Shanksville Redemption: Can America Heal?

 13 September 2021

One can never tell when the Martin Luther King Jr moment will come by, when a speech as soulful or as rousing could be mouthed, and while these are first impressions of a speech from a source that could be never guessed first hand, it has the potential of rhetoric and pitch to make the cut, it can be that clarion call, for the Soul of America as much as Dr King’s was those decades ago…

President George Bush Jr spoke at Shanksville to honour the memory of 9/11 of Flight United93 that crashed before it reached its intended target- The Capitol twenty years ago. It was a sideshow, almost discovered later, not in the immediate focus of the spectacular ruins that remained in the aftermath of the collapse of the WTC twin towers that day which forever altered the skyline of Manhattan and perhaps of American memory itself! It was assessed as one of the finest moments of American nationhood as a motley bunch of passengers and crew managed to thwart the efforts of determined Al Qaeda operatives, whose companions had on that day managed to strike other intended targets, including the Pentagon! It was one silver lining on a day when American Establishment moved to take their POTUS to the skies, their VP to an undisclosed bunker, and to carry out an operation of gargantuan proportions that diverted flights inbound to USA by having them land in Mexico, in Canada or retrace themselves back to Europe or Asia from where they had started that day…

It was an act of great courage, great understanding of common cause, of purpose and aught to be perhaps the single most act of civilian gallantry in the face of unexpected terror in the history of mankind even. For America, there could not have been a greater validation of its created nationhood, where a civic sense of unity, country first, and greater common good were to come to the fore!

Why would Bush Jr who was the President on that day, invoke this sacred memory two decades later and make a comparison of the barbaric monsters who attacked America on 9/11 with the crowds that assembled at The Capitol and tried to storm it on 6 January 2021 to prevent the Congress from confirming the electoral votes in favour of President Biden? The presence of VP Kamala Harris and former VP Dick Cheney on stage when President Bush Jr spoke at Shanksville, offered it a political equanimity, a cloak of legitimacy, to American Democracy itself, now riven by divisive politics of the Trump reelection campaign which saw the collective failure of American polity at multiple levels, despite actually managing somehow to complete a transition and honouring an electoral verdict.

Was Osama bin Laden and the Jihadist ideology of America being the source of all evil, the font of Western ideology and capitalism that supported Israel and Zionism, that harassed and harmed Islam and was ‘Satan’, an analogy of sufficient gravitas for the Oath Keepers, QAnon supporters and other Right Wing extremist shades of opinion who captured the Republican Party and who have since continued to back President Trump and who reject the electoral verdict of 3 November 2020? 

Look at where America has travelled in the last 12 months and you will know that unlike Al Qaeda, this RW extremism that is the bench strength of the Republican Party base today, has grown stronger, feeding on judicial victories that threaten to finally overthrow Roe v Wade, that have already made voting more difficult for Americans other than White Angle Saxon Protestants and those whom the WASP identify as their exclusive kindred? The red states have moved more to the right in the months under Biden politically and administratively than they did under Trump in four years. American efforts to Warp speed the vaccines for Corona virus have been largely derailed due to the refusal of adults to vaccinate when offered choices and the unvaccinated are at the forefront of America’s current wave of Covid led by the Delta variant! Never before has politics taken such a stranglehold that it affected public health, threatened gender rights, threatened to dispossess immigrants of opportunities and now has taken a stranglehold on the idea of America itself, as now! That is why Bush’s speech at Shanksville was a clarion call!

In ten minutes, largely devoted to the sacred memory of the victims who died aboard United 93, President Bush not just compared the assailant Al Qaeda terrorists, but went ahead to say that the assaulting insurrectionists of 6/1 managed to breach the Capitol which the terrorists could not do. For President Bush the imagery of storming of the Capitol weighed more than the casualties from that day, the scale of violence that was witnessed and even the chaotic efforts of law enforcement that day which rescued the VP and members of Congress, even as their chambers were run over or ransacked. 

If you see how politically 6/1 is treated by the Republicans now in office, you can find no support for any Congressional Committee, Inquiry or legislative mention to get to its roots and take action to counter it, in contrast to how political America reacted unanimously to act on 9/11. So much that US Congress looked the other way, as the American Administration created overnight sites that were not just off map, black, but sites that were outside the jurisdiction of US legal scrutiny. It allowed water boarding amongst other most inhumane and vendetta playing torture for captives who were suspected of being involved, however sparsely or incoherently even unwittingly with the plot that led to 9/11. If you see how America waged war in Afghanistan or invaded Iraq, you can see how these were done in that atmospherics where American polity sought vengeful reassurance about its nationhood, caring little for their own statutes that limit the Presidential power to wage war itself! You can also see how America undertook a position not challenged at all, of extrajudicial course, where it would allow its intelligence and special forces members to be judge, jury and executioner rolled into one! It was this tragic day that gave America the rationale to use drones without remit, to act without checks or balances, against any thing associated with Islamic terror! 

So why should President Bush try to appropriate the sanctions political America offered for its global war on terror, for this ‘civil war’ within America for America’s soul?

His exact words were- “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, but in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit and it is our continuing duty to confront them.” He did this while recalling an America that was not just ‘nostalgia’ but the very example of what he sought to sell as Americanness. He wanted an America now, which he felt it was when he led it. An inclusive honourable and large hearted America, that exists in private acts, one that we can never see in the acts of the State in United States. He paid a special tribute to veterans and to service members, to the Fallen who fought for two decades and have now returned from Afghanistan.

One cannot argue with Bush about Western world’s new longest day as 9/11 replacing the 6/6 which was the Allied Landings in the beaches of Normandy that began the end of the WWII. One cannot disagree with his striking evangelism as he spoke of ‘God’s terrible silence’. He spoke of how ‘after wandering in the dark, many have found they were actually walking step by step toward grace’. If one did not acknowledge who Bush’s intended audience was, one would not grasp this religious streak that silver lined an otherwise pitch for American universalism. Like King using a string of ‘hundred years ago’ Bush used ‘I know’ to embellish that universalism. The noble 40 (33 passengers and 7 crew aboard U93) were like the noble 600 of Tennyson, they stood for all Americans, they charged on America’s behalf and defeated the ‘designs of evil’.

So Bush was looking for the renewed United93 spirit. He was looking for American universalism that he extolled in his ten minute oration! He looked upward to the skies and ended with his assertion that those skies would always remind and rejuvenate that spirit! Only time will tell, if really those skies can inspire America anymore…

At one personal level, from painting portraits of immigrants to the political activism that Bush Jr has indulged in while remaining a Republican President, we can see an effort to claim a better legacy than the one his leadership of America actually offered. From his war on terror to axis of evil, what Bush actively or inadvertently did, was to help Israel and White Christian Supremacists to wash away their sins and emerge with a fresh clean slate to script their narratives. In toppling Saddam, in the aftermath of ISIS, the Syrian crises and now the return of Taliban, the churn in the MiddleEast that has tilted the balance irrevocably in Israel’s favour, in favour of White Supremacists in domestic politics can be traced directly as caused or as a consequence of his Administration’s decisions. At a political level, Bush Jr has perhaps seen the gamut of factors in flux now, which are threatening American existence itself, particularly how American Red Republican polity refuses to budge and in its extremism threatens the very foundation of America, in his view! If Bush did not so view this threat from within the ranks of a party his family served and from where his father and he became presidents , he would not have dragged the memory of 6/1 which is current and hotly contested into the sacred space of 9/11 which is settled and honoured!

Has President George Bush Jr got his Redemption at Shanksville?