9/9/2021

Binge-listened to Blindspot: Road to 9/11. Fascinating. (I was thinking this was recently published but it was from a year ago). We all think we connected the dots, but we keep gathering more dots—the whole page is black.

On the Saudi connection: Roosevelt had begun forming an alliance with King Abulaziz in 1945 for access to oil fields so as to feed the war machine. Soon after, communist paranoia made us use it. All the wars beyond that point were for resources or anti-communist. The end of the war in Afghanistan lets us revisit the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights.

Interestingly ironic that Osama Bin Laden’s father was killed in a plane crash.

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There is so much reflection these days because of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with all kinds of new media, including social media. Most people didn’t have cell phones—I didn’t get my first (dumb) cell phone until 2005. 

On that morning I was on the El and was reading Greg Kot’s review of Bob Dylan’s new release Love and Theft. In the following weeks and months music became an encoder of memory. I recall listening to U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind quite frequently as well as Beck’s Mutations, and influenced my writing at the time as well. 

Today I was listening to a series of podcasts about the lead-up to 9/11 and his angle on it was that it started around 1990. (Actually, the beginnings were in the 1940s when Sayyid Qutb came to Greeley Colorado, and was incensed by the decadence of American culture). The CIA had been involved with the Mujaheddin since the late 70s. 

All the wars that took place after World War II were wars against communism, and more righteously for civil and human rights. Every war that we’ve waged wasn’t completely about that. It was more about protecting our property and way of life and oil interests—as was the first Gulf War, all the while cozying up with dictators and other unsavory characters. The definition of “war” has changed over time or has become rather euphemistic, such as calling them “occupations” or “operations”. But in the US we’re always secretly fighting the same old cold war based on our archetypal paranoia, and it’s just wrecking the world. Ultimately, there will have to be some reconciliation with ancient tribal traditions at odds with the runaway train of modernity. It seems almost impossible to do but if you look at wars as being primarily anthropological, then put people in those places that deal with cultural issues. I recall David Brooks saying that in one of his pieces during the Iraq war. 

The past couple days I’ve been bombarded with things about 9/11, and I’ve been taking books out of the library and watching videos and it all enhances my understanding of it. There was a comment that was made by someone in the podcast series about connecting the dots, but now there are so many dots that it makes the page black and you can’t see any of the paths or connections. 

We’re in a situation now where the generations are advancing as well and they look at the world in a different way, and traditions both stay the same and change. That’s one of the things I never understood about antiquity: how do you hold together traditions when the generations are always changing and they have more contemporary values? Conversely, I think antiquity also needs to ramp up its understanding of the modern world and not be militant against it as a way to move it in a more conciliatory direction step by step. I think it is probably the most reasonable way. But so far, the world has shown that it’s not reasonable and we haven’t moved the needle one bit since the end of World War II. Go back to the Declaration Of Human Rights and start from there with all world conflicts. But it has never ended there. For the US, it’s about its paranoia about not being special.