I also find it too over the top. It’s everywhere.
The problem isn’t the two sides feel differently here, or react differently, it’s that they are both looking down on each other for that difference.
It is manufactured and contrived manipulation, some people are sensitive to that.
When blacks stop wallowing in slavery, and Jews stop wallowing in the Holocaust.
Bush could not have sold the Iraq war w/o the events of 9/11/01.
I don’t know what you mean by “it wasn’t (isn’t) even a war in Afghanistan”. If you’re saying that doesn’t qualify as a war, I disagree. No officially declared war, but we don’t do it that way anymore. We have 100k or more troops over there shooting and killing people. If that isn’t a war, I don’t know what is.
Right on schedule.
People love their tragedy-porn. Any local news station at 11 p.m. proves that. Are car accidents newsworthy? No. Random shootings? Not really. The most sensationalized of child abuse cases? Fuck no.
But 9/11? Absolutely, up to a point. And beyond that it’s just gross and indulgent and meant to manipulate our emotions. That’s why I read my news instead of watch it, and pick and choose carefully even then. I’m very well-informed, but there are certain things that are just not important enough to report on constantly.
But there comes a time to let it go, and for me that happened around a year or two after the fact. It’s possible to be reverent without turning it into a contest about who is the most “patriotic” or who is sadder about events from 10 years ago.
Actually, everything you mentioned is newsworthy, so I strongly disagree with you there.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
One of the reasons we don’t forget 911 is because it has political coinage by some conservatives.
Bush, Cheney and Guilliani could not say a paragraph without mentioning it. It justified enormous programs that have been very lucrative.
[/QUOTE]
So, what you are saying is that no Democrats or liberals are participating in any way with the 9/11 memorials, aren’t making any speeches concerning 9/11 or anything at all to do with 9/11…and that the sole reason we haven’t just put the whole affair from our collective minds is because of conservatives attempting to make political coinage out of it all? Or if Democrats/liberals are mentioning it, it’s only to elicit conservative votes (since everyone knows that Democrats and liberals both pine after the conservative vote!), since only conservatives care about it (or are manipulated into caring about it)?
That’s a fascinating observation gonzo. And here I thought that people other than conservatives remembered 9/11…
-XT
You know what else is sad and pathetic? Recreational grieving.
Sean Taylor played safety for the Washington Redskins for a few years before he was shot by someone who had broken into his home. It was a terrible tragedy, in that Taylor had had some problems and was getting past them and was becoming a truly remarkable football player. It was sad, and I was sad for him and his family.
Then things started to get weird. People who had no connection to Taylor whatsoever, outside of him having played football for their chosen team, were seen at Redskins Park and FedEx Field creating memorials and murals. Some were openly weeping and wailing, like they were at their kid’s funeral. Sackcloth and ashes would not have seemed out of place.
I believe a lot of those people were just grieving recreationally. It gave them a sense of community to all be there together, saddened over the same thing. Bonds, however temporary, were forged.
On a much larger scale, the annual 9/11 Grief-fest is pretty much the same thing. But don’t worry, in a generation or two it’ll be renamed to Freedom Day and will be an excellent time to find a good deal on a mattress.
Yes. All of this.
I think most people feel at least a tinge of something when they think about 9/11. The idea that people who are tired of hearing about it are lacking empathy or are just trying to be cool is just hogwash.
But the segment of the population that just wants to participate in the spectacle of it all and give the day a certain sacredness that they don’t even give to their own religious holidays…they simply turn people off. Their emotionality just seems a little too much for it not to be ginned up.
The OK bombing has been brought up. Now, for some reason that hit me harder than 9/11 did. Perhaps it was because I was a teen when that happened and the idea that you could go work and end up dead was a new concept for me.
When all the fund-raising was going on for the 9/11 families–families of stock-brokers as well as janitors–I did a Scooby Doo. Ruh? What made the 9/11 families different than the OK families? Nothing. There was nothing different about them. While all that ugly fighting for money was happening, I kept thinking about the OK bombing. And how you never heard those families making a peep about anything.
There was nothing different about either of those families and any family that loses someone to tragedy. Every day, families of first responders grieve over someone they’ve lost. Every day, some random family lights a candle for someone they’ve lost. The only difference between these people and the ones directly affected by 9/11 was that the world was witness to the horror that took their loved ones away. But the lost is just the same and just as senseless all around.
Seriously, if I had a family member who was a first responder and they had died on the job on 9/10, I’d feel a bit peeved about all their coworkers being constantly memoralized for 9/11. Those first responders were certainly brave human beings for running into the burning towers, but they were no more braver than any other person serving in the same capacity who happened to die in the line of fire another time, at another place. They are beatified why? Because they happened to die in a spectacle. The others didn’t. Too bad, so sad. No scholarships for their kids.
That’s what turns me off.
“Never forgive” whom?
Because I think most of the guys we are supposed to “never forgive” are dead already.
Get over it/yourself.
Haw, come on, you may have your flaws, but you’re not up to your knees in a medieval mental mudpit like the Balkans.
Ok, never mind.
Actually, on the contrary, compared to most of the 9/11 patriot contingent I feel I am the much more empathic and compassionate. I felt the same horror they felt that day, but I had the sense, knowledge, and compassion not to wish to expand it into a vendetta and a war of nations… a nationalist movement that embodied political, religous, racial, and institutionalized hate and hegemonic profit. The sadness and self-righteousness they feel for 9/11 as an event is much more limited and tribal or, shall we say “selective”, than what I feel… they are simply into patriotic masturbation and addicted to having their emotions manipulated. At this point, as a human, I feel much more ashamed, awed, horrified and saddened to the core of my soul that so many more hundreds of thousands of innocents in other places, besides America, have died in this conflagaration, at the hand of my countrymen, as to make 9/11 seem a minor drop in the bucket sapped from an entire tree of hate and fear. It is a senseless war and people profit from it everyday by the base and senseless invocations of 9/11, simply, It’s a distraction, justification, and fig leaf for an unjust, or minimally, unnecessary war. Frankly, I think 9/11 patriots are self centered and have a very limited view of compassion, but a hugely overdeveloped sense of vengeance and victimhood.
Potentially unpopular rant:
We’ve just been through our own nightmare. We do not need documentaries and retrospectives and other tragedy porn on a dozen different channels, encouraging us to relive someone else’s ten-year-old nightmare.
Exactly. The first I heard of 9/11 was this week. Before that, it was Jon Stewart’s campaign to get aid to the first responders who are still fucking dying because our government doesn’t give a shit about them. And before that, it was the elections.
And, yes, that middle thing still gets my goat. In no way should this stuff go away until people are not still dying from it.
Oh, and Argent Towers, either you don’t know what the word forget means, or you want us to not teach history.
I don’t want everyone to literally forget about the Holocaust. But I think that too much of an issue is made that everyone should supposedly “never forget” it. The truth is, people knowing about the Holocaust didn’t stop other genocides from happening after it. It’s an empty sentiment. People should learn about the Holocaust, as they should learn about everything that happened during World War II, and then move on to learning about and focusing on other issues.
The same is true of 9/11. It happened It was a national tragedy and it disrupted the country very severely. Let’s move on to other, more currently relevant issues. (Just where did the people who did 9/11 get their money?)
That’s kind of the same way I feel about televangelists, like one from Asheville, NC named Ralph Sexton. I’m good with him believing in God, as I believe we should be (you’re correct about that). What I do not like about him is that he believes, for example, that we should be all about reliving the Jubilees of the Old Testament and visiting the Holy Land of Israel. The way I read what you’re saying, it would be good for him to believe that such has a connection to his life and act accordingly, but if he questions our faith because we don’t believe in such things, that’s something else entirely. Is that what you mean? I hope it is.
Heck, Y2K came and went-and the computers still worked! The 2nd millenium of Jesus came and went-and no rapture!
I think we need to take a hard look at our response to 9/11-trillions $ spent, thousands of lives lost-and for what?
I have been doing my best to ignore all the glurgy music and video montages on TV, but this morning, I was this >< close to flinging the TV out the window. There was a promotion for a program about the dogs of 9/11. Yes, they plan to follow up on some of the rescue dogs.
I think I’ll crawl into a cave till Monday…
How much 9/11 programming are you seeing in Norway?
