Posted on 09/17/2006 4:01:16 AM PDT by goldstategop
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:
"Peter Hanson, Massachusetts
"Susan Hanson, Massachusetts
"Christine Hanson, 2, Massachusetts"
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.
Thanks for posting that! Wow! I hope to be the kind of American he is talking about.
I don't believe it's gender-specific. If you know anything about Myers-Briggs personality profile tests, it's a case of whether your emotions or your intellect rules your outlook. Men and women can both fall into that category. That's the bottom line for me.
one of Steyn's best - and that says a lot.
In case you're not familiar with it, I want to post Natan Scharnsky's "moral clarity" quote, from The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. Even if you are familiar with it, others should see it, as I think it is extremely sublime.
"Over the years, I have come to understand a critical difference between the world of fear and the world of freedom. In the former, the primary challenge is finding the inner strength to confront evil. In the latter, the primary challenge is finding the moral clarity to see evil."
Unfortunately, far too many in the West are willing to see and call out evil.
God bless and protect your son, and all like him. I firmly believe that we, as a country, are attempting the right thing, the moral thing, with what we attempt in the Middle East, with Iraq. I expect and believe that if we are not successful, we will end up creating the glass parking lots many have called for, before it is over.
I skipped watching and reading anything that day . I saw 9/11 happen before my eyes . That's all I needed to know . Once my enemy is dead and unable to harm me and my friends and family , then I will take time to morn and take time to perhps think about such silly nonsense as "root causes" . I've educate dmyself as to what is happening to America and the world . Morn the dead AfTEr the war is won.
Good point. I read a horrible account of Pearl Harbor a few years ago that said that for weeks after the attack, soldiers and sailors training on the beach had to run past upturned hulls where they could hear trapped sailors tapping to have someone notice them and get them out. We didn't have the fuel to power the torches that would have been required to cut a battleship's hull and we didn't have the time or the manpower to expend on rescuing them at that time. So our soldiers and sailors had to run past that beach, where the tapping kept up for weeks and declined and finally stopped altogether, while they got up to speed for WWII.
Make that:
Unfortunately, far too many in the West are *un*willing to see and call out evil.
He already has apologized.
I understand that he also said his statement didn"t reflect HIS personal opinion of Islam. Ok , so it's a %99 apology ..He should never have done that . I though for once someone in authority was showing the guts to call a spade a spade.Why is the world so damned afraid of these barbarians? Now even the Pope has to go PC on us.
"Please understand, it is not my position that is tenuous and subject to criticism, but yours. In view of the hate mail which your article has triggered, I must now take off valuable time from my work to consult with legal authorities about the article itself."
- A K Dewdney
MARK REPLIES: My mistake. From the hours you’ve devoted to those conspiracies, I assumed your work time wasn’t in the least bit valuable.
That's gonna leave a 'mark'.
It was his first time to fill in for Rush, and he was fantastic!
#47 BUMP!
God bless this fine Scot and may he as soon as he can gather his family to himself, emigrate from his dead, decadent and increasingly degenerate socialist state and come and join US. He is already an American in his heart -- the first and most important place to be one!
<< ... I have realized what sets your average American apart. An American is a citizen ... >>
Close but no Christmas box.
An American is just that, "an American."
Every American is sovereign, neither the subject of any ruler nor the citizen of any state.
We the (American) people, ARE the American Nation!
WE are our beloved fraternal republic.
And, as for storming cockpits, even Winston Spencer Churchill was way more American than he was a Brit.
Neville Chamberlain was a Brit.
"And the chickification of the media only reveals this trend will in fact worsen."
Also note a more sly attempt to downgrade able-bodied caucasian men. Virtually every commercial is now casting a woman as the strong character and the able bodied caucasian man as either a buffoon or a meek bystander. Of course, if it's a handicapped man or a gay man or a black man or an Oriental man, he's either a hero or involved in solving the issue. D'white guy? He's watching, clueless.
"I missed the day he guest hosted for Rush!!! Did he do a good job?"
Once you got past his accent, he was EXCEPTIONAL!!!!!! I hope Rush goes away more often and has Steyn guest host for him each time, although I also like the other guest hosts. Why not Thomas Sowell some time? He's great.
"How can anyone, with a clear mind, possibly come up with any other explanation?"
You pinpointed the issue. They do not have a clear mind on this issue. They are blinded with partisan hate and have developed a construct that they hope they can sell in their attempts to cast aspersions on the Republicans thus shifting the scales in their Dim favor. The do know what happened but they won't openly say it.
Oh, I think this is easy. Unless one specifically looks for programs about 9-11, one is very unlikely to hear much about it on tv. People just don't talk in detail about what happened. The girl was 17 when it happened, maybe mom and dad wanted to protect her from endless newscasts, or maybe she found the news upsetting and didn't watch.
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