Can We Undo The Biggest Lie?

Please allow me--by way of jumping on the I-Love-Brian-Schweitzer bandwagon--to kick the crutch from under the crippling reasoning of the radical right. Yesterday, Kos pointed us to Salon's hop up onto this very bandwagon, and as I read the entertaining, informative interview, I was stunned to see Schweitzer reframing, reprocessing, and rejecting the biggest lie of 'em all, the lie the lying right has used to create it's cesspool of violence, the lie that Lying Luntz likes to live by: "9/11 changed everything."

Um, no it didn't.

Join me in a flip...

I should tell you that I was there. My office is seven blocks north of the World Trade Center site. The first plane flew directly over our small building, rattling the windows, and, upon exploding into the north tower, shook us from the foundation up. I wrote in my diary that night:

We went outside, where tons of people had gathered on Greenwich Street. They were all looking up. When I looked up there were the two towers, in flames, with huge gashes cut through them. Some people where crying, but most everyone, including me, stood there just gaping. Sirens, people walking up Hudson, a general feeling like "Wow this is really bad this time."

I stood for a while, turning my back, then looking up at the fire, etc... We saw bodies falling from the building--people jumping to their deaths so they wouldn't die in the fire, I suppose.

On the street there was of course a lot of hysteria. Questions and crying. Gasping. Running. I felt like crying but held myself together. A colleague and I looked at each other in disbelief. We talked about how we didn't think it was safe to be in the area. We walked to the other end of the block and I went up to two men with FBI jackets and said "Is it safe for us to stay here on this block working or should we leave?" They said "Leave now." We went back up to the office to get our stuff.

The worst thing I ever saw in my life, the thing that scared me more than anything else I can remember, was walking up Hudson Street, having just left the office, and with all of these hundreds of people standing on the street staring up at the WTC, they all suddenly screamed and took a step backward. We turned and saw the second tower collapse. I really started to panic and felt for the first time truly in danger (not immediate danger, but a bigger vague danger, like there was no place safe to go). What will happen? How do we live feeling safe? Maybe we don't.

That fear I felt--a deep, slow panic--was very real. The politics that followed, like everything else about the Bush administration, was unreal.

9/11 sealed my own inclusion in the reality-based community. But it sent our government--cheered on by our irresponsible media--hurtling toward hallucination. After the seemingly endless cycles of whiskey, tears, and newsreel replays, after months of encouraging phone calls from my parents and friends, after a few random mental-health "sick" days spent wandering Central Park and Times Square, after the smell of chalky metallic dust finally blew away, I was back in good form. A strong New Yorker, a patriotic American. I was also amazed at my own quick recovery--it seems I recovered, but no one else in America did.

Every newscast, every casual political conversation, even every disgustingly middle-brow article in The New York Times Sunday Styles section told me no, we haven't recovered. We haven't recovered because NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME. Say it again: NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME. Say it again and again and again--that's what you're supposed to do with The Big Lie, right?

So what does Governor Schweitzer say in Salon? Um, he says, "But the point is, when you live in big cities, you see how many people can be killed by a single event, like flying into a building or a dirty bomb. I just don't believe that Montanans were so touched as they were on the East and West coasts about this. I mean, we were outraged that we were attacked, of course. But I will never know the feeling that somebody who is from New York had to have watching that happen."

But wait a minute, I'm sure I saw on TV lots of people in rural places stocking up on bottled water and duct tape! Aren't we still at Code Orange?

Schweitzer says no. [NOTE: There was a good discussion in the comments on Kos's entry (linked above) about whether Schweitzer was bashing East Coast "elites"--I see the point of some of those commenters, though it didn't bother me at all.]

Finally, after three and a half years, someone has the balls to refer to 9/11 as what it actually was--a devastating attack, that changed some things. It wasn't the beginning of a new era--it was a huge dramatic high-point of a tense situation that had been building for decades. It wasn't the end of some innocence we never had to begin with, it was an opportunity for new alliances and solutions to old problems (an opportunity we were soon to miss). It wasn't, in and of itself, the beginning of the end of our freedoms--but it was, of course, the opening the radical right needed to wedge their fascism between the American people and our Constitution.

Can we pull that wedge out? I think so. I hope so. The enamel that has sealed off the radical right from reality is beginning to chip away. I realize Salon ain't exactly the biggest news source for middle America, but reading this smart governor's reality-based opinions there do point toward a new understanding by some leaders. Will more leading Dems follow suit? I am hopeful. I am still scared, but I am more determined than ever to keep our government (read: our people) solidly rooted in reality.