Ten Years After.....

No, Not Alvin Lee's band....

I wonder how many more years these "commemoration celebrations" will endure, where we mourn our supposed "loss of innocence" (quoi?)as though we'd all suffered like the emergency teams' and the 9/11 fatalities' families and friends have. A nation of sad-faced, newly minted and regretful teenage ex-virgins. Yes, there's genuine empathy out there, but also, there's something else that's quite over the top. Disproportionate, as Bartlet would say.

Americans never seem to know whether to cry or party hearty over national traumas. Fireworks at a memorial service? Isn't All this hoopla just bad taste? We've done our share of nasty things to the planet. But here comes Leslie Gore Syndrome again, so illogical: it's my party and I'll cry if I want to...

huh?

September 11, 2001, was a tragedy. Impossible to watch, impossible to stop watching. Tarrantinoesque. But why the disconnect from history? Those helpless folks in Manhattan were not the first to jump to their deaths out of burning buildings because The Man didn't give a damn. The emergency responders were not the first heroic people to risk or lose their lives to save complete strangers. Is it, like Eddie Izzard sez, a matter of numbers? Then why isn't the imminent death of three quarters of a million Somalis on our radar? Why isn't every American infuriated by this? I mean really... why?

The despicable folks who allowed the tragedy of 9/11/01 to unfold because Bush's numbers were in the toilet and then made political hay out of it were not the first greedy humans to cause the deaths of thousands.

...and get away with it.

And those who participate in perpetuating the myth of unjustified wars are hardly innocent victims of the results.

Which is why the following is good advice if you want to stay sane in this Wag The Dog world.

(Now where did I put that flag pin... Can't leave home without it, as I recall.)