The Current Tragedies

[Kerim Friedman]

I thank Richard for allowing us to discuss this on this forum. I feel that we, as intellectuals, must do something to combat the discourse on the news. This thoughts are just meant to raise a few issues I feel need to be discussed, as well as expressing my initial reactions to the violence. - Kerim

Violence, and the News:

Violence

First of all - it is necessary to admit *shock*. I grew up in Hoboken NJ, from where I could see the New York City skyline across the river every single day. The World Trade Centers were like a mountain - a part of the urban landscape that may have changed in many little ways but was always dominated by the twin towers at the South and the Empire State Building to the North. I can not quite comprehend what I see when I look at the skyline from the 7 train in Queens. It will be even stranger when the smoke clears and there is no sign of the violence that brought this about.

The violence also must be mentioned - but how can one comprehend? It is hard to feel something for thousands and thousands of people. I understand that each of the towers holds over 10,000 people. Not to mention the crew and passengers on the planes. We have no idea how many survived. For people who knew people at work in those buildings, it must be truly painful.

The News

What has disturbed me most this week is the reporting about the incident. I feel compelled to vent a little bit about this, so please bear with me:

(1) Questions. There are still many questions that need to be answered. For instance, the Twin Towers were presumably built to withstand airplane collisions, and the third building (which housed the Fire Department emergency control room) was presumably built to withstand fires. Why were they so vulnerable? Even more important, it raises the question of the effectiveness and usefulness of increasing military spending. We spend nearly one third of our budget on the military, and it was unable to prevent this catastrophe. Already there are people talking about the need to spend *even more* on the military in the wake of the bombings. Nobody is saying that we should do more to improve the living conditions of people who see suicide bombing as a better alternative to staying at home. And there even some reporters who went as far as to say that "we might need to rethink some of our civil liberties that we take so for granted." An interesting way to put it when $2 million of that !
military budget was spent to erect a fence to keep protesters away from the IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington. And a host of commentators have already remarked on how lacking airport security just is, despite vast increases in spending over the past few years.

<http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0137/ridgeway3.php >
<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/opinion/12SAFI.html>
<http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=63059&group=webcast>
<http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Attacks-Boston-Airport.html>

(2) Harboring Terrorists. Because they know so little, and feel compelled to talk a lot, the reporters have been saying a lot of inane things. In addition to constantly showing the same footage of a few Palestinian kids who were cheering, they also have already decided that the whole thing was done by "Arab Terrorists," specifically Bin Laden. Now, this is a very likely scenario - but even Bush department officials and General Shwartzkopff (sp?) have been mindful of similar rushes to judgement at the time of the Oklahoma bombing. The case of Bin Laden is important to remember as the US prepares to go to war with "countries who assist and harbor terrorists" (or whatever the exact phrasing of Bush's speech was). In fact, Bin Laden is an example of one of the many ways that the US has itself trained, funded, and otherwise supported terrorists. This, together with examples in Latin America (The infamous "School of the Americas"), the Middle East and elsewhere, are not talked abo!
ut when the news proclaims this attack as an attack on "democracy, freedom, and the US way of life." No act of violence and terror is justified, but certainly it would be more useful to understand the role of the US in creating an international culture of violence than it would be to use this incident to justify even more violence in the name of "freedom"?

<http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/12/national/12INQU.html?pagewanted=all>
<http://alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11473>
<http://www.msnbc.com/news/190144.asp#BODY>
<http://www.soaw.org/>
<http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=63020&group=webcast>
________________________________________________________
P. KERIM FRIEDMAN
			Anthropology, Temple University
			<mailto:kerim.friedman at oxus.net>
			<http://kerim.oxus.net>
________________________________________________________