Hole in the Sky

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A few thoughts on the 23rd anniversary of 9/11.

I heard the report on my car radio at 5:48 MST of a plane crashing into the North Tower. It wasn’t clear what was happening and I thought of the B-25 that became disoriented by the fog and crashed into the Empire State Building.

Just as I was entering the gym that morning, I saw on the TV in the lobby the plane hit the South Tower and I had a strange reaction which remains crystalline to this day. It wasn’t shock or horror, it was merely the thought, eerie in its calmness, of “They have come.”

A year-and-a-half before then I was in the DC area on business. I had hauled out a friend of mine as an advisor, he had a very creative and detailed mind when it came to operations.

We were standing on the platform of a Metro stop, waiting for the next train to arrive, when my friend turned to me and out-of-the-blue said “How long until someone drops a biological down here?” I thought of the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway and the Oklahoma City Bombing, both in 1995. Then there was the 1993 truck bombing of the World Trade Center where a bunch of Islamists tried to topple one tower into another. Mass casualty attacks done by amateurs. We hadn’t even heard from the professionals yet.

When I caught up with my friend a few months after 9/11, he said that when he saw the plane hit the South Tower the first thing he thought of was our conversation in DC.

The thing is that you really have to believe that you are on the side of good in order to perform that much evil.

I spent some time in New Jersey growing up, way out in the sticks. We were fascinated by New York City and as you drove toward it, from many miles away, the first you saw of it was the World Trade Center. A distant yet towering fixture, a welcoming beacon on the horizon that spoke of a larger, wondrous world underneath it.

Then a bunch of barbarians blew a hole in the sky.

Scott Johnson at Powerline has made it a tradition every September 11 to link to James Stewart’s 2002 New Yorker article, “The Real Heroes are Dead”, which depicts the life of Rick Rescorla from his battlefield exploits in Vietnam, to his later marriage, to his efforts on 9/11 where his foresight led to the saving of thousands of lives and ended with his death in the South Tower when he went back looking for stragglers.

Rescorla is not just a heroic figure, but a man who through his character gave hope to his comrades, his fellow man, and most importantly to his wife. An exemplar of what the Greeks would call “Andreia.”

The article formed the basis of Stewart’s book, Heart of a Solider. I have given copies of it to the young men in my family because he was the type of man that the young should aspire to emulate. The most fitting tribute in the article comes from Rescorla’s life-long friend and comrade Dan Hill, who when interviewed by Stewart and said:

There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.

However the most haunting quote comes from the book when Hill laments:

Somebody cautioned that if a person or thing means the world to you, and you lose that person or thing, then you have lost the world. I lost the world when Rick died.

I follow a certain custom on 9/11. I read Stewart’s article, meditate, and go to 6:30 Mass. I pray for the people who died on that day and especially those who felt the terror as the towers collapsed on top of them. I give thanks for those like the first responders, Rescorla, and the people on Flight 93 who possessed the courage to do what needed to be done.

I say an extra prayer for the “Jumpers”, those who were trapped in the World Trade Center by the flames and smoke and at the end could only choose how they were to die.

It’s a sin of course to think this way, especially in a church, but even now after so many years I cannot help but be possessed of rage.

The Social Engineers and a Synthetic Candidate

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Gad Saad, a Canadian professor who seems a lot saner and more courageous than the general run of academics, has published an article in Newsweek:  Kamala Harris is Hoping You Turn Your Brain Off and Vote on Emotion.  He cites actor Ben Stiller on the reasons for his support for Harris:  “All the energy and excitement that is around this movement right now.”

Emotional appeals are of course nothing new in politics: Plenty of people surely voted for John F Kennedy because he seemed more ‘youthful’ and ‘vigorous’ than did Nixon.  And, as Professor Saad noted, emotional appears are also common in commercial marketing–“Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is an old saying in sales and marketing. And constructed iconic figures such as Betty Crocker have long been common.  Still, it is also true that the marketing had better not depart too far from the truth about the product: if the steak is no good, the restaurant isn’t going to be getting a lot of return visits. If the cake mix results in an inedible cake, the customer is probably not going to buy that brand again.

Although emotional appeals are nothing new in politics, it seems clear that the Harris/Walz campaign is taking such appeals to new heights/depths. The characters projected for Harris and Walz has been constructed by some very smart people based on their assessment of what will sell.  Does ‘opportunity’ poll well? Then have her talk about the ‘opportunity society.’  Is ‘freedom’ valued by most Americans?  Then have her use that word a lot, regardless of how disconnected it may be from her actual policies.  Indeed, the strategy appears to be to have her delay talking about policy as long as possible, similar to the way an overpriced restaurant may want to avoid having you see the actual menu until you’ve already made a reservation, parked (with valet parking) and have your entire party sitting down at the table.

There’s a pulp novel from 1954, Year of Consent, which projects a future United States which is nominally still a democracy–but the real power lies with the social engineers, sophisticated advertising & PR men who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want. When I reviewed this book in 2021, I saw some disturbing parallels with our present society.  Today, and especially in the context of the Harris/Walz campaign, the parallels are even more disturbing. Review is here.

In the world posited by this novel:  While the US still has a President, he is a figurehead and the administration of the country is actually done by the General Manager of the United States, who himself serves at the pleasure of the social engineers. Don’t we see a great deal of this today, with the increasing power of the administrative departments–and, especially, the figurehead nature of the current President, all highly dependent on the goodwill of the Communicating Classes?  And isn’t the rage against X/Twitter and Elon Musk driven by the perception that this platform dares to defect from the unity of those Communicating Classes?

Are there enough people in the US today who are willing to seriously think about issues and policies, rather than just supporting and voting for what gives them a positive instantaneous feeling of some kind?  By analogy, will they evaluate the car for reliability, performance, mileage, and crashworthiness, or will they just go with the model that shows the car with happy and attractive people?

And how can rational candidates do a better job of coupling solid policy stories with emotional appeals that are truly relevant as well as hard-hitting?

College Football and Memory

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When I started following sports as a kid, I was fascinated by the Dodgers. I hated them, but with that cool stadium, the uniforms, and that LA vibe, I mean, wow. To me they were LA so when I heard some of the older folks starting to reminiscence about the “Brooklyn Dodgers” and that d*** Walter O’Malley, I found their bitterness hard to comprehend. I was seven, the Dodgers were always LA, and these old guys needed to stop living in the past. I didn’t ask them if they tied onions to their belts when they went to the games in Brooklyn, which I heard was the style at the time.

I think I understand them better now.

They have broken up the Pac-12, my conference since I was a kid, for spare parts to feed TV schedules. I’m reminded of Karl Marx and his quip about capitalism changing our social relations.

Living in Arizona, the Pac-12 was the dream. Day-trips out to LA to catch whoever ASU was playing. Five hour drive, hit the In-N-Out Burger in Palm Desert, both driving out and coming back. Living in Arizona you had a love-hate relationship with LA and with California in general, call it an inferiority complex. However, sitting in those stadiums! There was the Rose Bowl when the sun started to set behind the San Gabriel Mountains. Then there was the LA Coliseum. Al Davis was right when he called it a dump, but to go to a game in that place was as close as a western boy was getting to Yankee Stadium

Then there were the weekend trips to places like Eugene and Corvallis. Strange lands of green landscapes, humidity, and this water falling from the sky that they called rain.

That was the Pac-12, our conference, for us westerners. We were in a time zone that played games when the rest of the country went to bed. Games played in places that were either paradise or big sky. Now we are going to places where people want to escape from: Cincinnati, Oklahoma, Iowa.

A little while ago, a friend of mine reminded me before there was a Pac–12 there used to be a Pac 10. In fact he remembered there used to be a Pac-8 before 1978 when they let in the hicks from Arizona, and wow did the rest of the conference kick up a storm. What I saw as permanence was in reality a snapshot in the midst of constant change.

As my friend said, you had 45 years in the Pac, that should be enough. Things change, life moves on.

This Fall, there’s going to be a kid who starts watching college football for the first time and he will think that it’s normal for USC-Rutgers or ASU-Cincinnati to be a conference game. That’s okay, I can live with that. That belongs to him in the same way that for me the Dodgers belong in LA.

However, I’m never going to a conference game in Cincinnati.

Worthwhile Listening

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Some recent musical discoveries and a few old favorites.

Riflemen of Bennington, The Committee of Correspondence

Sadness as a Gift, Andrianne Lenkeer

Yosemite, Molly Tuttle

It’s Allright, Emily Keener

Runaway Train, Roseanne Cash.  I’d assumed that this song was written by one of the Cashes, but it was actually written by John Stewart, whose version is here.

Shenandoah, Dave Alvin

Beautiful Trouble, Tom Russell

Hong Kong Boy, Tom Russell

What Work Is, Tom Russell

Broken Hearted Mama, Eric Andersen

Love is Teasin’, Marianne Faithfull

Visible Signs

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My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.

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