Years Later 9/11- Do You Remember When You First Found Out?

In September of 2001, many things in my life were new: I was the new Nights (7 p.m. – midnight) man entertaining on a little AM radio station in Nashville, Tennessee. I’d do my show and then off I’d go to check out some local DJs in my new Music City. Mostly, I checked out Liquid Lounge (before it became “Elements”) till about 3 A.M., looking for new club DJ opportunities and then go a short distance from my new downtown, back to my new little two bedroom cottage.

This was still the pre-cell phone era and I only had a land line and cassette tape- based answering machine which I based in my other room, across the hall in my studio room from my bedroom and had an incredibly long cord, which allowed me to be on the “princess” phone all over the house and even out on my little front stoop. I didn’t have my first home computer yet and there were still pay phones everywhere!

So I’d sleep from like 4 a.m. until maybe noon, unless I had some special morning interaction to attend or a gig; such is the life of the second and third shift radio man and many other alternative hour workers.

Then the phone rang around 10 or 11 a.m. I guess, and I heard the machine come on in the other room, and maybe my friend, Monique’s voice say something as I slept – and ignored it. Soon, the phone rang another time and I recognized her voice again! At this point I picked it up and my friend Monique says, “Turn on the TV!” I’m like, “No, I’m sleeping…” or something to that effect. She insisted and then I fumbled around and found the remote to turn it on. What I saw I thought was a movie, in the purple haze of awakening. “Why you want me to watch this movie, Mo?” I must have asked. She said something like, “No! A plane hit the World Trade Center!!” I began to sit up in my bed and just about then, the second plane hit the other tower. Shock. At that moment, I knew that this was no movie.

As I watched the coverage that fateful afternoon, I’d almost forgotten that I had a “show” to do that evening – and the more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to perform it. – I was bummed to the max! Calling my Mum in on Long Island, I asked could she smell the smoke and she said “Yes.” So I called my Program Director to ask him out of my show that night, but instead of empathy for my feelings, he replied, in, what I’ve learned is typical southern black American ignorance, “Aww man, its just a plane hit a building. G’wan in and do your show!” At that point, my respect for him, being in his position only because he was the station owner’s son, went from like and “eight” to a “one” on a scale of one to ten. How dare he condescend, knowing that my roots are at the base of the World Trad Center and having been in my house where I had a wall-sized poster of them and the whole southern tip of Manhattan above my bed!

Writing this now, I know that the rebel in me wanted to call out, but I think that my inner “Dan Rather” made me go in that evening, but not to do my usual “party” radio show. Instead, I opened-up the phones to my new Nashville local listeners, to let them air their impressions of the day’s attack. Many were initially sort of clueless, to my disappointment, but as my program grew into the evening, I remember that the discussions became more spirited and that many of my listeners knew that I was from there and expressed their empathy to me, if not for the national implications, for me as someone they only met through the radio who identified with New York City. It was the most solem show I remember in my professional radio career – I hardly played any music and we lived for the top of the hour network updates for five hours that night.

Last night, on the cusp of eighteen years later and trying to go to sleep, I wished I could listen to that show; probably taped it on a cassette which is likely in storage with much of my belongings from those days, my radio career having imploded with the advent of corporate ownership and automation, like those beloved towers fell.

In closing, I remind you to carry the message that we have to the young people in school now who have no recollection of that treacherous attack. It is super-important that we teach them the magnitude of that day, like the Pearl Harbor surprise attack was taught to us by our parent’s the generation.

Since 2016 or thereabouts, we as Americans have lost that unity that came about in the wake of those horrific and cowardly attacks. I close by asking you, my dear reader, to help bring back that sense of togetherness-of-purpose-umbrella, which we all gathered under after September 11, 2001.

Pearl Harbor Day 2015 Has More Meaning Than Ever!; Elusive “Dead Man” Sleep and 2015 Loose Ends

subterfuge The excitement of President Obama’s first election has soured sufficiently now that I even notice that he is soft on radical Islam and Muslim extremists. Another Presidental politician’s shell game. It was nice that he became the first non-Caucasian American leader, yet I have never considerd him the “first black President” as so many have. He is not a Black American, in my opinion – he is just brown and not really “down” with us. He has done nothing to promote true Black American men during his tenure. He is a woman’s President.

the use of tricks especially to hide, avoid, or get something;

NOUN

1.

an artifice or expedient used to evade a rule, escape a consequence, hide something, etc

As we commemorate Pearl Harbor Day here in 2015 I wonder how many people I drive next to daily or work with even know the importance of this day and how it is even more relevant now when juxtaposed against the backdrop of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the recent evil perpetuated by the barbarians in France that are spawned in its wake.
I agree with United States of America Presidential candidate, Mr Donald Trump, that we should sequester all “Muslims” who have come the USA in the past ten years or so and make them register as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt et.al did with the Japanese following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. We must stop the madness!

If you are going to immigrate to “the West” and in-particular, the United States, then you should dress as WE do. No burkas or other loose clothing that can conceal bombs or suicide vests allowed! Have we not learned this by now? Here at the the end of the year 2015, there is no longer a place for “politically correct” defense of my country. Ah, “politically correct” – a phrase created by the President William Clinton and his wife who is, not so coincidentally running for president in 2016 – another dumb move and I will move to another country if she and her band of idiots is elected.

We lost the fight after “9/11” and ever since the Camel Jockies are increasingly kicking our collective traditional asses with these cowardly surprise attacks upon innocent people trying to have a life – and for what gain? I am including Paris, France and all of the “NATO” winners of World War II in this. I am including Russia in this summation. Now is the time for the nations who built a positive world history in the wake of World War I and II and of the past three hundred years or more to conciliate a succinct Hiroshima/Nagasaki strategy to annihilate this annoying “Isshit” threat once and for all so that we can come back to at least an 1980s-style, Peace on Earth, collateral damage and all. They asked for it, we should give it to them! For our present and for your children’s future.

2015 Pick Hitts: A fashion trend which should end in 2016: “Hoodies”. They make you look suspicious, like a thug, “terrorist” or even like a Ku Klux Klansman (Citadel cadets). I have observed foolish guys who drive with them on inside their vehicles! Stupid – you cannot hear enough and it dulls your all of the senses you need to drive and avoid a wreck!
Hoods used to mean “thugs” or gangsters in the 1960s; Hooded sweatshirt were once only a functional item in our closets to be worn in bad weather! So lets return them to that status in 2016!

I long for the days when I could “sleep like a dead man”. Do you remember when you were a carefree kid and your sleep was sweet? I remember when I slept so deeply that I could not recall my dreams! Now, with so much shit on my mind daily, it is difficult to “quiet the mind” enough to sleep long and soundly – without “PM” drugs, lol Bring back the good old days! Is this what is it when you are over sixty and healthy – things like cuts and colds take two months to heal? I am sure that once I move to my next and final destination with my new wife and my music free from basement storage, I will have “sweet dreams are made of this” again. Pray for it – for all of us.

~ And finally, Dear network television and radio News Directors, Please find other words to use other than “terrorism”. It is so played-out that “terrorism: now reminds me of Halloween! There are so many other words that more accurately portray the barbaric violence of people blowing themselves up in the name of Allah or randomlyly shooting up innocents that you can use that would even galvanize we-the-people to rise up in-force to combat this meanace! Here are one-hundred-sixty-two of them https://www.powerthesaurus.org/terrorism

Oh, I forgot, you are in bed with the corporations who perpetuate this fear-mongering to improve your ratings. As TV sportscaster, Warner Wolf unsed to say, “Turn your set off there!”

Comments and corrections are always cheerfully encouraged and thanks for supporting my blog all of these years.
~ Naphtali

September 11, 2001, How I Would Have, If President, Banned a Taliban forever

I loved the World Trade Center towers and had many occasions to visit them and even DJ/co-emcee at a party there once upon a night.  Granted that hindsight is 20/20, but I said this then on September 11, 2001, and I say it now, and had our “leader” been as bold as he talked tough or as those in the war-torn past century, we wouldn’t be pouring money needed here in “the States” into an unwinnable war in Afghanistan today, or Iraq yesterday.  I would have chosen the Truman option; I’d have nuked the hell out of wherever we thought Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts were and possibly leveled Afghanistan by September 15, 2001.

The Japanese in WWII were as brutal to our troops and civilians as Al Qaeda/Taliban was on “9/11”, and that is all the justification I would have needed.  The United States strayed from being no-holds- barred under President Clinton who wrongly instituted “political correctness” at home and abroad.  All that did was make this country look vulnerable and weak.  There are no “safe” wars, and innocents will get killed if you are to win.

I always hear my Dad, the late WWII U.S. Army Major (one of few Black American men to achieve that rank back then) say about our fighting in Vietnam that “we are fighting with one arm tied behind our backs.”  I am sure he would say the same thing today about the USA pouring resources needed at home into fighting those who are engaging in a mythical “holy war”  if he were still with us here in the physical world.  He had another prophecy that he expounded to my Mum and I back in the early 1990s, “They are building a silent army and Trojan Horse over here…”  By “they” back then he meant “Arabs” because we didn’t speak in terms of “Muslims” unless talking about the U.S./Chicago-based Nation of Islam.  Noticing the influx of these new “immigrants”, he felt that they had meaner intentions than those who came to Ellis Island earlier in the twentieth century when he was a young man.  Prophecy fulfilled.

If you are the big, bad “superpower” and you let some upstart fanatic bloody your lip and don’t squash them then and there, you get what we have now and you are not so “super” anymore.  Where was the Enola Gay when we needed her – and the guts to use it?

With all the fuss over whether Iran is building a nuclear program, I wonder why, when if you have the ability to use one when attacked viciously, you don’t.  I do not see that as the high road, but an off-ramp.

Where YOU Were When You Heard About Michael Jackson?

So this is one of those “where were you when you heard…” moments – similar to the aftermath of “9/11” – that I have to write it about on impulse. 

June of 2009 was especially memorable for me because of the celebrity deaths that affected  life.  Beginning with the wierd circumstances (circumcisions?) surrounding David (“King Fu”) Carradine in Thailand on June 3rd, to Tonight show sidekick and ad pitchman Ed McMahon days before MJ on the 23rd, to one of the first “supermodel” actresses, Farah Fawcett on the same day, the 25th and then for another month thereafter with actress Gale Storm, whose show was one of the first I ever watched on old black & white TV as a boy; then frantic late night TV commercial ad pitchman Billy Mays (no wonder he was so hyped-up! lol), then cherished pioneer television evening news anchor man ( the first one to really popularize that term) Walter “uncle Walt” Cronkite of CBS News, favorite boxer from back in New Jersey, Auterro Gatti (more strange circumstances), football quarterback Steve McNair (a hero even though I’m not a Titans fan) slain by his paramour (I worked only yards from the crime scene at the time and fortunately got off work before the media circus began that day), and finally main-character actor of “The Streets of San Francisco”, Karl Malden.  June of the double-oh-nine was a life-isn’t-forever reality check, leaving those of us who remain here in the physical world with the usual unanswered questions…

I remember where I was when I heard the news about Michael Jackson – my friend, “kool Ronnie B”  was in town for the week visiting me from Atlantic City, it was hot outside and I  was showing him around town.  We were driving towards lunch at a cafe` near my house from downtown on Eighth Avenue, when the news came over the NPR jazz station’s top-of-the-hour newscast.  Since we were in conversation, during a pause, I looked over to him in the passenger seat of my car and said, “Did you just hear what I heard, Michael Jackson died??”  About that time my girlfriend, who had just  “officially” dumped me two weeks prior, called to find out if I still wanted her to take Ronnie around town that evening while I pulled my shift at the radio station.  I told her it was still on if she was into it and asked had  she heard the news about MJ.  She couldn’t believe it.  The lady stepped-up to the plate and chaperoned my friend around town that night while I worked and then joined up with them late that evening, keeping her word; it must have been her human nature to do so – one of her magnamamous qualities.  Oh yes, and that was the other  significant death that makes me remember where I was when “the gloved one” passed away – that of my relationship with the girl from Bela lugosi, err, “rus”.

  So you see why I say that June 2009 was a bitch for deaths as viewed through my precise and loving lens.  So… where were you when you heard the MJ news?