The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    David Seaton's picture

    September 12th

    By David Seaton on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 3:02pm |

    Watching, reading and listening to all the ceremonies and interviews surrounding the tenth anniversary of 9-11, for some reason I was reminded of a totally unrelated anecdote.

    Back in the 1950s Isabel García Lorca, the sister of the poet and dramatist who was executed by a fascist goon squad at the beginning of Spain's civil war, returned briefly to Spain from exile in the USA, probably trying to locate her brother's remains. When she was in Madrid, she paid a visit of several hours to an old prewar acquaintance, the eminent MD and philosopher, Gregorio Marañon.  Afterwards, the doctor's secretary asked him how it had gone. "A very charming lady" Marañon replied, "but she seems to be under the impression that she is the only Spanish woman who lost a brother in our civil war".  

    This got me thinking about a book I read this summer,  Howard Zinne's, "The Bomb", about the incomparable horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and this got me thinking about all the relatives and friends of the estimated million Vietnamese that were killed in America's war in their country and the scores of children that are still being born with grotesque birth defects due to the herbicides we covered the place with. That led me  to thinking about the over a thousand Guatemalans that we deliberately infected with syphilis in a 1940s medical experiment.

    "Stream of consciousness" being what it is, all of the above started me thinking about my wife's childhood in the ruins of postwar Berlin... the women clearing the wreckage and all the men folk either dead or in prison camps and the survivors eating dogs and cats. Everybody: Japanese, Vietnamese, Guatemalans and Germans seem to have put their tragedies behind them.

    I experienced 9-11 at a distance, but the 2004 Madrid bombings, where nearly  200 people were killed occurred quite near me on train lines that I have often ridden in the morning rush hours and people wept and marched and voted a government out of office and a memorial was built and ceremonies were held... and life has moved on. I suppose that is because over the last hundred years or so, Spanish people, like the Japanese, Vietnamese, Guatemalans and Germans, after so much weeping, have learned to dry their tears.

    Perhaps, instead of such endless self-dramatization, we should learn to do the same... out of respect for all the dead.... everywhere.

    Crossposted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

    Comments

    Good to see you again David. ha

    Ten years after, as they say:


    by Richard Day on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 5:13pm

    GROOVY!


    by David Seaton on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 5:11am

    Oh, David, you nonbeliever you.

    Those other folks are all ordinary humans.

    OUR dead were AMERICANS. They were. each and every one. exceptional--ornaments on the human tree, beacons in the human galaxy, etc. etc. etc.


    by jollyroger on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 9:29pm

    photos source:

    http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20110911/news/709119847/photos/EP1/

    A quote from Madrid from a CNN article:

    Jose Luis San Pio, who lost his daughter in the attacks, said the pain gets worse with each anniversary. "But Sylvia is always in my memory," he said, during a ceremony at a Madrid park where 10 American Oak trees were planted.

    Sylvia San Pio Resta, 26, was the only Spaniard to die in the attacks. She was pregnant and worked in the Twin Towers, as did her American husband, John Resta, who also died. They were both financial traders.

    Two quotes from Paris from an LA Times article:

    .....Many said they could imagine Paris being just as easily targeted by terrorists, and that 10 years ago they felt as though their own people were under attack. We experienced 9/11 too, with them. We watched the images at the same time," said 17-year-old Megan Coipel, who said she brought a large American flag to the event as a show of support. "It could happen here. We're not safe from anything," added her friend, Maxime Desprez, 16.

    Older generations said they felt forever indebted to the United States because of its role in liberating France from Nazi occupation. "Since World War II I know how grateful we must be to the Americans," said Eliane Brouilhit, 68. "I was shattered on 9/11. I was pulled down to pieces. I shall never forget."


    by artappraiser on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 11:53pm

    Yes, everybody, everywhere is supposed to line up and pay homage to the 3,000 dead Americans. I wonder when we are going to have a ceremony in New York, (or anywhere else for that matter), for the over 100,000 Iraqi children that died from the American inspired UN sanctions that Madeline Albright said were "worth it". Art... where is your horse shit detector? This is a circus... The USA are the biggest terrorists in the world... Osama bin Laden was a rank amateur compared to any US president... Obama included.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 12:24am

    David,

    1) I mainly posted the above because I do not think you are accurately representing the culture in which you now reside. Reading you over time, and then reading others, I think you do that a lot. I don't know if it's purposeful or just blindness or isolation in a ghetto, whatever.

    Personally I don't like the tree thing with the kids, I happen to think it's schmaltzy, and even worse it's not a decent thing to do to those kids to have them involved in an official commemoration.

    2) Not a nit: 372 foreign nationals (excluding the 19 perpetrators) were part of 2,977 victims, 12%.

    3) All I can say is where's you insight from literature now? Numbers of victims and ranking on the most bad actor scale, and not in what affects individual minds? (You really think the number 6 million is what upsets most people about the Holocaust when they first learn about it? I know you know what I'm talking about, otherwise you do things like use an illustration of a single black women lying naked and writhing in pain to represent a post about cholera in Haiti.)

    It's a simple and perhaps cruel fact of humans that shock and surprise attacks really resonate, but that they expect many people, including civilians, to die and to have all kinds of other bad things happen to them in war zones. Hence, the whole idea of being a refugee from war--that civilians leave war zones if they can and feel sorry for those that can't. They learned that, over millenia, that this happens, it's almost like it's in the DNA. They feel horror and sympathy and empathy if they are good people, and mourn and try to help or try to end it.

    But terrorism resonates more with many precisely because of the shock and surprise of the unexpected, and it is of course what terrorism is all about. It's nearly an evolutionary response that you would ponder more and longer on the unexpected threat and the surprise attacks and try to get a grasp of them through mourning and ceremony and similar.

    It's not just about Americans. It's about people everywhere who thought they were lucky enough to have found a safe place to live and work not feeling secure that they have done so.

    Isabel Garcia Lorca understood exactly what she was doing emphasizing the loss of her brother, and Maranon sounds like a cold calculating scientific body count type who doesn't get it why people get more upset over the death of someone they felt they knew over the death of someone they didn't.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 1:24am

    Oh, they tried to emulate the "Ground Zero" thing in Madrid, but Spanish people just don't get off on that stuff. They had a huge demonstration, voted a government out of office, dried their tears and went on to the next thing. They have had homegrown terrorism with hundreds of dead for years (ETA). As to Ms. García Lorca, I actually knew the lady and she was very nice, but to understand Marañon you'd have to understand that about 100,000 men and women are still lying today in unmarked mass graves all over Spain. And to single out one of them and make a special search for his remains, seems a lack of respect for and solidarity with all the others.

    The Lorca family, who are lovely people, have always treated Federico as a demigod, they wont even admit he was gay, which was an important part of his artistic personality... Nowadays they are against searching for his remains (probably because their "Tatabel" got what she wanted from Marañon and today the poet's remains are probably hidden discreetly in the family pantheon in the Granada cemetery.

    When we talk about the Holocaust we are talking about the genocide of 6,000,000 people carried out methodically over several years. How can you compare all of that with 3,000 people killed in one morning. Turning Ground-Zero into some sort of Yad Vashem is grotesque.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 5:05am

    Herewith something of a gloss, but anent the distinction between a methodological exterminatio. & 9/11, Osama deplored on one occasion the loss of lives (cf. collateral damage) and referenced his long standing "hard on" against the towers The attacks, after all, were timed for early a.m.-not for maximum carnage, & had the planes not been late from the gate, the toll would have been lower still.

    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 5:22am

    Gee Rog, I never thought of that... Osama... Mr. Nice Guy. So basically the carnage was caused by a defect of America's deteriorating infrastructure... inefficient airlines etc? Live and learn.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 5:55am

    Both planes that hit the towers were 14 minutes late Thus the second would have preceeded the work day by 12 minutes Guiliani gloated that the timing was "foolis

    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 7:24am

    I'll be damned Rog.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 1:33pm

    Yeah. Guiliani was all "Arabs! Can't figure how to go for the body count..."

    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 2:22pm

    Who knows-maybe that's one of the details a trial would have inconveniently elucidated.

    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 2:27pm

    So he only targeted the working stiffs that keep the building running and get everything ready for the white collar crowd? What a humanitarian.


    by Donal on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:05pm

    When the issue is body count, each body counts for one.

    At a trial, I have no doubt that in the penalty phase, a good lawyer would introduce evidence (if such were available) that the crime was planned to minimize loss of life while inflicting collapse upon what 'sama has elsewhere declared to be his target--the towers.

    The meme "they want to kill us-as many as possible, everywhere, all the time" is popular but contradicted by this example

    And, as I said,  Guiliani positively chortled that the timing was poorly done (because he, of course, promoted the meme).

     


    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:51pm

    Assuming that the "workday" begins at 9. In my experience, despite the "9 to 5" expression, most white collar workers are on an "8 to 5" schedule, or some variant thereof, with an hour(ish) off for lunch.

    (and, of course, what Donal said about maintenance workers et al.)


    by Verified Atheist on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:15pm

    As a nerd I've never worked a 9-5 schedule, I've always worked at 6 am to 2 pm, and then if anything went wrong with the network I would be back after 5 pm and work until it was finished.


    by tmccarthy0 on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:45pm

    I think bin Laden's calculation was to strike as early in the day as possible for surprise and used the day's  first planes... no humanitarianism involved, simply military calculation.


    by David Seaton on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:49pm

    You don't have to ascribe humanitarism.  He got shit from co-Islamists for the high toll of "innocents" as it was.

    He himself, in one of his tapes, referenced regret for the deaths, and specifically declared the destruction of the towers as his objective.

    Possibly just p.r. but then, we invented the concept of "collateral damage", did we not, for PR purposes?

    Recall the wisdom of Wilde:" Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue..."


    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:55pm

    Crocodile tears.


    by Donal on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 4:17pm

    Like our professed regrets in re : Chinese embassy bombed in Yugoslavia?

    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 4:36pm

    No, like crocodile tears.


    by Donal on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 8:27pm

    Not Wilde, La Rochefoucauld.


    by David Seaton on Wed, 09/14/2011 - 1:47am

    Sure, but how many more.people would have died if the strike were made at 1pm

    The towers hold a lot more than 3000, and the  peons are not on the upper floors (except for the restaurant workers, and even they were thinner at 8:30 than during the lunch shift)


    by jollyroger on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 3:53pm

    How can it be inappropriate to set one day aside, in America, in remembrance of 9/11?

    Provided we also set aside the rest of the year to fight against the ways in which 9/11 was, and still is, being used to destroy America from within.


    by Red Planet on Tue, 09/13/2011 - 6:31pm

    King Solomon?


    by David Seaton on Wed, 09/14/2011 - 1:48am