Doc Searls Weblog

There was far more, and often better, processing of what we hadn’t yet named 9/11 in the days that followed. Here is my own blog, twenty-five years ago today. Again, this is reverse-chronological. My learnings and writings that day go from bottom to top.

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Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Blog bloat

Up to almost 4400 visits today. Wednesday is usually the peak day of the week, but is way past the average — and almost a third what it hit when I got Slashdotted.

Anyway, thanks.

Living up to his nickname

As soon we saw the news yesterday morning we began to worry about our friend David “Save” Alper. I knew he worked somewhere in one of the World Trade Center towers, but we hadn’t talked in a couple months and I wasn’t sure. Joyce and I began to worry when calls to his apartment in New York kept going to a machine. His wife Susan (an old and dear friend through whom we met and got to know Save) seemed to be out too, and their absence began to acquire ominous significance. (Though not so much for Joyce, whose intuition told her Save was safe.)

This afternoon while I was out on errands, I became increasingly sure David had been in one of the buildings. But was he safe?

David/Save is one of the most alive people I know. He a big, loud, passionate, lovable, larger-than-life New Yawk kinda guy. It’s almost impossible to imagine him gone.

When I got home a few minutes ago, Joyce said she finally got a call from him. His story, which I would love to put up here later in long form, was amazing.

Here’s the short version… He worked on the 84th floor of Building Two. When the plane hit Building One, he and his co-workers began to work their way down the stairs, including stairs through the floors that were destroyed when the second plane hit that very building. By that time, however, they were out and blocks away. Apparently the evacuation was as orderly as a fire drill — until the worst finally happened.

I just did a search of my own email archives and came up with a perfect picture of Save, looking like the fun guy he is:

[photo: lwe2001.jpg — Doc and Save]

That’s me on the left. (By the way, we’re both Davids with nicknames whose wives call us David.)

Anyway, this is just tremendous news.

But it’s far from over. I still have other friends whose silence gets more eerie by the minute.

Dysconversation

I won’t point fingers, but I will observe that petty rectitudes are starting to jam the flow of altruistic conversation and useful information that might save lives and change minds. So here’s an appeal to give a smaller shit about whatever it was that bothered each of us before the hate hit the buildings — and whatever politics and moral defaults we may have had before we were hit with a flash flood of fresh information and unwelcome questions.

And yes, I am speaking about my own (privately much-criticized) Pacifism along with everybody else’s Whatevers.

Just one New York state of mind

David Williams writes (and I reprint with permission):

I live/work on the Island (Long) and luckily, no one that we know of was lost…

I am reminded of an old friend, David Dellinger (Chicago 8/7 conspiracy trial-1969)… He is a pacifist… He understands that there are evil people who do evil things… but could never bring himself to raise a gun and take another’s life. He spent one year and one day in a maximum security prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces… (Is this courageous? At any point, he could have said “yeah, I’ll go” and been out of it. He wasn’t afraid of dying, he was afraid of what killing another would do to him.)

I am a young man, but I have seen how history is recursive, and how our actions sometimes come back to haunt future generations…

A caller on the radio station which I listen to in the mornings on the way to work said (paraphrased)

“We never were so intentionally cruel to the innocent, so joyful in their pain”… I begged to remind her of My Lai (spelling?), and the rape and pillage of Vietnam villages, under order, by US soldiers…

Our country has been so intentionally cruel.

I hear the “we took precautions in Iraq” line, and I remember a few facts:

– We put Saddam Hussein in power.

– We did nothing to prevent the genocide of the Kurds during or after the war.

We, too, can be evil.

Does that mean that I am not devastated by this loss?

Fuck, I’m angry.

But what is justice? With all of our “smart-bombs” and initiatives in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is still in power. All of the people we killed, all of the country’s infrastructure that sustains life destroyed, and we MISSED him.

What are we going to do? Attack the Middle East, with a rightful vengeance that only a wronged people can muster? Attack them, and kill them, and show them what real terrorism is? Show them how it is done, and why not to “fuck with us” anymore?

And meanwhile, let’s make sure that we show them “Business as usual”, flights in the air the next day…

“You don’t scare us”… We should be scared. 4 Airplanes were hi-jacked with the same cardboard box opening knives that I was issued when I worked for the Wholesale Club…. It could have been 20, if they had wanted… Without some effective thought on whether we can prevent it again, we are going to launch X number of bombs back into the air, with the hopes that we catch the hijackers this time? All so that they realize that our “dicks” are bigger than theirs?

It is assinine.

Anyway, there’s my .02

Worth a bit more than that, I’d reckon.

Pictures speak clearer than words

The clearest multimedia depiction of the terrorist flight paths and impact angles is in Spanish. Gracias to Kottke for the link.

Thoughts

From Peter Kaminski’s Wiki:

• Henry Kissinger
• Vinton Cerf
• Noam Chomsky
• War Resisters League
• Gordon Sinclair

Here’s a long piece by R.W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times.

Also a good piece by David Beers, in Salon. The next feeling, after I was sickened by watching the WTC collapse on live TV yesterday, was the loss of what Beers calls “the psychology of immunity.” With that psychology, I gladly fly. For now, I’ve lost that. So have uncounted others. Terrorism at work.

Here’s more from my sister, excerpted from an email:

As our parents came of age with the Great Depression and were tempered into adulthood by the Second World War, we were born into the world of Nuclear destruction, came of age with Kennedy’s assassination, and were tempered into our adulthood by Vietnam, will today’s youth see this as their crucible? Or is this just a turning point into the world they are inheriting? Is this the Pandora’s box for them as the Bomb was for us? Once opened, it can never be closed; it is a reality that they will always live with?

Oh God, I hope not. I pray not. But I fear so.

But may this also be the fire that fuses us into the nation we can be, the world we can be. Like it did after the Depression and WWII, strength can come out of strife, heroism out of horror and hope out of Hell. May we be up to the test. May the world be with us.

And the always vivid Michael Moore, with a dozen quotable lines.

Meanwhile I wonder how much of the news isn’t getting out because Reuters had a Data Center in the WTC. Much, perhaps most, of the raw news that goes out on the world’s media comes up through Reuters or the Associated Press.

Maybe with a la carte micropayments for streamed content, we could get this kind of stuff full time

Adam points out that yesterday’s attack knocked Entertainment off the air, at least in those media that retain a sense of Serious Responsibility. I have to say it was comforting as well as informative to watch coverage from the major networks that not only displaced entertainment programming, but was uninterrupted by advertising.

Surreality check

Here’s Eric Norlin on the delta between war rhetoric and tactical action:

…the response will be swift, distributed and — if my hunches are right — nothing like a war. People are taking this “act of war” statement as some indication that we’re deploying, etc. It could mean something entirely different (my opinion). It could mean a return to certain Cold War tactics within the covert operations of the intelligence community. It could mean rescinding Reagan’s Presidential decree that made it illegal for us to assassinate foreign leaders. It could mean a return to power for the CIA — an organization that had lost most of its muscle to the NSA as of late. Just a thought…

Guess I’m one of those “people.”

Expressing appreciation

RageBoy reports: “Dunkin’ Donuts has made its entire product line available at no charge to the U.S. law enforcement community.” RB will be on NPR’s Marketplace tomorrow morning, by the way. Talking fashion, of all things.

Opposing views

My most persistent correspondent sends a story from the Jerusalem Post titled Sephardi chief rabbi to Muslims: Rescind suicide ruling. It begins:

Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron today called on the Islamic clerics who have published fatwas (religious rulings) ordering suicide-bombings and declaring the bombers shahid (martyrs), “to rescind the order and to call on the world to preserve the sanctity of life, and to forbid large-scale attacks on innocent civilians,” in a statement released this morning.

He adds:

Are these the Palestinians that you love.

You maybe looking for peace, but they are looking for war.

Appeasing terrorists and people who support and harbor them does not lead to peace, it leads to war.

Think in terms of life and death and not war and peace.

We want to promote life, sometimes that involves declaring war on those who support death.

He also writes, You should consider whether your implied policy of appeasement is not in fact helping their cause. Doc, please think before you post.

I do think. I just don’t think the same way as those who conflate terrorism with entire countries or faiths. We can thank that kind of thinking for what happened yesterday.

I also thank this same correspondent for sharing this story from Yahoo Asia about a Cairo citizenry apparently approving of yesterday’s attack: “The Americans are cowards. They use other countries to hit us. They don’t have the courage to meet us face to face,” said Khalil Matar, 43, who works in a state-run soap factory. “The myth of the indestructible United States has gone up in smoke.”

In that context war came home to us in the U.S. for the first time. If we think of the Gulf War as one that started under Bush the Elder and continues under Bush the Younger, yesterday’s destruction in the U.S. can also be seen as vengeance for allies’ “Highway of Death” strike against the Iraqi retreat near the end of the war. For the opposing view on that matter, see the links here and here.

Are we ready for more terror? Do we have any faith it can be prevented? Do we trust an administration so pickled in cold-war thinking that it would put billions into missile defense against unexpressed threats, rather than more thinking into why expressed threats are all too real — and backed by popular support, even among the populace of “moderate” countries like Egypt?

These are times when the easy answers are also the most suspicious. This isn’t a “war between good and evil,” or between “those who love freedom” and fill-in-the-blank. It’s the hostile expression of collapsed distinctions, mostly between innocent populations and a hated few.

Yes, let’s think before we post. But let’s also urge our leaders to think before they act, and to listen before they think — and to listen with extra attention to the unwelcome and unfamiliar voices.

It’s the only way we will ever learn the whole reason why so many of our friends and loved ones died yesterday.

One degree

Now the silences take ominous meaning. We leave messages with friends in New York and hear back nothing. Understandable, we think … but the worst possibility is far too plausible.

We’re all waiting for the dead, for passenger lists that consist of entire companies: law firms, brokerage houses, trade organizations, investment banks, technology shops…

And we watch the talking heads on television, talking about “the need for disproportionate response” as the “only way to respond to terrorism.” Even Colin Powell.

Terrorism isn’t war. Terrorism is few against many. War is tribe against tribe, nation against nation. Lately — certainly since World War II — whole cities have become legitimate targets in the mathematics of war. London, Dresden, Hiroshima. Persuasive disproportion.

Are we at war with Afghanistan, then? For our disproportionate response will we kill thousands in the world’s most wretched country, where a million children are dying already, just to waste a few dozen or hundred sneaky terrorists? This is what we contemplate when we talk about war.

One sigh, one life

Our cousin who works for the Pentagon is okay. She was out of town. That leaves dozens of others we know. Perhaps hundreds. Joyce’s sister just returned from a meeting with investment bankers in the World Trade Center. She now assumes that most or all of them are gone.

Well, we’re not ready for him to die

Here’s Kevin Jamieson on his own Big Question. Among others.

I first met Kevin on the Cluetrain list, where he was a wise voice of reason, equanimity and good humor. Until I gathered otherwise, I thought he was a grizzled old dude like myself. But he isn’t.

With guys like Kevin around, the country will be in good hands for another generation. But for now those hands are, like all of ours, gripping the tops of our own shaking heads.

What happened?

President Bush called yesterday’s events “an attack on freedom.” His statements throughout the day, like those of many I heard on the news, were full of patriotic bluster and promises of vengeance. Of course this is pro forma stuff, required to “reassure the nation” and all that. But can we trust the premises?

We don’t even know who did this stuff yet. We also don’t know what motivated them. Whatever it was, I’ll bet it didn’t have jack to do with “freedom.” It probably had everything to do with America’s support for Israel, which has always had its dangers.

One email I received yesterday said this:

I am curious about one thing, at any time today, did you ever hear anyone say anything as to what is it that the American people have done to incur such hatred, etc? What policy, what goal, what course have we followed? Did anyone attempt to hold a mirror up for us to reflect on our behavior and whether we contributed at all to this madness?

I have this fear that we will pursue a course of right wing extremism that will ignore the underlying causes that seem to feed and support Mr. Bin Laden. Instead we will increase security, buy more cops, more laws, fewer civil liberties, maybe an anti-missile defense, and do nothing for hunger, suffering, health care, housing, etc. I have always figured that if the Palestinians all had three bed room two bath houses and cars they would be throwing far fewer rocks, and not providing suicide pilots.

But we don’t know.

What we should know is that this thing has a context. What is it?

Like many who have written to me, I also fear we’ll slip into a fortress mentality without any idea exactly what or who we’re defending against. Today some chesty official on TV said “Your military is ready!” And I thought, “For what?” As Daniel Shorr put it on NPR, the attack on Pearl Harbor “had a return address.” This attack was bigger, and didn’t.

Yet it was highly effective. Our country was all but shut down, our president was on the run and everybody was talking about war without knowing who the enemy was.

The President’s eventual words of assurance and steely resolve didn’t convince me of anything other than his need to express them — and our need to hear them as well.

As my sister put it, yesterday’s events call for us to be leaders of the sane world. To be sane, you have to be in touch with reality. If we think this is another Pearl Harbor, we’re not even close to it.

Rational reactions

I’m impressed at the level-headedness and rationality of the ex-military and ex-national security folks I know. My sister, a retired U.S. Navy commander, wrote me an email this morning that contained many wise words, including one of the best lines I’ve read on this whole matter: We have been called the leaders of the Free World. We now must show ourselves to also be the leader of the Sane world. I’m not sure Eric Norlin’s response to ESR’s “First Lesson” falls in the same category, being a rant and all, but I trust that he knows what he’s talking about, having served for years as an NSA spook of some sort.

And if you can’t give blood (or already have), give money

Amazon has made it easy to donate to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund. Thanks to RageBoy Himself for both links.

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Afterwords:::

Lots of link-rot in a quarter-century. On behalf of reality, I apologize for those. We didn’t think the Web was a whiteboard back then. Now we know. When I have time I’ll dig down in the Internet Archive, and replace the dead links with resurrected ones. Alas, my own original blog, which ran from 1999 to 2007, is not in the Archive.

Nice to see Chris Locke, aka RageBoy, mentioned often in this. We lost him in 2021 and I still miss him today.