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By Richard Leader
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Many sociologists, armchair and professional, see September 11th
as a watershed event: not simply for what it was, but in how it
was experienced in real time by a rapt audience on the internet.
The claim made is that it was the first major Western tragedy to
unfold thusly, with virtual participants. Like the classic question
of “where were you” when John F. Kennedy was killed,
the fact that so many people can only answer “huddled in front
of my computer” for September 11th is a point that many academic
people-watchers find compelling, especially if they have already
staked their careers on proving the superiority of internet based
forms of communication.
As such, reporting on the online disaster-experience tends to prize
its most salient features, focusing on the fairly rare occurrence
of on-the-street reporting in all its immediacy, while glossing
over the fact that much of the internet was incapacitated on September
11th due to the unparalleled level of bandwidth required to support
the spike in traffic. That people turned to the “back-streets”
of the web for information often had less to do with the superiority
of those avenues (something that the blogs-as-revolutionary-media
crowd has now taken and run with, despite the word “blog”
itself being almost unknown in 2001) but proof of their also-ran
status: people on that day really wanted nothing more than for the
front page of CNN.com or BBC.co.uk to finish loading, giving them
the security that comes with an authoritarian medium.
In order to cement their hypothesis, substantial efforts have
been made to archive and catalog the content of the internet as
it was on September 11th in order to preserve this information for
posterity and locate it within the historic record. The Library
of Congress, in association with Archive.org (a non-profit with
very close ties to Alexa Internet, a casualty in the search-engine
wars that survived by catering to the advertising industry before
it was absorbed into Amazon.com) and other corporate think-tanks
has created virtual monuments to the day with websites such as September11.archive.org.
The expectation is, twenty years from now, when people are asked
“where they were,” they can point toward their own “participation”
in the event, perhaps even to their own words on that day posted
at various internet fora, allowing them to contextualize themselves
in the tragedy. This contextualization might not always be accurate
however, and the encouragement of it can hardly be considered apolitical
but part of the same conservative nationalistic-fantasy that served
to make the true injured party of the attack not New Yorkers but
the masculine pride of men well removed from the danger.
While these think-tanks are normally fascinated with the subject
of gender (or sex, the two typically treated as indistinguishable
by these parties), endlessly pontificating on how women use the
web to talk about babies with their girlfriends while men go on
to create new and fantastic things, gender is strangely absent from
the discussion of September 11th. As a pro-feminist, it is not the
sentimental “threads” cataloguing images of international
support on that day—American men being especially moved by
a Palestinian girl placing flowers at a memorial—that held
fast in my memory, but the endless dueling between males that occurred.
I witnessed debates about who knew more, or even the absolute most,
about airplane frames, steel construction, or the equations for
Newton’s Second Law of Motion. I saw men who swore upon their
sacred math that the towers would continue to stand, even as they
burned, insulting anyone who feared for the worst as overly-emotional
Luddites. The contemporary male response to a tragedy that they
perceive as their own is affectations of dominance (much as they
greet the misfortune of others with “dark-comedy”),
something that is left out of reporting that would rather dwell
upon the electronic messages of safety and relief exchanged between
family members on September 11th.
Feminists and those on the general Left are required to read between
those lines, history itself having been constructed and colonized
by masculinity: the rosy picture of internet relations in the wake
of disaster—save for the overly-capitalized ravings of abject
fools that can either be conveniently ignored or used to normalize
the foolishness of men less abrasive—is one that protects
male corporate interests and their financial and philosophical investments.
Despite patriarchy’s somber maxims about repeating the past,
it seems that each generation of men believes itself to have discovered
violence for the first time. One man’s act of war is another
man’s act of terrorism and thus not all calendar dates ring
with infamy.
While liberal publications have been hammering home the point that
President Bush “lied” about Iraq possessing weapons
of mass destruction for well over two years now, such efforts have
been ineffectual. The Bush administration was able to shift the
discussion to the desire to create and possess such weapons, the
will to use them, and naturally towards the exigencies of an occupation
already in progress. The Left is in a war of words that they cannot
win: indeed, it does not—or should not—have the same
arsenal of speech available to them (our language’s panoply
of invective that targets minorities and their attributes), nor
the same claim to masculinity, yet many Leftist males continue to
labor under the belief that they can conquer in this arena and that
doing so is necessary.
To better understand this, consider the reaction of many liberal
men, especially white ones, when confronted by the contemporary
display of a Confederate flag, typically used by conservatives to
provoke a parallel masculine conflict of some sort; both in establishing
the male-credibility of those who are first to fly it within their
social group and of those who are first to tear it down, vis-à-vis
their own set of peers. The standard response is something to the
effect of “The South lost, get over it!” as if might
had made right in that instance, as if had the Yankees been driven
into cold depths of the sea it would have equally proven slavery
to be manifestly moral. It would not have—and it is evidently
not needless to say so.
Bush gambled on weapons of mass destruction: it came up “tails”
and he lost. The problem is not with him losing but with his right,
his entitlement (and that of all Western Society), to be in a position
to gamble in the first place. To focus merely on that loss, the
nonexistent weapons and not the move towards war that election-minded
Democrats rushed to sign on with, is to agree with patriarchal ideals
and to suffer a struggle on their paradigm, one designed to serve
a status quo of masculine power that requires the subjugation of
others. Thus it is necessary to both remove oneself from this struggle
and point out the illegitimacy of it and its fundamental irrationality.
To this end, I suggest that people dissatisfied with this paradigm
look to the archives of the internet, in search of where they personally
were in the early days of the invasion of Iraq. Look back to those
days where every unopened can of paint in the desert was potential
evidence, where people still ordered Freedom Fries, where things
were said that the men in charge of preserving the world wide web’s
contents as “historical evidence” would much rather
the public forget. (Something that invariably makes this “Posterity
Project” a much more difficult prospect than those searching
the neatly organized archives created for September 11th.) Remind
people of this, of the premature masculine assaults that occurred
and those, even worse, that certainly would have happened had Bush’s
coin toss had come up “heads,” somehow justifying his
decision to ignore evidence and embrace the less than credible.
This, of course, runs the risk of playing their game—if done
for the wrong reasons and only to highlight the absurdity of their
wrongness given the advantages of hindsight—but on the other
hand, it does display how mild the force the Left has been able
to bring to bear in their “Bush lied” treatises, compared
to the tirades they would have suffered had Bush lucked into telling
the truth by accident. That alone should demonstrate the futility
of playing the game by the rules of patriarchy.
For my own contribution, I offer portions of a “thread”
from a technology forum that I participated at during that time
period. The text is unedited for spelling or content and the time
stamps are preserved.
Topic: Ooppps... the french must learn to like
crow...
Patrick Cox:
March 23, 2003 07:54 PM
The US has just sized a chemical weapons factory and the
commanding general of that local program. Details are still
sketcy, BBC says several hundred 155 and 205mm shells filled
with a nerve agent. It’s a 100 Acre complex!
Not sure how this is possible, Iraq said they didn’t
have it and the French said so too. The senior inspector who
searched that area and town said ‘huh’ (he’s
on CNN right now, under the microscope and SQUIRMING).
Terry Penrod:
March 23, 2003 08:14 PM
That is a VERY interesting turn of events Patrick. What will
the French say if this is confirmed beyond all doubt? A 100
acre chemical weapons factory right smack dab in the middle
of a country that "has no such weapons or weapons programs"
is a pretty significant piece of damning evidence. It also
indicates that we may uncover a great deal more dirty little
secrets around Iraq as time goes on. Secrets perhaps like
records or reliable witnesses that can finally tie them directly
or indirectly to known terrorist organizations.
Of course we may never know the whole truth as so many of
Saddam’s own people have been eliminated by him and
others are still sympathizers. We also may never find super
secret underground caches way out in the desert. But just
this ONE example will prove that they did and probably still
do exist.
Cheers, Terry
Patrick Cox:
March 23, 2003 08:18 PM
Two generals, now the Pentagon is moderating their language
to say it’s a suspected chemical weapons production
site. The general are cooperating and providing details on
that facility and hidden caches (which if true, will show
to the world that Saddam did not destroy their weapons). The
BBC says there are now seperate reports about siezed chemical
warheads outside of Basra... apparently they ran the two together
out of confusion.
Patrick Cox:
March 23, 2003 08:21 PM
Additionally, Centcom is now saying that they have firm intel
that at least two of the defending Republican Guards divisions
south of Baghdad have chemical weapons and large caliber soviet
and south african artillary capable of firing them with orders
to use them. Psyops units are bombarding the heck out of them
telling them not to.
Terry Penrod:
March 23, 2003 08:22 PM
It hardly matters which report is verified Patrick. Either
one or both will prove that Saddam has been lying through
his teeth all along and planning who-knows-what?
EDIT: P.S. That was a response to your first reply Pat.
Cheers, Terry
Mr. Bigglesworth:
March 24, 2003 10:08 AM
From what I saw on MSNBC last night (Sunday), the building
they found was not on the UN inspectors’ list and US
intelligence had no idea it was there. I think this is going
to be a smoking gun. I also imagine that if the general captured
isn’t talking, he will be on his way to Egypt shortly
for some “convincing”.
Killrtech99:
March 24, 2003 10:32 AM
Yeah, some nice solid evidence would make a delicious “I
told you so” sandwich.
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