Coverage Of 9/11 Was Too Wimpy (Mark Steyn On The Feminized 9/11 Remembrance Fetish Alert)

A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully tasteful. On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the annual roll call of the dead -- or, as the alliterative editor put it, "Litany of the Lost." That would be a grand entry for Litany of the Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. Sept. 11 wasn't a shipwreck: The dead weren't "lost," they were murdered.

So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined "Half a Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why." Well, in that case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend": Osama bin Laden issued a declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.

But, of course, that's not what the headline means: Instead, it's "incomprehensible" in the sense that, to persons of a certain mushily "progressive" disposition, all such acts are "incomprehensible," all violence is "senseless." Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the fellows who perpetrated it. Which is what that headline writer finds hard to "comprehend" -- or, rather, doesn't wish to comprehend. The piece itself was categorized as "Reflection" -- dread word. No self-respecting newspaper should be running "reflections" anywhere upfront of Section G Page 27, and certainly not on the front page. But it has exactly the kind of self-regarding pseudo-sophistication the American media love. The proper tone for 9/11 commemorations is to be sad about all the dead -- "the lost" -- but in a very generalized soft-focus way. Not a lot of specifics about the lost, and certainly not too many quotes from those final phone calls from the passengers to their families, like Peter Hanson's last words before Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center: "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very fast." That might risk getting readers worked up, especially if they see the flight manifest:

No, best to stick to a limpidly fey, tastefully mopey, enervatedly passive prose style that suggests nothing very much can be done about the incomprehensible lost. This tasteful passivity is the default mode of the age: Five years ago it was striking, even in the immediate aftermath, how many radio and TV trailers for blood drives and other relief efforts could only bring themselves over the soupy music track to refer vaguely to "the tragic events," as if any formulation more robust might prove controversial.

Passivity is far slyer and more lethal than rabid Bush hatred. Say what you like about the left-wing kooks but they can still get a good hate on. Sure, they hate Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Halliburton and Fox News and Rush Limbaugh rather than Saddam and the jihadists, but at least they can still muster primal emotions. Every morning I wake up to a gazillion e-mails from fellows wishing me ill, usually beginning by calling me a "chicken hawk" followed by a generous smattering of words I can only print here peppered with asterisks, and usually ending with pledges to come round and shove various items in a particular part of my anatomy. There's so much shipping scheduled to go up there I ought to get Dubai Ports World in to run it.

The foaming leftie routine seems to be a tough sell to a general audience. I see that, a mere three weeks after I guest-hosted for Rush, the widely acclaimed and even more widely unlistened-to Air America is going belly up. Coincidence? You be the judge. But I doubt the "liberal" radio network would be kaput if anti-Bush fever were about to sweep the Democrats to power this November. I think I said a few months back that the Dems would be waking up to their usual biennial Wednesday morning after the Tuesday night before, and I'll stick with that.

But there's more to the national discourse than party politics. And, whoever wins or loses, the cult of feebly tasteful passivity rolls on regardless. As part of National Review's fifth anniversary observances, James Lileks wrote the following:

"If 9/11 had really changed us, there'd be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there's a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don't. And we don't seem interested in asking why."

Ray Nagin, New Orleans' Mayor Culpa, is a buffoon but he nevertheless had a point when he scoffed at the ongoing hole in the ground in Lower Manhattan. And whatever fills it is never going to include those "stern stone eagles." The best we can hope for is that the Saudi-funded Islamic Outreach Center will only take up a third of the site. But in our hearts we know whatever memorial eventually stands on the spot will be rubbish -- tasteful rubbish, but rubbish all the same. Last year, I criticized the Flight 93 memorial, the "Crescent of Embrace," whose very title is a parodic masterpiece of note-perfect generically effete huggy-weepy blather. And in return I received a ton of protests pointing out that the families of the Flight 93 heroes had "approved" the design. All that demonstrates, I think, is how thoroughly constrained our society is within its own crescent of embrace: The cult of passivity has insinuated itself deep into our bones. Behind those "IMAGINE PEACE" stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.

At what point does a society become simply too genteel to wage war? We're like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who covered up the legs of their pianos. Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace. We fight tastefully, too. Last week one of America's unmanned drones could have killed 200 Taliban big shots but they were attending a funeral and we apparently have a policy of not killing anybody near cemeteries out of sensitivity. So even our unmanned drones are obliged to behave with sensitivity. But then, these days the very soundtrack to our society is, so to speak, an unmanned drone.

The Empire State Building took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again, but we don't. And we don't seem interested in asking why.

That quote is from James Lileks and was included in Styen's article.

But check this:

In 1966, construction of the World Trade Center began with a groundbreaking that razed 13 square blocks of low rise buildings, some of which predated the US Civil War. The construction was under the auspices of the semi-autonomous Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In 1970, construction was completed on One World Trade Center, with its first tenants moving into the building in December 1970. Tenants first moved into Two World Trade Center in January 1972. Link.

Six years to complete, start to finish. And here we are, five years later and what do we have? A hole in the ground.

We, as Americans, need to collectively have a big knot jerked in our tail. And then be taken down a notch or two.

IMHO, there's a place for being nice and a place for being passive and a place for being compassionate and a place for being benevolent and a place for being charitable and even a place for being a little Politically Correct.

But that place should never be applied to the war with the Islamofascists when they have take a holy oath to kill all of us in a most bloody, horrific way. They have no concept of nice.

I really, really hate to say this, but it may take another attack on our country, maybe more, before folks wake up to the reality. Sad.

That's worth posting:

THE CITIZEN AS STAKEHOLDER
After a recent lover's tiff prompted by my girlfriend's bog-standard casual anti-Americanism, it really got me thinking. The argument was prompted by us watching some of the September 11th stuff that's all over the TV in the U.K. right now, and our basic disagreement was her spouting of the usual British snobbishness over what we incorrectly perceive as over-the-top American flag waving and patriotism. In this regard, the British and Americans will always be different (and I do love the true British patriot's understated love of country), but immediately after our tiff I came to a realisation. Forgive the long winded explanation, but it's worth it in the long run.

A few years ago I worked at one of our prime Scottish tourist traps, the Whisky Heritage Centre at the top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. We had a lot of tourists from all over the world, of course, but my favourites were always the Americans. For those so inclined, there are a lot of trivial things that could arouse dislike or jealousy of Americans abroad. They tend to be wealthy. If you're a snob, they don't often harbour the same intense dislike of popular culture that drives a lot of western self-loathers. The reason I liked Americans, however, is best demonstrated with a short anecdote. A young American family were amongst the visitors this particular day, a pretty non-descript young American mother, father and a child around 5 years. They came in, did the usual tourist stuff and left. No one really paid them any attention.

About a week later after we'd all but forgotten them amongst the waves of tourist faces, they returned. Apparently, during their earlier visit, their young child had exhibited some of the kleptomaniac tendencies of his age group, and snatched up a couple of tiny bottles of malt whisky (the kid had good taste), and stuck them in his satchel. No one had even noticed, but the parents had marched him straight back when they'd found out. Now, this could of course have been a standard scene in any country involving good parents of any nationality. But these parents were not just teaching a valuable lesson to their child. I could sense a heartfelt anguish to redress any act which reflected poorly not just on them, but on their country. And that was the key difference. An American abroad thinks of himself genuinely as an ambassador for their country, because Americans are stakeholders in their country in a way that people in Britain, France or Germany are not.

After this event I began to look at Americans differently, began to see a whole raft of issues differently. I began to see gun rights not as the hobby horse of a nation of right wing violence fetishists (which is the standard perception of just about everyone in the EU), but as a natural outcome of a self-reliant people who feel that the first line of defence is themselves. I read the same stories about US citizens setting up their own patrols along the Mexican border, but unlike everyone around me I didn't laugh at these poor deluded hicks pretending to be sheriffs in the Wild West, I marvelled at their sense of empowerment. We Brits moan constantly at the incompetence of our customs and immigration officials, but I could not imagine in a million years a group of us ever getting together to try and help or fix it. I read the reports of active citizens trying to help any way they could after 9/11 - the retired fire chiefs in New York, the wave of citizens giving blood, National Guard reporting for duty unasked. We are a passive, downtrodden people in comparison, only insisting upon our right to moan at successive governmental incompetence.

I have realised what sets your average American apart. An American is a citizen in the true sense of the word, mindful of not only his rights but his responsibilities. He is a stakeholder in his country, and respects the symbolism of the accoutrements of state - the flag, the anthem and the head of state. Can you imagine a group of Brits storming the cockpit of flight 93? I wish I could say yes - perhaps in Churchill's era (it is depressing to think he died in living memory) - but in all honesty I envision a group of surly Brits awaiting the intervention of their incompetent government, gingerly looking at each other for some sign of leadership. It's no surprise
to me that there was no shortage of leaders on that American-laden ill-fated flight.

My point, if I have one, is that all these things we Europeans like to mock in Americans - their self-reliance, their relative religious piety, their 'cultural ignorance' (I'd call it a lack of obsession with other cultures), their ability to rally to the symbols of statehood in time of war - these are the things that will ensure America has a fighting chance in the future. These are the things we in Europe have given away, if we ever had them. But I do draw strength from the American example, even if the media tells me I shouldn't, and my family and friends at least seem to have their eyes open with regard to the threats we face from radical (and even moderate) Islam. I will not ever stop challenging the bullshit knee-jerk anti-Americanism that seems to be the default position of anyone who thinks of themselves as a great thinker, in so far as I am able. So while I share your sense of pessimism for the future, Mark, at least some of us will not go there willingly.

Nick McCrea
Edinburgh

Bravo, Nick!

I'm sure you meant to say, 'un-holy oath.' But to your question, what is it going to take? Personally, I think enough woke up on 9/11 to start the purge of Islam from the civilized world. The purge will expand to the fartherest corner of the globe until all its remaining practitioners have isolated themselves where they can do no harm execept to each other. Then it will purify itself or destroy itself until the last immam is standing or the last woman is standing.

But how to declare the 'Cain Sanction?' That is the question. A good start would be by civilized countries dis-allowing immigration and citizenship and serving notice on all practitioners within their borders.

I'm sure by now the terrorist arm of Islam is aware that its demise will come at the hands of the people, not the gummints during their final hours. I'm also sure the so-called 'moderates' see the handwriting on the wall and are making arrangements to flee lest they get caught in the crossfire.

From the suitcase bomb thread yesterday, even the terrorists are warning their fellow practitioners to flee certain areas. They should have warned them to flee the country. That would have served as a self-imposed Cain Sanction -- and wisdom.

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Steyn ping!