I too worked in the Pentagon a while back and I tried calling my friend whose retired AF. Her husband is also retired AF but works with the Coast Guard and makes morning errand runs to the Pentagon every day. I finally got in touch with her that night and she still hadn't heard from her husband. She called me the next day to let me know that both her husband and a friend of ours that still works in the Pentagon were OK. I was working in the school and had to go out to my car after both towers and the Pentagon were hit because I couldn't stop crying. My students were so scared and supportive.Originally Posted by JAD_333
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ~ Jimi Hendrix
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
No worry's, I don't feel shame, 9/11 was an unspeakable crime against humanity and you'd have to be inhuman to not feel any remorse. Its just a shame that since then we have seen equally shamefull attacks in Madrid, London, and Beslan.
Facts to a liberal is like Kryptonite to Superman.
-- Larry Elder
This is an excellent column from Malkin. I've bolded the parts that were seen as slap-forehead-DUH! obvious measures to take after the 9/11 plot's details unfolded...and each of them has been opposed by...you know what's coming...Democrats.
John Doe in Post-9/11 America
By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
"If only." Those are the verbal crutches America must discard in a post-9/11 world.
If only the State Department hadn't been so sloppy in issuing visas to the 9/11 hijackers. If only police and state troopers had been able to check the immigration status of the hijackers who were pulled over for speeding before the attacks. If only universities had been more diligent in monitoring the hijackers' whereabouts. If only the feds had listened to alert agents' recommendations to profile young Arab students in our flight schools. If only someone, anyone, had said something when they saw the suspicious behavior of the jihadists on dry runs.
We have borne the bloody costs of coulda-woulda-shoulda. Nearly 3,000 dead. The World Trade Center in ruins. The Pentagon on fire. The fields at Shanksville, Pa., scarred. Six years later, we can no longer afford hindsight heavy breathing. Memory must guide action. And action must be taken without apology.
Zogby released a poll for the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks showing that "77 percent of those living in the East and 46 percent of those living in the West -- 61 percent overall -- said they think about the attacks at least weekly. Eighty-one percent -- 90 percent in the East and 75 percent in the West -- said the attacks were the most significant historical events of their lives."
That's good news. But remembrance without resistance to jihad and its enablers is a recipe for another 9/11. Not every American wears a military uniform. Every American, however, has a role to play in protecting our homeland -- not just from Muslim terrorists, but from their financiers, their public relations machine, their sharia-pimping activists, the anti-war goons, the civil liberties absolutists, and the academic apologists for our enemies.
Earlier this year, jihadist enablers attempted to intimidate citizen whistleblowers who said something about the suspicious behavior of six imams on a US Airways flight in Minneapolis/St. Paul. The legal battle to protect ordinary Americans from such lawsuits gave rise to the John Doe movement. Pro bono lawyers and GOP members of Congress stepped up to provide protection. And Americans across the country expressed solidarity with the airline passengers targeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations and its ilk.
The Left greeted the John Doe movement with mockery and derision, preferring instead to suck its collective thumb, wield the grievance card and play the blame game. But it's the John Does of the country, not the race-hustling litigators and speech-stiflers, who will help prevent the next terrorist attack. They are John Does like Brian Morgenstern, the young Circuit City employee who contacted authorities after viewing a jihadist training video by the Fort Dix Six Plotters.
"It was a difficult decision at first," Morgenstern told Fox News. "I went home, and I talked with my family about it. And we all came to the general conclusion that it was the right thing to do." No regrets. No apologies. And no "if onlys."
Not everyone is willing to do the right thing. When the FBI recently asked for the public's help in identifying two men acting suspiciously on Pacific Northwest ferries, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper refused to run the photos -- and instead held a reader haiku contest mocking the terrorism concerns. When two young Muslim men were arrested and indicted on weapons and terrorism charges after being stopped near a naval base in Goose Creek, S.C., Muslim civil rights groups immediately cried racism and suggested that law enforcement officials were bigoted and paranoid.
There are 9/10 people and there are 9/12 people. 9/10 people live in a world of make-believe, where sensitivity trumps security and second-guessing is their only acceptable homeland security policy. 9/12 people are the John Does in your neighborhood, on your plane, train or bus, moving ahead with their lives but always on alert.
We live in post-9/11 reality where "Never forget" is not just a once-a-year slogan. It's a 24/7 frame of mind.
Michelle Malkin makes news and waves with a unique combination of investigative journalism and incisive commentary. She is the author of Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild .
©Creators Syndicate
Copyright © 2006 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
An even BETTER column:
I bolded some things I really want you to note, and turned red the parts you simply must understand.September 12, 2007, 6:30 a.m.
After the Hill Surge
The Iraq debate now.
By Peter Wehner
General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, testifying before the House and the Senate during the last two days, did what many people thought was impossible: They reset the Washington clock. These good men, by what they have achieved in Iraq and by the force and power of their testimonies, have recast the terms of the debate. They will now have until next summer to build on their successes, which in turn could eventually lead to a decent outcome in Iraq. To appreciate how extraordinary this is, it’s worth recalling how far we have come.
* * * *
2006 was an awful year in Iraq. A very difficult situation turned grave in the aftermath of the February bombing of the Samarra mosque. Iraq began to break apart, with ethnic and religious violence increasing across the land. The American strategy, flawed from the outset, was not able to contain the spreading chaos and the approaching civil war. The American public, already weary, began to turn in large numbers against the war. And Republicans lost control of the House and Senate in the November midterm elections.
By the end of 2006 the original “light footprint” strategy was jettisoned — but a new strategy was not yet in place. Confronting gale force political winds and calls from almost every side to wind down the Iraq war, the president — to his everlasting credit — did the opposite: He called for a surge in forces. It was the last chance we had to keep Iraq from a descent into hell. And to oversee that new strategy, the president turned to a general named Petraeus.
By now most people know what unfolded in the aftermath of that decision. General Petraeus, in combination with his exceptional team, put in place the elements of a successful strategy, which included a significant increase in American troops who were armed with a new mission. And now, eight months after it was announced — and only three months after the full compliment of troops arrived — we have seen signs of real progress.
Civilian deaths of all categories have declined by more than 45 percent in Iraq since the height of sectarian violence in December. During the same period the number of overall ethno-sectarian deaths has decreased by more than half and by about 80 percent in Baghdad. We’ve seen a dramatic decrease in monthly attack levels in Anbar Province, due in large measure to the rejection of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) by local Anbaris. The number of car bombings and suicide attacks has declined in each of the past five months. And the number of areas in which AQI have enjoyed sanctuary has been considerably reduced.
In the words of Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and senior author of the Iraq Index, “All major categories of violence have been trending downward over the course of the year, according to most primary data sources, be they American, Iraqi or non-governmental.”
The central government remains frustratingly inefficient — yet we are also seeing a hugely important, if largely unanticipated, phenomenon: political reconciliation from the ground up. We are seeing revenue sharing without revenue sharing laws, conditional immunity without conditional immunity laws, and de-Baathification reform without de-Baathification laws.
What does all this mean? General Petraeus will now be given the time he needs to continue his extraordinary work. We don’t yet know if he’ll succeed; Iraq remains a fragile and fractured nation, violence is still high, AQI remains lethal (if on the run), and Syria and — especially Iran remain deeply problematic. With all that said, we’re now on a path to progress. In the words of Ambassador Crocker, “A secure, stable, democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors is attainable.”
* * * *
If the situation in Iraq is fundamentally different today than it was eight months ago, the same thing is also true of the politics of the war. Today Democrats more than Republicans are confused and divided about their approach to the war. And during the last week, something important changed. Leading Democrats organized an effort to smear the commanding general in Iraq.
Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts said the general’s testimony was a “Petraeus village” that was “just a façade to hide from view the continuing failure of the Bush administration’s strategy.” Representative Rahm Emanuel, in discussing the Petraeus report, said, “We don’t need a report that wins the Nobel Prize for creative statistics or the Pulitzer for fiction.”
Senator Dick Durbin said, “By carefully manipulating the statistics, the Bush-Petraeus report will try to persuade us that violence in Iraq is decreasing.” Last week one unnamed Democratic Senator told The Politico, “No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV… the expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us.” And just like that MoveOn.org published a full page ad in the New York Times stating, “General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us.”
What exactly is causing the American Left and its Democratic supporters to slander General Petraeus? What is his Great Sin? It is simply this: General Petraeus is helping America succeed in this war, and he is honestly reporting on his success. Apparently this is grounds for vilification among some on the Left and within the modern Democratic party.
The effort to besmirch the good name of David Petraeus is politically insane. The claim by anti-war critics that they oppose the war but support the troops is a lot harder to make when those in their ranks maliciously attack the commander of the troops, who happens to be succeeding.
And for those of us who have watched much of the hearings on television, one could not help but be struck by this contrast: Petraeus and Crocker in command, unflappable, professional, radiating competence and confidence, respectful but never allowing themselves to be intimidated. Many Democrats, on the other hand, appeared angry, agitated, long-winded, and out of their depth. General David Petraeus is the military analogue of Justice John Roberts, and their critics looked equally foolish going after both men.
* * * *
“If ever (Herbert) Spencer wrote a tragedy, its plot would be the slaying of a beautiful deduction by an ugly fact,” Thomas Huxley wrote. It is an odd situation indeed to find members of America’s political class greeting demonstrable evidence of progress in Iraq as ugly and inconvenient facts. But fortunately we seem to be past the danger point, when Members of Congress can recklessly undo what General Petraeus, Ambassador Crocker, and the remarkable men and women of our armed forces have achieved. Now Members of the House and Senate are simply left to posture, rage against the wind, and passionately insist, against a growing body of evidence, that a war that might be won is hopelessly lost.
— Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
Me too.
I'm sure that Allah smiled upon their brave and manly act of slitting the infidel throats of helpless women.
****king subhuman pieces of shyt.
My absolutely indelible mental picture was the CELBRATION of masses of Muslims to the news. I was SO disturbed that I ended up going to the chaplain for counseling about some really horrible images I was getting my head about what I would do if I was ever within arms' reach of those animals. I scared myself.
Last edited by Bluesman; 13 Sep 07, at 01:45.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
A dad came in today to withdraw his son from school. He and I got to talking while his son was taking his withdrawal form around to his teachers. Found out that his nephew (19 yrs old) had just deployed to Iraq and was killed a couple days ago. His son was very close to him as they were only a couple years apart in age. It hit him extremely hard. Sometimes I get too sensitive when I'm talking to parents. My eyes got all misty while we were talking.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.” ~ Jimi Hendrix
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
I hear ya!
What really burns me is that the rest of the passengers cowered and stood by for so long before doing anything. Has the U.S.A. really been P U S S I F I E D so much that a plane load of everyday people can't take on a few maniacs, armed with the all powerful box cutter?
I have had to fly quite often since 9/11 and I can tell you this. No terrorist is going to take over any plane I am on unless he takes me out first.
Additionally. If I am ever in a high rise building that is on fire, hit by a plane, etc, and some know nothing manager says, "It's all OK. Get back to work". That manager gets kicked in the balls on my way out. Staying is not an option.
Lastly, my heart goes out to the survivers directly affected by the events of 9/11. That date will haunt them to the day they die.
You don't understand: in the world of 9/10, that's what we were all SUPPOSED to do: sit tight, and the big ole government know-it-alls of the FAA would sort it out in a jiffy.
That's what was meant by whoever it was came up with the phrase that 9/11 represented a failure of imagination: we just never believed that there were fanatics that could conceive of something so monstrous as to hate us so much that killing themselves would be an honor, as long as thousands of us died, too. Hijackings used to be about getting something for the hostages. Not anymore: it's about KILLING. And they absolutely had our number: they knew they'd be perfectly fine, right up until impact. They knew that our people would not fight 'em, because Big Brother knew best.
THIS is what happens when you trust another person for your own security.
Here's a Mark Steyn column that covers the whole thing, and I fervently hope everybody reads the whole thing:
And then this one:A WAR FOR CIVILIZATION
Topical Take
Tuesday, 11 September 2007
This is what I wrote six years ago, on Tuesday, September 11th 2001, for the following morning's National Post in Canada and that week's Spectator in Britain. This version is fromThe Face Of The Tiger, with second thoughts at the foot of the page:
The above column is virtually as it appeared in print, including a few things I was wrong about. The death toll: more than Pearl Harbor and the War of 1812 but less than the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. I was wrong, too, about the “courage” of the suicide bombers: I was not yet sufficiently immersed in the psychosis of Islamism and its perverted death-cultism, in which before committing mass murder one carefully prepares one’s genitals because paradise is a brothel. Many readers objected to the passage about the Americans with Disabilities Act, and I apologize for giving offence – I’d probably just skip the point if I were writing it today. But the images and stories of the disabled were among the most heart-wrenching of the day, including that of the able-bodied man who stayed – and perished - with his wheelchair-bound friend because he could not bear to leave him and let him die alone. I don’t understand why we sue small mom’n’pop businesses because their general store in a remote rural town has no wheelchair ramp, but we cheerfully encourage the disabled to work on the 80th floor of skyscrapers whose first move in an emergency is to shut down the elevators.You can understand why they’re jumping up and down in the streets of Ramallah, jubilant in their victory. They have struck a mighty blow against the Great Satan, mightier than even the producers of far-fetched action thrillers could conceive. They have driven a gaping wound into the heart of his military headquarters. They have ruptured the most famous skyline in the world, the glittering monument to his decadence. They have killed and maimed thousands of his subjects, live on TV. For one day they reduced the hated Bush to a pitiful Presidential vagrant, bounced further and further from his White House to ever more remote military airports, from Florida to Louisiana to Nebraska, by a security staff which obviously understands less about the power of symbolism than America’s enemies do.
And, for those on the receiving end, that “money shot”, as they call it in Hollywood - the smoking towers of the World Trade Center collapsing as easily as condemned chimneys at an abandoned sawmill – represents not just an awesome loss of life but a ghastly intelligence failure by the US and a worse moral failure by the west generally.
There was a grim symmetry in the way this act of war interrupted the President at a grade-school photo-op. The Federal Government has no constitutional responsibility for education: it is a state affair, delegated mostly to tiny municipal school boards. But one of Bill Clinton’s forlorn legacies is that the head of state and the Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful nation on earth must now fill his day with inconsequential initiatives designed to soothe the piffling discontents of soccer moms and other preferred demographics of the most pampered generation in history: programs to connect elementary schools to the Internet, prescription drug benefits for seniors, government “lock-boxes” for any big-ticket entitlement the focus groups decide they can’t live without, and a thousand and one other woeful trivialities.
And so the President was reminded of his most awesome responsibility at a time when he was discharging his most footling. If you drive around Vermont and Massachusetts and California, you spend a lot of time behind cars with smug bumper stickers calling for more funds to be diverted from defence to education, because this would prove what a caring society we are. Tuesday was a rebuke to those fatuities: the first charge of any government is the defence of its borders – and, without that, it makes no difference how much you spend on prescription drug plans for seniors. From the moment Colin Powell advised against marching on Baghdad and ended the Gulf War, the world’s only superpower has been on a ten-year long weekend off. It loaded up the SUV, went to the mall, enjoyed the good times and deluded itself that in the new world politics could be confined to feelgood initiatives – big government disguised as lots and lots of teensy-weensy bits of small government.
Yesterday’s atrocities were a rude awakening from the indulgences of the last decade, with some awful stories to remind us of our illusions – disabled employees in wheelchairs, whom the Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.
On Tuesday, the post-Cold War era ended and a new one began.
The first named victim I was aware of was the wife of the Solicitor-General, Barbara Olson, whom I sat next to at dinner a few weeks ago. She was one of the “blonde former prosecutors”, which sounds like a rock band but was the standard shorthand for the good-looking female commentators who turned up on CNN every night during impeachment – she was smart, witty, a fearless scourge of the Clinton Administration. She’d postponed her trip to California by a day so she could wish her husband Ted a happy birthday on Tuesday morning and so found herself on American Airlines flight 11. She had time to call to tell him her plane was being hijacked and that she had been hustled to the back of the cabin with the other passengers and flight crew. By then, the Solicitor-General knew that two planes had deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center. He told Barbara what was happening –that she wasn’t in the hands of some jerk who wants his pals sprung from jail and a jet to Cuba but cooler customers with bigger plans. A few seconds later her flight ripped through one side of the Pentagon.
I’m sure Ted Olson, in the course of the day, saw some of those TV pictures of taxi drivers, merchants and schoolchildren in Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine passing out candy to celebrate the death of his wife and thousands of others. This is not terrorism - five guys in ski masks plotting in a basement. This is war, waged in the shadows but openly cheered by millions and millions of people and more covertly supported by their governments, including some who are, officially, our “allies”. America lost 2,403 people at Pearl Harbor, 2,260 in the War of 1812, 4,435 in the entire Revolutionary War, and 4,710 on the worst day of the Civil War. It is entirely possible that the final loss on Tuesday will exceed those totals combined. That’s war.
What matters now is how the US reacts. President Bush, echoing a long line of British Prime Ministers responding to IRA attacks, called the perpetrators “a faceless coward”. “Cowardly,” agreed Rudy Giuliani, and Jim Baker. Those Prime Ministers were wrong and so are the President, the former Secretary of State, and the Mayor of New York. The men or women who do such things are certainly faceless but not, I think, cowards. A coward would not agree to hijack a plane. Many others might do it for, oh, $20 million, a change of identity and retirement in the Bahamas: those would be the stakes if life was run by Warner Brothers or Paramount and the terrorist was played by John Travolta or Bruce Willis. But very few of us would agree to hijack a plane for the certainty of instant, violent death. We should acknowledge that at the very least it requires a kind of mad courage, a courage 99% of those of us in the west can never understand and, because of that, should accord a certain respect. Assuming (as Barbara Olson’s phone call seems to confirm) that no United or American Airlines flight crew would plough into a crowded building even with a gun at their heads, the men who took over the controls were sophisticated, educated people, perhaps even trained jet pilots who could be pulling down six-figure salaries in most countries but preferred instead to drive a plane through crowded offices in one all-or-nothing crazed gesture. If these men were cowards, this would be an easier war. Instead, they are not just willing to die for their cause, but anxious to do so.
And what causes are we willing to die for? By “we”, I mean “the west”, though in truth these days that umbrella doesn’t cover a lot – the United Kingdom, most of the time; France, when it suits them; Canada, hardly at all, not in any useful sense. Even America’s sense of purpose has shrivelled away since the Gulf War: Why was there such a comprehensive intelligence failure? Is it because the US has come to rely too much on electronic surveillance – satellites, telephone interceptions - and virtually eliminated human intelligence – the old-fashioned spies who go into deep cover at great risk to themselves? And is the delusion that you can fight terrorism with computers from outer space just another wretched example of the nouveau warfare pioneered by Mr Clinton in Kosovo? Or, to be more accurate, not in Kosovo but far above it and then only after dark on clear nights, dropping Tomahawks at a million bucks a pop on empty buildings. One quasi-governmental network of killers can find four fellows who can fly a jet willing to commit suicide on the same day, but the Clinton Doctrine tells the world that the greatest military power on the face of the earth no longer has the stomach for a single body-bag. The doughboys of the Great War went off singing, “We won’t come back till it’s over/Over There!” But not Mr Clinton’s army: We won’t go over till it’s over/Over There! Such a craven warmonger cannot plausibly call anybody else a “faceless coward”. In Kosovo, America declared it was prepared to kill, but not to die. Their enemies drew the correct lesson.
There are cowards elsewhere, too. The funniest moment in the early coverage came when some portentous anchor solemnly reported that “the United Nations building has not been hit”. Well, there’s a surprise! Why would the guys who took out the World Trade Center and the Pentagon want to target the UN? The UN is dominated by their apologists, and in some cases the friends of the friends of the fellows who did this (to put it at its most discreet). All last week the plenipotentiaries of the west were in Durban holed up with the smooth, bespoke emissaries of thug states and treating with them as equals, negotiating over how many anti-Zionist insults they could live with and over how grovelling the west’s apology for past sins should be. Yesterday’s sobering coda to Durban let us know that those folks on the other side are really admirably straightforward: they mean what they say, and we should take them at their word. We should also cease dignifying them by pretending that the foreign ministers of, say, Spain and Syria are somehow cut from the same cloth.
There is also a long-term lesson. The US is an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. Britain, France and the other old powers believed in projecting themselves, both territorially and culturally. As we saw in Durban, they get few thanks for that these days. But the American position – that the pre-eminent nation on earth can collectively leap in its Chevy Suburban and drive to the lake while the world goes its own way – is untenable. The consequence, as we now know, is that the world comes to you. Niall Ferguson, in his book The Cash Nexus, argues that imperial engagement is in fact the humanitarian position: the two most successful military occupations in recent history were the Allies’ transformation of West Germany and Japan into functioning democracies. Ferguson thinks the US, if it had the will, could do that in Sierra Leone. But why stop there? Why let ramshackle economic basket-cases like the Sudan or Afghanistan be used as launch pads to kill New Yorkers?
Instead of an empire, the US belongs to Nato, a defence pact of prosperous western nations in which only one guy picks up the tab, a military alliance for countries that no longer in any recognizable sense have militaries. The US taxpayer’s willingness to pay for the defence of Canada and Europe has contributed to the decay of America’s so-called “allies”, freeing them to disband their armed forces, flirt with dictators and gangster states, and essentially convert themselves to semi-non-aligned.
The British no doubt will respond by pointing out how lax American security is, compared to Heathrow or even Waterloo Station. And they’re right. Granted, every democratic government knows that sometime somewhere some killer will wiggle through the system. But yesterday all the killers got through. Had the conspirators attempted to seize four planes but succeeded in taking only three, we could have consoled ourselves with the knowledge that we had merely a 75% failure rate. But they successfully commandeered every plane they aimed for: a 100% systemic failure.
The killers picked their point of embarkation well: Boston’s Logan Airport is a joke. It is, first of all, not an airport but a building site, and has been for years, a maze of extremely permanent temporary signs, construction sheeting and makeshift walkways, all adding to the chaos. I wasn’t catching a flight a couple of weeks back, just meeting one, but it was delayed and I wanted a coffee and newspaper and discovered I had to go through to the “secured” area to get them. Overwhelmed by unnecessarily increased traffic, the security guards could give only a cursory glance to most bags, and a few sailed through the scanner while their eyes were elsewhere. At Logan, “airport security” is an oxymoron.
So let the British gloat: they’ve got great security systems. But on the other hand what was the point, given that they’ve decided to surrender slowly, piece by piece, to the IRA? When a great power is faced with a terrorist enemy, it has to win – fast and decisively. It has to identify the leaders, remove them silently and ruthlessly, shred their infrastructure and thus deny them the kind of victories that encourage civilian supporters to think their cause is a going concern. In the Fifties, the British did that in Malaya and saved that country from Communism. A decade later, when the IRA re-emerged, they no longer had the stomach for it.
Let us hope that America doesn’t show the same lack of will. This is, as the German government put it, an attack on “the civilized world”, and it’s time to speak up in its defence. Those western nations who spent last week in Durban finessing and nuancing evil should understand now that what is at stake is whether the world’s future will belong to liberal democracy and the rule of law, or to darker forces. And after Tuesday America is entitled to ask its allies not for finely crafted UN resolutions but a more basic question: whose side are you on?
Everything else – the ugliness of the Arab street, the uselessness of Nato, the self-loathing of the west, the incompetence of Logan Airport – is just as true today as it was then.
Does anybody here in this message board really understand why I'm so goddam' angry lately?PRIMAL
Topical Take
Monday, 10 September 2007
Six years is longer than it seems. I don't know quite when the sensibility of that immediate post-9/11 era slipped from the present into history, but it's clear that the mood delineated in the piece below belongs to a lost era. Only the other day the father of Tom Burnett withdrew his support from the drearily passive/actively appeasing (according to taste) Flight 93 memorial. This essay appears in The Face Of The Tiger and was written about a week after September 11th:
It was the accumulation of events that set the tone. One plane hit, then another, then the Pentagon was smoking, the White House was evacuated, the towers crumbled, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, there were other flights missing, there were bomb scares… For a few hours that Tuesday it felt like the Third World War, and so commentators fell into war mode. And by the time the networks had shuttled Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and the other empathetic glamour gals to the scene it was too late to revert to the banality of “healing” and “closure” and all the other guff of a soft-focus grief wallow.
Even on that first day they were saying “everything’s changed”. But what exactly? The main difference seemed to be tonal. These days, an army of grief counsellors can arrive at a high school shooting quicker than a SWAT team. But, when they showed up last week to ply their grisly trade, they found few takers. In my general store, on the TV up above the ammunition and tampons, the local station, temporarily lacking any other local angle, fished a pain-feeler out of the Rolodex. “But a lot of people are saying they feel very angry,” the interviewer gamely pointed out.
“That’s okay,” said the grief counsellor. “Often, in the early stages, when we’re processing pain and hurt and sorrow, it can emerge as anger. So it’s okay to feel anger.”
Clustered round the TV, sipping coffee, the guys were vaguely irritated by this, raising the interesting question of whether it’s okay to feel anger toward the grief counsellor. “Processed pain” is as bland and unsatisfying as processed cheese, and its self-evident irrelevance to the occasion seemed the most pitiful bad taste. It reeked of victimhood, the cult of the age but the last thing most Americans wanted to project at a time when there were so many real, actual victims under the rubble in New York and Washington. The New York Fire Department lost more members in one day than the US armed forces have lost in the last 20 years. And they had no time to have their grief professionally counselled, just a few moments to blow the soot and dust off their helmets and get back in there.
If you want a word for the mood of this immediate aftermath, try “primal”. In a feminised culture, guys were back – big burly firemen evoking Iwo Jima and raising the flag atop the ruins of the World Trade Center. Watching tanks rumble down the street, Manhattanites were amazed to discover that the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue really is an armoury, and not just, as it is to most New Yorkers these days, a heritage site you can rent for art and antique shows. On the steps of the Capitol, members of Congress broke into a spontaneous performance of “God Bless America”. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about an historic event, “America The Beautiful” is about the topography, but, when it comes to the nation, Irving Berlin said it simplest and said it best:
God Bless America
Land that I love
Berlin wrote those lines sincerely and without embarrassment. He was a Jew and he endured slights: When he married a society girl, Ellin Mackay, she was dropped from the Social Register. When Ellin’s sister took up with a Nazi diplomat in New York and went around sporting a diamond swastika, she suffered no such social disapproval. Throughout his life, fate seemed determined to test to the limit Berlin’s faith in both America and the simple certainties of popular song. But he never forgot being a child in Temun, Siberia, when the Cossacks rode in and razed his village, sending his parents scuttling west. About his adopted land, he had no doubts, and his were the words Americans turned to. Sung on Federal property in normal circumstances, they’d be considered religious enough to attract a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union:
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With a light from above…
But even the ACLU isn’t dumb enough to launch church-and-state lawsuits when half of Lower Manhattan is filled with prayer vigils. Prayer, not grief counselling: the real thing, not its ersatz lo-cal substitute.
In my state, New Hampshire, the “Live Free Or Die” state, there were thousands of flags. Dawn Dupont of Pembroke stood out on the road holding her “Beep To Bomb Bin Laden” sign, and the overwhelming majority did. The students at Plymouth State College made a huge “Live Free Or Die Against Terrorism” banner and unfurled it in the state capital, Concord. A neighbour of mine put up the biggest flag in town and demanded a massive military response. “But she’s a Democrat,” I said to a friend. “And a lesbian.” “Ah, yes,” he replied, “but she belongs to the hawkish wing of the lesbian movement.”
There are a lot of them around. The New Statesman would be foolish to assume the warmongers are all GOP cowboys.
In the midst of all this, the globetrotting celebrity Bill Clinton, making a rare appearance back in the United States, showed up on the streets of Lower Manhattan and, for the first time, looked oddly anachronistic. America’s would-be Ex-President-For-Life, he suddenly seemed irretrievably stuck in the day before yesterday. If the Clinton era was characterised by anything, it was public passivity – sometimes because people were content (the economy), sometimes because they were ambivalent (abortion), sometimes because they just didn’t want to know about it (his sex life), sometimes because they were scrupulously non-judgmental to the point of ennui (altogether now: “Everybody does it”). The GOP seemed to find the era tonally offensive as much as anything else. In 1996, Bob Dole howled, “Where’s the outrage?” Three years later, William Bennett wrote a book called The Death Of Outrage.
Well, there’s outrage now, as well there should be, though how it will be directed remains to be seen. If September 11th marked the close of the passive era, then it ended in a spectacular, awful but telling way. The perfect symbol of what Dave Kopel (in National Review) calls “the culture of passivity” is the airline cabin, the most advanced model of the modern social-democratic state, the sky-high version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. Massachusetts and California can only aspire to cloud cuckoo land, but up there where the air is rarefied a Federal regulatory authority can bring Utopia into being at the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen. The commercial airliner is an Al Gore dream. There is no smoking. There is 100% gun control. You are by obliged by law to do everything the cabin crew tell you to do. If the stewardess is rude to you, tough. If you’re rude to her, there’ll be officers waiting to arrest you when you land. The justification for all this is a familiar one - that in return for surrendering individual liberties, we’ll all be collectively better off. That was the deal: do as you’re told, and the Federal Aviation Administration will look after you.
Last Tuesday morning, the FAA failed spectacularly to honour their end of the bargain – as I’m sure the terrorists knew they would. By all accounts, they travelled widely during the long preparations for their mission, and they must have seen that an airline cabin is the one place where, thanks to the FAA, you can virtually guarantee you’ll meet no resistance. Indeed, in their FAA-mandated coerciveness the average coach-class cabin is the nearest the western world gets to the condition of those terrorists’ home states. We’ve all experienced those bad weather delays where you’re stuck on the runway behind 60 other planes waiting to take off and some guy says, “Hey, we’ve been in here a couple of hours now. Any chance of a Diet Coke?”, and the stewardess says he’ll have to wait, and the guy’s cranky enough to start complaining. And one part of you thinks “Yeah, I’m pretty thirsty, too”, but the rest of you, the experienced traveller, goes, c’mon, sit down, pal, quit whining, don’t make a fuss, they’ll only delay us even more.
And so, on those Boston flights that morning, everyone followed FAA guidelines: the cabin crew, the pilots, the passengers. There were four or five fellows with knives or box-cutters, outnumbered more than ten to one. If they’d tried to hold up that many people in a parking lot, they’d have been beaten to a pulp. But up in the air everyone swallowed the FAA’s assurance: go along with them, be cooperative, the Feds know how to handle these things. I’m sure there were men and women in those seats thinking, well, there’s not very many of them and they don’t have any real weapons, maybe if some of us were to… But by the time they realised they were beyond the protection of the FAA it was too late. [And there's your answer. - Bluesman]
The full story of what happened on three of those four terrible flights will never be known. But we do know something about the final moments of United Airlines Flight 93, the decisive event of the day. Thomas Burnett, Jeremy Glick, Mark Bingham and others phoned their families to tell them they loved them and to say goodbye. Denied even that consolation, Todd Beamer couldn’t get through to anyone except a telephone company operator, Lisa Jefferson. He explained three men were on board and one seemed to have a bomb tied around his waist. She told him about the planes that had smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Mr Beamer said they had a plan to jump the guy with the bomb. He asked her if she would pray with him, so they recited the 23rd Psalm:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me…
Then they rushed the hijackers.
Miss Jefferson kept the line open. At 9.58am, the plane crashed, not at Camp David or the White House, but in a field in Pennsylvania. Jeremy Glick knew that he would never see his three-month old daughter again, Todd Beamer that he would never know the baby his wife is expecting in January. But both men understood that they could play their part in preserving a world for their children to grow up in. By being willing to sacrifice themselves, Mr Glick and his comrades saved thousands, perhaps including even the Vice-President and other senior officials. They were not passive.
One of the smartest observers of the American scene, Virginia Postrel, noticed something about these men: they were all technology-company executives. David Brooks, the author of Bobos In Paradise (“bobos” being “bourgeois bohemians”, the new ruling class) has been mocking these tech execs for years. They put their companies in low-rise identikit buildings in boring office parks, a feature of the landscape I have no strong views on one way or the other but which Brooks feels symbolises the deficiencies of the age:
Nowadays when you walk amidst the office parks, you see a country that is great but insufficient too - great in its scientific accomplishments, in its tolerance and in its industriousness.... and yet insufficient because of its self-satisfaction and complacency.
Warming to his theme, he comes close to indicting the office park as an un-American activity:
When you scan through the great figures who are supposed to represent the American spirit, almost all of them seem hopelessly out of place in office parks. We used to think America was a pioneer nation, but the people in the office parks haven’t thrown off the comforts of civilisation to strike out on their own: This isn’t the realm of the Puritan, the Cowboy, or the Immigrant.
So too you can’t fit George Washington in an office park. He may have embodied the American spirit when we were a nation fighting great wars for freedom and democracy, but it is hard to see Cincinnatus getting excited about an IPO.
Nor is it easy to imagine Lincoln parking his Chevy Suburban in one of the oversized spaces and fiddling with his Palm Pilot on his way to the morning meeting. Lincoln was too grand and too political for an office-park nation.
I don’t suppose Lincoln would have given his office park any more thought than he gave his log cabin. But, insofar as there were any consolations on September 11th, it was because of the heroism of the “office-park nation”. Why’s that so surprising? Thomas Burnett headed a company that’s making the devices that replace heart valves smaller. These men worked in the most dynamic sector of the economy, where people start their own businesses, develop new products, and maybe don’t worry enough about how swank their office is. Pace Brooks, they’re the new pioneers, the first settlers: they strike out for new territory – the undeveloped plot on the sub-division on the edge of town – throw up a rude dwelling and get on with the important stuff. According to a friend, Burnett was a “patriot”, a hunter and military history buff whose office had busts of Lincoln, Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. It’s what’s inside the office park that counts.
Miss Jefferson believes she heard what were Todd Beamer’s last words: “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!” Then they jumped the hijackers.
“That’s Todd,” his wife Lisa said. “My boys even say that. When we’re getting ready to go somewhere, we say, ‘C’mon guys, let’s roll.’ My little one says, ‘C’mon, Mom, let’s roll.’ That’s something they picked up from Todd.”
As it turned out, the men from the office park would have been instantly recognisable to Washington and Lincoln. They weren’t self-satisfied or complacent at all.
Could you or I do what they did? This will be a long, messy, bloody war, in which civilians – salesmen, waitresses, accountants, tourists – are in the front line. America will need more Todd Beamers and Jeremy Glicks, and not just in the air. The culture of passivity is spread very wide throughout the west - the belief that government knows best and that citizens have sub-contracted out their responsibilities to protect and defend their liberty.
We know now that, for all its promises, the Federal Government wasn’t up there over upstate New York when Flight 11 doglegged and began homing in on Washington. We know, too, that when you’re facing terrorists willing to kill and die that the decisive moments are the first – the few minutes before they’ve established control or killed their first stewardess. So the next time it happens, Americans have a choice: they can follow FAA guidelines – or they can say screw ’em and their worthless assurances, and rush forward to overpower the fanatics, even if the FAA has seen to it they’ve nothing to charge them with except the rubber chicken. If you want a name for it, try the “Minutemen” – after the men of the Revolutionary War who were pledged to take the field at a minute’s notice.
Across the placid, prosperous post-war decades, all the great words have been appropriated: if “courage” means facing up to your drinking problem, what’s left for a fellow on a business flight who jumps the whacko with the bomb? In his Inauguration Address, George W Bush enjoined the American people to be “citizens, not subjects” and, although no one paid much attention at the time, last week gave us some fine examples. Slate’s Mickey Kaus thinks nothing’s changed – that the sleeping giant will get bored, go back to sleep and this will all be off the front pages by Thanksgiving. But at least the horror and heroism of September 11th has usefully brought into focus the two alternatives the next time this happens (and it will, sooner than we think): you can be the kind of citizen who acts, or you can be the kind who just sits there and lets the Federal Government regulate his cutlery.
C’mon, guys. Let’s roll.
Last edited by Bluesman; 13 Sep 07, at 05:27.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
I do.
Hell, I was mad that the U VA students were slaughtered like sheep by one feckhead with a couple of handguns.
-dale
What makes me angry?
About three days ago I watched a BBC programme called 'Hard Talk'. In this episode the auto-cue reader had four guests for a debate along with a studio audience.
The motion was 'should we negotiate with Al Qaida'.
Speaking for the affirmative was Terry Waite of Lebanon hostage fame along with the former head of Pakistans ISI. Speaking for the negative was a British conservative mp and a Muslim man whom I didn't recognize.
The audience was comprised of an even balance between British Muslims and non-Muslims.
The loudest and most vociferous members of the audience arguing against the motion were the young muslims, the mostly middle-aged non-muslim audience were the ones speaking of negotiation and compromise.
The motion to negotiate was passed by 56% to 44%. As the most opposed seemed to be the younger Muslims, I guess that most of the non-muslims were for the motion.
Yesterday I watched various Senators question General Petraeus over his report, and almost universally expressing disappointment with his report and finding inventive ways of calling him a liar to his face.
Those of you who know me will have realised through my often seemingly conflicting opinions and ramblings that I'm not the quickest person around and I take a long time to make up my mind over most things, if at all, but there are some things I know.
I know that I could never be a General in the American army because I would be unable to prevent myself punching those senators in the nose, but their abuse of Petreaus isn't why I'm angry.
I know that the mufsiduun must be hunted down and killed without mercy.
I know that given the support, time and resources the military and police can achieve this, as those they battle are at the end of the day mere moral vacuums, approximations of humans, flesh without soul, basic evils with no true character.
I know that the fight isn't just on the battlefield, that an equally important
fight is the one for the minds of our people.
I know this battle of ideas is my battle, and I know that at this time I am loosing it, and the viral ideas of the mufsiduun are being viewed by my people as something that can be 'accommodated': that if we just reach out to them everything will be all right: that the virus that infects them is 'something we can live with'. But this current loss is just a small part of the war and this is not why I am angry.
I know that it is not a battle against Islam, and that many of my fellow word warriors, the surviving immune system of the human race, come from within Islam as well as the other great schools of thought.
I know that apart from the Irhabi who must be killed, sanitised, wiped from the face of the earth with extreme prejudice, my main enemy is my own generation.
I know this from my life experiences, and I am reminded of it by both the BBC programme, and Patreaus's 'grilling'.
Both of us (Blues) grew up at the tail end of the baby boomers, in fact technically we both are baby boomers, and we both know that in the main, we are a generation without morals.
For those reading who are too young to have seen this, the baby boomers were a generation who were treasured, who, because of the terror and pain their parents went through, were denied nothing.
Growing up we were gifted with more earlier than any other generation, and came to expect this coddling as of right. For the longest time we were protected from all ill by our parents, until many were no longer able to face adversity.
They do it still. They take no responsibility. They demand that someone else protect them. In the past it was their parents, now that they can't, they expect their children to.
This is what makes me angry: the lazy cowardice of the bulk of my generation, where hard decisions are to be avoided by sleight of mind; where if you ignore something for long enough it becomes someone elses problem; where if you ignore or debase the messenger the problem is solved; where a basic moral vacuity allows any action no matter how base to avoid responsibility.
And what truly makes me angry is that because of this, and if I fail in my battles, instead of continuing the legacy of my ancestors and making the world a better place for the next generation, I will in sixteen years time be farewelling my beautiful baby boy as he goes off to fight a far greater war because of the cowardice and perfidy of my generation, a generation who will sacrifice their parents legacy and their childrens future for their own comfort.
What makes you angry Blues?
Last edited by Parihaka; 13 Sep 07, at 12:03.
Well reasoned and well said, Parihaka!
Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.
Bingo. You got it.
It's MY side I'm angriest at, or at least they SHOULD be on my side, but they're not.
I'm angry because I know history, and I see it playing out so clearly in front of me. I see the same sort of appeasement mindset of the British in '39; I see a public that believes so many falsehoods and untruths, and are willing to believe the worst about their own country, and the best of their enemies.
It's almost impossible for me to express it, because there is so much WRONG with what's going on today. I am literally overwhelmed by the things I see everyday that is so 180-out from reality.
I've tried, really tried, to see the other point-of-view, and I'm as introspective as you can dam' well get, without being a total neurotic. But this is SO CLEAR to me, and I know down deep that I'm not wrong, but the rest of the world IS, about so many, many things.
Some of the sheer idiocy I've seen on this board from seemingly-intelligent people have made me question what I think. But I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the world is upside down; only I and a few like me are right-side up.
Now, that makes one question whether things really are as one perceives them, but some of it is SO dam' clear, so OBVIOUS, and THAT, RIGHT THERE, is what's made me so goddam' ANGRY.
There is NO EXCUSE for seemingly-intelligent people believing some of the so-obviously-wrong things that they believe.
I am in a terrible state-of-mind these days, because there are many reasons to be fretful about where we're headed as a civilization faced with an existential challenge, and almost no reason to have faith that we'll meet it. I think those of us that just BELIEVE everything is going to be alright are going off of FAITH, and frankly, I don't see in our People exactly what the wellspring of that faith IS. We're FAILING. And this civilization, like any other, has no 'right' to exist, if it will not do what it must to survive.
We all believe that we live in the best available societal organizational model that has been tried up to this point, as far as providing for the Heirarchy of Needs. But that does NOT speak to its ability to survive an external threat, and in my opinion, the first may even preclude the second. We're fat, dumb and happy, and that is NOT the state one needs to be in in order to survive an attack.
Well, we are under attack, and so many of us are so somnolent as to not notice, or have reached the wrong conclusions about its nature, because believing something false is easier than facing up to the reality.
We're in TROUBLE. Most of the reason for that is not our enemies' competence, but our own lack of will to defend what is valuable. There is nothing, Nothing NOTHING, NOTHING as important as human will in contests like this, and on our side, it can't be found, unless under the medal racks of men that seek to defend the very people that slander them and seek to frustrate their efforts. Our enemies have nothing but willpower, and that will probably be more than enough, because this conflict is simply not about weapons...it's about the desire to impose one's will. We ain't got it; they DO.
So, lately, I've been noticing more and more and more of the signs that Osama is correct about us, and we have no dam' idea what makes HIM tick. One of the things that sets me off more than anything is the 'These Colors Never Run' tee-shirts and bumper stickers. Oh, they're better than their peace symbol analogs (which ALSO provokes the hell outta me!
The same redneck idiots that wear that shirt think Osama lives in fear of us or his own death. He doesn't. And I imagine him, hiding out somewhere, watching us screw ourselves over, again and again and again, while we play political games, and he plots our deaths. We can't even do the common-sense things that are so obvious without fighting ourselves about the most mundane, unimportant details...and in the end, some half-measure that simply won't help is adopted and we move on to the next issue that shouldn't even BE an issue.
I believe we're going to lose the war, because we have no will to win it, or even believe there IS one. It doesn't have to be like that, but then again, there is no law written in the cosmos that says because we're RIGHT, we'll win, just because...well, we SHOULD. Victory will go to the side that maintains its will to impose that will on the other side, because, in the end, it's Jungle Law, and whoever tried harder 'deserved' the win.
We're not trying, and that's what's making me angry.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
I'm still confident that we'll win. It'll end up being a lot more expensive and messy and bloody than it should have been had the sniveling moral cowards Bluesman and Parihaka mention not bent over for the Left, but in the end we'll win.
-dale
I wish I had your faith, but like I said: just going from what I see around me, I have no idea why you believe it.
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell
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