9/11: Out of Time / Culture of Life

Tragic days are days out of time, in the worst way, days that achieve the status of poems -- never changing, always changing. They share this quality with days of great joy.

To the victims and heroes and heorines of that day and days and days after, all of my heart is with you today.

The air is full the dead, and breathed by the living, may we breathe with our hearts open.

As we breathe the dead today, as every day, may we commemorate them by moving toward life.

Click &c.

On 9/11, five years ago, I had a theorealitcal experinece. Both theory and the real, permanently blendered together. I got up, as I do, to check my email, drink my coffee, and the headline on AOL was unreadable, both too full and too empty of meaning for me to process. It said simply, "Plane Smashes into Twin Towers." With a picture of the first plane already having hit, some smoke, but not much, coming out of the first tower. Nothing. No signification. All the signification ever at once. Zero Degree of language. I couldn't even really see either the words or the picture. I kept looking at it, not reading it. So I turned on the TV. And then, I could read again.

I could see that people were dying, that time was short, that people were afraid, and some were heading toward the mess. I could see that we were bonded in our fear and in our compassion. I felt, through that alienating TV set, a profound sense of how we all go through this history, this life, together.

Reading meant interpreting, and eventually, I think two days later, I thought about the image. The tall, tall building collapsing in on itself, twice. The collapse within myself and as I realized that there was no way out, no way back, no clear way forward, not with our favored tools and ideas. The tall, tall, phallic building, a symbol to us and the world of our economic and engineering success, had been brought low, collapsed, by a plane, another great American symbol, also phallic, of our economic, engineering, and "imperial" success. No joke, no irony, I realized we were in for the cock fight of our lives.

Because all this, and all the aftermath, takes place within the historical context of patriarchy, whose marrow flushes competition, radical individiualism, sexism, control, domination, castration, racism, ---- all ENMITY for the others, out into the blood stream of our cultures and socieities. The patriarchal US was attacked by an even more vehemnelty patricarchal group of terrorists. Al Qaeda, Taliban, the Wahabbists, the regime currently in Iran -- these misprisioning, nostalgic, off-shoots of Islam are patriarchy crystalized.

Sarcity, that too is a partriarchal value, that there's not enough stuff and sense of self, and we have to fight over it, claim it, protect it, guard it jealously.

SOSDM: same old shit different millenium.

9/11 is not a change. 9/11 is only an intensification of the nasty truth of patriarchy (herein known as Jack).

It was a day when we said that America lost its innocence. Our innocence is manufactured, agreed to, culpable, and really quite unattractive in a country with such power. We were never innocent, not existentially. We have only been innocent in our denial of our own culpability. We left a power vacuum in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Taliban filled it. That was not an innocent choice. We just left them. Cause and effect. It catches up, even with the mighty, eventually.

On a feminist listserve, we were parsing the events, the news coverage, the links and lack thereof to the situations of women around the world, oppressed by their own itertations of patriarchy as well as ours in the form of military and foreign policy, globalization, etc. And one woman posted a news story about men walking arounding feeling terrible because all of a sudden, on 9/11, they felt that they could be attacked anywhere, anytime, life or limb or self ripped away. One woman's response was: Welcome to being a Woman. -- Because we do, to varying degrees, all live with that possibility every day. -- Part of the loss on 9/11 was that a patriarchal country felt feminized, and that's the worst thing one can do to a Jack.... bitch.

I thought, yes, welcome to being a woman anywhere in the world, and to being Israeli, or Palestinian, or gay, or___________. Our empathy with our others has not yet widened to the scale of our shared world.

But, feminization can go well, too. It can support a Culture of Life, a real one. It's not just a matter of symbolic, or social, or economic, or real castration. Feminization, using feminist theory and principle to guide us now, can, I am not kidding, really change the world after 9/11.

Community of support
Cooperation in problem-solving
Respect for non-damaging difference
Looking out for the meekest

I could go on and on, but there are books. This has all been laid out.

REALizing that we're actually in this together, in foreign policy, in health care, in education, in civil infrastructure, in this messy, and gorgeous life. A Culture of Life is much more than what it means in the mouths of Jacks like the president and the pope. It means a culture that actually, really, supports the well-being of humans: materially, intellectually, sexually, creatively, spiritually. And we don't live in a culture of life, yet. This is what feminism, humanism, the new progressive spiritual movements, social justice, and my little Renaissance 2.0 are after.

Our strength that day came from COMMUNITY. Our ability to love, to connect, to care, to give, to listen. My only joy that day, and in the days after, was when people reached out and helped and loved each other. I didn't cry, not one tear, until day two, 9/12, when a friend called and said, "Do you believe it, after all they've been through, women in Bosnia are laying flowers at the gates of the US Embassy." And then, my heart broke.

You see, I knew a tiny little bit of what women went through over there, with rape prisons an essential part of the ethnic cleansing, and I could not believe that a people so battered could find some love in themselves for us strangers. But they did.

And the love broke my heart. That's when the greiving started.

Because the hate, and the fear, and the phallic quest for dominion ... I'm used to that. I'm used to the violence and damage of that. I'm more used to it now than before 9/11. Because it's SOSDM.

That's also when my commitment to the feminist theory and activism I support became as real as it could possibly be. Feminism is about changing the marrow in the bones of this patriarchal culture. No matter what paradigm shifts you want to talk about, they all take place, so far, in the metaparadigm of patriarchy. It's time for that change. Between the NeverEndingWar and climate change and the need to get energy from hydrogen (which, btw, is totally possible and available), we will need to shed that phallic individualism and the war of all against all that we are all quietyly fighting, and get it together.

The work in feminist philosophy, the work in social justice, these should lead us now.

Jack, as they say on the Colbert Report, you are on notice.

The way out is through community, communion, real grown up love of each other. Which is not easy, either. Don't kid yourself.