Five years ago this past Monday, my old friend Wes called and found me at home, and told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.  I turned on the TV and saw that in fact both towers had been hit, and were smoking uncontrollably, belching flames and smoke like the world’s largest power plant.  When I saw the first one collapse, and then the second, I felt profound shock and grief, and immense frustration at my own powerlessness.  I spent much of the day intermittently breaking into tears.  I felt mixed waves of sadness and anger, sadness and anger, sadness…and anger, alternating through me like a current, like a sine wave.
 
I spent an hour or so on the Internet researching cockpit cabins, and happened upon a long article from Salon from 1999 that detailed the escalating number of cockpit breaches in commercial airliners, and the reticence of the airline industry to pay the money necessary to reinforce the doors.  “Now they’ll pay the money” I thought.
 
Somehow Wes and I managed to meet later that day for lunch.  “Surely” I said, “now this country will honestly face the waste from its over-consumption, especially of oil from the Middle East.  Surely now, after we get the guys who did this, we will take steps to change our energy consumption habits, our consumption of forests and oceans and minerals.  Surely we will understand that projection of power into foreign lands to secure resources has a price.  Surely even this Administration can no longer hold back the floodgates of change.”  I said stuff like that that day, trying to put together some coherent sense of the connections between the attacks and US foreign policies.
 
And yet, I was wrong.  Totally wrong.  The country was not ready to see truth, and certainly could not as long as it was preyed upon by master propagandists like Karl Rove, Richard Cheney, and even the President himself, George W. Bush.  The people of this country, manipulated and worked over by economic pressures, failing schools, and lobotomized major media, stood little chance against the Bush onslaught in the wake of 9/11.  And the people themselves bear blame as well, for willingly handing over their critical faculties, and their faith in themselves, and their born right to be skeptical of the claims made by any man or woman, regardless of their power, or prestige, or pocketbook.  The people had in some sense become wicked and blind, just as had those at Sodom and Gomorrah.
 
9/11 was an attack perpetrated by a radical group of killers, relatively small in number, and ostracized and shunned by the vast majority of the world, both then and now.  The response called for by the 9/11 attacks was one of precision, intelligence, discernment, and care.  It called for precise intelligence, agile surveillance, heightened communications and security measures, and cooperation and goodwill from the vast numbers of people across the globe who held out their hands in friendship and condolence to this grieving nation.  9/11 called for a leader to put this evil gang in perspective for us, to point out exactly how they were dangerous, and how they were not in that they posed a substantially lesser threat than previous mortal threats that this nation has faced: global war launched by fascists in the 1940’s, and nuclear showdowns with a socialist state gone sour.
 
9/11 called for a President who would warn his advisors not to play fast and loose with intelligence, not to provide inaccurate counsel, not to sensationalize matters for political gain, not to drive divisions between the population or between government branches, not to create tensions with populations in other parts of the world.  9/11 called for a President who would strike the right balance between revenge and justice for the perpetrators, and study, analysis, and then amelioration of the causes of their hatred.  9/11 called for a President who would recognize the unique opportunity to, as Lincoln said, “bind up wounds” and start the world on a long march toward true peace and prosperity, based not just upon respect for political rights, but also for cultural heritage and environmental and resource needs.
 
But the President and his henchman instead gave us exactly the opposite of what we needed, because their interests have never been congruent with the truth.  Instead of a constrained, measured, analytical approach to the vengeance we sought, the threats we endured, and the problems we faced, the nation was fed a constant, unremitting, fattening diet of unconstrained scares, expansive phantasmagoric interpretations of actual threats, and packaged proposals and experiments to remake vast portions of the world at the end of the guns of indoctrinated young Americans, without any reference to the realities of those foreign places.  What should have begun and ended as an investigation, arrest, trial, and punishment of a band of killers and their true affiliates, has turned into a massive, resource-hogging, hatred building, polarizing, and deadly morass called The War on Terror.  It is, like so many other of their wars – The War on Drugs, The War on Science, The War on Evolution, The War on Welfare, The War on Big Government, The War on Sex – ill-defined, illogical, counterproductive, hypocritical, economically wasteful, destructive, and in the end, unwinnable.
 
On September 12, we had all become children of 9/11, I among you.  And as time went on, and I saw how wrong I was in my predictions that NOW change would come, but how right I still felt in my convictions, I started this show after asking for a chance to speak out.  The first New Capital Shows spoke out against the imminent war in Iraq, and pointed out that the Bush Administration had been planning such a war long before it was even in power.  One of my first guests was Nicholas Lemann, then the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, now the Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism.  I, a total newcomer to this media profession at the time, asked him, an immensely talented and highly-regarded journalist, what possible veracity he saw in the Bush Administration’s evidentiary claims for war in Iraq.  I recall this establishment journalist telling KPFT listeners in response that he just truly doubted that Bush officials, including those in the Pentagon, would knowingly harm the credibility of this nation by proffering nonsense to the world.  Put another way: the current Dean of Columbia School of Journalism, the most prestigious school of journalism in the country, decided that it was more important to trust the intentions of the Bush Administration than to perform true investigative journalism and find the real truth.
 
This show is therefore a child of 9/11, a child born of the frustration at the misguided power of those who have since 9/11 controlled our government, and who have made mistake after mistake after mistake, and insulted us further by insisting on their rectitude even as reality said, and continues to say, something different.  They have made both mistakes of commission, choosing to take actions that have hurt us, and mistakes of omission, not taking other actions that we desperately needed. 
 
These people will not last in power forever.  Their smug arrogance, their sound bite communications, their monotonous propaganda, repeated over and over again, never bothering to change even a few words for fear that an uneducated public for which they bear large responsibility for creating and maintaining, will misunderstand them, and glimpse a few rays of truth.  Their dependence upon fear and separation, upon weakness and ignorance, and upon graft and bribery, are all wearing thin.  They too shall pass, just as 9/11 passed five years ago, and just as my frustration passes each Thursday into a guarded, hopeful optimism as I step into this booth to be with you on the radio.  And history will look at them with the ignominy that they deserve.  History will be pitiless with them, in the same way that they have been pitiless with our country, refusing to mercifully level with those who look up to them for the truth.
 
In about 800 days, the self-declared “War President” will be finished attempting to ameliorate his own personal demons and deficiencies at the expense of our national community.  And as at the end of most wars, when the gates swing open, reunions are held, tears flow, and people sob and laugh that they have survived the war, the warriors, and the war presidents, so we too shall have our happy days.
 
Days of reckoning are coming.  If you cannot feel it, just give it some more time.  They may be coming slowly, or they may be coming fast.  They may come in November when the nation decides if it likes the way things are going or if it wants some change, or they may not come in November.  They may come in a quick flash, or they may subtly dawn like many mornings.  We will hope and work so that they will come peacefully. 
 
9/11, for all of its horror and sadness, brought out community in the world.  And although the Bush Administration has done its best to destroy communities and leave us isolated from each other, there are many of us who are determined to prevent that from happening.  In the wake of 9/11, we saw in many ways that we are not alone.  But it was the haunting image of two people, at the top of the World Trade Center, grasping each others’ hands, and then jumping to plummet to their deaths to avoid the flames, together, hand in hand, that spoke most powerfully that day of the human need to connect in the face of terror, hatred, and madness.  And that – more than anything – the mission of connecting people into community - is the mission, is the business, is the purpose of this radio network, of this station, and of this show.
 
I’m Leo Gold.  This is the New Capital Show.