On September 11, 2001, I was in Austin, Texas, completing a summer stint as office peon of the Texas Association of Broadcasters between my sophomore year at Columbia and junior year abroad at the University of Rome. The TAB was overseen by a middle-aged woman named Ann, who resembled a demonic Furby and who specialized in rendering existence tedious in the way that only Americans in office buildings seem to know how. Human vibes rarely emanated from her being, and an Exorcist-type spectacle ensued whenever I deviated slightly from the prescribed script for asking if she could take a call from so-and-so. Each and every malfunction of the Xerox machine was further proof that I had no future.
Befitting the inhospitable environment, the office thermostat was set to tundra mode, meaning that in the dead of the infernal Texas summer I came to work bundled in sweaters. I often spent my lunch breaks asphyxiating myself in my car in the parking lot, windows rolled up, in an effort to coax some life back into my cells. At my desk, I rebelled against tyranny by drinking wine out of my coffee cup and placing calls to Chile on the office telephone.
Beyond the confines of the workplace, it had been a less than monotonous summer owing to an operation on my cervix—after which surgery every gynecologist I would ever visit outside the US would inevitably inquire in horror as to what third world country’s doctors were responsible for internally mutilating me. Over time, my cervical inferiority complex would grow into a sense of violation by my very own homeland, an entity that would rather go bomb people than provide its citizens with effective health care or other useful amenities.
September 11, of course, produced all sorts of new opportunities on that front. I was back at the TAB post-cervical invasion, and spent the day in the conference room watching replays of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on a large projector screen. Outside, US flags began to proliferate at an obscene rate, and, as the government-media nexus sought to portray the assault on American borders and iconography as a direct violation of every individual American, folks across the country were catapulted to new levels of patriotic resolve and indignation. The stage had decisively been set for the impending slaughterfest known as the US War on Terror and the increasing public internalization of the logic of empire, according to which borders only matter when we say they do. READ MORE AT EVERGREEN REVIEW.