Monk

Wow, Paul Krugman comes out strong with a provocative stand on 9/11. It strikes me as a risky move considering the tendency of the media to marginalize him as sort of left-wing political hack. But Krugman is primarily an intellectual and he shoots for truth, and the political consequences be damned.

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Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

-- "The Years of Shame" by Paul Krugman

Dick Cavett doesn't think much of all this 9/11 brouhaha in the media, and I am inclined to agree, though this is the tenth-year anniversay, which might call for greater notice. One does hope that we might cool it when it comes to the 11th, 12th year and so on, maybe doing something bigger for the 20th year. However, if this is the pattern, maybe we should follow it with the other big historical events, such as winning World War II or getting out of Vietnam, or when the Constitution was ratified, though after a hundred years, I can see cooling it down to 25-year celebrations.

Let more of our history have such vitality in our cultural memory. 9/11 was historic and it's not exactly dead history, I understand, but it can seem odd that we should be so focused on it, as though this macabre case of mass murder is what most defines us as a people and a culture, and I hope that's not true. The more likely outcome, of course, is that we will grow tired of 9/11 eventually and then just forget about it, like everything else.

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Have you, perchance, decided — as I have — not to spend the weekend re-wallowing in 9/11 with the media? Aside from allowing Saint Rudolph, former tenant of Gracie Mansion, to trumpet once again his self-inflated heroism on that nightmare day, the worst feature of this relentlessly repeated carnival of bitter sights and memories is that it glamorizes the terrorists.

How they must enjoy tuning into our festival of their spectacular accomplishments, cheering when the second plane hits and high-fiving when the falling towers are given full-color international showcasing for the tenth time.

Who wants this? Surveys show people want to forget it, or at least not have it thrust down their throats from all over the dial annually. It can’t have to do with that nauseating buzz-word “closure.” There is no closure to great tragedies. Ask the woman on a call-in show who said how she resents all this ballyhooing every year of the worst day of her life: “My mother died there that day. I’m forced to go through her funeral again every year.”

-- Dick Cavett at The New York Times

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I will commemorate this anniversary of 9/11 with the observation that it has been a refreshingly cool summer anent the jihadist threat.

Back in the spring of this year, you may recall that we were getting a lot of indications and warnings that we were in for a heated summer of jhadist violence against America and Israel. Although it is true that we have not enjoyed peace, we also haven't really suffered the promised surge of violence, under which we should have suffered by now a wave of suicide-bombing attacks in America.

Instead, all we have gotten are a couple of embarrassingly flaky videotapes from the once fierce lion Osama bin Laden, in which he seems to have lapsed back into the Stalinist era of orthodox Leninist-Marxist ideology (maybe from his college days?) in which capitalism is the root of all evil. Of course, salvation is not to be found in those tired communist formulae, but in converting to fundamentalist Islam! Yeah, I think we'd rather pay higher taxes.

True, such violence is likely to occur sometime, but it is intriguing to see the summer pass by in dull, lazy ordinariness.

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According to a special on the ABC network, 9-11 happened because Bill Clinton was preoccupied with a sex scandal. I hope the authors of history books migrate toward that opinion. It would make 8th grade a lot more entertaining, especially since 9-11 will probably lead to WWIII between radical Islam on one side and various radical infidels on the other. I figure we’re one dirty bomb away from that.

Teacher: “Billy, can you explain what caused World War III?”

Billy: “Some skank in a blue dress gave the president a hummer?”

Teacher: “Very good, Billy. For homework I would like the class to depict the scene using macaroni.”

-- Dilbert Blog

Just a reminder that we are going into the home stretch of the 2006 elections. There is even talk that they have Osama's head on ice for a nice October surprise. It promises to be an interesting month.

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