This is an updated version of this blog from the 10th anniversary.
As the time passed, we went from the 1, 2, 3, month anniversaries to 6 months, then a year, 5 years, a decade, and now we hit the 20 year mark and hard for anyone to believe, the war in Afghanistan is finally over. Not a single one of us would ever have believed “President Biden” would end the war after “President Trump,” the TV guy?, yeah, that guy, did not have the guts to follow through on his promise. After this one, thee anniversaries will tone down a little bit for the next few years and Americans will make a big dealt of the 25th Anniversary,
Let’s talk about the war. Another US war defeat; real New York Jets style choke job of allowing a victory get away. 93% of American supported the US invasion of Afghanistan and by 2002, al Qaeda had been decimated and the Taliban were out of power. So what did the US decide to do? Stick around and nation build. Now a vocal group of Americans are blaming it all on President Biden. Sure, let’s make it his fault as we have go to blame somebody, right? I suppose it is just human nature that many think wars will be quick and painless like those Oxford Classics students running off to France in 1914 thinking they were Achilles and would be home by Christmas. Americans have become used to defeat despite being the “greatest” at all things it does. America essentially lost in Korea, Vietnam is legendary, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. When you have Generals like Michael Flynn, John Kelly, and Stanley “let me tweet about Bud Light Lime and how President Obama is useless from a cafe in Paris while supposedly commanding a war in Afghanistan” McChrystal, did you ever really think you could win? Don’t fret though, in another few years, there will be another surge of jingoism and military spectacle for us all to enjoy and forget the last few “quagmires.” We can all rock our lapel pins again and yellow ribbon car bumpers asking the Almighty to “Bless Our Troops.” One has to say “Our troops” to make it feel like we have skin in the game.
Now, 9/11. I think there is a law on the books, U.S. Code § 741, that says nobody can write about September 11, 2001 without mentioning the weather that day: sunny, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature was just plain comfortable. A perfect day. I was doing what I did every day: attending to my homeroom teacher duties in W200 at Saint Francis Preparatory School in Queens, NY. The hallway teacher at the time, Barbara Kosakowski told me “two planes crashed into the World Trade Center and I asked “Was it an accident?” and she said she didn’t know. I was assuming they were small Cesnas (like Dana Andrews in Airport 75). When the bell rang at 9:35, I went down the hallway to W205 as I usually did, to say hello to my friend Phyllis. I saw she was sitting at her desk crying and I turned to the left and saw what was on her TV screen: a shot of the World Trade Center towers in flames with a billow of smoke going to the left on the screen. I assume shot was from atop the Empire State Building and if my memory serves me well, the TV was on Channel 7). Right then I knew, this was not an accident though, I was still puzzled. The noted philosopher Mike Tyson once said “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” and I suppose that was the same case: you feel like you just took a blow and you’re trying to get your bearings.
Since I had a free period I went outside and walked down the road a little bit and there’s a walking bridge that goes over the Long Island Expressway just behind SFP. I walked onto the bridge and you could see the smoke rising from Manhattan and there was an old woman on the bridge crying–she turned out to be a nun too. As the day progressed, the school was quiet and students were being pulled from class left and right with parents picking them up. I went outside more than once that day to smoke and as I walked back from that bridge over the LIE at some point, maybe around noon-1 pm, I saw two upper class students leaving the school (that SFP ‘double last’ or were they cutting? I didn’t care). I recall pointing up to the sky for those two miscreants to see the two fighter jets and said something to the effect of “we’re going to war”. A year or two later, when one of those students graduated, Mark Sljukic, shook my hand and said “We’ll always have 9/11 Sugrue”. Despite the many students I will forget over the years, Mark will not be one.
On a lighter note, for you football fans, you may recall the NY Jets were defeated the Sunday before. One of my students, a sports fan par excellance, Nick, was walking by my class room, waved his arm up and said “Don’t worry Sugrue. We’ll get ’em next week”. I recall thinking at the time, “the whole fucking world is going to hell and he’s thinking about the Jets”. Forever after, my students always appreciated that story and Nick denies ever saying that to this day (drop him an email and ask him, he WILL deny it).
“Don’t worry Sugrue. We’ll get ’em next week”
When school ended I went to my second job: teaching an undergraduate class of World Religions at St. John’s University. Needless to say the school was closed and a FDNY truck was blocking the gate to the school on Utopia Parkway. Like many others, I spent most of the rest of the day on the phone. How many times did people use the term “surreal”? My buddy Adam told me he had just alit from the subway at South Ferry right before the second plane hit the south tower. He said it was utter mayhem and it sounded like the plane at the end of the Pink Floyd tune and he saw the reflection of the blast in the glass of building and the whole scene took on a red color. He said he went to the office, called his mom and sister to see they’re all “ok” and left a message for his dad in Northridge, CA and said “Dad, when you wake up you’re gonna see some really fucked up shit on TV but I just want you to know Jackie, me and mom are OK”. He then walked uptown, had a beer at The Old Sod, and took the R train home to Queens. THAT is a coping mechanism. Later that day, I spoke to my friend Ben who lived on 16th Street at the time and he said 5th Avenue was like a scene in Independence Day where the traffic was stopped. I recall him and I both agreeing on a comment I said “Nothing good will come from this”. To this day, I stand by it. I was off from work the next day and went and sat in Propsect Park with a young lady named Jessica, God rest her, who I seeing socially at the time and recall that heinous smell from the World Trade Center site that wafted over Brooklyn. In the words of the great Mike Dulski, “it smells like, ‘sniff sniff’, cancer”
Here we are 20 years to the day and where have we come? First, the attacks of Septemeber 11, 2001 were acts of pure, unadulterated EVIL. That’s what it was–forget the psychology, the economics, and the politics. The people who planned these attacks and received some form of gratification from seeing such human misery and agony were clearly operating on a level more disdainful than Satan himself could muster. The people that did these acts were guided by the spirit of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust—the Spirit that always says “no”. As God says “let there BE” they say, “no”.
Second, President George W. Bush was given a opportunity that day that he passed up. However you feel about the Bush presidency, he was given a chance to become a genuinely “Great President” and be mentioned in the same sentence as Lincoln. Instead of becoming great, he went and hid in a bunker in Nebraska and then started a war in Iraq where plenty were killed. He and his cohorts took the low road. Bush was weak man, as most of us are, this writer included, but he could not rise to ocassion and be a genuine “leader’. He did not have in his personality the ability to be a genuine President of the United States and he let other people such as Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumselfed, and Dick Cheney dictate to him how to run a nation.
Third, and this gets back to what I stated in my discussion with Ben: “nothing good will come from this.” What “good” has come out of it? There were close to 4000 people murdered on September 11, 2001, and I add a few hundred more after the official count as there are all those nameless illegals, and how did President Bush respond? He had the USA, without a formal Declaration of War, which Congress would have approved, invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The nation was successful in achieveing both. Twenty years later, the USA was STILL there. The USA then propped up a the dictator in Pakistan, General Musharraf, who won 65% of the election–something George Washington couldn’t do, and that IS the country that produces the Taliban (and was harboring bin Laden in Abbotobad). Bush and his people, the foremetioned Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney then went on a brilliant PR campaign, with the aid if the “liberal media” to create a reason for the invasion of Iraq. When I taught high school, there were about 5 people, of the 150 faculty, at the “Catholic'” insitution that went ‘on record’ against the invasion: despite the fact that even Pope John Paul II was against it.
Next, there’s the issue of HATE. There’s no place for it. Those peolpe on 9/11, that few hijacked planes into buildings and murdered thousands of people were people who, depsite the fact they claimed believe in God, hated being human as Adam and Eve once did–they wanted to be Gods. That my readers is ‘sin’ in the truest sense of the word. I think that this anti-Islam thing today in America is the same as ‘us’ Catholics were once treated. To hear that Muslims are not loyal to America, they’re terrorists, and ALL of that bullshit is well, bullshit. Saw a man from Lebanon living Dearborn, MI on TV that spent something like 30 years working at the Ford Plant and he’s not loyal to America? 30 years on an assembly line at the main Ford plant is pretty much a form of national service.
So here we are, now a generation removed from the attacks and what has transpired since? These great United States routed the Taliban government and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, then we had Enron and Worldcom, the invasion of Iraq(and we are still there with no end in sight), the questionable election in 2004 (how many Ohioans went to jail for voter fraud? 8?), Hurricane Katrina or the unravelling of the Bush presidency, the 2006 ouster of the republican Congress, the financial debacle of 2008 and TARP, the auto industry collapse, the 2008 election, the rise of the Tea Party, distrust of government (surprise!), Republicans intent on keeping the US economy stagnant in hopes one of their sub-par candidates can defeat Obama in 2012, the Arab Spring, bin Laden being killed (a case of the chickens coming home to roost: a violent man dies a violent death), Donald Trump, a failure as a businessman and a TV impresario on “reality” TV, as President, Charlottesville, a spike in hate crimes, overt political and major media support of the White Power and Neo-Confederate movement, and of course, 659,000 deaths from COVID. Perhaps it is not just our Presidents that didn’t have it in them to do what needs to be done but the whole country.
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