House of Eratosthenes

There’s enormous coverage, but no news. None of this is news, it is drama, portraits of courage and sadness. Last phone calls between loved ones, “the last time I saw him was when…”, “when I saw the first Tower fall I…”

And firefighters. Lots of firefighters. America wants its real life heroes unarmed and unthreatening.

Lots of sadness, but no anger. No one on TV is angry? The Towers didn’t fall, they were kicked in the face. How many politicians do I have to watch cry on TV? STOP CRYING. I already know it’s sad. Don’t tell me we are resilient, don’t tell me we’ll go on, are there people worried they won’t go on? Show me the country has some men in it, show me that we aren’t five year olds.
:
Observe that the media has unilaterally decided that no American will ever again see the images of the planes being slammed into the Towers. “Come on, you’ve seen it enough times, nothing to be gained from that. Here’s a firefighter.”

I’m told anger serves no useful purpose. But sadness isn’t going to prevent this from happening again, sadness isn’t going to restructure the planet so that people don’t want to do these things. You might say anger won’t either, but I’ll take my chances.

No, anger doesn’t prevent things from happening. But anger is not the issue. Think on this — imagine yourself tasked to cut a lawn. You had other things planned for this block of time and you’re irritable and peeved; you want the lawn as thoroughly cut as you can possibly manage, and you want to spend the absolute minimum in terms of time, energy and effort to get it done. You want to mow that lawn the way a man buys a pair of socks at the mall. In & out in record time.

Now if it’s up to you to determine the mental positioning and emotional profile of each blade of grass, how would you condition them? And I say the answer is: Precisely the way our media and our so-called “leaders” have been conditioning us. Sad and not angry. Every single swath you mow down, the yet-to-be-cut blades on the next swath over say to themselves….aw, how sad. Where were you when that happened? Conforming with each other barely enough to lean in the same direction, so you can take care of ’em when you come around again.

You would push for a complete extirpation from this particular lawn, of any sense that a blade of grass is worth something. You’d want the blades of grass to get mopey, depressed, but not outraged in the slightest. Your goal would be to make them suicidal without being aware that they’re suicidal. Lining up like lambs for slaughter. Then you can get it all done, dump out the clippings and still make your tee time.

The issue is not anger; the issue is a sense of the value of human life. We’re losing track of what is really important. Losing track of this simple and easily-grasped idea that, the twenty-five-year-old firefighter who responded to the crash of Flight 11, and was ripped away from us forever by the crash of Flight 175, should today be thirty-five…and isn’t. There should still be another fifty years ahead of that fine man. And there aren’t. He’s forever 25. It’s true of him and the thousands of others — that is what we have lost. That is the mindset, stolen from us, but only passively, relieved from our possession after we willingly gave it up. By the chattering-class over here, not by terrorists. The terrorists took the lives, the media took the sense & sensibility that those lives were worth something.

We’ve become like the lawn, waiting to be mowed. At least, that is the picture that emerges from the boob tube. Vast barrels and bushels of mopey sadness, not so much as a dollop of natural anger. Our media remembers that something was removed from us, but they appear to have forgotten that a hostile act was involved. It is a blight against all of us that so much footage can be watched, and there won’t be any mention that this was an unnatural act, committed deliberately by hostiles.

Update: Mark Steyn, writing on exactly the same theme, is taking note of what does & doesn’t make it on to the peace quilt.

How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal with Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims into Silence,” reports the Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried, “Let’s roll!” and rushed the hijackers.

No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all the Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the ten-year hole is something we did to ourselves — and in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half an hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes that there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

Which is why I always admired the memorial w/ pool in Military Park (I think) in downtown Newark, New Jersey of all places. I didn’t really “get it” until I looked down on it from the 10th floor of the hotel.
Those were the days.
That was 20 years ago. Wonder what kind of shape it’s in today.
- CaptDMO | 09/11/2011 @ 18:12
After the attack, I was less concerned with mourning the lost…and more concerned about what the rest of us were going to do to the beasts that did this to our country. I wanted vengeance.

I wanted the Taliban terrorists to die screaming, in a fireball…just like a thousands of innocent people did on our soil.

And now, ten years on, there are already people writing brain-dead articles for the Sacrament News and Review, complaining that billions of dollars have been spent, that more American GIs have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than civilians were killed on 9/11, and gosh, what do we have to show for all of it? Oh, the kind of health care system and education we could have had for all that money flushed away on bombing Taliban positions! And all that money we’ve spent on enhanced security measures and foreign military aid and…(sarcasm off)

….Yeah. And had we done nothing, the bad guys would have stuck to their original conclusions – that America is a wounded / paper tiger. And we’d have been hit again and again and again, and thousands more people would be dead. As it is, dozens of attacks have been attempted since then and been foiled, frighteningly often by no more than the terrorist’s own incompetence – the underwear bomber, the shoe bomber, the Times Square bomber, and others.

As I wrote elsewhere on the Web today…stopping this from happening again is Job #1 for the US government. Half of us in America are worried that the Earth’s temperature might rise half a degree over the next century. The other half are worried that terrorists will run airliners into tall buildings if given the opportunity.

None of the other crap we spend the taxpayers’ money on matters, not compared to this.
- cylarz | 09/13/2011 @ 15:58
Clarification: I know the 9/11 hijackers all died themselves in the attacks. I wanted punishment and revenge exacted on the guys “back home” who planned and organized this.

It’s been said: Nations don’t survive by setting an example for others – nations survive by MAKING an example of others.
- cylarz | 09/13/2011 @ 16:00

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Lots of Sadness, But No AngerSunday, September 11th, 2011

Lots of Sadness, But No Anger
Sunday, September 11th, 2011