I'm Falling For You: Examining the Hegelian Process of Bildung, 9/11's forced negation of self, and America's Nero Complex

The morning of September 11, 2001 is perhaps one of the clearest memories that I have stowed away in my consciousness without the proverbial assistance of the "Memory Committee" used to jog recollections, and in this instance I can recall exactly the '5 W's' of the morning as such:

WHO: myself, in a dark bedroom convinced that I was dying from an undiagnosed malady, possibly cholera; the reality being a sinus infection.

WHAT: woken up at 10:30am to be told that "the world is on fire".

WHERE: Elmwood Park, IL

WHEN: 9/11 fool!

WHY: because "they hate our freedom" as our President at the time so eloquently stated.

At the time I was a member of the Communist Party and working with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chicago on some propaganda brochures, which I considered myself to be the Goebbels of that scene, and by that I mean REALLY GREAT at getting the job done.

This of course was before the RCP was forced to relocate their unheated digs in Wrigleyville to the more charming neighborhood that houses the Empty Bottle, albeit a more appropriate setting for their whole ideologies which fetishizes' a self-imposed expatriate who hung out with the Black Panthers "a few times".

The guy actually referred to himself as "CHAIRMAN Bob Avakian"...what a goof-ball! NO WAY!

I digress.

The morning the towers fell I reacted only as a 20 year old fully-fledged Revolutionary could, which was to say I ran into the living room shouting "BURN MOTHERFUCKER BURN!", while my heart swelled and I remember feeling the exact same way as when I first heard Huey P. Newton's poem, "Revolutionary Suicide":

"By having no family I have inherited the family of humanity.

By having no possessions I have possessed all.

By rejecting the love of one I have received the love of all.

By surrendering my life to the revolution I have found eternal life.

Revolutionary suicide."

At that precise moment the World Trade Towers, which had been in my political dreamscape represented as two unapologetic rigid middle fingers posed to the rest of the world, had finally experienced Fanon's 'year of the boomerang', which is not to quote the Rage Against The Machine contribution to the 'Higher Learning' Soundtrack.

The chickens had, indeed, come home to roost.

The attacks on the World Trade Towers can consequently be understood using the same pathology of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, that is, each person carries the collective consciousness of the impact within our own cultural, political, economic, and most poignantly our personal selves.

The aftermath of 9/11 has forced each one us to construct a new personality of "Americans" within the context of the rest of the world for perhaps the first time since our own warding off of colonization, along with rebuilding our sense of self in the face of our own Nero Complex. With no direct sensationalism intended I pose this picture of the WTC 'Jumpers' (which sounds like a new band name for my bff and I) in order to illustrate an overwhelmingly concrete feeling that I feel exemplifies post-9/11 developments on both didactic and dialectic levels.

Faced with the realization of eminent death and a pervasive fear of immolation, although realistically the majority of WTC workers near the sites of impact asphyxiated on smoke and chemical debris from the buildings, groups of people began to take flight from the towers; some holding hands as if lovers and others leaping alone seemingly escaping from the albatross of the Towers.

Regardless, the 'Jumpers' of 9/11 represent more than an individual choosing their own destiny in the face of unabashed destruction, but moreover each nations' own process of Bildung, which in America's case created a forced negation of self and the critique of our own Nero Complex.

While I no longer subscribe to the People's Weekly World there is no doubt in my mind that 9/11 occured as a concrete actualization of dialectical materialism, that is reality and change in such are representations of the constant conflict of opposites that arise from internal contradictions. Plainly, America karmically deserved it.

If America had been a girl filing a rape report the patriarchy would have said that she asked for it. Dig?

Let's talk about the Hegelian process of Bildung.
Bildung is the complex process by which individuals and collectives seek cultural formation by both learning, experiencing, and developing various aptitudes of personality, authenticity, and humanity. In the context of 9/11, the attacks are a direct response to the conceit of globalization as well as our own interconnectedness among the diverse cultures of the world, in that, each individual began to experience culture without our own awareness or consent until Al-Qaeda's public declaration of: FUCK YOU WESTERN CULTURE wrested the notion into our collective consciousness.
It is paramount to correlate globalization, which may be seen as a culturally spectral Bildung movement, to the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalist groups as its' antithesis. The growing pains of forced Western globalization is reflected in Nietzsche's letter to a friend, which states:

"First, one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly different ways, from the chain sickness even after he has broken the chains."

9/11 has given, specifically, America the gift of self-negation and the opportunity for an existential crisis by which we can begin disrupt our process of living in the ways we have become accustomed to as well as to question timeless truths that we have manipulated the world into believing. The attack on the towers may be seen, ultimately, as a turn to terror and/or terrorism in order to contest Western globalization as a transcendent truth and in turn created fanatical devotion to an ideology of martyrdom.

Many critics have stated that America has thus had a Nero Complex regarding the effects of globalization on both the developed and underdeveloped nations of the world, by which we continue to eat our Big Macs while watching the telly as commercials of starving African children cause us to in turn to choke down larger handfulls of Ranch Doritos. I feel that the situation is perhaps more dire than the common satire of Americans, and that we have not so much played the fiddle while Rome was burning, but went to a Fall Out Boy concert where pictures of said concert were immediately uploaded onto our personal social networking site.

In other words, this is already America's default picture.

At this moment, I feel that there will never be an honest dialogue not so much as to why 9/11 happened, but moreover why it ultimately had to occur. As many of us understand from our childhood's sometimes an old-fashioned ass-whupping is exactly what an unruly brat needs in order for the concept of wrong-doing to sink into their grey matter.

Slavoj Zizek has most likely best described the entire fiasco in his new book entitled, "First as A Tragedy, Then As A Farce", whose title references Marx's notion of history repeating itself and that the end result is perhaps more terrfiying as a farce. Afterall, the collapse of global capitalism as evidenced by America's "Great Recession" is the just desserts for ignoring the needs of our natural and social world while instead continuing to manifest a culture of celebrity.

Zizek's book comes out October 5, 2009.