The national trauma of September 11, 2001 returned to haunt the confirmation hearings of Judge Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court, as he described them as having changed American jurisprudence and the orientation of America to the world, transporting his audience back to his presence in the Bush White House that fateful day– as a new precedent for protecting the United States from attack that necessitated increased Presidential power–as testimony tried to transport us back to the very day, as if to prepare us for its approaching anniversary. Brett Kavanaugh, who then served as President George W. Bush’s staff secretary and legal counsel, described his surprise at learning in the West Wing how hijackers flew a plane into the Twin Towers; Kavanaugh remembered how he had been urgently instructed to “get out, run out,” and stood “bewildered” among his colleagues in nearby Lafayette Park, trying to make sense of the new constitution of the United States in the world, as if to make sure we understood his reactive stance to the terrorist attack,–in short, Kavanaugh sought to appeal to most Americans’ fears and illustrate his own integrity, hiding his agency in affirming the President’s right to authorize torture in the name of protecting the nation.
In short, the day changed his life as it did ours. The many sites of 9/11 commemoration nationwide may have indeed made reflection on the terrorist attacks a common shared experience for Americans–indeed a more recent common point of reference in our landscape not only in over seven hundred memorials across the nation, many naming names of former local residents, others including steel remnants from a tower or welded steel debris. Monuments extend from Shanksville, PA to Phoenix AZ, Bayonne NJ, Beverly Hills–where a twisted column of the WTC facade rests atop a base shaped as the Pentagon, atop a foundation housing copies of the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and Gettysburg Address, as if a time capsule preserving foundational documents of the nation, Indianapolis, Laguna Beach, Boston, Grapevine TX, Palm Beach FL, Naperville IL, Cashmere WA, Valhalla NY, and sites far closer to the former World Trade Center, like Staten Island, Jersey City, where so many memorials are clustered–in addition to a quite considerable number of “transnational memorials” that lie outside of the United States’ sovereign bounds, recently counted at as exceeding a thousand, that try to place the event in perspective by often offering and incorporating fragments of the WTC original steel as relics of the lost building. The clustering bears witness in a sense to the impact of the event on the United States, they suggest the regularity with which population centers–predominantly in the northeastern cities, to be sure stretching from Washington DC to New England, but reaching broadly to the midwest–responded to the traumatic impact of the attacks through sites where citizens engaged in commemoration of the terrible and still terrifying event.
The efflorescence of over seven hundred 9/11 monuments across the nation respond to the broad need for sites of mourning and remembrance, so often mobilized in national discourse and so often unable to be sufficiently monumentalized in ways that might be able to encompass the single tragedy: one is even able to unite the memorialization of sites on a hike along the September 11 Memorial Trail, in a sort of religious itinerary of introspection, linking the memorial of Flight 93 in Shanksville, former site of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon, as if in a new road of sorrows or via Dolorosa of one hundred and eighty-four miles, and connect three sites where terrorist attacks struck the United States.
In such a national landscape, so deeply saturated with sites of commemoration, the evocation of the reactions to the events as they occurred within the White House could not but be especially compelling. During extended confirmation hearings, his confirmation marked by multiple vocal protests, Kavanaugh explained carefully and apparently reassuringly how after the events of 9/11 he had “thought very deeply” about the need for expanding executive powers in order to help protect America from further ” 9/11-style” terrorist attacks. If the terrorist attack truly “changed America, changed the world, changed the presidency, changed Congress, changed the courts,” as Kavanaugh assured viewers, leading President George W. Bush to act as if every day were September 12 in their wake, and forcing the nation to do its best prepare for the eventuality of a future deliberate attacks of terror–
–as if to illustrate he met the needed deliberateness sought in a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Was the reference truly reassuring?
Kavanaugh’s quite conscious decision to transport the nation to the days of the Bush Presidency were more than a weird time-warp than a trip down memory lane, occasioning his evocation of Bush’s vigilance to prevent any future attack–which hasn’t yet occurred in over fifteen years, although the specter loomed large as it was resuscitated in the 2016 Presidential election to great effect. The night before the attack, as it happened, Kavanaugh had gone on a date with the fellow staffer who he would later marry, Ashley Estes, and the nominee was persuasive in describing how 9/11 had defined his career and sense of self, as well as how the confirmation hearing was reported to the Alt Right, as if to normalize Kavanaugh’s advocacy of potential racial profiling as a reasonable response to terror. The canned nature of the recollection during U.S. Senate confirmation hearings broadcast on national television suggested a clearly planned strategy of performing for public audience by evoking the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as if they formed part of a glorious national past in which he played a prominent part: the myth of personal heroism picked up in Alt Right media seemed plan to illustrate his character to Trump’s constituency.
The Patriot Brief (September 11, 2018)
Whether or not September 11 constituted a watershed in American jurisprudence, or seemed such in the eye of the hurricane, the attack on the World Trade Center propelled New York City’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, to the global stage where he quickly became a global protagonist–and the act of global terror had the side-effect of bequeathing him to the world. For the globalized event elevated Giuliani, then at the end of his mayoral tenure, into a global hero. New York’s Mayor Giuliani was not only famously trapped in the towers for fifteen minutes, years after he made the third tower–against the advice of his own Director of Emergency Management–into a Command Center, preferring the prominent place of such a site to the suggestion of Brooklyn, but creating an improvised executive response center to the terrorist attack at the site, preferring the stagecraft of coordinating city departments with state and federal authorities from the World Trade Center to draft and announce citywide anti-terrorist measures, and defined the public face of the city on radio and television profiles over the course of the day, as the nation sought to get clear bearings and orientation on what had happened and what that meant.
Proud of the newfound prominence guaranteed by quick taking up a secure place at the World Trade Center ruins, Giuliani became America’s mayor as he proudly announced as if from a brotherhood, “I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most workers…. I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them,” and revealed in his appearance on the cover of Time as Person of the Year in 2001, explaining that as soon as he had word of the attack, he left the midtown hotel where he was lunching for the site where he remained for sixteen hours since the Twin Towers crumbled and fell, and Rudy stayed tall–even replacing the monument of the World Trade Center as aller than the Empire State and embodying a needed “tower of strength.”
The magnification of the status of Rudy Giuliani into something of a global superhero was a bit of a major casualty of 9/11. Mayor Giuliani had indeed arrived quite quickly, before the second plane hit, moving as most were mesmerically transfixed to television screens replaying the first collision for hours over that morning, to watch men and women fall a tower, in time to see the south tower implode, and be nearly trapped inside the makeshift command for ten minutes in the nearby center he established as a temporary site of government that seemed a site of resistance to terror, in ways that were broadcast to the world. As time froze for most of us, he was a man of action. Inhabiting the site and granting repeated interviews, as the nation and world tried to process the terrible event, Giuliani worked to comfort families of the missing and visited the scene of attack to try to contain its apocalyptic proportions, turning to read Winston Churchill the night after the attack, after taking off his mud-stained shoes, taking comfort in the stoicism of the British leader whose sentence–“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat“–evoking London of the Blitz, as if to draw some comfort as well as to inflate his own heroism.
And although September 11 was also the day of the primary to chose his successor, Giuliani almost consciously used it to pole-vault to the global stage, becoming not only the comforter of the nation, mourner-in-chief (“the number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear”), and a global emblem of hope–if not a public politician–who no doubt gave the comparison to his biographer to Churchill during the Blitz– “What Giuliani succeeded in doing is what Churchill succeeded in doing in the dreadful summer of 1940: he managed to create an illusion that we were bound to win“–in the hopes to enshrine his improbable ascension to the role of “Greatest Mayor Ever” in posterity, and indeed to presidential material. Meanwhile, Donald Trump boasted that the destruction of the Twin Towers made one of his buildings at 40 Wall Street the tallest in the city, securing funds intended for small businesses affected by the disastrous attack, and receive $150,000. (Trump a bit less hastily followed Rudy in granting interviews at the site of the destroyed towers, hoping to burnish his own status against the terrible tragedy.)
The place of Global Giuliani emerged in the following years, leading up to his improbable and ill-fated Presidential run of 2008, as if in a planned roll out of Giuliani’s new career that profited from the global news of the attacks, which both mirrored a recent globalization of news media and a globalization that promoted news to global attention and continuous news coverage, in which Giuliani had so prominently starred. Giuliani Partners used the charisma gained after the terror attacks to rebrand “America’s Mayor” on a global stage, promising to transform any cities willing to hire him on contract to promote them to global cities, from Central America to the Middle East and pedaling promises of a release from fear. The new millennium offered one of the oddest episodes of the aftermath of globalization and as a traveling salesman whose snake oil was the promise of global prominence. The questionable role Giuliani adopted from Mexico City to Belgrade to Sao Paolo to Kiev, posing as crime crusader able to transform any city that approached him with a plan to transform to a “global city” to meet intangible demands of economic development desired in the new millennium. Giuliani convinced many he was able to confer useful “advice” through a new firm that traded in duplicity, Giuliani Partners and its subsidiary, Giuliani Security and Safety (“GSS”) which make open promises for “a comprehensive range of security and crisis management services.” Rudy paradoxically promised the ability to transform cities to “world-class cities,” using the lingo of globalism and transformation as if the baptism by fire lent him skills and requisite expert a promising transformative abilities to achieve the inherently utopic promises of becoming a global city; he became something of an agent of globalization, based on his centrality of the global event of 9/11 that had once affectingly and movingly crossed all national borders, as he promised he resolution to resolve fears of crime, revitalize markets, or offer immediate transformations of civic space for elites.
Working in cities from Puerto Rico to Colombia to the Middle East, Giuliani moved close to power, freely trading his own claims to end fear and lending his newfound prestige on global media. He toured with Peruvian law-and-order presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori in 2011, helping her to project a crime-fighting image on the campaign trail, and accepted the task to convert Rio de Janeiro into a “global city” in time for the Olympics in 2016. Giuliani sold himself on a global market as a crime-fighter able to reduce crime in its favelas, serving as a “security consultant” able to promote “zero tolerance” policies he allegedly pioneered, despite utter lack of familiarity with the scene on the ground in Peru or Brazil, let alone Belgrade. The promises remind recall how globalization is tied to the denial of personal liberties or freedoms, from the false narrative of “zero tolerance” Giuliani championed as of his own creation in New York to the removal of individual liberties that he made a selling point of the crime-fighting plans, irrespective of any knowledge on the ground; his firm pedaled the same rebranding of the mayor from Mexico City to the prepare Rio de Janeiro to become a global city in time for the 2016 Olympics, as Giuliani the person moved among police forces surrounded by armed security and armored convoys while showing little local familiarity with a location’s specific social dynamics–the Giuliani brand sufficed and was indeed all that was needed for the policy recommendations, guarantees and policy assurances he would provide. (Giuliani’s considerable global ties may well have led to fears about potential conflicts that his own Senate confirmation hearing would reveal–undoubtedly prompting numerous red flags for Reince Preibus or Don McGahn–even before questions have surfaced about his violation of existing federal foreign lobbying laws.)
Giuliani arrives in Mexico City to meet with local police (20013) Victor Caivino/AP
For over fifteen years, Global Giuliani has branded himself as an itinerant savior, drawing liberally from an accumulated media bank of 9/11 in his continued television appearances for a huge range of constituencies. Giuliani brokered ties across the globe, irrespective of local dynamics of power. He preached to the government of Qatar’s emir and police force to corporation behind the Keystone XL, TransCanada, and in Iran with opposition group (briefly cited by the Dept. of State as a terrorist organization) Mujahedeen Khalq (M.E.K.) or to TriGlobal Strategic Ventures, a group promoting development in former states of the Soviet Union, where he consulted with many Russian oligarchs to promise”business solutions . . . in global markets,” and a company tied to Russian’s state-owned petroleum pipeline firm Transneft. (Giuliani met with none other than Russia’s foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov back in 2004, as well as the chairman of Magnitogorsk Steel Works). He has worked widely in Latin America in the Dominican Republic in 2012, the same year he worked in both Ecuador and for Raul Molina in Panama in 2013, Tijuana,Mexico in 2014, Guatemala in 2014, and Puerto Rico, before his work in Brazil, promising global status by trafficking in consulting deals tied to his reputation of being “tough of crime” and “experience with terrorism”–in the new parlance of globalism.
The many lies of protecting individual freedoms seem seamless with globalization, which talk tough while failing to protect and even to render individuals more vulnerable, and criminalizing others. This is the vulnerability of globalization, the decline of individual liberties, the absence of security, criminalizing outsiders to the global city, and the peddling of assurance against the range of unprecise fears in which he has so broadly trafficked and promoted, responding to worries of globalism by provoking them, and by assuring audiences of their reality with false reassurances of his abilities to lead us out of their mess.
Since September 11, 2001, indeed, the spread of memorials to the events of 9/11 has grown to the hundreds both in the United States and the rest of the world, as the event has become a site of morning and marked a sort of entry into a new globalized world, where the relation of one place to the dynamics of the rest of the world has changed, and done so on a global scale in ways that have inaugurated a widespread transnational commemoration of the events of 9/11 in many other nations worldwide–especially in Europe and Japan, where they echoed the alliances forged after World War II–
–but also among American allies in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Israel.
The appearance of the global impact of 9/11 could not be clearly mapped to sites of Giuliani’s physical presence, or America’s allies, but suggest an intersection among them, including most prominently military allies–Japan; Australia; Kuwait; Afghanistan; NATO countries and member-states; Canada; Mexico–in a very partial map of the world, but one that suggests a new and important spatiality of 9/11, shaped by the limits and perhaps also the declining extent of American hegemony.
Memorial Mapping Project, interactive map of global 9/11 memorials
But the memory of 9/11 has continued to act as a fulcrum able to leverage Giuliani’s stature to superhuman size, as in the Time magazine cover, so that he appears to tower over the problems faced on the ground, and it was no doubt with this status in mind that Donald J. Trump, showing as parochial view as ever, assumed him in his legal defense team and as something of a spokesperson, so that he left his most recent perch at Greenberg Traurig with the assurances that he, Rudy, he would lead the Mueller investigation to wrap up but in a matter of weeks–a claim that few must have bought, save perhaps the Donald, and as events proceeded Giuliani transformed the leave of absence from the esteemed for what was announced as a “limited role” expanded to regular presence on daily talk shows to a “resignation” the firm accepted eagerly, even as Greenberg Traurig chair n Richard Rosenbaum noted “a great deal of respect for the Mayor’s incredible career and what he has done for New York City and our country for many years and consider him a friend.” The resignation “in light of the pressing demands of the Mueller investigation” was described as necessary given the “all-consuming” nature of his role with the current President, but the large law firm was also perhaps ready to distance themselves from “America’s mayor” after his statements on cable news defending under-the-radar hush money payments was standard for a lawyer ran against firm policy, and the fame of in 9/11 had worn thin and become ever so tarnished in the light of his open courting of fairly questionable professional codes of ethics.
The optic of 9/11 offers, after all, an optic by which to investigate the mechanics and lopsided dynamics of globalization, and the new spatiality of the new millennium. So does the retrograde nature of the prominence of the events of 9/11 in Kavanaugh’s testimony to U.S. Senators and to the nation: and it is oddly fitting, if also disturbing, that while Kavanaugh assured the nation of his competence in assessing the new nature of national threats as a result of 9/11, and seemed to promise continued readiness to measure the new sort of challenges that the United States would face in the future, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford–who would accuse Kavanaugh of aggressive sexual assault–in her professional work as a psychologist applied herself to investigating signs of post-traumatic stress disorder among children caused by the same attacks of 9/11–as well as depression among young adults, abilities of emotional recognition, and child abuse–while Kavanaugh worked hard to change the American legal system to face what he saw as the imperatives posed by future terrorist attacks. Personal ethics, however, seem to have been swept under the table, in the light of the broad mandate for defending the nation against a global threat, as if needs for national safety sanctioned the absence of any ethics in a state of exception.
The resonance of 9//11 within his confirmation hearings, and within the ways Trump has sought to revive national fears of imminent terrorist attacks as a candidate and as President, attacking post-9/11 wars but focussing on threats of terror, calling NATO “obsolete” for real terrorist threats, and raising the specter of “Radical Islam,” and “radical Islamic terrorism,” as actual threats to the nation, coordinated with memes Russia’s Internet Research Agency put out on social media to “Stop Islamicization,” using the memory and trauma of 9/11 to shift attention from the geopolitics of Russian aggression. And when Trump summoned rhetorical greatness, evoking at Shanksville, PA the men and women who “boarded that plane as strangers, and entered eternity forever as heroes,” he seemed to assume his greatest rhetorical heights as a national spokesman, despite our the deeply ingrown divisions of our union, in enshrining 9/11 as an eternal and defining moment for the nation, however oddly frozen in time was that claim, as he accepted the thanks of his Interior Secretary for “protecting our borders.”
