Political Writings I Wrote As A Kid In A Post-9/11 World
On the 20th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks that forever changed the world, here is a small retrospective on what my experience was as a child and teenager growing up in the cultural and political aftermath that followed.
I was 8 years old on the day when, for many, it felt like the world was ending.
September 11th, 2001. A Tuesday morning during a fresh term of primary school, where mere days before I had just begun Year 4.
Everything was normal, until it wasn’t. Suddenly my class was interrupted by a member of staff coming into the classroom, whispering into our teacher’s ear, and the next thing we knew, we were being ushered into an unscheduled assembly.
There we all sat, rows upon rows, frog-legged on the glossy laminated wood of the sports hall floor, looking up at the headteacher before us. And it was there on that day, with the adults communicating as best they could the grave importance of what had happened so that us children would know to care, that we were told there had been an attack in America. New York. The twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Planes had flown into both buildings. Nobody knew why yet. But what was clear was that it was not an accident.
The world was different now. But it was too soon, and we were too young, to comprehend even the tiniest fraction of how much everything was already beginning to irrevocably change around us.
We didn’t know.
Yet.
The world was scary and strange, but now it was becoming scarier and stranger, and at a pace faster than one could keep up with.
Wars, soldiers, Afghanistan, Iraq, Osama, Saddam, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, WMDs, IEDs, suicide vests, Fox News, 24, 7/7, Fahrenheit 9/11, “Mission Accomplished”, Dubya, American Idiot, propaganda, conspiracies, Loose Change, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, war crimes, Enhanced Interrogation, waterboarding, torture, oil, jihads, unknown knowns, radicalisation… it was all a whirlwind of insanity, which was impossible to avoid having seep deep into one’s mind.
The following writings of mine hail from deep within that era.
The first example of how my mindset had been shaped, by the onslaught of tumultuous events that immediately followed 9/11, comes in the form of a poem I wrote in 2007, when I was 13. It was part of a poetry writing competition held in our secondary school’s various English classes, as well as in many other schools around Wales. The ones that were deemed the best would be selected to be compiled in a published anthology of young writers’ poetry that everyone could buy physical copies of upon publication.
Fortunately for me, I was one of the many students of various ages who had their poem picked for the book, which I still have to this day.
Everyone’s assignment was the same: we had free rein to write about whatever we wanted, in whatever poetry format we desired. (Acrostic, haiku, lyrics, rhymes, no rhymes, and so on.)
I guess at the time I was preoccupied with the subject of the ongoing war, and the futility and unending horror soldiers were facing at the behest of Bush and Blair. At the time I think I was reading the book Will They Ever Trust Us Again? — a compendium of letters and emails from people serving in the military, and their families, where they detailed their experiences of battle on the frontlines, their frustrations with the administration, their disillusionment, and the atrocities they bore witness to — so that might have been fresh on my mind when I was deciding on a topic to write about.
Keep in mind a few things.
I had less than an hour to write it; it was hand-written on a single piece of lined paper, so I couldn’t correct many mistakes; and I was 13, so it was always going to be somewhat clunky, and certainly not in any way subtle. Other than that, here is the poem I wrote, without correction or omission:
Pointless
(2007)
This whole war is pointless
Has been from the start
Ever since President Bush announced it
(Stupid old fart).
The soldiers, including me,
Came on a plane to nowhere
To fight a war that made no sense
And fight an army that’s mostly not there
I don’t know why I even came here
I must have got lost on the way to college
But when I got to the military base
I thought I would manage.
I realised months ago that that was stupid
Of me, when I met the drill instructor
And he hollered in my ear
And called me a “sore”.
The heat in Arab country is extreme
It’s too much to handle
And while us foul-mouthed soldiers sweat it out
The sergeants wear only shorts and sandals.
In this sun-dried landscape of sand dunes
And valleys I have seen men killed
From both sides in equal measures
And I also have killed.
Amongst the sandy landscape
And standing in a bloody mess
I look around me at the bodies
Blood and machine gun shells on the ground
And one word flashes through my mind:
Pointless!
The last piece of writing comes from 2008, when I was 14, in the form of a speech I was to deliver in front of my English class, my English teacher, and a camcorder filming mine and everyone else’s performances as part of giving us our final grades.
The task we were given was to pen an argument for hypothetically putting something we hated into Room 101 — à la the TV show of the same format, inspired by the eponymous room in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — and thus trying to persuade our audience to pick our most hated thing as the one to be confiscated to the confines of Room 101 forever (hypothetically).
As the Pointless poem probably made abundantly obvious, the thing I hated the most at that time was George W. Bush.
So I set about writing a 5 page rant — front and back! — detailing as many salient points about Bush’s destructive incompetency as I could recall, throwing in a few jokes (not necessarily good ones), and then spending the night before my presentation reciting and rehearsing my script over and over again, until it was burned in my memory. (I believe I made some small cue cards of the script in case I got lost during my monologue, but I managed to go off-book through about 95% of it, which I was happy with.)
Presented to you here now is the complete typed-out transcription of my hand-written script. I hadn’t read it in over 13 years, so to say that I cringed would be an understatement. Included are an assortment of footnotes annotating the parts I felt needed addressing, correcting, and/or apologising for.
You’ll see…
George W. Bush “Room 101” rant
(2008)
Guten Tag, fellow terrorists!
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
An interesting statement. The person who said it might not have known how correct that it was. A bird in the hand is worth two more than Bush.
George W. Bush, to be precise. The Commander in Chief. Or rather, Commandeering Thief.
Although, he is comparable to a bird. Not Hillary Clinton, he can’t live up to her.¹ I mean a bird like a duck. Because he is a giant noisy Texan quack. Why do I say this? Well, if you don’t know, perhaps you should watch Michael Moore.² But for now, I’ll elaborate.
Before he even became a President, Bush was bumbling around in a job he was clueless about: the oil business. He made the two or three companies he directed lose millions of dollars, and never got any oil. Scary to think that someone who can’t even get himself petrol is running the 50 states of America.
There is also the fact that not only is he a smug Texan quack, he is an illiterate, ex-alcoholic, felony-committing smug Texan quack. When asked what his favourite childhood book was, he named one you all may have read, and understood, as a child — The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
The thing is, though, is that the book was not even published until a year after he graduated from college.
Then, later in life, he was arrested and spent a night in a cell, for DUI. (“Duck Under the Influence” is what it should stand for.)³ But Bush denied any knowledge of that night. Maybe he really does not remember.
A bird is worth two more than Bush. Because even a bird is more comprehensible than Dubya. Imagine the nightmare. One of his supervisors — maybe even Dick Cheney, his right hand man, who seems to be Bush’s right hand with the amount of time he spends with Bush⁴— hears him say “wipe out the Russians,” the nuclear weapons are sent flying, and Bush says, “What’s goin’ on? I just said I wanted to wipe the Russian dressing off my tie!”
A bird is worth two more than Bush. Because a bird is freer than the selected countries Bush has set his beady little eyes on for terrorism. Some time ago, he made a speech, and one of his terrible quotes is: “The world now has a decision to make. You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” Well, if you say so, Mr. Lone Ranger. So again, I say: Guten Tag, fellow terrorists! (Not hello, that’s a general English greeting.)⁵
Speaking of the Lone Ranger, Bush clearly is deluding himself by thinking he is like the famous cowboy. The amount of times, while “hunting” Saddam Hussein, Bush declared “we’re going to smoke ’em out” or “smoke ‘im out of his cave,” makes me wonder about his frame of mind.⁶ Or lack of it.
A bird is worth two more than Bush. Because a bird has more rights than the amount of people who were denied the right to vote for anyone during the election in 2000. Most of whom were African-American. Along with that, he used his first cousin⁷, who worked for Fox News, to announce that Bush was the winner of the election, even when every other news station from A to Z had announced that Al Gore was the winner. Gore had 600,000 more votes than Bush. So, not only is Bush a duck, he is a cross between a duck, and a cheetah.⁸ Although he hasn’t got as much stamina.
Now, a man no one voted for sits in the White House. Who is unable to do anything without his dad cleaning the baby food off his mouth. Who lets Osama Bin Laden, the man who actually created 9/11, escape from America the day after the attack, in a plane he commissioned for takeoff. Who says the most ridiculous things, and gets away with it. Who, on 9/11, instead of taking action, sat in an infant school reading out a copy of My Pet Goat to a bunch of milk-sipping kids. Who has control of all the nuclear weapons in the USA. And who hunts with a shotgun the bird who is worth more than himself,⁹ while on vacation forty-two percent of the time he is President.
So please, fellow terrorists, let us send this Paris Hilton¹⁰ equivalent of a President away. He only ever got into politics because of his dad. And everyone knows that fame that comes from a biological parents’ job is a really bad thing.¹¹ Here is a message for you, Bush! Get out of the White House now! Before you know it, you’ll be skinnier than Claire Danes¹², hated by everyone, and have a few cameos in The Simpsons, like all other past presidents.
Fellow terrorists, if we don’t rid of him soon, the world as we know it will become ridden with war, paranoia, and possible Bush offspring.¹³
Hear my pleas of anguish, fellows. Let us put this cross-bred¹⁴ Texan where he belongs: in Room 101. Let us lock him up, and make him swallow the key, whilst drinking Black Gold Texas Tea.
Before the Bush becomes mightier than the bird.¹⁵
Thank you.
¹ This is one of the many instances of belaboured wordplay I used throughout the speech, and the first of several times when I ventured into casually sexist or misogynistic language, which will regrettably get a bit worse later on. Sure, there’s the various contextual excuses — I was a dumb teenager, I was ages away from ever joining social media, it was 2008, it was a different time, etc — but that doesn’t make it right, of course.
² And here is where my bias, and erstwhile primary source of my information, was revealed. Or it would have been, if I had kept the line in the final diatribe. I guess even back then I thought that that was too revealingly simplistic and naive of me, to show that all the citations for my information really only came down to watching Fahrenheit 9/11. If I’d also mentioned the rest of my info and bias was through regularly watching The Daily Show as well, then the liberally polemical nature of my speech would’ve been glaringly apparent. (I am still liberal, by the way; I just know nowadays not to have Michael Moore be the one stop shop for all my political history needs.)
³ I’m quite glad I ditched that lame duck (ha ha) of a joke. I was already stretching the bird/duck metaphors and wordplays to their breaking points, and this would’ve been a step too far.
⁴ An extremely immature, thinly veiled, and now obviously homophobia-tinged wanking joke. I probably cut it because I thought my English teacher would disapprove, but in hindsight, I’m glad I never said it aloud, as it’s kind of akin to Stephen Colbert’s “cock-holster” jab he made at Donald Trump many years later, only far less explicit.
⁵ This running joke wasn’t well thought out, to be honest.
⁶ “State of mind” would’ve been a better choice of words, and even then I don’t think it would have been entirely right. I was in over my head.
⁷ Jeb Bush, a.k.a. the “please clap” guy.
⁸ Oof. The punning at its worst.
⁹ Clunky and clumsy. F-. See me after class.
¹⁰ I don’t know why I had a bee in my bonnet about Paris Hilton of all people, but suffice it to say my comparison between her, and the guy whose terms in office saw the advents of 9/11, the Iraq War, the mismanagement of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Patriot Act, and the 2008 global recession, just to name a few? Yeeeeeeeah… I was way too mean to her for no good reason. Other than the latent misogyny, obviously, which is somehow about to get even worse, because Past Me was a dick.
¹¹ “Nepotism” is the word you’re looking for there, Jack.
¹² And there it is! A double-dose of nastiness misdirected at someone who didn’t deserve it, delivered at the expense of making a stupid, unfunny joke. Why single out Claire Danes? Why body-shame skinny people in general, and her in particular? A combination of troubling misogynistic attitudes, and self-loathing at my own weight, altogether projecting my negativity onto an actress that our class had most recently seen in Romeo + Juliet. All very repugnant on my part, and I sincerely am sorry to anyone whom I might’ve caused offence to.
¹³ The naïveté of a child, to think that getting rid of one bad man would stop or solve any of the world’s problems.
¹⁴ I was attempting to harken back to the “duck + cheetah” analogy from earlier in the speech, but in hindsight, it might’ve made more sense to have just gone for the low-hanging fruit of saying “inbred” instead of “cross-bred”. Hell, if I was going to go full edgelord with my cynical schtick (as I so painfully obviously was going for), I might as well have.
¹⁵ The fuck does that even mean?!
