Can
A Date Be Cursed?
By Preston Peet
September 9, 2002 (posted at DrugWar.com Sept. 11)
Birthday
Cakes
In the first 35 years of my life, the most
significant date for me personally in history was of course my
own birthday. A voracious reader from an early age, I would come
across many incredible events in history that took place on my
own special date. Though all dates have their own tragic scorecard,
most relating to my own birthday seem extra momentous.
The earliest recorded event in history that
may have taken place on my birthday, as claimed by Dr. Ernest
L. Martin in his 1981 book, "The Birth of Christ Recalculated,"
was the birth of Christ himself. Dr. Martin alleged that by using
celestial charts that corresponded to the approximate era of Christ,
he put the famous birthday on the same day as mine, way back in
3BC. This assertion, while interesting and a bit amusing, is also
more than a bit fantastical. And while various groups of people
have committed grave evil and violence in the name of Christ,
the actual birth has never been reported as anything but peaceful,
even if it was in a manger. This cannot be said of most other,
provable major historical events that fell on the same date.(1)
William Wallace, made familiar to a wide
modern audience by Mel Gibson¹s portrayal of the Scotsman
in the popular film Braveheart, defeated the English forces arrayed
under the command of Sir John de Warrene, Earl of Surrey, and
his chief tax collector, Hugh de Cressingham, at the Battle of
Stirling Bridge, in 1297. Half of the English army was destroyed,
including Cressingham, as were many of the under equipped yet
temporarily victorious Scots. (2)
Statue on the William Wallace Monument
From Images
of William Wallace
In 1709, French forces met combined forces
of the Spanish and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Battle of Malplaquet.
Stopping the allies' advance towards Paris though forced to retreat,
the French managed to kill an estimated 20,000 enemy troops.(3)
The Stars and Stripes is claimed by some
to have been first carried by Americans in the Battle of Brandywine,
Pennsylvania, in 1777. Estimates put British dead and injured
anywhere from 500 to 2000, and for the defeated Americans between
1200 to 1300 dead and wounded.(4) Alexander Hamilton,
later killed by Aaron Burr in an infamous duel, became the first
US Secretary of the Treasury in 1789.
Flag carried at the Battle of
Brandywine- US Postage Stamp
With the sole exception of Daniel Webster,
US President John Tyler's entire cabinet resigned in 1841 because
of a bank bill veto by Tyler.(5) In 1842, Mexican
forces took San Antonio,Texas, then retreated with prisoners.
In 1850, Phineas T. Barnum brought the Swedish
Nightingale, Jeny Lind, to New York City amidst great fanfare
for her US premier at the Castle Garden Theatre. Lind, already
a well known opera singer, became one of the United States' early
pop stars.(6)
A mob of Paiute Indians and Mormon men set
upon a wagon train of settlers at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in 1857,
slaughtering an estimated 127 men, women and children on or about
the same date as my birthday. This was up until the 20th Century
the greatest mass killing of US citizens by other US citizens.(7)
The groundbreaking ceremony at the Pentagon in 1941,(8)
and the US First Army entering Germany in 1944, heralding the
beginning of the end of the Nazi death machine, both fell on the
same date as my later birth.(9)
Arguably less destructive events took place
in 1953 when Dr. Charles Hufnagel managed to successfully replace
a faulty aorta valve with a plastic one, and in 1954 when Lee
Ann Meriwether, Miss California (and future Cat Woman on the Batman
tv series), won the first televised Miss America Pageant.
Lee
Ann Meriwether
The US Congress authorized the creation of
the US Food Stamp program in 1959, insuring that poor Americans
get at least a semblance of federal assistance in obtaining basic
necessities, like eating.(10) On the creative
side of things, the Beatles, one of my very favorite bands of
all time, recorded Love Me Do in 1962, the very first Beatles'
song ever released.(11)
Then in 1966, I was born to a young woman
in Florida who neglected to note the father's name or anything
else about him for that matter, then gave me up for adoption,
starting me out on a path of misadventure and instability from
the get-go, living up to my birthday date¹s more negative
historical aspects.
In 1967 "The Carol Burnett Show"
premiered, and in 1970, the final show of "Get Smart"
aired. The following year Nikita Krushchev died at the age of
77 of a heart attack. There were 11 Israeli athletes taken hostage
by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics of 1972, which
ended on my birthday. In 1973, as I was enjoying the earliest
birthday party of which I have real memories, the US CIA assisted
in the overthrow and assassination of Chilean President Salvador
Allende. In 1974, the second longest baseball game in history,
lasting 25 innings, was played between the St. Louis Cardinals
and the New York Mets. The television show "Mork and Mindy"
first introduced comedian Robin Williams to the US public in 1978.
Moving into the latter stages of the last
century, as I was celebrating my nineteenth birthday while living
as a boho expatriate in Paris in 1985, a US satellite passed through
the tail of the Giacobini-Zinner comet, the first to gather data
directly from a comet in space. In 1990, the first President Bush
declared in his "Toward a New World Order" speech that
day that "Saddam Hussein would fail" in his bid to annex
Kuwait, despite Bush's later leaving Saddam to remain in power,
thereby insuring that his son and our current President can now
be urging yet more death and destruction against Saddam and the
Iraqi people, distracting public attention from the much troubling
questions about the current Bush administration and its ties to
corporate greedheads.
George
Herbert Walker Bush
In 1995, the US blues legend John Lee Hooker
got himself a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 1997, Scotland
created its first independent Parliament after being united with
England for 290 years, and in 1998 US Independent Council Kenneth
Starr sent the US Congress a report accusing President Clinton
of eleven offenses for which he could possibly be impeached.
I have always looked forward to my birthday,
right up until last year. I share a birthday with a variety of
luminaries, such as the author D.H. Lawrence, (1885), film director
Brian DePalma, (1940), Ferdinand Marcos, former despot President
of the Philippines (1913), Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead, (1943),
pop star Moby, (1965), and even share the exact same date of birth
as Kyle Kushman, cultivation editor and fellow writer at High
Times, (1966).
October 2002 High
Times
But this year, as the day creeps closer,
now less than 48 hours away as I sit here and type at 1:30 on
a Monday morning, I find I am not looking forward to the day at
all. I am filled with an unsettling feeling, almost a dread, finding
myself at odd moments unexpectedly choked up and teary eyed. As
I am turning 36, I would until last year have simply put it down
to getting older, as I¹m reaching an age where am I no longer
quite as excited about growing older, suddenly finding I want
to hold on to my youth just a little while longer. A classic case
of the birthday blues. But I strongly suspect that this is not
the main reason for my distress.
My birthday plans were very simple last year.
Instead of my normal routine of climbing out of bed at the crack
of dawn and sitting down to work on waking up and answering my
email, I was sleeping in without a care in the world, snuggled
in under the sheets with the love of my life. The ridiculously
obnoxious ringer on the phone in the living room jolted us from
sleep. Crusty eyed and not quite awake, we were confused by the
worried tone of my girlfriend's mother, who told our answering
machine that she wanted us to call her right away as she was worried
sick about us in the city. What in the hell is she talking about,
I said to my girlfriend as I prepared to roll back over into sleep.
She felt enough urgency to get up to replay the message. Passing
the tv on the way to the phone, she clicked it on to check the
temperature on local news channel NY1. The next second I was bolting
for the living room in response to her piercing shriek.
"Oh my god, they got the World Trade
Center."
Manhattan, September 11, 2001
Sure enough, though we didn't then know who
the "them" who carried out such an insane and terrible
attack were supposed to be, (nor have we in the public actually
seen to this day a year later the proof laid out in detail that
points to one man or group as responsible), looking out my window
I could see a huge billowing cloud of dust and debris from what
we later decided was the just that minute fallen Tower 2, and
the torch in the sky that was what was left of Tower 1.
Trying to imagine a NYC skyline with only
one WTC tower, thinking how odd it was going to be, I raced for
the roof where I snapped a series of photos of the burning tower,
then of the crumbling tower as the screaming of the other people
watching events unfold from the roofs around me just south of
Houston Street washed over me.
The Tower goes down
The fall of the building itself made no sound,
or at least, not one that I recognized. While I couldn't see the
jumping people who¹d been earlier trying to escape what I
vividly and disturbingly imagine was either the flames or their
pain or both, I could see flickering flames in individual windows.
It was more than obvious from my vantage point that there was
mass carnage there less than a mile from where I stood, that there
had to be scores of people dead already, if not more.
The streets below my rooftop were filled
to capacity with hoards of fleeing masses, all looking dazed,
the massive numbers eerily quiet. All I could think about was
all the people who had been wiped out, people who as they started
their day of normal routines probably never imagined it was to
be their very last day taking their last steps on Earth.
The whole thing was made even more surreal
and shocking by the incredibly beautiful, blue cloudless sky,
the perfect temperature, and the fact that September 11 was, and
still is, my birthday.
Lower Manhattan obscured by debris,
the Towers are gone
I have said a number of times that I cancelled
my birthday last year, that I got a free year at 34 out of the
otherwise horror-show of a day, but I cannot find it in me now,
as the date is nearly upon me, to make light of the day. As the
airwaves and print media fill with endless September 11-centered
stories, the "The Babies of 9-11", "America Remembers
9-11", and "This is Why We Are At War" programs,
they all serve as reminders that as bad as some of the other events
of September 11 have been throughout history, from here on out
my birthday will be remembered around the world as the date of
the most horrific mass killing of innocent civilians within US
borders ever, with most of the destruction and death happening
right in front of my own eyes.
Seeing the moves to profit politically off
the heinous and murderous crimes seems yet more depressing and
evil when I realize every year will be the same for some time
to come, with repeated specials about the event as Bush and crew
lead us careening on into their endless war on terrorism, on to
more destruction, more hate, more despair and fear, and ever more
killing.
I'm left wondering in my blacker, more irrational
moments if a particular date can be cursed. I wonder as well if
I¹ll ever really have another genuinely happy birthday on
September 11, once a very happy day for me, but now dark and damaged.
References:
1- Biography of Dr. Ernest
L. Martin
http://askelm.com/resources/biography.htm
2- The Battle of Sterling
Bridge
http://www.lawbuzz.com/justice/braveheart/victory.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5443/stirlingbrig.htm
3- The Battle of Malplaquet
http://www.bartleby.com/65/ma/Malplaqu.html
4- The United States Flag/The
Battle of Brandywine
http://www.va.gov/pubaff/celebAm/Flag.htm
http://www.ushistory.org/march/phila/brandywine.htm
5- History of the US Treasury
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/history/secretaries/tewing.html
6- Jeny Lind Premiers in
NYC
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/sep11.html
7- Mountain Meadows Massacre
http://www.mazeministry.com/mormonism/mmmassacre/newmm/mm1.htm
8- Pentagon Facts and Figures
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pentagon/facts.html
9- WWII Timeline
http://www.worldwartwotimeline.com/
10- Food Stamps Authorized
by Congress
http://chronicles.dickinson.edu/timeline/1951_2000.htm
11- Love Me Do
http://www.thebeatles.com/html/lovemedo/
More Information about September 11
Second Birthday in a Row Ruined by Terrorism
http://www.theonion.com/onion3833/second_birthday.html
Historical People and Events
http://www.aboutfamouspeople.com/article1221_2.html
On This Day
http://www.on-this-day.com/onthisday/thedays/alldays/sep11.htm
Pre-September 11 Reports of Terrorist Threats,
Including References to the World Trade Center- Why Did It Take
8 Months?
http://www.drugwar.com/pprewtcwarnings.shtm
September 11 News
http://www.september11news.com/
9-11 News Tracker
http://www.researchbuzz.com/911/mtype/
September 11, 2001- Attack on America
http://www.truthusa.com/911.html
Unanswered Questions- Thinking For Ourselves
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/
September 11, 2001: No Surprise
http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/September11.html
One Year Later, Cover Up Continues in Venice,
Florida
http://www.madcowprod.com/
The Complete 9-11 Timeline
http://208.187.163.46/completetimeline/
Sense and Nonsense about September 11
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0912-01.htm
