We Are Good
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, I wrote down everything I saw or heard in the media, and fashioned a sort of poem. A month later, I read it at San Francisco’s Edinburgh Castle pub, and then recorded an audio version for Salon.com. It’s now been published as part of the Public House anthology.
We Are Good
Rubble rubble
Plane into tower, fireball.
Reverse angle of plane into tower, fireball.
CNN
NBC
BBC
MSNBC.com, too much traffic try again later
Brokaw
Rather
Jennings
Firemen
An engineer
A psychologist
Black box
Rubble rubble
Plane into tower, fireball
Long shot of plane into tower, fireball
September 11, 9-11
Mayor Guiliani says “Walk home now”
Twin towers
Pentagon
Pennsylvania
U.S. embassies in Africa
New York phone lines dead
After several hours, friends finally return e-mails:
“It’s fucking nuts—there must be 30,000 people dead,” says one.
Another says, “I saw a bleeding America—it smells like one big electrical fire.”
Rubble rubble
Palestinians dance in the streets and hand out candy
Pakistan
Tajikistan
Uzbekistan
Why-I-Oughta-Stan
Where are all these countries? I’m American. I barely know the difference between North and South Carolina.
Aircraft carriers
F-16s
Boston airport
Box-cutter knives
Polls show 91% of Americans
95% of Americans
“Sign me up”
In Paris, pop radio stations play John Lennon’s song, “Imagine”
In Germany, a moment of silence at the Volkswagon plant
In London, the Guardian newspaper said: “it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don’t get it.”
Rubble rubble
Plane into tower, fireball.
Home video shot by a doctor
Video shot from the space shuttle
“It’s like Planet of the Apes out there,” says a rescue worker
“I reached down and felt a hand. Someone was still alive.”
San Francisco Opera closed
Where’s Bush?
Is it Taliban, or Taleban?
Click here to learn more about the Taliban
Angry religious bigots from rural areas—Sort of like a really hirsute Aryan Nation
1500 degrees
flying bombs
Cloud of dust
Pearl Harbor
“quiet anger”
cowardly act
Make no mistake
“There’s three of us who are going to do something about it”
Steely resolve
“They hate our values; They hate what America stands for,” says our president—who was elected by fraud and appointed by the Supreme Court. “We were attacked because we are good.”
We are good. We’re also fat and trivial and we don’t know jack about other cultures. It’s a long-ass plane flight to another country. We came here—some of us below decks—to start over. No fear, no problem. Raise a family. Start a business and hit the jackpot. Hit the skids and blame your parents. And now, our national tragedy is laid bare before us on television—our naiveté, our can-do spirit, our confidence, our grieving, all radiated back at ourselves. Hey America, how long can YOU look into a mirror?
Admittedly, we’re an asshole nation. But within the historical pantheon of asshole nations, we are distinct. In ancient times, asshole nations stormed a village, burned it down and took the women. Later on, asshole nations colonized islands and instilled their own culture—do natives in the Caribbean REALLY need to play cricket?. Today’s asshole nations are kickin’ it old-school—decapitate the enemy, shoot women in the head. That’s not the American way. The U.S. is refined. More of a corporate asshole. A confident, cologne-soaked, gum-chewing prick in a sharp suit who likes to throw money around. Let’s do business! Everyone kneel down and open your hungry mouth to our endless diarrhea squirt-stream of pop culture—Hollywood! Nikes! Big Mac and a Coke! Goes down easy, doesn’t it? We’ve saved untold millions from the cuisine of their own country. Millions have been enlightened by the dramatic works of David Hasselhoff. And if it’s the right situation, we’re there with medicine and sacks of rice, pay off the dictator, bomb a few buildings, set up a puppet democracy, because WE ARE GOOD PEOPLE AND IF WE DON’T DO SOMETHING, EVERYONE WILL SAY WE SHOULD HAVE. Those people burning our flag on the news every night? They’ve never even SEEN an episode of Baywatch.
Rubble rubble
Plane into tower, fireball
Emmys canceled
baseball canceled
Football canceled
Madonna canceled
Stock market drops
Airlines lay off employees
According to the Yahoo search engine, its number one search word, “sex,” drops down to number 17
Tom Brokaw’s voice
Peter Jennings’ eyes
Dan Rather’s tears
Katy Couric’s legs, waxed and shiny
Grief counselor
More grief counselors
“What must have been going through your mind?”
Cadaver dogs
Poor intelligence
“It was surreal.”
“It was like a movie”
“It’s like a Tom Clancy novel”
“Son, you need a phrase they can get their heads around. Keep it simple. Look at mine: ‘Line in the sand, Thousand points of light.’ What have you got?”
“The Evil One.”
“Well, it sounds kind of…science fictiony. Second choice?”
“The Demonic Desert Evil-Doer, aka the infamous Bearded Beast, hater of truth, arch-nemesis of the Federation of Good”
“Evil One it is.”
Rubble rubble
Rental cars
Laptops
flight manuals
Why can’t Guiliani be president?
Crop-duster planes
Hazardous waste trucks
tittie bars
Texas
Minnesota
Hamburg
Thailand
Egypt
Yemen
Philippines
France
Florida—It’s always Florida
Itzak Perlman plays violin live on CBS News—this hasn’t happened since about 1952.
“Any enemy of the Muslims will be punished by God”
God bless America
Members of Congress assemble on the steps of the Capitol and sing “God Bless America.” It was patriotic and spontaneous. But our politicians just can’t sing. At all.
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I leave the house for a walk. It’s a sunny clear day. The streets hum with a weird vibe. People walk like animals who’ve been hit with a stick. A group of second-generation punkers hang out in front of a café, wearing chains and green mohawks. Because I’m old enough to have listened to the Sex Pistols the first time around, I instantly think, “Look at them—hanging out goofing off, while the east coast burns.” I approach closer, and realize they’re crowded around a boom box, listening to BBC news.
——————————————————————————————
Rubble rubble
Plane into north tower
Plane into south tower
“Ho-ly shit”
Continuous coverage
NPR, CNN,
Terror From the Sky
America Under Attack
America Mourns
America Rising
America On Alert
America Fights Back
“I’m sorry to have to cut you off, General”
Operation Infinite Justice. Operation Enduring Freedom. Enduring Justice? Free Endurance?
First test of the president
Business as usual
Building an alliance
“This enemy hides in shadows”
“Prince Charles calls for calm”
Yassar Arafat gives blood (A Palestinian man in my neighborhood says “That was a good one!”)
increased security
no curbside check-in
Who is Osama bin Laden?
There are several Osamas
“No one else has the flair for terrorism”
“Get that bastard”
“At one point or another, we probably armed him”
The worst attack in US history
“The rockets from America will come”
“It’s been a rollercoaster day for traders”
“The American cowboy is reaping the fruits of his crimes against humanity”
“I’m a loving guy. I’m also someone, however, who’s got a job to do”
Make no mistake
San Francisco Opera to resume performances
There’s a new kind of terror
“We’re Americans – we can’t be terrified”
“You know they have other things planned”
properly outraged
Firemen get laid even more
“We haven’t had looting,” says Guiliani
Within the week, a television reporter is accused of impersonating a federal agent, a retired jail guard attempts to steal expensive watches, and a man is caught looting a Brooks Brothers store.
The Pentagon is the world’s most secure building
“You just learn to love the building the way you love a ship”
190 reported dead
estimated 5,000 dead
12 hijackers
18 hijackers
19 people were willing to take their own lives
At the Munich Olympics, terrorists at least had a list of demands
“Some of the hijackers who passed through New Jersey during the summer developed the habit of buying doughnuts by the boxful”
“I didn’t recognize my wife of 31 years”
Restaurants respond to tragedy
Rev. Billy Graham says to remember that ‘God is our refuge and strength.”
Rev. Cecil Williams says “It’s okay to be different—it’s not okay to be the same”
Rev. Jerry Falwell says this is America’s payback for gays, feminists, and the ACLU
Rev. Falwell appears on live TV, and says what he said was “stupid.”
Politically Incorrect host Bill Maher apologizes for a politically incorrect joke. His advertisers pull out. He apologizes on other TV shows. On radio. And in newspapers. Network affiliates cancel his show.
Humor is bad. Irony is bad. A new era of honesty. No more pessimism. The White House says “This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.”
In Nazi Germany, farmers were forbidden from calling any animal by the name “Adolf”
————————————————————————————————-
Rather, Brokaw, Jennings—The news keeps looping and folding and spewing regurgitated government-approved facts. I hit the mute button and put on some music. It’s a strange song from 1971 called “Maggot Brain,” by George Clinton and Funkadelic, which I’ve never heard. Against a video collage of rubble and planes and reporters and Talibans—a voice says:
“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time. For y’all have knocked her up. I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe. I was not offended. For I knew I had to rise above it all. Or drown in my own shit.”
The music begins, minor key, a lone guitar solo which goes on for ten exhausting, hair-raising minutes, alternating from poignant-quiet to shrieking wah-wah. In the recording studio, legend has it, guitarist Eddie Hazel was told to play the first half “like your momma had just died,” and the second half as if she was found alive. One take. As a soundtrack to the beginnings of war, it’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. It finishes. I play it again.
————————————————————————————————————-
Rubble rubble
Chunks of rubble for sale on eBay
Make no mistake
Pilots trained in the United States
Terrorists trained by the United States
Stinger missiles provided by the United States
U-S-A! U-S-A!
We’re gonna root out and whip terrorism
“We will lead the world to victory”
Sounds like a great time to be an American. Unless you look like an Arab. A man in Arizona shoots a gas station owner dead because he wore a turban. As he was handcuffed, the killer shouted, “I stand for America all the way.”
Where’s the line between patriotism and idiocy?
What does any of us—from any part of the world—really want out of life? A good meal, a little money in the pocket, a sky without bombs, the exposed skin of an attractive woman?
Everyone, light a candle at 7 pm
Everyone read this excerpt from Nostradamus
Everyone look at this funny photo
“We been bitten, but not beaten”
“The grief process will de-intensify over the weekend”
Berkeley. What can you say about Berkeley?
Telethon. Benefit concert.
Celebrities elbow each other to gain access to Manhattan’s Ground Zero
Who’s on the disaster A-list? The brand new Miss America, Katie Harman breezes past the roadblocks and signs autographs for the salvage crews—on used body bags.
———————————————————————————————————-
Rubble rubble
Plane into tower, fireball
Animated map of plane taking off, changing course, going into tower. Fireball.
“On Friday, every employee of Time Inc. received a small American flag in the mail. The flag, perfect for taping to a computer monitor or putting in a coffee cup of pens, was the gift of the consumer-marketing division of Time magazine.”
American flags are stolen from homes and cemeteries
“Go to our web page and click on the printable flag”
Flags appear on athletes’ jerseys and deli windows
Flags wave from porn websites, reminding visitors to give to the Red Cross—How does that work? Do you donate before or after you jerk off? Will you remember to?
“Hey, anything red, white, and blue sells”
cells in 34 countries
cells in 50 countries
Armed military on domestic flights
Buildings evacuated
Opening mail can kill you
“Why do they hate us?” say the headlines. Why are they protesting the U.S. all over the world? Is it because we’ve always aligned ourselves with corrupt kingdoms? Or that our military leaders chuckle during press conferences, like kids who blew up a frog with firecrackers?
American children are learning more about Islam than their parents ever did about Vietnam.
Bert is Evil
Faith versus faithless
Taliban versus warlords
Pundits versus pundits
Wanted dead or alive
“We’re barking up every tree that’s out there”
“In this battle against terrorism there is no silver bullet”
“The press is getting increasingly perplexed”
It’s the new, sensitive war.
Drop the bombs
Drop the food
Should we make it even more of a game and drop SUVs with the faulty tires?
“Attention, people of Afghanistan! Aid is being dropped by plane at a very high altitude using large parachutes…Despite the parachutes, the bundles will still fall very fast….Do not stand directly below them.”
Another war, another set of vocabulary words:
Partnership of nations
Porous border
Bunker busters
Flying radio station
Nasal swab
Cutaneous anthrax
Suspicious white powder
And a new schoolyard-bully style of propaganda:
“OUR forces are armed with state of the art military equipment. What are YOU using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry? OUR helicopters will rain fire down upon your camps before YOU detect them on your radar. OUR bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows.”
UN workers killed
Ground war
Middle East
No end in sight
Collateral damage
Media censored
Conflicting accounts
Protests in the thousands
Unemployment
Recession
Sounds like 1973 all over again. Does this mean we have to listen to “Bad Bad Leroy Brown”?
What can we really do? We seek answers through friends and family. We look a little closer at ourselves. We rally around the flag. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to listen to what my government advises, and focus on what’s important—keeping this country strong. Like the car commercials say, “Keep America Rolling.” I’m going to get on with life, and forget about all those other countries and their confusing religions. I’m going to the mall, eat too much at the food court, and buy things I don’t need, with money I don’t have. Because America needs me.
(Original audio recording for Salon located here; that version was then downloaded and remixed by Australian musician Darren Langlands into a CD, along with remixes of Bill Hicks and William S. Burroughs.)