Posted on 09/09/2002 8:39:47 AM PDT by SBeck
Mourning As A Performing Art
Migraine Television Home Columns
September 9--We’re going to do it, I know we are. We’re about to celebrate Bin Laden’s Victory Day. By all indications, it will be a media circus, like when Princess Di did—a grand battle in the ratings wars. We’ll wallow in mawkishness, and whimper, and humiliate ourselves. Watch. There will be manufactured solemnity, factitious reverence, sorrow by Disney, and an unremitting ooze of therapy. Heaven help us, we’ll probably get in touch with our feelings, and Heal. Maybe booths will sell cotton candy.
It’s embarrassing.
I suppose I have a bad attitude about the upcoming festivities. On my office wall is a row of magazine covers I shot for Soldier of Fortune in a previous life as a freelance photojournalist. One of them (November, 1983, written as Rick Venable) shows Marines coming ashore in Beirut, the lead guy carrying an M-203. I spent a week or two with those guys, patrolling downtown and suchlike. Shortly afterward, the truck bomb arrived. Moslem terrorists. Two hundred forty-one dead.
America didn’t do anything about those killings, then or later. There was no carnival of mourning on the anniversary. I guess the networks forgot. What do you suppose? As for dead Marines, who cared? After all, they didn’t go to Princeton, and you never saw them in pricey booze chutes in Manhattan.
Judging by appearances, the forthcoming coverage will be appalling both in quantity and moral fraudulence. The ad agencies, I have read, are pondering what tone to use on September 11. It is a delicate question. The trick is to gull the rubes without disturbing their sensibilities. (Singing toilet paper may not be just the thing. Unless it sang a dignified dirge maybe. Mining the dead for ad revenue is harder that it might seem.)
The Moslem world is going to love every minute of it. In fact, I see in the Washington Times that they are going to have anti-American rallies in London to celebrate the great day. How convenient, they must think: The Americans are going to crawl for us. I’ll give you odds bin Laden is comfortable somewhere, probably in Saudi Arabia, laughing and laughing and laughing. I would be.
Maybe he’s not really in Saudi. Maybe he’s in Vail, waiting for good powder. But he ain’t been caught. I tell you, he’s one slick A-rab. I don’t like the guy. I’d shoot him if I could, and poke holes in his towel. I have to respect the sucker, though. He changed the United States forever. We’re going to be a scared security state for all time, with the cops reading our email. The home of the free, land of the brave.
I assume, subject to correction by events, that we’ll have every television truck on earth at Ground Zero, and the rest at the Pentagon. There will be endless tributes to the Hallowed Dead, who will be treated as saints crossed with Joan of Arc. Actually of course they were just people who happened to be at work on the wrong day. Being hit by an airliner is no more heroic or tragic than being run over by a dump truck. This is the age of Oprah Consciousness, though. We’ll have contrived tears from televised airheads who didn’t know the dead and don’t care about them.
People get mad if you say it, but, fact is, we got stomped. One raghead with a few subordinate loons took down the Trade Center, turned us into a docile police state, made us spend billions bombing peasants in Afghanistan without issue, frightened us into letting our airlines go into bankruptcy, and now we have Homeland Security, which makes flying so unpleasant that most of us will take trains. The best we could do now is just to shut up. Naw. We’re gonna wave it around on prime time. We’ll let everybody watch it again.
Time was, this wouldn’t have happened. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we squashed them. When the Nazis attacked us, we invaded. But that was before Oprah Consciousness. Now the Moslems kill a few thousand people in New York, and the President immediately goes to a mosque. Don’t you love it?
After Pearl Harbor, did Roosevelt go to a Shinto temple?
The whole thing is surreal. We can’t even admit who did it.
Quiz: What people have been consistently kicking our teeth in for decades? Chippewas? Latvians? Tibetan monks? Or Moslems?
It was the Iroquois who took over our embassy in Tehran and make fools of us for months, until Jimmy Carter sent in that comic-opera rescue team and independently made fools of us. Isn’t that what you remember? Iroquois?
The Norwegians blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, right? Damn those Norwegians. The Cole? The Starke? Presbyterians did it. I’m sure of it.
Is there no limit to our absurdity? (No. The question was rhetorical.) We all know who the terrorists are, but we won’t even search Moslems because that would be discrimination. We won’t arm pilots because guns are, Squeeeeak! so fwightening. We take away fingernail clippers as deadly weapons. This is the country that stormed Iwo?
It gets sillier. We’re going to wage an international crusade against terrorism, yet we throw little boys out of school for drawing pictures of soldiers, and we don’t let them play dodgeball because it’s so violent. The earth must be laughing.
A pretty good rule of diplomacy might be that you shouldn’t huff and puff if you aren’t going to back it up. It’s undignified. It invites more trouble. The Towers went down, and we huffed. Grrr, woof. Bush said fiercely that we were going to make terrorists everywhere wish they had never been born. For at least two weeks everybody was solidarified and America was on the march and companies sold Instant Patriotism kits, with a little flag for the aerial and a bumper sticker. Bow-wow-wow. Wurf.
And then we fizzled. We bombed Afghanistan some, but I can’t see that it did much. We sound as though we may do something unpleasant to Iraq. I guess that’ll get rid of terrorism. We’ll see. It’s hard to know what we’re going to do. These days wars are declared by the president, not congress.
I’ll root for us, but bet on them. The Moslems have got our number. They have the momentum. They appear to rely on what is becoming an international formula for defeating the United States: Don’t give the Yanks a point target, and draw the war out until they get bored. Do you reckon it’s working?
The dead at Ground Zero were not saints? Hundreds of firemen rushed headlong up the stairs of a burning tower, even though they knew another tower had just collapsed. Why? Because they were prepared to sacrifice their lives to save others. That's pretty saintly.
Fred is a "conservative"? No, he's a cowardly defeatist.
If you're not part of the solution - that is, keeping the memory of our dead alive and our resolve to fight strong - then you're part of the problem.
Reed is practically a collaborator. He's certainly not a patriot.
I don't always agree with him, but most of the time, he hits the nail right on the head. Sometimes, the wood he drives it into ( and that includes us ) gets split, but-more often than not-it's been truly driven !
This is the one point where I disagree. I think it's a bad idea to bet on them, because their tactics don't lead to a plausible end game scenario. The fact is that the American public will build up a reserve of hostility towards Islam that will eventually boil over because of some specific event, most likely a WMD deployed on a major American city.
That will not be a good day to be a Muslim in America. Mecca will most likely become a large radioactive crater soon afterwards, and then WWIII begins in earnest.
We've had our Reichstag fire, and soon we will have our Krystallnacht. Mark my words on this one.
For some Freepers, perhaps it's all just an affront to America's national dignity and a jumping-off point for a lecture in geopolitics. I lost friends and very nearly lost family. It's more personal for me.
So when Reed flippantly refers to the victims of the atrocity, I have to call attention to the fact that he's a gutless a__hole.
Here are the three facts that Reed has gotten horribly wrong:
(1) The victims of September 11 were not all slobs who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hundreds of the dead DELIBERATELY placed themselves in harm's way to rescue others - they were some of the bravest and most honorable Americans who have ever lived. Reed can't comprehend this, because he's the kind of guy who'd put on a dress to be in the first lifeboat.
(2) Our assault on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan was not fruitless - I'd like to see a pansy like Reed explain his warped read to the family of Mike Spann. Naysayers like Reed were the first to claim that we'd be fighting the Taliban government for years before giving up - we defeated them in a matter of months from half a world away.
(3) Expressing our sorrow for our dead and mourning their loss is thoroughly human and thoroughly civilized. It's what separates us from the Muslim animals we're fighting. If Muslims want to interpret that as a sign of weakness, I don't much care - I'll let Reed try to impress his hero Bin Laden with his boorish callousness.
Yes, our borders are still Swiss cheese, our new regulations are stupid and fail to address the real problem, our educational infrastructure is still in the hands of psychobabbling Communists and we should be prosecuting the war more ruthlessly. Many commentators have expatiated on these glaring problems far more eloquently than Reed has. And they didn't need to insult the memory of the dead or the prowess of our fighting men to do it.
After Pearl Harbor, did Roosevelt go to a Shinto temple?
The whole thing is surreal. We can’t even admit who did it.
Ahhhhh how refreshing to hear the TRUTH...but can America handle it???
I will pray for the families that day...I will sit and remember how it felt...But lets face it we have done NOTHING to stop further attacks . We are afraid of hurting someones feelings...and then we want out southern borders open for political reasons...we have turned into a paper tiger
The family of a GI KIA gets around 6 grand! I lament the dead from 9-11 as much as anyone, but there is something SERIOUSLY wrong with THAT picture.
And Fred has the whimpering police state thing spot on.
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