Saturday Sunday What? The Task of America’s Adolescence Is To Learn to Apply Past Institutional History to the Present Moment

 

 

I’m as hopeful that they had the Original 9 on the tennis courts  - Arthur Ashe main stadium, Billie Jean King Tennis Center - at the U.S. Open ladies final that featured two teenagers – given how youth-obsessed Western culture is generally - as I was flabbergasted to hear so much revisionist history today about “the country was united then blah blah de blah” when there are a whole bunch of us WHO WERE ACTUALLY THERE who remember it way differently.

 

This morning I heard Andy McCabe say “that was when Bush finally became President” and I immediately thought “I can’t BELIEVE he just said that” and  “but of course ‘Gaslight Andy’ McCabe would say that” and “that’s where they got that g_dd_mn phrase” and “Dude, we know he was a golf-playing box of rocks and Cheney and Rove ran the government to pour literal trillions into the pockets of Halliburton and other military contractors so that the U.S. would never get universal healthcare after it was stopped the first time after the Civil War because White people didn’t want Black people to have it and we’re not just talking about the Confederate Southerners.  Come on.  Who are you kidding?”

Why Doesn't the U.S. Have Universal Healthcare?  One Word:  Racism - Original NYT 1619 Project

 

Come on.  Like Mr. Gentleman C had any idea, any concept, of the future repercussions of what he was doing.

 

But Cheney knew.  And Karl Rove knew.

 

And Beer Kavanaugh and Amy Covid Barrett were lawyers on the team that argued to try to get the then-SCOTUS to force the Florida electors to stop the 2000 POTUS election recount (that Bush went on to “win” by some 950 votes).

 

So they also knew.

 

I’m encouraged to see Muslim Americans today speaking out about what it felt like to be targeted then and what it’s like to have been targeted since then.  I was a baby in NYC with a baby job in Building One on the 77^th floor with my strongest memories of the time (after the shock of having survived at all by the sheer luck of the near-premises staff meeting instead of it happening in the office) being the acrid odors below 14^th street and how often my just-served in the US Navy mixed-race boyfriend got harassed in the street because ignorant White people thought he was “Arab” or “Muslim”.  

 

 

Got some of that myself but at least never got a hijab snatched off my head like some of the young Muslim women I know who suffered through that.

So when Bush II, making a speech TODAY, is all “This is not the America I know” I am like “talk to Karl Rove” and “Dude, who are  you gaslighting?”

 

There are reports of 9/11 victims who are just now being diagnosed with illnesses that had their origins in the terrors of that day two decades ago now.

 

So – those of us just recently getting to our first docs’ appts for … awhile … bc of the combination of family responsibilities and how long you have to generally wait for an appt in the time of COVID ... who are getting comparatively unexpectedly bad news about more tests for stuff nothing in our previous medical histories would’ve indicated would be likely  (families of origins’ unsettling habits of withholding family medical histories and subsequent requirements of rooting around like a detective in family records notwithstanding) – should we be asking about whether the origin of some of these conditions could’ve sprouted from surviving extreme trauma on 9/11 … ?

 

I mean – OTOH, I understand Bennifer 2.0 is apparently official again on the Red Carpet at the Venice Film Festival.

 

So …