The answer: for the same reason I don't on the anniversary of the Deerfield massacre. The slaughter of the innocent, whether settlers' kids or cube farm functionaries, is a working hazard for those fortunate or unfortunate enough to be the empire's children. Yes they were innocent, but only of the knowlege of their own culpability. No, I won't celebrate -- and that's what this is: a maudlin serenade to the hardships of empire.
Father Smiff notices flags -- indeed, what mawkish poison. Even at its most sublime, the firefighters charging up those stairs, headed toward the top of a building about to come down to meet them, is not tragedy. Wrong genre. It's melodrama, and melodrama is best served house by house over the dinner table of a family, not on TV, like a tearful version of rockin' New Years Eve.
Tragedy is the unavoidable collision of two rights, not the horror of blowback for a series of chronic unending wrongs. But wasn't the slaughter indiscriminate? Well, not altogether -- no more so than the slaughter of Dresden, or Hiroshima. These were real people working in ignorance inside evil symbols -- like symbiotes in Moby Dick's belly.
Trouble is, we're in there somewhere too.
Comments (1)
The main issue of 9-11, for me, has always been the way the administration hi-jacked it to launch their imperial wars. And hi-jacked doesnt do justice to the ongoing Orwellian use of "terror" as a means of stifling thought.
The dems have been craven collaborators in this project, and I'm sure they were part of the chorus yesterday.
Posted by bobw | September 12, 2006 3:21 PM
Posted on September 12, 2006 15:21