Woke up early this morning and see that MSNBC is replaying in real time the footage from the Today show from 9/11/01. The other channels were doing the reading of the names of each victim in alphabetical order. When I started watching, they had reached "M." I was surprised how disturbing it was to rewatch the gradual demise of the World Trade Center again with the contemporary babblings of Katie Couric and Tom Brokow, etal. So I turned it off. After all, last night the last thing I saw was the controversial (?) mini-series Part I of The Path to 9/11 replete with its disclaimers about it being composite and all.

On the Internet news of the day I found an article from Norway. It's about a Muslim cleric living there who liked that movie "Loose Change" and is pretty sure Osama Bin Laden is a figment of imagination. He even utilized the term "Bush & Co." so prevalent on leftist websites. Sigh... odd bedfellows.

Maybe today is a day for something else. It just seems to me that the best way to deal with 5 years after (not to mention 10, 20, or 25) is not what's being done today by television.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

"We cannot allow a mine shaft gap"

this weekend we bought United 93 on DVD. Saw it in the theaters originally. Haven't watched the DVD yet, but heard the special features are very good.

Last night, I put out our US flag as my way to mark 9/11. For me, in many ways, that's enough to mark 9/11/2001.  

Jordan .

Today's New York Times editorial titled "9/11/06".

- - -

The feelings of sadness and loss with which we look back on Sept. 11, 2001, have shifted focus over the last five years. The attacks themselves have begun to acquire the aura of inevitability that comes with being part of history. We can argue about what one president or another might have done to head them off, but we cannot really imagine a world in which they never happened, any more than we can imagine what we would be like today if the Japanese had never attacked Pearl Harbor.

What we do revisit, over and over again, is the period that followed, when sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose. How, having lost so much on the day itself, did we also manage to lose that as well?

The time when we felt drawn together, changed by the shock of what had occurred, lasted long beyond the funerals, ceremonies and promises never to forget. It was a time when the nation was waiting to find out what it was supposed to do, to be called to the task that would give special lasting meaning to the tragedy that it had endured.

But the call never came. Without ever having asked to be exempt from the demands of this new post-9/11 war, we were cut out. Everything would be paid for with the blood of other people’s children, and with money earned by the next generation. Our role appeared to be confined to waiting in longer lines at the airport. President Bush, searching the other day for an example of post-9/11 sacrifice, pointed out that everybody pays taxes.

That pinched view of our responsibility as citizens got us tax cuts we didn’t need and an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft. With no call to work together on some effort greater than ourselves, we were free to relapse into a self- centeredness that became a second national tragedy. We have spent the last few years fighting each other with more avidity than we fight the enemy.

When we measure the possibilities created by 9/11 against what we have actually accomplished, it is clear that we have found one way after another to compound the tragedy. Homeland security is half-finished, the development at ground zero barely begun. The war against terror we meant to fight in Afghanistan is at best stuck in neutral, with the Taliban resurgent and the best economic news involving a bumper crop of opium. Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 when it was invaded, is now a breeding ground for a new generation of terrorists.

Listing the sins of the Bush administration may help to clarify how we got here, but it will not get us out. The country still hungers for something better, for evidence that our leaders also believe in ideas larger than their own political advancement.

Today, every elected official in the country will stop and remember 9/11. The president will remind the country that he has spent most of his administration fighting terrorism, and his opponents will point out that Osama bin Laden is still at large. It would be miraculous if the best of our leaders did something larger — expressed grief and responsibility for the bad path down which we’ve gone, and promised to work together to turn us in a better direction.

Over the last week, the White House has been vigorously warning the country what awful things would happen in Iraq if American troops left, while his critics have pointed out how impossible the current situation is. They are almost certainly both right. But unless people on both sides are willing to come up with a plan that acknowledges both truths and accepts the risk of making real-world proposals, we will be stuck in the same place forever.

If that kind of coming together happened today, we could look back on Sept. 11, 2006, as more than a day for recalling bad memories and lost chances.

 

I did nothing to mark the occasion, as usual, and then when listening to the radio, Zane Lowe made a mention of it, and played 'Redemption Song'.  I could deal with that.

I have a weird reaction to September 11, 2001, upon it being mentioned.  My first thought is inevitably, 'oh shut up!'.  I know of course that it has to be talked about, but so much of what you hear when those words are mentioned is just garbage.  I actually go out of my way not to read any articles about it.  It is everywhere, and it fatigues me.  I'm so, so tired of it.

Nevertheless, I acknowledge what a pivotal point it turned out to be.

I saw this posted yesterday on MySpace by one of my friends. Not really sure how I feel about it, but I thought it was interesting to share. Here ya go::

<blockquote>Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honour of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you To offer up a moment of silence For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, For the victims in both Afghanistan and the US

And if I could just add one more thing,
If it's not too much to ask . . .

A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of US-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation. Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year US embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,

Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country. Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin And the survivors went on as if alive. A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it. A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war .... ssssshhhhh.... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead. Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.

An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years. 45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas 25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky. There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains. And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...

For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears. Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written. And if this is a 9/11 poem, then: This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971. This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977. This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored. This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell, And pay the workers for wages lost. Tear down the liquor stores, The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all... Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we, Tonight we will keep right on singing... For our dead.


EMMANUEL ORTIZ, 11 Sep 2002
boricano@hotmail.com
*poem printed in "The Roots of Terror," a publication of Project South.</blockquote

Love those moral equivalency poems. But I don't believe them.

The way it has always made sense to me is the outward ripple. You learn YOU or someone in YOUR immediate family has cancer, you feel it to the bone. You read how many hundreds of thousands HIV-AIDS infected people are in Sub-Saharan Africa, it's a different matter. All of them do not equal the pain of one suffering family member. It's the mind-body's natural means of protecting itself. You cannot go through life with an equal and all consuming heartache over the same maladies, griefs, and pain suffered by the whole world even though in the world we live in, the images and the knowing are omnipresent.

Someone you know was working on the 105th floor of the WTC that day. You feel differently than you do if you're dancing in the streets of Gaza handing out gummy grenades to children all the while proclaiming "The Mossad did it! The Mossad did it!" This is natural.

Someone you know lives three blocks from the WTC and their grandson watched the second plane hit the North Tower that morning as he was walking to the subway to head over to school in Brooklyn, you feel differently than if you're weaving baskets in Guatemala and have never left your village -- a village where government agents have tortured and killed your brothers, sons and uncles. It's natural.

Your sister brings you a coffee mug she bought on September 10, 2001 from the WTC gift shop and you feel differently about that hunk of cheap pottery than you do about another coffee mug on your shelf. Who cannot understand the distinction?

I have a reaction upon reading the myspace little I'm-such-a-sensitive-human-being-and-you're-not non-poem similar to Herofix's reaction described in the middle paragraph of his post. Oh and hey -- didn't he leave out the Katrina victims? Racialist! Hope he is arrested for throwing a rock through the Taco Bell.

Now here's Christopher Hitchens' piece from yesterday's WSJ. I like it better though because although he casts a wide web, it is more selective than myspace.boys.  The devil/angel is in the selectivity.  It's called "Solidarity."

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

I counted the amount of Dutch blogs that are calling it the 11th of September dissaster.
9/11 is actually written 11/9 out here .. so .. ehm, but that's about it I believe.

Oh, and I watched a Zembla show about Loose Change.
A group of university kids and their prof's took this summer to calculate and simulate all the claims in that 'movie'.
They found out, what was already known, it is utter crap.
It was nice to see a prof, who had only flied a couple of small planes before, crash a 757 in the Pentagon.
It was a militairy simulator of a 757, but accurate as can be.
He hit it 4 times in a row, from the same angle and with the same speed as the original one.

Building 7 was the only thing they had questions about, according to them everything points out to a controlled demolition which at the same time seems impossible under the circumstances.

I agree that the poem gets outta control. At first I'm like... hrmm... you have a point! Then when it gets into Taco Bell and yada yada I'm like, "damn, I could really use a Nacho Bell Grande!" LOL. I kinda agree about the Super Bowl thing, but then again, I don't like football, sooo....

LMAO! 

That guy goes back to 1492.

I can out self righteous him. I mourn the poor neanderthals done in by the cro-magnons in 21,000 thousand B C.

I mourn everyone who did not die peacefully in their sleep of natural causes at an advanced age.

Aren't i a great humanitarian ? 

Those are reminiscent of so many other scenes. I wonder if those memorial rugs were manufactured in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia??? And mostly I wonder if Bush doesn't know about the anti-American statement it makes to walk on an image of the American flag.

There's also this way of memorializing 9/11: A cigarette lighter!

In June 2002, the Israeli Customs authorities at the Port of Ashdod uncovered and confiscated a shipment containing tens of cigarette lighters adorned with the defiant image of Osama Bin Laden against the background of the Twin Towers. When the lighter is activated, a flame appears in front of the towers, to which a miniature plane is attached.

The shipment arrived from China in a container destined for the Palestinian Authority. The cigarette lighters were manufactured in China, by a company named Yings Technology, and addressed to Abdel Magid Co., a firm in Khan Yunes.

This shipment of cigarette lighters is yet another manifestation of feelings of hostility against the United States and sympathy towards Bin Laden, prevailing in the Palestinian Authority. The Authority itself has done nothing to counter this phenomenon.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

So which do you think they consider more of an insult, the women walking on the flag, or the horses?

That being said, I have no patience for flag fetishism in its "positive" form either.  Those who defile a flag to create outrage and those who get outraged are opponents in a sport that doesn't interest me much.

I guess I take a world view on 9/11.  We see Americans as brothers, so grieve with them for the loss of so many of their citizens (and a few Aussies too I might add).  But my second thought is always to the thousands/millions dying needlessly throughout every year of starvation, preventable disease etc.  Then a couple of thousand dead doesn't seem like such a big deal.

The symbolism and the theatre of the event is what's made it so big.  The fact that someone dared to attack the US on it's own turf, and gave them a very bloody nose.  The fact that many of us watched it live on TV.  The realisation that there is a huge chunk of the world's population that is being indoctrinated to hate the US, the West in general, and everything we stand for.  For these reasons 9/11 is a big deal, and will remain so.

But with the passing of time I think many will downplay it's significance based merely on the relatively small numbers of people involved.

Oh - and how did I mark it?

Well I worked lifting heavy gymnastics equipment from about 8:30pm till 6:30am, and then slept most of the way through Sept 11...