^{If We Can Put a Man on the Moon, Why Can't We Talk Sense?}

After the moon landing, a new phrase entered our lexicon. Everyone started saying "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we..." and then they'd insert their personal wish. Usually, the wish had no relation to landing on the moon other than the difficulty. Nobody said "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we design a reusable orbital entry vehicle?" It was always cure cancer or end racism or build a soup that eats like a meal. Noble causes, of course, but they don't necessarily follow from landing on the moon.

Although it hasn't solidified into a single phrase, September 11th has produced the same sort of piggybacking. "If only we'd [Insert Cause Here] the tragedy of 9-11 wouldn't have occurred." Or, "If we truly want to prevent another September 11th, we have to [Insert Cause Here]." I've also seen the variant "If we don't [Insert Speaker's Desire Here], the terrorists win."

Sometimes these things are obvious and goofy. I wrote in Tryptic Cryptic proper about a DJ I heard complaining that September 11th was "the price we pay" for being a soft society ruled by feminists and homosexuals. Yes, that's right, if gays hadn't been at the controls of all our warplanes, none of this would have happened. "Say what you will about Osama bin Laden, he is a man," the DJ said. It's tough to argue with logic like that.

Everytime we have a ghastly crime someone crawls out of the woodwork and says "This wouldn't happen if we had more guns in our schools/workplaces/restaurants/day-care centers." And yes, I did read the suggestion that all passengers on airlines be allowed to carry guns. Yeah, I'll be flying those friendly skies.

The plan to drill for oil in the Alaskan wilderness has been re-titled the Homeland Energy Security Act. Slapping the words "national security" onto a dumbass idea doesn't make it less of a dumbass idea.

Fellow Cryptonaut m.a.d. even found a parody article titled, "The Bombings mean everyone should support my politics." Although I have to point out, the majority of suggestions I hear try to push us even further to the right. In some cases, a rightwing utopia seems to be the goal, regardless of the effect on security. A woman wrote the Hartford Courant asking, now that we are all patriots and unified and everything, why don't we have prayer in school? I've lost track of the number of talk radio callers, letter-writers, editorialists and pundits who've commented with glee that Americans are no longer speaking of themselves with hyphens. "People are finally getting it and just calling themselves Americans!" Everytime I hear this I want to say, "Yeah, I've always hated black people too."

Even Bush has gotten into the act with his own "If we want to prevent another ..." theory, claiming that missile defense is now more important than ever. Maniacs carried out these attacks with hate, money and boxcutters. Fucking boxcutters! What are you gonna do? Shoot the boxcutters out of their hands from space?

Maybe these ideas seem obvious and goofy to me because I'm not a right-winger hypnotized into some kind of groupthink. I might not be welcome in our future unified rightwing utopia. I've already read four or five "love it or leave it" letters, including one in the Yale Daily News titled "Hey Leftists: Better Start Waving That American Flag!" Hey Right-wingers, better stop drinking out of the toilet!

Other, smarter, people from the left have tried piggybacking decent ideas onto September 11th. Noam Chomsky has written about the myriad of factors, most prominently American foreign policy mistakes, that produced the 9-11 terrorists. You can surf good sites like znet and alternet and find many good ideas haphazardly linked to 9-11. Most prominently, people talk about our alliance with Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.

Usually, it's about Israel. "If only we [didn't side with Israel all the time/listened to the Palestinians/stopped giving Israel support], they wouldn't hate us so much and we wouldn't get bombed." I absolutely support taking a more enlightened approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We should abandon our instinctive alliance with Israel and we should take a hard line approach to their provocative actions, like the West Bank settlements. We should diplomatically bitch-slap either side whenever they target civilians or kill children. Becoming more of an objective facilitator and less of Israel's big brother can only help the peace process. I believe this was true before September 11th and I believe it's still true after September 11th, but not because of September 11th.

The same is true of the sanctions on Iraq. Ideally, I'd like to see some State Department and UN brainiacs come up with a way to get more humanitarian aid into Iraq and to provide full access to the UN inspectors. Iraq has been allowed to sell oil, but the money has gone into things like developing weapons rather than hospitals. The present course of action can only lead to more deaths, either in Iraq from starvation or America from chemical weapons. It's an issue that has to be raised aggressively, but it has both diddley and squat to do with September 11th.

Sometimes we act like Osama bin Laden and el Queda terrorists are characters in a movie or novel we can deconstruct. Like we can remove these two motivating factors and they will wander around with nothing to do. Or with love in their hearts for a new, enlightened America. We act like we can speak for them when they - neither claiming responsibility nor providing their own motivation - won't do it for themselves. "Oh, here's what they want. They want [Insert What I Want Here]."

I'm all for moving the peace process forward between Israel and Palestine, but if you think this would satisfy the el Queda network, you're dreaming. Listen to bin Laden's tape. He wants to "drive the infidels from the land of Mohamed." We are not going to satisfy terrorist networks into being so happy with us that they leave us alone unless we declare war on Israel ourselves.

No matter how often I hear this kind of piggyback rationalization, no one mentions what everyone in the el Queda network says in their prime motivation: religion. No one ever says, "We can prevent another September 11th if [we all became radical fundamentalist Muslims]." Well, that's silly. But so's pretending their motivation is solely a response to our foreign policy and has nothing to do with religious indoctrination.

I believe in a foreign policy that helps poor nations and punishes aggression. I believe active engagement and diplomacy in the area can only help us when everything goes to hell and we need, say, Egypt's help to track down a suspect or something. Is our failure to do such things in earnest responsible for September 11th? Bullshit. The people responsible for September 11th are the ones who hijacked the planes and the ones to paid for them and told them to do it. Good foreign policy is a justification in and of itself, not something we should do because we imagine it's the hoop terrorists want us to jump through.