My relative, Gene Strachan (b. 1920) was old enough to have served in WWII. He was an aircraft mechanic on New Guinea and had never lost that spirit. But he had not fit comfortably back into ordinary life. After I moved here he called me and asked if he could visit, because I have the Sam Strachan family albums and he wanted to gather up all the information about his life that he could. Gene's father was Thomas (b. 1892), my grandfather Sam’s youngest brother, probably a surprise menopause baby, born after the Archibald Strachan family had immigrated from Kilmarnock, Scotland, to South Dakota. My grandfather was a grown man by then. The whole family homesteaded together on the land close to Faulkton, newly cleared off when the Brulé Sioux were moved to reservations.
No one got rich. In fact, Thomas was a little unsteady economically and his own family was poor, but luckily he had married Ida Carrie Platt in 1918, a Scandinavian woman who could cope and compensate. Finally he became a county agricultural agent and an expert on grasses. Then things went much better. But Gene had bitter thoughts about going shoeless and lunchless. He felt he had not been protected or guided. His own marriage was not comfortable and ended without children. After the war he made his living as a bookkeeper for a uranium mining country. By the time he called me in 2001, he had acquired a Cheyenne grandmother as a companion. He was also deep into a genealogical project and bequeathed the results to me, handwritten, carefully xeroxed, ordered and bound.
I barely knew Gene and didn’t want him to come. I had the lowest income of any year after recklessly retiring too early. He sent me a check for $500 but he would have done better to spend it on a motel room. I had no working TV, no recliner, etc. We were barely settling into some kind of tentative relationship when my neighbor came over breathlessly to tell us about 9/11. To me it was on the same level as the major bombings in the Middle East -- a lot of destruction, a lot of death. I had no attachment to the Twin Towers nor even downtown Manhattan, which had not been leveled like, say, Sarajevo. I knew the Twin Towers had been targeted before. But Gene was desperate to know everything. He could have gone to the neighbors’ to watch but he was not gregarious. He went outside and tried to understand how to hook my TV back up, which I did not want. I set him up at the computer to watch video as it came in. He had never used a computer.
We had already agreed to tour the reservation but he and his friend really had very little interest except that the woman was amazed at the wealth and kept asking for reassurance that these were Indian ranchers. Cheyenne is a much poorer tribe. We kept the radio on, and Gene, even as an old man, clearly wanted to re-enlist in the inevitable war. His companion, a nursing assistant, was more concerned about the fact that I didn’t bleach my shower floor daily. They refused to use the shower during the whole visit.
They stayed three days, reviewing all the old albums. The photo Gene was looking for finally turned up: it was Archibald Strachan’s house, a peculiar Victorian invention with tall windows set into a mansard roof. To him, that was worth the trip because others in the family told him he was imagining it. I gave them my bed so was sleeping in my so-called bunk house and even then there were difficulties for them getting in and out of bed, often complaints from him about his stomach, and improvisations to approximate a recliner so he could get a necessary nap. In a few years he died of stomach cancer, which he had evidently known he had all along. It may have motivated the genealogy research.
So the memory I’ve connected to 9/11 is not the surreal attack, not the months and months of aftermath, nor even the need for revenge. What I remember is an old man with a lot of unresolved issues from his boyhood, a scowling old Indian woman who despised cats (though seeing her in my bed, they went to sleep with her the same as they did with me -- “remove this beast!” she commanded.), and somewhere way back in the past a skinny young man with dogtags but no shirt, gleaming with sweat and oil, toiling over an airplane engine on which depended the life of the pilot and maybe the fate of the war. Implanted in him was heart-deep patriotism and the discipline of a focused worker.
New Guinea is where Jared Diamond was challenged by his helper to explain why the US is so rich and his tribe is so poor. The result was the landmark book, “Guns, Germs and Steel.” Diamond went much deeper into the jungle along the ridges and valleys of the country and he understood that the rich so overmatch the poor that they kill many, many more than any terrorist ever could, but often silently -- a matter of bookkeeping after the fact rather than spectacular explosions.
Gene Strachan with my brothers in Kennebec, S.D. July 22, 1956
Gene’s generation was builders, industrial technicians. Gene’s major pleasure in life was fine cars. But I’m not much impressed by built environment, even though my father’s family was. They came to the prairie to be agriculturalists, but they were living through an industrial farming revolution.
Even the Twin Towers memorial, which I watched a vid about, strikes me as remote, over-rationalized. The image that stayed with me in the aftermath was not the people leaping hand-in-hand off the top floors, but rather the man who was somehow preserved in a pocket of rubble, wearing his nice suit and expensive wristwatch, still clutching his briefcase, and slumped intact against a block of concrete. He was probably dead from impact, but the illusion was that he was waiting patiently to be set back on his feet and reactivated. Maybe his whole life was like that.
Tall buildings are a practical way to use space on an island like Manhattan but the internet had already doomed them, the same as herbicides doomed my grandfather’s weed harrow. People can work from Connecticut or Texas or even Montana (if the telephone companies ever catch up with their fiberoptic network). People no longer have to work in physical proximity. And if you think those physical buildings were vulnerable, think of the vulnerability of the “cloud.” If bin Laden were alive today (or whoever the next one might be) his students are working on iPads or the equivalent -- no need for bombs when hacking will destroy more. Why fool around with expensive espionage when pre-pubescent boys can crouch against the wall learning to data-scrape, finding their way into the code systems of city power grids?
But changing the means of destruction does not change the causes, which go back to Cain and Abel. It’s about domination and submission, as was built into mammals when they were still reptiles. But what some don’t understand -- but people who know human dynamics do know -- is that the one who seems to be the submission/rebel/underdog is always the one who sets the terms of the conflict. Bin Laden won, all right. But it wasn’t the explosions that did it -- it was our susceptibility to fear. It has cost billions and changed our society to suspicion-based. It may bankrupt us yet, and yet the top 1% of the population accrues mountains of money.
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