This week we’re chatting amiably about NEVER FORGETTING various things, including the perils of shitty cars, cats, purposely missed social connections, flying with VIPs, and twenty years of the War on Terror. Listen! Has something we said, or failed to say, made you FEEL something? You can tell us all about it on Facebook or Twitter, leave a comment on the show’s page on our website, or you can send us an email here. Enjoy!
Show Rundown
00:30 — Never Forget intro essay
05:28 — Remember shitty old cars?
13:53 — Cats, dogs, and weaponized bladders
20:33 — An unusual flight home from Vermont
30:53 — When to talk to strangers (Never.)
38:55 — What to remember about 9/11
1:04:20 — Whining about obnoxious commercials
Relevant Links
Cats terrorize football stadium — https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaaf/2021/09/11/fans-catch-falling-cat-miami-game-american-flag/8303179002/
TSA isn’t particularly good at doing the job with which it has been tasked — https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-operation-us-airports/story?id=51022188
Gronk selling insurance poorly — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpqk10L4NdI
Nike isn’t so sure about that whole JUST DO IT thing any more — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm_aiDpkGmQ
We’re reading The American War in Afghanistan: A History, by Carter Malkasian. If you’d like a copy, buy it here — https://amzn.to/3AfGDZJ (Brain Iron Dot Com is a (somewhat reluctant) participant in the Amazon Associates program, and we may get a small share of qualifying sales referred to Amazon via these links. Shop local when possible!)
And here is a transcript of the opening monologue, which should not be understood to be a proper essay at all but just a monologue. There is a difference!
“Here we are, Abe. Cast Iron Brains. A podcast that, twenty years on from that awful Tuesday morning in 2001, believes that we must, indeed, NEVER FORGET the 2,977 humans murdered by 19 terrorists and their enablers--the bankers and janitors, the security guards and firefighters, the moms and dads and sons and daughters, all these lives violently ended by people who probably sincerely believed that they were engaged in a holy war on behalf of a just and righteous god, all these lives pointlessly destroyed because of random bad luck, a deeply felt misapprehension of divine will, and the psychopathic, self-aggrandizing intentions of a few men responding to the injustices of the world around them with only more nihilistic destruction. Nearly 3000 people killed, all equally worthy of the basic dignity owed every human life--to be loved, and to be mourned, and to be remembered.
“To be remembered for their humanity, to be remembered for what was stolen from them, and stolen from those who knew them, remembered for what they gave to their loved ones, and what their loved ones gave to them. Remembered like any other human life, really, whether lived to whatever can be called a natural end or extinguished by disease or accident or tragic and spectacular violence--even when a human life concludes joyously, bursting with grace and gratitude for having had the chance to share with them this incredibly unlikely but apparently inevitable experience, the basic unfairness of total finality is always there, so unavoidable a reality that we construct elaborate, millennia-spanning cultural fictions around the promise that what we know to be true cannot be so, must not be so. But this really is all we have. The mistake is in not realizing that it is enough. The mistake is in forgetting how precious and rare each moment here really is, diluting it with the insistence that there is more, elsewhere. The same mistake that makes such calamity and devastation conceivable in the first place. A mistake of grief. A mistake of hope.
“NEVER FORGET, we promise each other, at first charmed, even hypnotized by the basic humanity of it, the implicit commitment to one another so reassuring and safe. Then, NEVER FORGET, we are exhorted, with the itchy trigger finger of righteous vengeance; then, NEVER FORGET, we are admonished, with calm rationales stoked into escalating paroxysms of moral certitude; and now, NEVER FORGET is a masking agent, sprayed like heavy perfume over the slow decay of our acrid catharsis--twenty years of surveillance and torture and death, of mistrust and hatred--over a putrescent civilization that doesn't yet recognize its self-annihilation, but suspects it.
“Never forget, because remembering is easier than lifting the sheet and confronting the dead before us, the dead in our wake. Enough dead, in twenty years of the WAR ON TERROR, that if we killed 3000 people every month since September 11, 2001, we'd still be sixty 9/11s short of the total number killed in this endeavor. And though it's impossible to sort the innocent and the guilty, we can at least count the non-combatants--more than 360,000 dead civilians, enough frantic and pointless death for a 9/11 every other month for twenty years. All these lives pointlessly destroyed because of random bad luck, a deeply felt misapprehension of divine will or the noble allure of political progress and regulation, and the psychopathic, self-aggrandizing intentions of furious man responding to the injustices of the world around him with only more hysterical grasping for control. And we can only hope that the battered survivors of an unjust world can do what we have not, can find a way to forget, that they will not make our mistakes of grief, our mistakes of hope.
“Sometimes, I think, forgetting is better.”
