This past Friday, the world observed the 25th anniversary of one of the worst days many Americans have ever experienced—the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Among many other moments I recall from that day, which is still etched clearly into my memory, I descended the stairs of my parents’ house to find that my great-grandmother Liz had come to visit and was watching the World Trade Center burn live on television.
I had graduated college the year prior and was about to turn 23.
My great-grandmother was in her early 80s.
“This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Liz said, eyes wide, after WTC 1 followed WTC 2 in the same fast crumble-collapse.
Her comment really put things in perspective for me.
Here was a woman who had lived through any number of disasters, including experiencing the Great Depression as a teenager and the horrors of World War 2 as an adult, and yet this moment, huddled with her grandchild and great grand-children around a television set at the beginning of our new millennium, was the absolute worst.
So it was a terrible day.
And the days that followed were bad and filled with uncertainty.
And into this uncertainty there stepped a number of figures—so-called or imagined “heroes” who purported to hold America together through these difficult times but who, it was later revealed, may not have been as pure-hearted or as competent as they seemed.. among them none other than George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States.
“No Orchestrated Sadness, Please”
On September 13, 2001, the New York Times (Online) captured a series of textual snapshots from its forum regarding the terrorist attacks—including a post made by Patrick Gunkel.
President Bush had just issued a proclamation declaring a national day of mourning.
He asked Americans to pause at noon on September 14th and hold memorial services, ring bells, and take time off during the lunch to commemorate the national tragedy.
“I call on every American family and the family of America to observe a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance,” President Bush wrote in his proclamation, “honoring the memory of the thousands of victims of these brutal attacks and comforting those who lost loved ones.”
I’m not sure I remember this national day of mourning at all, and yet this news apparently really set Gunkel off.
Although he was surely horrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, Gunkel seems to have immediately played everything out right to the end and saw the immediate danger of the tragedy being used in the service of political ambition.
Gunkel’s short forum post, titled “No Orchestrated Sadness, Please,” excoriates the idea of a “National Day of Mourning” as “utterly inappropriate and transparently manipulative.”
Just two days after the attacks, Gunkel had concluded the attacks were hijacked by “propagandists and showmen.”
“The private feelings people may have in response to recent events are quite sufficient and will, by contrast, be both genuine and proportionate,” Gunkel wrote.
“There has already been enough damage done to the authenticity, humanity, and dignity of Americans... we do not need more of these hucksters’ hypocritical efforts.”
Talk about being the proverbial skunk at the garden party… I can’t say I really agree with Gunkel here.
Sure, the danger of 9/11 as an excuse for domestic political excess was clear and present, and yet that did not make a national day of mourning inappropriate.
Although many Americans did eventually turn against the efforts of the “propagandists and showmen,” from my perspective it seems premature and heartless to skip so quickly to the endgame in the way he did, and with such brusque language as well.
Imagine someone who’d lost a loved one in any number of the various horrific ways that were possible on that day coming across Gunkel’s message and reading it?
“A Sop to Ignorance and Malfeasance”
I’m not sure where on the political spectrum—if anywhere—Gunkel was identifying in September of 2001.
I know that he had long-since ended his association with the right-leaning Hudson Institute; that his libertarianism had taken a big hit in Texas; and that the failure of his Ideonomy Project, as well as many romantic disappointments, had made him pessimistic and cynical. I don’t have any evidence of Gunkel calling himself a Democrat, liberal, or progressive. It simply doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind. Nor do I see Gunkel casting a vote for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election, despite Gunkel’s interest in the “tertium quid” or paradigm-busting “third thing” that can turn standard binary choices into a spectrum. Gunkel was therefore very likely feeling cynical, politically dispossessed, and pessimistic about both his own and the world’s future.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, a long, painful, drawn-out, and obviously manipulated conversation transpired regarding the invasion of Iraq.
Gunkel was an opponent of this war from the very beginning.
In a June 13, 2004, editorial essay, published on the commentary website OpEdNews, Gunkel raged against a misleading news article published by WorldTribune.com that made it seem like the phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) supposedly held by Saddam Hussein had been located—in other countries!
It turns out, however, what had been located were not likely to be actual weapons, but merely components of them. Nor did the United Nations (UN) report the article was based upon identify the components as WMD-related.
“What a deceptive news article this is, and a report for the United Nations to release!” Gunkel raged.
“The use of the acronym ‘WMD’ in the article almost invariably refers to mere ‘COMPONENTS’ of, or potentially or alternatively usable in, such weapons.”
According to ChatGPT, WorldTribune.com was at that time a right-leaning publication. So it’s no surprise that the article was deliberately distorting the UN report.
Gunkel was noticing, long before the threat of AI-written content had emerged, that “fake news” in the service of ideological goals had become very easy to spread in the digital age.
Gunkel’s editorial can still be found on the Internet Archive (copy and paste rather than clicking on the link):
“The Worst Form of Paranoia”
Then, a little over a year later, Gunkel returned to write about the Global War on Terror (GWOT) with a new editorial posted to the OpEdNews site.
The editorial, posted on July 6, 2006, offers a diagnosis of paranoia that he believed had begun to afflict the highest levels of western government in response to the ongoing post-9/11 threat of terrorism.
It also contains some interesting color about Gunkel’s time in Princeton, New Jersey, painting him as a lurker who pops his head into the offices of academics on the Princeton University campus unannounced.
“[Paranoia] is what I see on faces everywhere when I talk to people about 9/11, ‘homeland security,’ the Iraq War, and related matters,” Gunkel wrote. “And I see it in the groups of academics who specialize in ‘the new terrorism’ and ‘national emergency,’ or ‘skyrocketing threat to civilization,’ that I have casually met in their offices on the Princeton University campus—who, comically enough—are the most staid of crackpots.”
In a certain way, I can actually validate Gunkel’s claims based on my own personal experience with the GWOT.
As a writer/editor working for the U.S. government during this period, I edited dozens of security-related reports that began with the formulaic opening line: “In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001…”
I even wrote a few such reports myself using the same framing.
Although I’m not sure I personally felt paranoia in 2006—I had experienced this after 9/11, but it was an acute experience living and working in Washington, D.C., during that period, that had by that time had worn away—I do agree with Gunkel that paranoia had settled into the general bureaucracy.
I even remember the specific feeling, after having yet again written those formulaic words at the beginning of a new report, that anyone in government could justify writing any such report so long as it began with that opening:
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001…
Gunkel’s editorial can still be found on the Internet Archive (copy and paste rather than clicking on the link):
In an introductory note to Gunkel’s editorial, Rob Kall, editor of OpEdNews, describes Gunkel as a “philosopher-scientist genius.”
What Other “Gunkelia” Might Be Out There?
This is a question I’m always asking, and I’ve frequently been rewarded with an answer—a new archival discovery; a new contact to track down; or a new anecdote about the fascinating, complex, and even tragic life of a unique and authentic American character.
This is how I’ve amassed such a large amount of “Gunkelia” few other people have ever seen, and why I’m still focused on trying to convince the biggest such holder of remaining Gunkelia, a woman who took possession of all Gunkel’s materials at his death, to archive or otherwise publicly share what she has been holding onto.
I’m fairly sure I’ve only discovered a fraction of Gunkel’s online writing as well, given how many message boards and other services he apparently used to frequent.
The writing I’ve highlighted above helps illuminate one part of Gunkel’s intellect at a single point in time, but I’m sure there are many more such tidbits out there in the digital space of bygone times that highlight other aspects of Gunkel.
Of possible importance, Gunkel also included in his September 2001 message on the New York Times message board a preferred user handle—pgunkel1—that, in addition to his email address listed on the Amazon.com profile ([email protected]), may prove valuable for any future digital archeologists.