Had your fill of 9/11 porn yet? I guarantee if you turn on the TV at this moment on some channel there’ll be a plane crashing into a building and a nutter from the Midwest telling you it was organised by the Jews via the offices of the Zionist Occupation Government, the towers packed with thermite, the Pentagon hit not by an aircraft but by a missile, Rumsfeld an alien lizard creature, Charlie Sheen or some other madman asking why They keep lying to us. Or one of the more upmarket programmes — same shot of the planes crashing in and people jumping out of the windows, but done in slo-mo with accompanying music by La Monte Young or Philip Glass.
Those images were, for a while, considered contraband, deemed for some indeterminate period of time after 9/11 to be too harrowing to watch; but now we cannot get enough of them. Harsh though it may have been, there is some truth in the Guardian columnist Gary Younge’s observation that there is a certain narcissism evident in the relentlessness of the coverage; the crucial fact of the tragedy is not that 3,000 people may have been murdered, but that they were Americans, in America.
Less telegenically gratifying, but more revelatory, might be a detailed exposition of what has happened to us as an indirect consequence of 9/11: not just the wars we have embarked upon with fundamentalist liberal belligerence, but the other related stuff. The trivial and the less trivial; from the self-important security monkey patting down your five-year-old child at the airport to see if she’s packing a chunk of Semtex all the while telling you it’s for your own good, sir, would you stand back or I will have to contact the police, to the laws enacted theoretically to protect us from being similarly murdered but which are cheerfully deployed by every authoritarian institution in the country to make sure you haven’t put tea bags in your plastics-only waste bin, or to stop you taking a photograph at a railway station, or standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. And to bang you up for longer without trial, and then to lock you away for years simply for saying stuff with which right-thinking people fervently disagree, as happened to the lunatic sheikh Abu Hamza al Masri (and one or two others). As a consequence of 9/11, security now trumps everything and provides a justification for each and every intrusion into our lives, so that while we are watched by more closed circuit TV cameras than any other nation in the world, we cannot ourselves take photographs of the CCTV cameras in case we’re planning to blow them up.
Have we ever been more cowed? I don’t know if this is an indirect consequence of 9/11, but it seems to be part of the way we are now, our submissiveness before any form of authority, no matter how spurious. Those yellow fluorescent jerkins, the ones you see everywhere, worn by people telling you what to do. I bought one a week or so back for an experiment and started bossing strangers around. They all did exactly as I demanded, no matter how ludicrous the instruction; nobody questioned the reasoning. With a rather blissful irony people even left the pavement and walked in the middle of the road ‘for your own safety’ when told to do so, despite the fact that it was quite a busy road and there was nothing whatsoever amiss with the pavement. I suppose it’s a good job nobody was killed or maimed. But we have become used to this exponential expansion of bossiness and now passively connive with it, if that’s not a paradox.
Here’s another trivial example of the sort of thing I mean — very trivial, really, but it made me unaccountably annoyed. Two special coppers — Blunkett’s Bobbies — from the South Yorkshire police marched into a party shop in Sheffield and ‘advised’ the staff to remove a mannequin from the doorway which had been dressed to look like Colonel Gaddafi and was holding a sign saying: ‘You ain’t seen me, right?’ The officers apparently told the staff that they had ‘reservations’ about the mannequin and it could be deemed ‘inappropriate’ and that they should remove it ‘to prevent possible community tension’.
The shop staff of course did as they were told instead of telling the Old Bill to sod off and mind their own business, maybe catch a few criminals if they have a spare moment. I asked South Yorkshire police for an explanation of their manifestly intrusive officiousness, but got nowt by way of reply. I rang them and getting no joy there then emailed them a list of questions, which included things like were the coppers praised or reprimanded for their actions, what law did they think was being transgressed, what evidence did they have of ‘community tension’ being heightened by a dummy dressed as Colonel Gaddafi and could they furnish all businesses in the South Yorkshire area with a list of public figures whom the police thought it ‘inappropriate’ to mock. I even ‘tweeted’ them a few questions — yes, yes, of course South Yorkshire police are on Twitter, of course they are — but I’ve had no reply.
The shop’s owner, a bloke called Peter Tooley, told me he wondered what the world was coming to, etc, and that as a sort of comment on the antics of the police they now have a mannequin dressed up as Captain Mainwaring of the Walmington Home Guard holding a placard up saying ‘Don’t Panic!’ Fair enough, although if memory serves me correctly it was Corporal Jones who said ‘don’t panic’, not Mainwaring. But I suppose that is beside the point.
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