I suppose I mean are we going to have a national day of morning and martyrdom for Trump’s victims? Not to take anything away from the 9/11 victims but, maybe it’s me but tens of thousands dead because of POTUS seems worse to me than ~4,000 dead by foreign terrorists. Maybe it’s me. I’m a highly defective human being and dotard so I may be missing something.
I think I get it. It's hard to explain. I remember a few weeks after 9/11, the father of an acquaintance of mine died in a car wreck. The other driver had some sort of seizure and came across the median at high speed. They were both killed. The oncoming driver lived long enough to beg someone to tell him if he'd hurt anyone else.
So there they are, dead, no bells, no drums. I know intellectually that the story here is of personal grief, and that the dead and still-suffering survivors of 9/11 form a collective experience, a significant and history-changing experience.
There is no balance to be achieved, in my mind. I just have to live with both events: the collective tragedy (which is thousands of personal ones) and the memory of people I don't know, dead before their time, in a car wreck or after weeks on a ventilator or on a patrol in Niger or while sleeping in her apartment when the police burst in. This is when "it is what it is" isn't enough, but it's all we get.
Also, I think we've found the exact number required for human death to abstract, statistical, and therefore invisible: 2,978.
Anything over that is just numbers.
Think of a parallel: there's a monument to lives lost due to "Communism" and there are some large numbers there, though their counting is super-problematic (of course).
But what about the memorial to lives lost due to Capitalism? How do you even count that? The system can't function at all unless we all agree to pretend these are mostly deaths due to "natural causes" or "co-morbidities" or "insurgency" or "law & order". Where do you STOP counting?
Deaths from capitalism are like the essentially unavoidable Covid deaths. Likely well over 100,000 of the Covid deaths aren't natural, so to speak, but due to Donnie being worried about how he'd look -- and him being so stupid and screwed up that apparently being seen as a savior of lives isn't a good look to him.
Since, as with everything else, 9/11 was all about him, he claimed the collapse of the Twin Towers meant he now had the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. Of course, this was also a fucking lie.
Not just obscene Trump BS but a classic lack of class from the piece of shit.
Of course, if he was a Democrat, he'd have been vilified by now for his remark (which I think may not even be correct. It seems 60 Wall may be taller.)
Thanks, Roy. I don't think there's another event in my lifetime that has inspired more unadulterated drivel than 9/11, especially from our right-wing brethren. I remember the Noonan column you eviscerated in your essay, Hugh Hewitt's front-line bravery, Josh Trevino's tragic "I was there!" experience in Cleveland, and so on. Your last paragraph will no doubt be one of the sanest, most insightful written today by anybody.
Here in Oregon "social media" (hah, I love that term because it is a lie wrapped in insanity itself, it' ain't fucking social!) is promoting lies about Antifa going around and starting the fires.
It's fucking insane... nothing goes in this direction without huge destruction following in its wake. Not just the fires, but the damage to the real social fabric that holds the people of a country together.
And I can't even get out of this shithole country...
Did you hear the chatter that this rumor is spreading because chuds with police scanners listening in on emergency traffic keep hearing "BLM" not realizing they mean "Bureau of Land Management"?
No, I hadn't heard that but I'm unsurprised. Out in the hinterlands there are some real dumbass hillbillies. I know because some of them are my neighbors.
Trump - and the Republicans generally - have perverted the real meaning of patriotism. It is "that last full measure of devotion" you cited, not the performative symbolism of which we see far too much: gigantic American flags at used car lots, military salutes at sportsball games, the bumper stickers and, especially, the excuse that terroristic acts provide to curtail civil and human rights of U.S. citizens.
Trump, as usual, always speaks the GOP's inside voice very loudly. After Jamal Khashoggi' s gruesome assassination at Mohamed bin Bonesaw's direction almost exactly two years ago, Trump, Pompeo and Boy Wonder frantically covered up the whole affair quite specifically to preserve those $110 billion of arm sales to KSA. Then just the other day, that same Trump denigrates his own officer corps as just being interested solely in those same kinds of arms sales.
Doing your job, honestly and competently, is actual patriotism not the garbage and grifts that Trump and his enablers promote.
Republicans' patriotism has always been either completely fake or tissue-thin. They LOVE to wave the flag. They LOVE America.
But they despise everything the flag actually stands for. They hate most of the people who live in America. They have fought for nearly a century against the government of the United States. And they think the Constitution (except for the 2nd and a few words of the 1st amendments) is some kind of communist manifesto that needs to be eradicated.
It's hard to express the rage that has long since calcified into a dull tragic frustration.
What kills me the most is that Boomers & Gen Xers have been so quick to dismiss & marginalize their children for refusing to seek their normalcy or trust their institutions. This generation started with 9/11 and has basically never seen "normalcy" or a functioning USA. So we spit on them for trying to change their world (Thanks, David!) instead.
Which means nobody learned a goddammed thing from the event. As Jean Baudrilliard might suggest: 9/11 never happened. It was always pure simulacrum, of the fourth order. Even as NYC choked on concrete dust.
I often think of a woman from my home town who died on Flight 93. She was coming home from her grandmother's funeral. She was three months pregnant with her first child, who'd be nearly 18 now and maybe an ally of David's. That's all I've got. That child never existed.
<<The Louisville Courier-Journal tells us, “Sen. Mitch McConnell’s reelection team continues to hammer challenger Amy McGrath ahead of the November election over her 2017 comments comparing President Donald Trump’s election win to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
” >>
Of course, the guy who spent 5 weeks in the Army Reserve at Fort Knox during the Vietnam War attacks the woman who saw combat action in both Afghanistan and Iraq. If Republicans were even 1% more full of shit, manure would be oozing out of their ears.
McGrath is spot on. The two worst days of my life were being in Manhattan on 9/11 and in America on Election Night 2016. Not just for the moments, which were nauseating enough, but for the dreaded certainty that everything would be worse from those moments on. 19 and 4 years later from these anniversaries all the possible worst case scenarios have come true.
I've been having an ongoing existential unraveling off and on over the past 6 months, as I suspect many of us are (which is layered on top of general onset Middle Age existentialism AND today's annual PTSD existentialism of watching the Towers fall from a rooftop on Irving Place on my first day of employment for six months), and it's getting a bit thick -- the air here in LA for starters, but the weight of [gestures at everything].
BUT -- I promise this isn't about my whining -- I've gotten to "know" many of you folks because of all of it and that's meant a lot. Virtually, of course, but between Roy's genius and yours, collectively, I feel pretty lucky to have been entertained and provoked by some of the smarter, better, post-Meaning, louche habitués of the demimonde out here in America's staggering decline. So thanks to our host and the rest of you.
Don't forget the attacks and some of the bafflegab surrounding them were the locus of the first unkillable Web Conspiracy Nuttery. How many in QAnon started with "Loose Change"?
"On Friday, September 11th, 2020, Release the Kraken Across America is asking every American to stand outside and release the Kraken at 8:46 am. Do your best reeling it in afterwards, Dolores, but should you manage it, please release again at 9:03 am. Continue and repeat."
9/11/2001: The day we became a nation of cowards incapable of acting like adults.
And here we are.
My bad. Should have been clear that my issue isn’t the awfulness of the attacks but our responses.
That said, though, on the 9/11 scale, where does a POTUS causing the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans fall now?
“We’re gonna need a much bigger memorial.”
(Periodic reminder that Trumpov's business model has always been to make *you* pay *him* to put his name on stuff.)
I’m still getting it wrong.
I suppose I mean are we going to have a national day of morning and martyrdom for Trump’s victims? Not to take anything away from the 9/11 victims but, maybe it’s me but tens of thousands dead because of POTUS seems worse to me than ~4,000 dead by foreign terrorists. Maybe it’s me. I’m a highly defective human being and dotard so I may be missing something.
I think I get it. It's hard to explain. I remember a few weeks after 9/11, the father of an acquaintance of mine died in a car wreck. The other driver had some sort of seizure and came across the median at high speed. They were both killed. The oncoming driver lived long enough to beg someone to tell him if he'd hurt anyone else.
So there they are, dead, no bells, no drums. I know intellectually that the story here is of personal grief, and that the dead and still-suffering survivors of 9/11 form a collective experience, a significant and history-changing experience.
There is no balance to be achieved, in my mind. I just have to live with both events: the collective tragedy (which is thousands of personal ones) and the memory of people I don't know, dead before their time, in a car wreck or after weeks on a ventilator or on a patrol in Niger or while sleeping in her apartment when the police burst in. This is when "it is what it is" isn't enough, but it's all we get.
That has been what I’ve been turning over in my mind recently: we’ve been doing a 9/11 every 3-5 days this year.
Part of the reason covid doesn’t register with the public in that way is that there’s no spectacle.
Also, I think we've found the exact number required for human death to abstract, statistical, and therefore invisible: 2,978.
Anything over that is just numbers.
Think of a parallel: there's a monument to lives lost due to "Communism" and there are some large numbers there, though their counting is super-problematic (of course).
But what about the memorial to lives lost due to Capitalism? How do you even count that? The system can't function at all unless we all agree to pretend these are mostly deaths due to "natural causes" or "co-morbidities" or "insurgency" or "law & order". Where do you STOP counting?
Deaths from capitalism are like the essentially unavoidable Covid deaths. Likely well over 100,000 of the Covid deaths aren't natural, so to speak, but due to Donnie being worried about how he'd look -- and him being so stupid and screwed up that apparently being seen as a savior of lives isn't a good look to him.
Our leaders were fast to blame 9/11 on Al'Qaida.
This time, both the media and the opposition party have some serious problem with calling Trump exactly what he is:A killer.
Recall Donald Trump's contemporaneous reaction to 9/11: He boasted that the fall of the Towers made his property more valuable.
Recall, also, the lie he later appended to the event: That he personally saw Muslims celebrating in New Jersey as the Towers fell.
No event so infamous that Trump can’t make it worse by lying.
Close:
"No event so infamous that Trump can’t make it worse by" saying or doing anything.
Since, as with everything else, 9/11 was all about him, he claimed the collapse of the Twin Towers meant he now had the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. Of course, this was also a fucking lie.
"Of course, this was also a fucking lie." You're being repetitive.
Not just obscene Trump BS but a classic lack of class from the piece of shit.
Of course, if he was a Democrat, he'd have been vilified by now for his remark (which I think may not even be correct. It seems 60 Wall may be taller.)
Thanks, Roy. I don't think there's another event in my lifetime that has inspired more unadulterated drivel than 9/11, especially from our right-wing brethren. I remember the Noonan column you eviscerated in your essay, Hugh Hewitt's front-line bravery, Josh Trevino's tragic "I was there!" experience in Cleveland, and so on. Your last paragraph will no doubt be one of the sanest, most insightful written today by anybody.
I appreciate that, thanks.
This is yet another column that needs to be made public.
White House announces commemorative reading of “My Pet Goat” by Mike Pence.
I would definitely read a "Where Are They Now?" article about the kids who attended the original My Pet Goat recitation.
Lovely, Roy.
19 years on the country has gone insane.
Here in Oregon "social media" (hah, I love that term because it is a lie wrapped in insanity itself, it' ain't fucking social!) is promoting lies about Antifa going around and starting the fires.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/10/oregon-police-beg-public-stop-calling-false-reports-blaming-antifa-wildfires/
It's fucking insane... nothing goes in this direction without huge destruction following in its wake. Not just the fires, but the damage to the real social fabric that holds the people of a country together.
And I can't even get out of this shithole country...
Did you hear the chatter that this rumor is spreading because chuds with police scanners listening in on emergency traffic keep hearing "BLM" not realizing they mean "Bureau of Land Management"?
Fucking acronyms, how do they work?
No, I hadn't heard that but I'm unsurprised. Out in the hinterlands there are some real dumbass hillbillies. I know because some of them are my neighbors.
I actually got out of the boat and checked that the Chris Miller WAPO op-ed
really was from today.
Nuts, no?
Sí
Trump - and the Republicans generally - have perverted the real meaning of patriotism. It is "that last full measure of devotion" you cited, not the performative symbolism of which we see far too much: gigantic American flags at used car lots, military salutes at sportsball games, the bumper stickers and, especially, the excuse that terroristic acts provide to curtail civil and human rights of U.S. citizens.
Trump, as usual, always speaks the GOP's inside voice very loudly. After Jamal Khashoggi' s gruesome assassination at Mohamed bin Bonesaw's direction almost exactly two years ago, Trump, Pompeo and Boy Wonder frantically covered up the whole affair quite specifically to preserve those $110 billion of arm sales to KSA. Then just the other day, that same Trump denigrates his own officer corps as just being interested solely in those same kinds of arms sales.
Doing your job, honestly and competently, is actual patriotism not the garbage and grifts that Trump and his enablers promote.
Republicans' patriotism has always been either completely fake or tissue-thin. They LOVE to wave the flag. They LOVE America.
But they despise everything the flag actually stands for. They hate most of the people who live in America. They have fought for nearly a century against the government of the United States. And they think the Constitution (except for the 2nd and a few words of the 1st amendments) is some kind of communist manifesto that needs to be eradicated.
The GOP loves America so, they want it to be an oppressive, repressive, exploitative failed state.
Every time a Republican uses a term, they're perverting it. Like pro-life. Other than being pro-birth, they're completely anti-life.
It's hard to express the rage that has long since calcified into a dull tragic frustration.
What kills me the most is that Boomers & Gen Xers have been so quick to dismiss & marginalize their children for refusing to seek their normalcy or trust their institutions. This generation started with 9/11 and has basically never seen "normalcy" or a functioning USA. So we spit on them for trying to change their world (Thanks, David!) instead.
Which means nobody learned a goddammed thing from the event. As Jean Baudrilliard might suggest: 9/11 never happened. It was always pure simulacrum, of the fourth order. Even as NYC choked on concrete dust.
I often think of a woman from my home town who died on Flight 93. She was coming home from her grandmother's funeral. She was three months pregnant with her first child, who'd be nearly 18 now and maybe an ally of David's. That's all I've got. That child never existed.
<<The Louisville Courier-Journal tells us, “Sen. Mitch McConnell’s reelection team continues to hammer challenger Amy McGrath ahead of the November election over her 2017 comments comparing President Donald Trump’s election win to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
” >>
Of course, the guy who spent 5 weeks in the Army Reserve at Fort Knox during the Vietnam War attacks the woman who saw combat action in both Afghanistan and Iraq. If Republicans were even 1% more full of shit, manure would be oozing out of their ears.
McGrath is spot on. The two worst days of my life were being in Manhattan on 9/11 and in America on Election Night 2016. Not just for the moments, which were nauseating enough, but for the dreaded certainty that everything would be worse from those moments on. 19 and 4 years later from these anniversaries all the possible worst case scenarios have come true.
Trump's presidency is far, FAR beyond any scenario I could imagine back then.
I've been having an ongoing existential unraveling off and on over the past 6 months, as I suspect many of us are (which is layered on top of general onset Middle Age existentialism AND today's annual PTSD existentialism of watching the Towers fall from a rooftop on Irving Place on my first day of employment for six months), and it's getting a bit thick -- the air here in LA for starters, but the weight of [gestures at everything].
BUT -- I promise this isn't about my whining -- I've gotten to "know" many of you folks because of all of it and that's meant a lot. Virtually, of course, but between Roy's genius and yours, collectively, I feel pretty lucky to have been entertained and provoked by some of the smarter, better, post-Meaning, louche habitués of the demimonde out here in America's staggering decline. So thanks to our host and the rest of you.
The feeling is mutual, comrade.
Don't forget the attacks and some of the bafflegab surrounding them were the locus of the first unkillable Web Conspiracy Nuttery. How many in QAnon started with "Loose Change"?
Lemme see if I can improve that copy:
"On Friday, September 11th, 2020, Release the Kraken Across America is asking every American to stand outside and release the Kraken at 8:46 am. Do your best reeling it in afterwards, Dolores, but should you manage it, please release again at 9:03 am. Continue and repeat."
Beautifully written Roy.