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Seattle’s newest lesbian bar; cops caught laughing about another cop running over someone; family-friendly shelter units are especially scarce; saving what’s left of Seattle’s historic Black neighborhood.
Local 9/11 remembrances; autumnal weather’s welcome return; a passenger’s anti-mask tirade stalls a Fauntleroy ferry run; Wilson and Seahawks’ triumphal season debut.
Posed photos depict a Black Everywoman front and center; wildfires are still as bad while toxic smoke gets worse; who’s backing the ‘Recall Sawant’ drive?; 19 years ago today wasn’t the worst thing to happen in America in our lifetimes.
Venerable music-dance club’s building’s for sale; Gates details past meetings w/Jeffrey Epstein; Columbia River barges are stuck behind a broken dam lock; 18 Years After.
andraste.com via the smoking gun
crosscut.com
scene from antiwar protest downtown, march 2003
After all the recycled bluster about the police and the firefighters and especially the troops, about the valiant politicians and the flag waving celebrities, about the need to never forget the horrible day which begat the horrible decade of the endless wars and the mass intimidation and the institutionalized fear mongering and the ugly racism and the corruption of democracy, what more is to be said?
Quite a bit.
We can remember the World Trade Center’s Seattle architect, Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986). His local works include Puget Sound Plaza, Rainier Square, the Pacific Science Center, and the IBM Building (based on his early WTC design work).
Yamasaki didn’t live to see the towers attacked. But he knew the consequences of war-inspired fear and prejudice.
It was only the intercession of an early employer, and the fact that he was working in the northeast at the time, that got him exempted from the WWII internment of western Americans of Japanese ancestry.
We can remember the opportunities for international cooperation to build a safer world. And how those opportunities were deliberately quashed by the Bush-Cheney regime.
We can remember the Patriot Act, the TSA, the “total information awareness” domestic eavesdropping scheme, the media’s ignoring of an initially strong antiwar movement, and all the big and little ways the regime waged war on its own citizens.
We can remember the Americans troops still in harm’s way in Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. And those who didn’t make it back. And those who are back home but seriously harmed physically and psychologically, and who have received insufficient care.
We can remember the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who had nothing to do with the original attacks but died in the ensuing wars and occupations.
We can remember we still need exit strategies from both occupations, strategies that will protect Iraqis and Afghanis of all sexes and ethnicities.
We can remember the terrible damage wrought on the U.S. budget by war spending, combined with the millionaires’ tax cuts and the rest of the neocon economic misadventure.
And remembering all that, we can say, yes, “never again.”
Never again will we be manipulated by fear, either by foreign civilians or by our own leaders.
Never again will we let peace and reason be treated as dirty words.
Never again will we invade first and ask questions later.
Never again will we strike against entire nations over the horrendous crimes of a few dozen individuals (most of whom had never lived in either invaded nation).
Never again will we allow fear of “Islamic” fundamentalist repression to become an excuse for “Christian” fundamentalist repression.
Never again will we sacrifice our freedoms under the excuse of protecting them.
from thestand.org
…I wouldn’t write any 9/11-plus-nine-years punditry today. So instead, here’s a remembrance from someone who was there, and who now sees a lesson in the perseverence of life.
As promised a couple weeks back, here is my preliminary list of some of what I love about this nation of ours. Thanks for your emailed suggestions; more are quite welcome.)
(This article’s permanent link.)
NAOMI KLEIN WRITES about “Protesting in the Post-WTC Age.”
A Muslim-American is “shamed by the language and attitudes I find some of my fellow Americans using about Islam.”
The “commodification of ugliness.”
Love French pop singers (and who wouldn’t)? Then check out The Ye-Ye Girls tribute site.
…who’ve opposed wars in the past (sometimes blaming them on “testosterone poisoning” or similar reverse-sexist reasoning) will now have to reconcile any personal opposition to a war against the Taliban with the existing feminist denunciations of that regime’s treatment of women.
Author-essayist Riane Eisler, interviewed in the L.A. Weekly, has her own such ideological reconciliation: The Afghan fundamentalists’ misogyny, she claims, is such an integral part of their ideology of violence and domination that it’s the duty of equality-loving people to fight back against them.
…to the next print issue, here’s the full version of an essay that will appear in edited form in the mag. It’s by Eve Appleton (who wrote for our previous print issue), and it’s about a number of issues relating to the threat of war. Its most important point is her proclamation that yes, she is a patriot AND a worker for peace.
At first, I thought the sudden emergence of an overriding central political issue would render irrelevant all the littler things progressives obsess over, such as gender-role images in the media or PoMo deconstructions of texts.
But then it dawned on me that all these sub-issues relate, at least indirectly, to the main tasks at hand: Getting the U.S. going again, not letting Bush pull us toward an inevitably-futile armed conflict, and getting the U.S. out of the colonial-empire game that got us into this mess.
Herewith, a few speculative ways some of the heretofore largely separate progressive causes might tie into the new Cause #1 (finding a way out of this new military-political situation without losing lots of innocent lives here or elsewhere):
Thus, it takes PoMo thinking to find a response to the attacks that doesn’t end up destroying modern (western) society in the name of saving it.
So don’t for a minute buy into the notion that the conservative prowar contingent’s got some inevitable monopoly on the nation’s hearts-‘n’-minds.
The things progressives have talked about all these years are more relevant, and potentially more promotable, than ever.