9/11 In School: What Will (E.G.) A "9/11" Curriculum Teach?

As Murka prepares for the by-now annual, increasingly furious barrages of patriotic, jingoistic, exceptionalist codswallop to commemorate the events eight years ago, when hijacked commercial jet-liners were used as guided missiles to attack the foremost symbols of Murkin Global Imperialism, it is worth remembering that, compared with the waste laid to "mere humanity," and the material damages inflicted upon the rest of the world, by USer militarism and neo-colonialism, even just since the end of WW II, our national "suffering" from the 9/11 attacks is and was trivial. Shocking! Definitely. But trivial.

Of course, there is now a curriculum to bring all that bathos and tragedy into the classroom, in an appropriately jingoistic, nationalistic, exceptionalistic fashion. I'm just guessing here, but I'm betting there are no mentions in the "9/11 Curriculum" of the "chickens coming home to roost," or the possible motivations of the attackers other than "hating our freedoms." Wanna bet?

Of course, the attack was bad, and tragic for the victims. But, had it been any worse, Robert Sheer doubts that the "nation" could have withstood the internal, official pressure from the Busheviks to revoke the Constitution and cancel the American social contract.

That's Sheer's point in his remarks on the matter on TruthDig the other day.

What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?

Good question, innit. Who believes the country couldn't have been railroaded into forsaking its freedoms in the face of something like that? I'm guessing this won't be in the 9/11 Curriculum...

It is worth remembering, for many reasons, that

...Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our “mistakes.” Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express “regret” for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.

In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren’t able to find Manhattan on a map.

We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them.

And I'm guessing these radical notions don't make it into the 9/11 Curriculum, either, even though one of its authors claoms they haven't tried to "sugar-coat" it. Of course not. It's the bathos that's memorable, that "sells."

By the way, I shall here repeat my prediction that by 2011, the 10th anniversary of the events that September day, there will either be completed , or at least well underway (if Obama's in deep trouble, it'll be signed, sealed, and delivered by then) an effort to rename Labor Day in memory of the victims of that day.

I mean, nobody cares about labor anymore. It's so "last Centuries."