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.
As someone who could do nothing about being born a "chick," I would argue that it's actually not what you term "chickification" - but the unfortunate triumph of politically correct touchy-feely-ness that pervades the media and our culture. Sorry, I don't buy that as gender-specific.
I'm just a chick, though, so what do I know.
Steyn did wonderfully when he sat in for Rush! Sorry you missed it.
Thanks for posting that. Awesome.
Just an aside...
at least USA Today did a large article on the sanitizing of images of 9-11.
They admitted the media at large (and themselves) had done it.
USA Today said their editorial staff had been on the horns of a dilemma:
not wanting to be accussed of insensitivity if it appeared they were
exploiting images, but still wanting to show the full story in pictures.
To their credit, they did publish some photos of "jumpers" that I'd never seen.
And did details on the topic of the "jumpers" as to the number and how
they'd saved lives, as in when people in the towers saw them and decided...
we're getting the h-ll out of here no matter what the intercom says.
My eldest son raised his right hand and took the oath as he entered the military this past week.
Which quadruples my determination that we get some leaders for this country with brains, courage and moral clarity. In other words, real conservatives.
May God bless and protect your son in his service to our country. Please thank him.
Thanks. I will. He's one among many great young people I know who give me hope that this country has a future.
Ya know, I feel like I need to provide a little different perspective on what the great Steyn is saying here.
Mark, what do you expect from the media anyhow? Or from Vermont, for that matter?
All across this country, even in solidly conservative fly-over country, most print outlets are run by a bunch of ricecake-munching feminized liberals.
But they don't represent the real America.
The real America was flag-draped on 9-12. It was represented by a young man climbing into the back of a pickup truck with Old Glory on a pole and driving through town, waving her proudly. I saw that myself in small town America.
It was represented by the young people who signed up for military service, some of whom have already paid the full price of liberty. I know one of them, a Marine who gave his life in Najaf.
There are still men in America, and when it is all said and done, they, and we, will do whatever it takes to win this war.
Freedom has always been bought by the few anyway.
Let the Left whimper in the corner. Nobody wants to be in a foxhole with them anyway.
If we do, there will be a cacophony of voices blaming it on "Bush's war" in Iraq.
There will be no leftwingers singing on the capitol steps, at least not America the Beautiful.
I deal with a fellow at work who promotes this drivel. "We should be looking for bin Laden!" is what I hear. Or "we should have 200,000 troops if Afghanistan!" is another. When reason fails you will hear "Did YOU serve in combat?", etc., etc.
Killing bin Laden, although a good thing, will not stop radical Islam. And you don't do that by putting 200,000 troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
Yeah, 911 just "happened" and Katrina was GWB's Fault. It is insanity
If the wimps among us get their way we will surely have another 9-11. But probably much worse.
In NYC for an entire week or more after 9/11, on the upper West Side there is a Blood Bank where people were lined up around the block to donate blood, hopefully to survivors, but there were none who needed it. There were also American flags all around for months, people bought those flags that fit on their car windows. I wish even a fraction of those flags would re-appear.
The recent "ultimate" has been the debate about what we should call the terrorists... "Don't call them Islamo-fascists! That is unfair to Muslims." Mort Kondracke: "We should call them what they call themselves: Islamo-jihadists." Yeah: let's call them whatever they want. Pretty sad state of affairs.
I have friends here, close to SF, who lose a close relative on Flight 93. They are dear, sweet people, but they are in the "peace at any price" camp who are always wondering "In what ways was this our fault?" They are very nice people (and not stupid in other ways) and I don't want to lose their friendship, but I cannot for the life of me comprehend how they could have a relative on Flt 93 and feel anything but towering rage and hatred for the b******ds who created that situation.
They are very thoughtful people, despite this huge blind spot. They know I am a supporter of President Bush and his war policies, and at this last memorial for 93, they went out of their way to get a Presidential seal lapel pin for me, from one of the President's aides.
I think some people are just really afraid to feel very powerful negative emotions. They find it easier not to "comprehend."
"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."
Tell me Chris Wallace didn't really refer to the plane steered into the Pentagon as an "accident"!
Is there some rare brain disease running in his family which causes madness? His father seems to have an advanced case of it, and some of the wacky things Chris has said lately makes me wonder if he is also suffering from the same
ailment.
Ever notice newspeople of whatever gender, on almost any story ask the person they're interviewing, "What did you feel?"?
Guys don't worry about what somebody feels. They want to know what the problem was, and how it was fixed. If it wasn't fixed, they want to know what is being planned to fix it, not how somebody "feels" about it.
So in that sense, the media is very "chickified".
Excellent Steyn piece.
Bin Laden et al are praying 24/7 to put us to sleep,
keep us numb, make us apathetic about voting,
shame us for cherishing freedom, liberty, abundance,
joy and beauty.
Steyn's fire in the belly warms me.
Thanks so much for the ping, Pokey! Brilliant article by Steyn (not that he ever writes a clinker, in my opinion).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.