 |
| There is no ‘header’ because there are no words. |
I have a friend who’s birthday was September 11th until he moved it up by 2 days. 9/11 effected everyone in his or her own way.
I have another friend who’s husband was furious with a client who’s office was situated on the 89th floor of the first tower hit. He’d received a text the day before telling him his client presentation scheduled for 9am had to be pushed-back to the following day – a scheduling conflict that saved his life, but not his client’s.
I wasn’t in New York or Shenksville or running for my life at the Pentagon when 911 ‘hit’ – and that’s exactly what 9/11 did – it hit.
I had flown back from Rome only a very short time before the 9/11 strikes. Bearing that in mind, I vividly recall a discussion I had with a ragged-looking but well-spoken man in front of the Italian Fascist facade of Mussolini’s Victor Emanuele in Rome.
 |
| Mussolini’s Fascist facade of the Victor Emanuele in Rome. |
The man had an accent, but his English was impeccable. He told me he was from Afghanistan. He’d set-up a little card table with a signature-petition attached to a clipboard while he stood on the sidewalk of that hectic, historic site. He was standing outside in hopes of gathering signatures on a petition to enforce a trade embargo against the Taliban in Afghanistan – The Taliban – the very same band of criminals Ronald Regan and Bush-One had armed during Russia’s pointless war in those beleaguered mountains.
The Afghani-man was showing passers-by an album of photographs of his wife who’d been educated in America. There were photographs of her dressed in American professional women’s clothes, like the tailored-suits Hillary Clinton has always worn.
He met his wife at an international-student’s ‘mixer’ at an American university. His future wife was studying to bring pediatric medicine back to her homeland while he was studying science to do the same. As fate would have it, they were from neighboring villages in Afghanistan but had never met until they found themselves attending the same college in the United States. They fell in love, married and returned to Afghanistan as a young, hopeful professional couple determined to make changes for the better to their country and their world.
My flight back to Philadelphia was 4 hours away, so my tourist-time was all but evaporated. I was killing time listening to this odd and unlucky stranger, noticing the burns and scars on his craggy face. It was impossible not to notice his partially missing fingers chopped-off neatly at different digits while he turned the pages of the photo-album for me to see. The photos hit me in the stomach while he leafed through pointing-out Holocaust-like atrocities including photos he boldly exhibited of his wife, the lady-doctor who wanted to be a pediatrician – she’d been drawn and quartered – divided into visceral pieces for the “criminal offense of wearing western clothes.” Her head was on the ground separated from the other 4 parts of her severed body.
“You’re an American” he told me, grabbing my sleeve saying “you don’t understand – they hate you and they’re going to do something to you – I don’t know what or when.” He talked about his homeland punctuated with spitting contempt for the Taliban and a man named Bin Laden. Both names were words I’d vaguely recalled my elderly father telling me about – based on a large-print article he’d read in Reader’s Digest. “Son, terrorism is the real threat facing America’s future,” he told me while I politely listened to what I took for paranoid ramblings. My Dad’s mind popped-in and out of lucidity during his declining days, so I never knew what to take seriously.
However, in-front of the Victor Emanuele, I wanted to turn-away from the horrifically cruel photos I was being shown. “This only happens in other places of the world,” I quietly thought to myself, stuffing some wadded-up lire into the plastic fishbowl he placed for contributions… Not fully grasping the comparative value of the lire to the US dollar, I signed his petition as illegibly as possible in an effort to escape seeing those photos which were impossible to look-at and equally difficult to ignore.
Only hours later I was on my flight home to Philadelphia International. I flew home from Europe shortly before the events of 9/11 feeling like my own world was safe and secure – grateful and fortunate that I was not living in a 3rd world country like Afghanistan.
 |
| My self-portrait painted upon my return from Rome |
Back home, all wrapped-up in my own world – literally speaking - I was painting a self-portrait in my studio when word hit the airwaves about the sequence of plane-crashes on targeted buildings in New York and Washington, DC as well as the heroically averted attempt in Shenksville, Pennsylvania.
Shocked out of my private thoughts, I was painting the only self-portrait I’ve ever done. Transfixed by the news coverage – the full horror sunk-in. I wept and ironically ruined the rendering of my eyes – later painting-in dark-glasses to cover the mess I had made of my own likeness. At one point I toyed with the idea of painting a reflection of the World Trade Towers in the lenses but removed the images thinking it would be dishonest of me. I wasn’t there. I was merely another helpless US citizen transfixed by the surreal images on television. I had only the right to share in the horror as a helpless bystander.
I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about that lone man standing in front of the Victor Emanuele with his solitary voice shouting into the wind “They’re going to do something to you…” He’d told me he was trying to spread a “warning to anyone who will listen, to honor the loving memory [of his] martyred wife.”
The real martyrs are courageous victims and not indoctrinated volunteers gleaned from a bevy of brainwashed zealots. I wondered where the brave Afghani man was when he heard the news on that fateful September day(?) I tried to imagine how he’d reacted to learning his ‘Cassandra-like’ predictions had come true…
At home, the majority of American’s I knew felt an uncomfortable mix of grief, helplessness, patriotism and fear. There was also a conscious thread in my ‘wonder’as to why this had happened to our nation? What had we done to deserve such a cruel blow from out-of-the blue? As Americans, we’d been collectively sleeping through all the warnings including the first blatant bombing-attempt on the World Trade Towers in 1993.
Had our secretive capitalist banks done something to make these people hate America? Why did they hit our financial district and our nation’s capitol? Did our country’s elected leaders join forces with financial brokers to secretly do things of which the average American citizen had no possible knowledge? If a stranger slaps you across the face for no apparent reason, it’s usually one of three things: You’ve offended them – they’re crazy – or both.
 |
| One of a great many photographs of child slave-labor in the Middle East (in this case, Pakistan) under the watchful eye of corporate giant, Nike. |
I remembered reading an article in Newsweek about how Nike was using child-slave-labor in the Middle East to produce soccer balls and sneakers. Children were literally ‘cobbled’ to a cobbler’s bench with the article’s header reading “Just Do It.” I never again bought another Nike product – nor will I respect anyone who endorses Nike. The American labor movement was formed to prevent that very sort of atrocity from happening within our shores – only to find the lure of inexpensive goods – cheaply produced elsewhere – made our American consumer dollar appear to stretch further. Who cared how it was made or where it came from…?
A month after the 9/11 strikes, I remember feeling sick to my stomach on learning George Bush had ordered a full-scale war-offensive on a 3rd world country. Any level-headed mature adult knew this needed to be handled as an international police action – not a catastrophic decision to ‘bomb-Afghanistan-back-to-the-stone-age.’ Our retaliation needed to be directed toward a very small band of international criminals. Sadly caught in the crossfire were un-tolled numbers of innocent people who largely didn’t know where America was or how we were different from the Russians who’d trampled over them a decade earlier. These people knew nothing about the US – let alone how once in our glory days we’d sent a man to the moon. We were indiscriminately killing and incarcerating a population to whom our troops were later challenged to “win-over hearts and minds.”
George Bush launched the 2 longest, deadliest and costliest wars in American history due to a severe dearth of sensible, mature adults among his mentors and minions. Cheney/Bush handled the matter like it was a Chuck Norris screenplay or a John Wayne western on steroids. Cheney/Bush were both incapable of seeking a wiser path or higher ground. Today, still, countless scores of lives and limbs continue to be shattered or destroyed – both Afghani and “Allied” (aka American) troops in an effort to unsuccessfully round-up a rag-tag faction of extremist hoodlums.
The events of 9/11 were then conveniently misused as an excuse to instigate a second war in Iraq – eventually exposed as an ill-fated gas-station robbery gone wrong. It took Barack Obama’s leadership to order the kind of precision covert mission that neatly took-out Osama Bin Laden. Cheney/Bush lacked the wisdom to do anything like that – they viewed both wars as an opportunity to profiteer.
The destruction that began September 11th on Wall Street led to the impoverishment of the American middle-class (exactly what Bin Laden had in mind) and dashed nearly everyone’s hopes and dreams for a secure future – security and securities of all definitions have never been the same since. The United States was burdened with fools at the helm of the ship of state on 9/11. America’s leader’s fell for every crumb of bait Al Queda and the Taliban tossed America’s way with George W. Bush playing right into their hands. Cheney/Bush with breathtaking incompetence mishandled all subsequent events in the Middle East like the Keystone Cops who couldn’t shoot-straight.
Who really won the war effectively declared on 9/11? Our 2 wars were compounded by Wall Street’s greed running-amok and constipated republicans refusing to budge in Congress leading to a diminished quality of life for American citizens who never dreamed their lives would end-up shattered, pocket-poor and mourning the loss of sons and daughters or grandchildren – gone forever – with so very little to show for the effort and sacrifice. On the other hand, Wall Street recovered and flourished.
 |
| A Greek-language magazine called ‘E’ dated September 11th, 2001 |
The week that followed 9/11 an elderly Greek woman named Mrs Generalis called me and asked me to come to her office as soon as possible. Mrs Generalis was the unofficial ‘mayor’ of our largely Greek neighborhood. She owned a commercial and residential building that backs-up to the 19th century ally where I live. She ran a Greek travel agency and notary-public service that faced 10th Street. She didn’t much like anyone, but for some reason she always liked me. Perhaps because I was an artist like her accomplished son.
She showed me a Greek language magazine called ‘E’ dated as being the September 11th issue. Magazines go into production well in advance of the cover dates. Often advertising deadlines are even earlier. Monthly periodicals are in the mail to subscribers a good 3 weeks before the cover date. The front cover shows a ‘New Yorker’ style illustration of a concert pianist sitting down in front of a piano shaped like a cellphone. But what was on the inside made the flesh on my forehead involuntarily pop my eyes open. There was a very studently-executed Adobe Illustrator advertisement for Nike depicting an over-weight American in a sweatsuit jogging past the World Trade Towers as 2 airplanes were aimed at each tower – contrasted by an explosive depiction of light on a blue sky. Ironically, September 11th was a beautiful day – before the sky went black with smoke and soot.
 |
| A very suspicious advertisement in the 9/11 issue of ‘E’ |
“The Nazi’s they did things like this during the big war,” she said in her heavy Greek accent. “They hid messages in – how you say – innocent-looking advertisements and personal ads so other Nazis knew where and when an attack would happen.” I was reminded of how American forces used Native American languages like Cherokee to send our own secretive missives creating an unbreakable code since there were no Latin, Greek, Asian or German derivative nouns and verbs.
Mrs Generalis called the FBI after I made a scan of the pertinent pages of her Greek language Magazine. Ten years ago she and I were told to say nothing about it, so we didn’t. I couldn’t imagine WHY we were asked not to talk about an ad in a magazine already out circulating in public domain… Mrs Generalis has subsequently passed-away, and history has since written itself…
 |
| The publisher information for ‘E’ magazine. |
We are all helpless against those who fail to hold honesty dear – be they terrorists or elected incompetents well within our own government.
I was not a first hand witness to the events of 9/11 – but I will always wonder about the suspicious coincidences in the Greek language magazine simply titled ‘E’… and how America got into such economic chaos and wide-spread personal financial ruin after two disastrous and unaffordable wars. War is never a good idea for anyone – except for those with profit-motives or a deranged ideology.
Reflecting further on my last couple hours in Rome in front of the Victor Emanuele, I was left with an indelible image of a lone and courageous man from Afghanistan, from whom I’ve subsequently learned a great many things: Life is not infinite – comfort is not to be taken for granted – and there is nothing more valuable than the generosity of a man who has lost everything.
 |
| The 911 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York. |
