I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life

By JOSH FOX

(Part 4. Jump to part 1, 2, 3)

Good morning, America

Whenever I am asked to speak or write about September 11th, I feel that I have to include a kind of history lesson. The ignorance of (or the simple complicity with) the terms of this war astounds me. This state of perpetual war. I feel that I have to mention the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died since the Gulf War as a result of barbaric United States sanctions that bar the most basic of medical and humanitarian aid to that country. (A higher death count than the combined use all of the weapons of mass destruction ever deployed.) I feel that I have to mention the U.S.-controlled World Bank and IMF which program massive poverty and civil unrest throughout the world. I feel that I have to mention the fact that the CIA created the Taliban and Al Qaeda as a "buffer" against Soviet-controlled South Central Asia, and how Afghanistan is crucial territory in order to transport oil from the richest reserves on earth (The Baltic, The Stans) to the west. I feel that I have to mention that the United States is an incredibly destabilizing force in the world. That the U.S. has caused, by conservative estimates, about 8,000,000 deaths in the fifty years since World War II. That our peace and our security exist in a constantly adversarial relationship to the life and security of the rest of the world. These things are not difficult to find out. The truth is out there, you just have to go to St. Marks book shop on 9th Street and 3rd Avenue and start reading.

Josh Fox is director of the International WOW Company in the United States. The company's productions include "HyperReal America" and "The Bomb," a play that was in development at the time of the World Trade Center bombing, about the history of manmade terror.
Official site

New York since Sept. 11

Artists take a look at the city since the World Trade Center attack:

• Josh Fox: I Never Felt Love That Big in My Life (jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4)

More to come shortly

But I am not really the guy to set down the facts, as so many have done and far better than I can (see reading list at end). I am a theater director. I am interested in the way that we can understand humanity and continue to feel.

But it is our responsibility, the responsibility we have to our own education, to our own ability to make phone calls, to speak out when things are not right. "Chickens coming home to roost" was not going to go over at ground zero with the cops and firemen, even though, I am sure, many of them agreed. But the fact was, every time I heard Bush speak, it was as if I was being beaten up all over again. I remember the days following 9/11 being a helluva lot harder on the psyche than the actual day. It was the TV. The TV made me crazy. The constant sense of hypocrisy, the way they jumped all over it, took it away from us, on the streets. George W. Bush coming to Manhattan? Who wanted him? It was like the devil himself swooping down to shake the hands of angels. It was disgusting and deeply disturbing.

The same was true of when we were asked, at Ground Zero, if we wanted to be on "Good Morning America." Here we were, just trying to do the simple task of handing out water to people and we ran into these huge TV cameras. "Do you guys want to be on GMA?" "What's GMA?" We say. A bored-looking young woman with a microphone replies, "Good Morning America." Like, DUH. It was then I realized how far away from reality these people are. She talked to us like she was watching TV. Like she was waiting for the commercials to end.

So we declined. We felt like hell, we looked like hell. It was too painful to speak on television. It was too painful to speak, period. But I'm kicking myself about it now, a year later, and I feel, a year deeper into the mud.

If I had a second chance at "Good Morning America," right now, I would say grieve, yes, be human, be alive. But weep for those innocents our government is preparing to kill in vengeance for our dead. I would say, keep the television off. I would say, look around you on the subway platform, can you feel the extreme love that we can have for each other, our eyes filled with tears? I would say, do you know how we are all now bound forever in brotherhood with all those who have been bombed, all of those who have walked streets under fire. All of those innocent people that have watched war grind their buildings and bones into dust. And I would say, be careful. I would say, don't let your rage go, don't let your sorrow and your love turn into hatred. I would say, Osama is a Bush. Same guy. I would say, no not in my name, no more war, no more bombs, no more killing. I would say, who do you think controls the images that we see? And if I got that far, without being Dan Rathered into submission, I would say that I wished Osama and Bush to be locked up in Disneyland, with radio-controlled anklets on them so that they could never get off the goddamn Space Mountain. 20 years at least on a continual Space Mountain. Chain Dick Cheney and Mullah Omar together to the big Yeti that jumps out at the Matterhorn ride and exile Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell to 25 to life on "Its a Small World After All." Because as a human being, I don't believe in punishment. But I believe that certain people, mass murderers like Osama, Bush and the like, should be put far far away from the controls of the planet.

There are no cannibals in our tribe. We ate the last one yesterday. That's a good joke right?

Why do we feel that deaths in New York City are more important than deaths in another part of the world, caused by violent means?

"Al Qaeda history teaches us that major attacks occur anywhere from 12 to 24 months apart."
— NY Times
"Did you know? Did you know it then sitting comfortably in your chair that you were in a kind of sleep? Did you know that you were being taken advantage of? Did you know that your silence was a kind of consent. You're opinions don't matter. We don't count. I did. Somewhere in the back of my mind that I wasn't paying attention to."
— From "The Bomb"

A little history

So back to the irony. The irony is that I can write here and put on stage things that the "free press" cannot. I can say openly that the war on terrorism is terrorism itself. Which is undoubtedly true. I can say that the cost in human life is not worth the infantile goal of retribution. And I can write here that the war has been a failure. We haven't caught anybody. We haven't found out who did this and we haven't found out how to stop them the next time. I can write here that I honestly don't believe there is any way at all to secure New York City except by making sure that no one wants to attack it.

I can write here how easy it is to make a nuclear bomb that fits in a briefcase. Once you have secured a super-critical mass of uranium (about the size of a bowling ball) then you can set it off with a sledge hammer. I can write here that 3/4 of the highly enriched uranium is missing from Chechnya. More than enough to do in New York City. And more than that.

The truth is "out there." It is. You just gotta look deeper under the surface. If you found this article you went deep. If you found our tiny play downtown, you went deeper still.

So what are we doing to stop all of this?

For most Americans, the study of foreign policy is like some kind of bizarre hobby. We read about how America operates throughout the rest of the world from our armchairs in Chappaqua, from our loft spaces in Brooklyn, from our railroad flat dives on the Lower East Side and we know full well that we can never vote effectively on issues of foreign policy. We know in our heart of hearts that Al Gore would do nothing differently from George Bush in this scenario. We know, at heart, that we have no representation in these matters at all. That a more diplomatic, more generous more sane foreign policy was not on the ballot (unless you voted for Nader).

We know that we have to take to the streets for that, it's not on the ballot.

We've gotta write stories and make plays about that. Most of all we've got to turn off the goddamn TV and get out there on the streets and talk to people. We've got to a talk face-to-face, meet face-to-face, and remember what that's like.

The United States and Britain flew a major bombing raid on Iraq on September 9, 2001(!!!!) It wasn't reported on the TV.

The doctrine of mutually assured destruction "protected" us during the Cold War. It stated that neither side would launch a nuclear attack because inevitably both sides would be completely destroyed. Remember how much fun that was?

Did you know that the United States used atomic weapons in the Gulf War? We didn't use A-bombs — that would create too much press coverage. We used depleted uranium, we shelled with depleted uranium, most of which has yet to be cleaned up and is blowing all around Iraq causing cancer rates to skyrocket and children to die by the tens of thousands. Forty to 48 percent of the Iraqi population in the region of Basra (a large city in the south of Iraq) will die of cancer. (You can read about it in John Pilger's recent "The New Rulers of the World.") Isn't this a form of nuclear terrorism against the civilian population of a nation?

The Gulf War was a new kind of warfare indeed. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and we were content to believe that we could romp all over the world tightening globalization's straitjacket on the economies of the rest of humanity and pummel large parts of Latin America and the Arab world with military strikes. We never dreamed that these actions could come back to haunt us. By and large, the major media does not cover the real effects of globalization with any scope or human decency. The news media is in such a frenzy to tell you that we are strong and we will all be ok.

But how is that possible? I mean, really how? The one great thing that I can say about the generation X slackers and their terrifying apathy is that they really really don't want to die for their country. Hooray! I don't either. But if you live in New York City, how can you duck and cover? How will the world become safe again? How can we re-define our rights as citizens of the world? As brothers and sisters, not as citizens? How can we say that we will be fine, that our children will be able to walk down 9th Street and Avenue A?

More importantly , how can you keep your hands clean? How can you say, please use my tax money for only roads, bridges and hospitals and not cluster bombs?

And the point has been made over and over and yet I will make it again: Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Suharto, Marcos, Noriega, and many others are all former CIA employees. Or I should say rather, grantees. On July 3, 1979, President Carter authorized $500 million of your money to aid "tribal groups in Afghanistan known as the Mujahideen." Their aim was the overthrow of Afghanistan's first secular progressive government, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, who came to power in 1978 after a popular uprising. By all accounts the PDPA (See Wall Street Journal) was an immensely popular new government. Women gained unprecedented freedom, attending universities and medical schools. Even miniskirts were in vogue in Kabul. However, the PDPA had Soviet backing. So the Americans fund the Mujahideen and start to destroy the PDPA, killing teachers, terrorizing women, lynching the PDPA's last president from a flagpole in Kabul. Then the Soviets sweep in and occupy the country. The Soviets reacted to our covert action. Not the other way around, as the New York Times would have you believe.

I am sure that there was a time and a place in history where a complex knowledge of the foreign policy of the United States was not a requirement for being a moral human being. But that time has passed.

So the proxy wars continued, at the cost of yet another civilian population. But the Mujahideen laid no claim to individual rights or freedoms. That wasn't their banner. They were never about freedom. They were never about individual rights. They were never about quality of life. It was about control. (See "Rambo III" for an in-depth account of how Sly helped Osama.) And now they've taken out the WTC.

The outrage I feel at the moment is as much with them as it is with "my own" government as it is with you, the American people, for buying all of this shit. It is with the press and major media who are kowtowing to government pressure to report only their side of things. I ask myself over and over again, why, why don't "we" care? Why do we give away our power every day? Why aren't we in the streets? What is this culture of powerlessness?

How refreshing it would be if they would just dispense with the rhetoric once and for all. Make no pretense towards espousing freedom and human rights and democracy, never make a mention of these ideals (read: buzzwords) at all in our major media. Just be the empire we are. What do you think your fellow American's response would be to this headline: Today we continue to bomb and starve out Iraq, we tightened the economic reins on Argentina, Bolivia, Thailand, Indonesia and many other countries too numerous to mention, we also bombed a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan to divert attention from Monica Lewinsky's dress and we probably killed a few thousand innocent people ALL FOR THE SAKE OF OUR GREAT EMPIRE AND OUR GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO AIR CONDITIONING, SUV'S, FANCY TENNIS SHOES AND THE RULE OF THE ENTIRE PLANET.

As a matter of fact, while we're being true to ourselves, why not just dispense with newspapers altogether — they are just a sounding board for focus groups and opinion polls, after all. We don't need the newspapers anymore because the American people have surrendered their rights to vote. (Actually you can vote, just don't ask that those votes are ever counted). We won't bother with the newspapers or the TV because we know that everybody is happy. We are going to merge the two major parties into the Republicrats and we won't even bother to inform anybody of what is happening at all.

But who is to blame? For WHAT? Where do we start?

I am sure that there was a time and a place in history, where a complex knowledge of the foreign policy of the United States was not a requirement for being a moral human being. But that time has passed. We must educate ourselves to the actions of the government we pay for. We cannot excuse ourselves of the horrible crimes committed against humanity in the name of our country simply because we do not care to find out what is really going on. We are implicated. We are responsible and we must act.

Certainly our old grantee, Osama, is to blame for 9/11. Or someone is. Whoever planned it out and executed it, yes these people are directly responsible. But what about the people who created conditions in which his arguments made sense? What about the people who perpetuate a system of worldwide domination and inequity?

Poverty, destitution, total lack of political agency and a lot of pain. This is what causes terrorism. This is what makes poor people blow themselves up in shopping malls.

So my sympathies are with the victims. But with ALL the victims. I would like to see the New York Times run a photograph and biography of every "innocent" person the U.S. killed in their carpet bombing of Afghanistan. Because in this day and age, those who control the images, control opinion. It's all fucking lies and propaganda handed down directly from the state department. I'm not angry, though, no.

On 9/12 last year, 69 percent of Americans greatly feared another terrorist attack. Today, that figure has dropped to 22 percent. But what has really changed?

What now?

It is very seductive to only take what is prescribed by the major media. Who the fuck has time to do otherwise, anyway? Everyone that I know is totally strapped for time. Especially in New York. Many people work two and three jobs just to make ends meet in the current economic climate. I saw a cartoon in a newspaper during Clinton's boom days. It depicted a single mother who was reading a newspaper. The headline read "Another 50,000 jobs created by the new American Economy" The mother's caption, "I know, I have three of them." What happened to the leisure suit and the four-day work week we were all promised as technology eased our work loads? Fuck that, what the fuck happened to the 40-hour work week? Who works 40 hours in a week anymore? I urge all of my friends who work for the dot coms, those who work anywhere, who have a regular salary with benefits, I say, guys, fucking leave at 6. Its the LAW. You cannot be fired for refusing to work over 40 hours a week without overtime. Nobody will do it. Why? Because they will be fired. That is the state we're in. Who has time to read books? You gotta stay up late. You gotta see a few less Hollywood blockbusters. You gotta turn off the damn TV. Right? I am probably preaching to the converted. I dunno, what are your thoughts? What should we do?

E-mail me and tell me: info@internationalwow.org.

One thing is for sure: we cannot continue rolling over and playing dead. That is a dangerous game. It's like going to sleep at the wheel in the middle of the Indy 500. You're letting chance take over at that point. Because there is no one looking out for us. We don't count. If Madeleine Albright can say that 500,000 dead Iraqi children is worth the price of our policies in that country, how many New Yorkers are worth the glory of the "War on Terrorism" to Colin Powell? A million? Two million? Five million? These are the stakes. We are silent. We are faced with the biggest challenge of our lives right now and we don't even realize it. We must break our silence at all costs. We must stand in opposition to these murderous policies at once. There is no moral argument that supports any other position. The status quo is corrupt. We have to change it now or it will be changed for us. We as intelligent, Internet-using New Yorkers need to use our heads on this one and campaign to stop the insanity that the United States is perpetuating throughout the rest of the world.

I can hear it already, you are saying, "Yeah, but Josh, they knocked down the fucking World Trade Center for chrissake."

I want to find the place where I sign up and say no. I want to check that box. I know from receiving the 3,000 audience members of "The Bomb" that there are a lot of people out there who feel like this.

But who is they? And who are WE? It is time that we redraw the lines. The THEY are terrorists. The terrorists exist on both sides. THEY are on both sides of this conflict. WE are the people who have no choice about where we live. WE are the people who elect not to bomb and not to fly planes into buildings. THEY are the people who do. It's that simple. What country you come from is of absolutely no relevance at this time. THEY are the people who have access to nuclear weapons, to court systems and jails, police armies, hidden bunkers and caves, THEY are the people whose underwear was bought by the CIA, we are not. We bought ours at the fucking Pathmark, or wherever. You know what I mean? You are either with US or you are with the terrorists.

But I want to find the place where I sign up and say no. I want to check that box. I want my opinion, an educated opinion polled in the New York Times. I want my airtime on "Good Morning America" back, goddamnit. I know from receiving the 3,000 audience members of "The Bomb" that there are a lot of people out there who feel like this. If you've been feeling this way, thinking this way, I want to tell you that you have so many friends all over the world. Perhaps you can't call them up on the phone, but they're on your side. They're not the THEY. They're with us. How can we get together? Party at my house.

Today in the news: "They blow up our buildings and people, we blow up their buildings and people, they blow up our buildings and people, we blow up their buildings and people. "

Who sets this into motion?

Just read the front page of the Times on any given day. They're at it again, spinning and spinning about how we need to crush Iraq with our little finger. How many will have to die in those attacks? Is that going to make you and me any safer? Or more at risk? Iraq has no program of mass destruction left to speak of. Every international expert sent in over the last two years has verified that. Bush has no proof of threat. Only daddy's unfinished business.

Who will stand up and say that this kind of propaganda is a big bullshit lie?
Who will refuse to let their grief fuel the war machine?
Who will shout to stop this insanity?
Who will ask the papers to do a little bit more work than just copy the faxes from the State Department?
Who will try George W. Bush and the whole cadre as the kleptocrat war criminals that they are?
Who will stand up and say we have to clean our own house before we can try to clean somebody else's?
Who will say that the war against terrorism is terrorism itself?
Who will speak for love and honesty without shame?
Who will break the silence?

Today is the day. Today is the day. Today is the day that it matters. And every day.

Peace,
Josh
Tokyo 9/11/02

Some further suggested reading:

Terrorism and War
by Howard Zinn

The New Rulers of the World
by John Pilger

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
by Greg Palast

by Noam Chomsky see:
9/11
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (with Ed Herman)
Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians
Deterring Democracy

Previous | Jump to part 1, 2, 3, 4

SEPTEMBER 11, 2002
OFFOFFOFF.COM • A GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK

Reader comments on :

Post a comment on ""