaho or the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was all laid on the backs of two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and the case was closed.

What a shame that we didn't just go get Osama bin Laden after September 11th, bring him to trial, and close that sad chapter of our history. If we had targeted the man responsible instead of turning our wrath (or our greed) on the whole Middle East, our treasury would still be relatively full, our prestige around the world would be intact, our military would be strong, and thousands of lives would have been spared.

Our country has not seen the last of terrorism, from home or abroad. When the next awful act happens we need to react with a calm and measured response. If it can be handled as a law enforcement issue, it should be. And if it is an act sponsored by a foreign nation that requires a military response, that response should be quick, targeted, and to the point. We literally cannot afford another quagmire like Iraq. When we march into quicksand and can't get out, it is the terrorists who have won.

Come Fly With Me

by Pa Rock

Cowboy humorist Will Rogers is reported to have said that he never met a man he didn’t like. Well, my heart is not as pure as his, and I can dislike people based on the slightest of slights or the most insignificant provocations. But it’s not people that really get my mad game going – it’s airports!

I do not have the physical ability to remain calm in an airport, an especially dangerous situation for me because I live in Phoenix where the dumb-ass airport security caused a woman’s death last fall. You don’t mess around at Sky Harbor Airport!

Airports have always been cauldrons of discontent based on their operating procedures: overbooking flights and losing luggage being two of the more egregious examples of avoidable trip-spoilers. Weather also can have a large impact on the sanity of passengers, especially after sleeping two or three nights on an airport floor. And there's always the added thrill of never knowing how many hours you may have to sit, cramped up and sweating, on a plane before it actually takes off. Airports are not for the feint-of-heart or those with pronounced homicidal tendencies!

The biggest outrage at our nation's airports, however, is the Cretin Corps whose duty it is to rifle through luggage and remove obvious threats to public safety, such as toothpaste or hair gel. Osama bin Laden would have less trouble riding his camel onto the plane than I would trying to smuggle an extra ounce of Crest past the ever-vigilant, petty bureaucrat, cop wannabe who lives for the thrill of trying to provoke me into a stroke!

I might be able to maintain if the rules were enforced the same way in every airport, but each one does things in their own unique style. What flies out of Denver, may have to walk out of Kansas City.

And speaking of Kansas City (God, how I love a smooth transition!), those mangy varmints, I think they call themselves "First Line" or something clever like that, have one of the choicest scams in the nation. Kansas City fancies itself to be a world class barbecue town - just don't spread that tidbit to Memphis, Chicago, or the entire state of Texas! And because they are so well known for their barbecue, they sell countless barbecue recipe books and sauces in the terminal gift shops. The rub - they sell that, too - the rub is that if you buy their world class barbecue sauce, in plain sight of the luggage goons, they promptly relieve you of it as you try to board the plane. There are, of course, no signs to that effect in the places that sell the barbecue sauce.

Kansas City may have great barbecue, but I suspect that much of it is served up in the homes of the airport baggage screeners. I also bet that their families have some of the whitest teeth in the Midwest!

Hate Mail

I got an email tonight from a college-educated young woman whose work with children I truly respect. Imagine my surprise when I opened her email and found myself confronted with that stupid diatribe about Obama being a Muslim that has been circulating through cyberspace for months. Same old crap. It used his middle name over and over, capitalizing it in case one might have overlooked the significance, and it stated as accepted fact that he was a Muslim and therefore a danger to America. I wrote back and told her that I still loved her, but that her email was pure horse shit. I pointed out that not only is Obama a Christian, he chose to be a Christian - unlike many of us who were born into the religion and exercised little or no choice beyond family dictates.

Do you realize that Hussein is one of the most common names in the world? It ranks right up there with John and Juan. Maybe we should fear the Arabian name Aladin as well!

Do you realize that being a Muslim is not an evil thing, in and of itself? When Europe was going through a thousand years of the Dark Ages - 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D., it was the Muslim world that was perfecting mathematics concepts like Algebra and Geometry, creating literature, developing an understanding of science, and pushing the boundaries of knowledge and the arts.

America has undergone two major acts of terrorism in the past fifteen years. When a squad of Saudis knocked down the World Trade Center and hit the Pentagon, President Bush quickly got all of bin Laden's Saudi relatives out of the US and then declared war on a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. It has become, in effect, a holy war that stirs crap emails like the one I received today. If a person is a Muslim, then he or she must be our enemy. The other act of serious terrorism was Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City. Did a holy war follow that blatant attack against the government of the United States of America? Did President Clinton send in the military to clean up the scuzzball militias who hide behind the Constitution to spew their Nazi racist venom. No, but those terrorists were caught - unlike Osama who still roams freely thumbing his nose at Bush and Company. Some good police work would have done more to bring the guilty bastard to justice than this crazy war has done. And, it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper!

The war in the Middle East is costing our government $12 billion a month, damaging our troops and their families in ways that cannot be calculated, and destroying our credibility and standing in the world. January 20th, 2009, cannot come quickly enough!