9/11, 12/7, and 11/22

I woke up at 4:15 a.m. this morning and, for some reason, my mind drifted to the 9/11 disaster. I always call it "the 9/11 disaster" not "the 9/11 attacks." I'm not quite sure why. Maybe because the attacks were just the beginning of the long, dark, senseless disaster that is still going on more or less in front of our eyes. I'm speaking of the unprecedented power grab that George Bush and his political operatives are still trying to pull off. But all that's the topic for another blog entry!

9/11 is one of those rare universal events, a shared experience. Anyone can ask anyone else, "Where were you when you heard?"

The attack on Pearl Harbor was such an event for my parents' generation. My mother heard about it the day it happened, December 7th, 1941, but she wasn't really paying attention. She came home from classes at L.A. City College to be greeted by her mother who (without much understanding but, knowing Grandma, a good deal of melodrama) announced, "The Japs have bombed Pearl Harbor!" (That's what we called them back then. We didn't know any better.) Apparently, "Pearl Harbor" meant pretty much nothing to either my mother and grandmother.

But the next day, as Mom rode the streetcar down to City College, she and her girlfriend were mystified seeing soldiers with machine guns on tripods hiding behind every-other Oleander bush along the highway, staring nervously toward the ocean. My mother and her girlfriend agreed that this was something new.

Soon after arriving at school, an assembly was called. Mom tells me that in those days, each student had an assigned position on the green for assemblies. The student body stood to listen to the live radio broadcast of President Roosevelt giving his famous "Day of Infamy" speech.

My mother turned to her girlfriend and said, "That's funny" (meaning "odd" not "haha"), but the young man behind her hissed, "You won't think it's so funny when they start bringing the dead home in boxes." That sobered her up. And the rest is history, as they say.

That history was determined, in part, by how Roosevelt immediately framed the meaning of the attack: He explained that it was a surprise attack planned months in advance, was part of an larger offensive by the Japanese across Asia, and that "the people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understood the implications to the very life and safety of our nation." We were at war.

The universal event that bound my generation was John Kennedy's assassination. On November 22, 1963, I was in fifth grade and just short of my tenth birthday. I sat near the front of the classroom, in the second row from the left, and near the front door. Mrs. Whitney came into our room and took our teacher, Mrs. Fulmer, aside and whispered something into her ear. Mrs. Fulmer looked shocked and concerned.

Now, before I tell you what happened next, I should tell you what these ladies looked like. (That's what we called them in those days, "ladies" -- it wasn't considered demeaning back then. We just didn't know any better.) Mrs. Whitney must've been in her early 50s. She had very precisely coiffed hair. All the time. With streaks of gray in it. I'm not sure if the colors were natural or artful. She had long fingernails with nail polish that matched the lipstick on her pucker-wrinkled lips which tells me now that she must've been a smoker. She was scary. Nobody had posture like her!

Mrs. Fulmer was her polar opposite. She was about as wide as she was tall. She looked old, downright haggard, but she had dark brown hair and I'm sure that was fake. Her breasts were so large and pendulous that my classmate, Stuart (who ended up schizophrenic in his teens) said that each breast was as large as a third grader.

So, Mrs. Whitney comes in and whispers to Mrs. Fulmer, and Mrs. Fulmer looks shocked. Then Mrs. Whitney whispers back (loud enough that those of us in the front rows could hear her), "The president of the PTA?" Mrs. Whitney gave Mrs. Fulmer a look that I had never seen one adult give another: Something along the lines of, "You stupid moron!" Mrs. Whitney was so incensed that she whisper back a little too loudly, "No, the president of the United States!"

The next moment, Jimmy Trimble (who was sitting closet to them) leapt up on his chair and shouted (with that inexplicable delight of a 10-year-old boy who is the first to know something but doesn't understand the gravity of what he knows), "They killed President Kennedy!"

I have no idea how the teachers reacted. I sat there in stunned silence. I was in love with John Kennedy, but so was almost everyone else in America and in the "Free World" (that's what we used to call Europe and the Western Hemisphere, thanks to the unfortunate compromises Mr. Roosevelt made with the Soviets near the end of The War).

After the initial shock of Kennedy's very public murder, we got a double jolt when the alleged gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot dead in full view of news cameras. It seemed odd to me (and I was only 10) that the man who killed Oswald, Jack Ruby, was suffering from terminal cancer and would be dead in 6 months. It seemed very convenient, as if some very tidy conspiracy was at work: "Take him out with the dead man."

But almost immediately after Kennedy's death, the FBI was framing the meaning of the assassination for us, telling us that Oswald had acted alone, that he was a misfit with mental problems. To this day, many people don't believe that.

So, now we've had the 9/11 disaster. George, Dick, and their neoconservative gang have tried their darnedest to frame the meaning of that one. "The terrorists hate our freedom," Iraq + 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, smoking gun = mushroom cloud, etc., etc., etc. Thank heaven at least a percentage of the American people have refused to believe that crock! Unfortunately, the disaster continues.