I feel like I should say something but I don’t know what to say jukebox and open thread
Lupe Fiasco - Words I never said Ft. Skylar Grey (Lyrics on screen)
Last year, we wrote some essays.
Elias wrote 10 years removed, a different memorial to September 11.
Doc Saunders wrote Recollection.
Jason Kuznicki wrote The Machinery of… whatever.
RTod wrote 10 Years Later.
James K wrote Terrorism and the Mind-Killer.
I wrote a trifling On the Changing of Narratives.
Burt wrote A Work In Progress.
Erik wrote A Song for 911.
JL Wall wrote Thinking in Song and A man there was in the Land of Uz.
Patrick Cahalan wrote For The Families.
Consider this an open thread.
Huh.
All I remembered about mine was that it was universally hated here. So much so I have never reread it; the outcry I remember made me assume I’d gone way on on a limb with a flame-thrower.
Funny, it seems pretty tame a year later.Report
I’m sorry I didn’t comment on it then. It doesn’t read as particularly inflammatory to me (but I may not be the yardstick you want to use).Report
I have to say, though, that the writing makes me cringe. From that standpoint, this might be the worse thing I’ve ever done here.Report
The year you look back at a post from the previous year and don’t cringe? That’s when you have to worry about complacency.Report
If our website has done good things besides Dr. Saunders’s Epic Post being used as a teaching aid in at least one class, it’s made many of us better writers (and it pretty much has to do that by making many of us better thinkers first).Report
Same for me, on both counts.Report
Tod, I just clicked over to your post to see what made it so horrible. Nothing, it was well written and thoughtful as I’d expect. But irony of ironies, given the contrtemps following my latest nudging of yto see who your first critic was and how that argument went down.Report
On the previous thread Jaybird thought there was more telling than showing about TVD, but in the linked thread on RTod’s post, TVD is actualrealtrue showing. I mean, not only is his trollery on display, he accuses Tod of misrepresenting views he previously expressed to Tod, which Tod calls him on and which he then denies, dodges, ducks. And we’re talking about Tod here.
I don’t mean for this to start a flame war – least of all because it puts RTod in the center of things – but for anyone wondering what the dispute is about, you’re right James. It’s easy to see what made the thread – and Tod’s reaction – so horrible.Report
I’m just disappointed it’s not about the Three Musketeers sequel.Report
On 9/11 I was working on an archaeological site with 120 kids visiting on us on a field trip. We heard about the first crash via telephone and then the second. We had to keep it together until the kids left because we didn’t want to scare them. When I got home at noon I discovered the full extent of the attacks. Then I went in to my ‘real’ job and because all plane travel was grounded we had no work to do. So we watched coverage on TV and tried to figure out just what the hell it all meant.
Eleven years I’m still trying to figure it out…Report
Why does it have to have meant something?Report
Because otherwise it didn’t mean anything.Report
What does “mean” mean?Report
Something.Report
Oh.
(By the way, if ANY conversation breaks the internet… it might be this one.)
Ceasing obtuseness, I wonder how much our search for meaning in this instance is more about the human tendency to seek patterns in randomness and less about there being an actual-but-unattainble meaning for the events in questions.
I’m reminded of the speech given by the Army captain or whatever towards the end of “28 Days Later”… People killing people. That is what it was before 9/11. That is what it was on 9/11. That it what it was after 9/11. That’s just what is.Report
It should have meant something. It was a major moment in foreign relations. It led to the additional deaths of thousands more people after that day. Trillions of dollars spent. I guess my point is that today it all seems pointless.Report
What seems pointless? 9/11 itself? Or everything that followed? I think those are very different things, largely because the primary agents are different.Report
My hunch is that 9/11 meant something very different in the Muslim world than it did here. It meant something very different to Muslim extremists and Al Quaeda than it did to Americans.
Likewise, our response to 9/11 means something different to us than it does to those groups.Report
I think 9/11 itself and our response. I don’t see the Muslim world liking us anymore or fearing us. I mean, they killed one of our ambassadors yesterday. What did we accomplish?Report
I was reading “mean” in a much more abstract way. In terms of what we accomplished, I’d say not a hell of a whole lot.
For me, the question is, what did we hope to accomplish? Even that seems hard to answer.Report
I was in grad school at the time. I woke up, took a leak, started making coffee … and my daughter shouts from the next room that a plane hit the World Trade Center. Curious, I turned on the tv and watched as all the shit went down. Saw the (replay of the) second plane hit the other tower. Saw both towers go down, of course. My wife and I talked about conspiracy theories. Immediately and without hesitation. We both thought – she more than I – that there was just no way in hell hijackers could fly those planes like they did. (And then there was building 7…)
I had lectures to review, and assignments for the students, and whatnot. I couldn’t even think about any of that, tho it was in the back of my mind. I finally wrapped my head around my own life enough to stumble into class and talk about what happened in NYC and let the kids go early. I went back home and watched the news. None of it made any sense.
The whole effing day was a blur. Still is.Report
It occurred to me that 9/11 is pretty much just something in a history book to most anyone under age 18 or so. Young people probably are puzzled why so many adults are still whining about it all the time.Report
From Galway Kinnell’s “When the Towers Fell”
Then before me I saw, in steel letters welded
to the steel railing posts, Whitman’s words
written when America plunged into war with itself: City of the world!…
Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
— words of a time of illusions. And I remembered
what he wrote after the war was over and Lincoln dead:
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest — they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d…
In our minds the glassy blocks
succumb over and over into themselves,
slam down floor by floor into themselves.
blowing up as if in reverse, exploding
downward and outward, billowing
through the streets, engulfing the fleeing.
As each tower goes down, it seems to
concentrate into itself, to transform itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole
infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light,
each life, put out, lies down within us.Report
I had many friends in NYC at the time, was a frequent visitor; and I was worried sick about them on that day.
None were actually hurt, but a dear old friend of mine was in very close vicinity when the first tower came down. I can’t remember if I actually got hold of her on the phone that day, or the next; when I finally did, she told me of the moment they realized the tower was coming down, of turning and running as fast as she could, fleeing with all her strength; of the horrific indescribable *shriek* that the tower made as it came down, and the clouds of choking dust overtaking her as she ran; of sitting in a diner’s counter, unsure how she got there, with other dazed shellshocked people; of the diner’s owner’s hand shaking, shaking, spilling on the counter, as he poured cups of water for all.
I was really, really mad about 9/11, for a long long time.
No, not mad. I was beyond furious, whenever I thought about it, or saw or heard something about it.
I simply could not believe or accept that someone could have done this thing – that people just leaving their homes and going about their business were just snuffed out, like they meant nothing at all.
For a long time I could only watch tiny snippets of the tributes, of the documentaries, of footage of the jumpers (oh, footage of the jumpers was the absolute worst), before I would feel just this completely uncontrollable rage rising in me. I would turn them all off. I couldn’t see straight, just blind with tears and anger, anger, anger.
I’m not sure when that feeling finally faded away for me.
It was years, I know that.
I’m very glad that feeling’s gone.
But I still didn’t go visit the area or ‘Ground Zero’ when I was in NYC a few weeks back.
I was afraid that feeling would return, maybe.
I imagine for those that were closer to it than I was, that feeling may never fade.Report
Jay, Lupe is awesome when he gets it right. Good choice.
Did you see that he’s now threatening to leave music?Report
Last I saw, he was putting out Food and Liquor II later this month (and, I assumed, touring to promote it).
What is it? That bullshit with Keef or something?Report
Yeah, the bullshit with Keef. He said he was leaving hip hop to devote himself to literature (his first love, apparently).Report
He has to be true to himself, I guess. I hope he’ll come back to music after he writes the book he feels he has in him.Report
I’m suddenly realizing… Back last year and before, it seems like so many things got framed by the GOP through the lens of 9/11. Is it just me, or has that all but disappeared?
If so, why is that? Is it that Bin Laden’s death has allowed us to move on? Is it the desire to focus on nothing but the economy these days? Is it that Obama is essentially doing the same things Bush did, and the p**sy card no longer works on liberals on the war on terror?
I don’t know, but I’m suddenly realizing that 9/11 has kind of disappeared from the political day-to-day, and I didn’t even notice it leaving.Report
I think the culmination was the 10th Anniversary and then, internet be praised, our attention spans said “let’s change the goddamn topic”.
When Osama was finally shot in the damn head and fed to fish, even the worst of the neocons didn’t want to talk about 9/11 because doing so would be aid and comfort to the enemy and, meanwhile, the rest of us were ready to stop talking about it at the same time.
That’s my theory.
I suspect that, henceforth, we’ll only really devote a lot of thought to 9/11 on the anniversaries that are “big” ones.
All that to say: Yeah, you’re right. I think that this means that whomever is president can (finally) pull out of Afghanistan and call it “Peace with Honor” or whatever they’re inclined to call it.Report
All of this sounds right.Report
Bin Laden’s eschatology died in Iraq, not in Pakistan.Report
I was in my first year of grad school. Did not have class that day was home out in Queens close to LaGuardia. Always, always listened to the news in the morning I did not that day. My sister called me hysterical telling me a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. I turn on the TV in time to see the second plane. Lost TV reception, antennas were on the towers. Then my dad calls still on my cell with my sister I kept trying to get them to tell me what was going on. Decided to go downstairs to my landlords (they had cable). Mr. Boiardi looked at me like I was insane when I told him. We sat and watched the towers fall.
Russell’s post from last year really spoke to me. I could have written the last two sentences of that post “However, what I always remember most of all is how full New York City was, in the days and weeks after the attacks, of decency and compassion and sacrifice. Which is why I will always consider it in some way my home, no matter where I live. Why I will always love it more than any other place on earth.”
I still have a very hard time seeing anything connected with that day.Report