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Erev Nineleven

By Michael J. Smith on Thursday September 8, 2011 08:00 PM

Knock knock.
-- Who's there?
Nineleven.
-- Nineleven who?
Sob! You said you'd never forget!
Ordinarily I am a great friend to memory, perhaps because my own memory is so poor. But there are things that need to be forgotten before they can be usefully remembered; for which re-discovery is the only discovery, and the resistance to oblivion is a resistance to understanding. Nineleven is one of these things.

I would very much like to forget Nineleven, and I wish everybody else would too. 'Memory', as actually practiced about this topic, is really nothing of the kind; it is a robotic repetition of grievances, a hysterical itch-scratching that only makes the itch worse.

Of course it serves its purposes. There's nothing like a carefully-cultivated sense of victimhood to make people cruel -- if only vicariously cruel; but hey, the world-bestriding thug state will take whatever buy-in it can get.

Comments (20)

A respondent a chez IOZ posted this:

"The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word 'cowardly' is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."

~ Susan Sontag

Seems appropriate.

Contrast the 10 year anniversary of 09/11/2001 with the 10 year anniversary of 12/07/1941.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-wiener-anniversaries-20110909,0,2887180.story?track=rss

When you do you'll see just how pathetic these United States of America has become.

This country has become a nation of self-absorbed whiners and cry babies. Fuck em.

Oh, when I said that Americans were a bunch of whiners and cry babies I was painting with a bit of a broad brush I suppose, I still think it generally true.

But it certainly ain't true of these righteous motherfuckers:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44439782/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/#.TmmTwdSSdZ8

Hey Judge, Bite my Fucking Hairy Ass.

I ain't queer, but I'd be a liar if those broad shouldered longshoremen ain't making me swoooooonnnnn.

Yeah, nice. Meanwhile, all Obama has to do is keep breathing and he's re-elected. Is SMBIVA officially renouncing its mission of explaining SMBIVA and the bankruptcy of the Democratic Party?

It sure seems like that's the vibe and theme here now.

I have quite enough bitter pills I can swallow on my own. I really don't need to keep reading this kind of post, which strikes me as pretty close to pointless. Who among us takes anything but pain from the corporate 911 dogshit that will occupy the next few days? None? But who is really celebrating? Nobody.

Shit or get off the pot, SMBIVA...

Al Schumann:

Exit counseling for Democratic Party harvestees becomes sisyphean after a few years. But it can be educational. I've learned is that a preponderance of evidence is not, by itself, all that important. It can affirm and reinforce, but what drives people away from a cult-like organization is repeated experience of personal abuse. What they want after that is conviviality.


chomskyzinn:

As good a time as any, this weekend, to commemorate September 11.

1973.

Hey everyone, Michael Dawson is upset!!! WHAT IS SMBIVA DOING TO FURTHER THE CAUSE OF THIRD PARTIES???

In the same vein, I'd like to remember 9/11 as the day I quit my job as dough roller at Round Table Pizza. Thanks Mr. Atta, you gave me the strength to take that next step to parking lot attendant!

IOZ:

Mister Smiff, you are truly a righteous gentile for the wonderful title.

Brian M:

This is exactly why I am in such a sour mood this week, because I know this is exactly what the machine is doing:

"Of course it serves its purposes. There's nothing like a carefully-cultivated sense of victimhood to make people cruel -- if only vicariously cruel; but hey, the world-bestriding thug state will take whatever buy-in it can get."

Gag me with a spoon, but I hate the sense of treacly victimizaation. the U.S. military has committed dozens of 9-11 sized crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan (and beyond) during the past ten years.

Nice try, PA. Yeah, right, I'm a stupid shill for "third parties."

One wonders what your own agenda is, based on that projection.

Meanwhile, SMBIVA has a purpose: Explaining the futility of the Democratic Party. My perception is that the proprietor is too weary to sustain the effort, at the exact moment the thesis is QED.

I do not need SMBIVA to bitch about 911 "memory." Nobody does. That point is beyond obvious.

Boink:

from YNETNEWS (full item):

"White House: Obama concerned by situation at Israel’s Cairo embassy
Published: 09.10.11, 02:56 / Israel News

US President Barack Obama says the Administration is taking all necessary steps in order to calm the situation at Israel’s Embassy in Cairo.

In a statement issued by the White House, the president expressed his deep concern over the situation in Cairo and the safety of Israel’s diplomatic staff there. Obama urged the Egyptian government to honor its international obligations and ensure the safety of Israel’s diplomats. (Yitzhak Benhorin, Washington)"

Crank up the drones.

mjosef:

That's a plaintive call, MD.
I am better off for knowing the real purpose of SMBIVA, which I had thought all along was about blowing off steam, but which you say is for highlighting the futility of the Democratic Party.
Which explain the desuetude of SMBIVA - that's a given, that mission, Democrats are revealed as Republicans, game over. So what's next? Rancid libertarianism like Cockburn? Deluded messianic MLK worship and nutjob evangelical faith in people's revolutions like Paul Street? Bizarre unrepentant blogging about long-about micro-cult battles? OP's go down to Dixie and get shot? Naderite hair-shirt brigades? Hedges' public psychic disintegration for self-martyrdom? Growing rutabagas in the sidewalk to prove green purity? Wearing Obama '08 pins to publicly wear a diaper of willing idiocy to have "Believed" in greatest con man to grace our times?
Rejoice in happy nihilism, friends - it's the one and only.

MJS:
SMBIVA has a purpose: Explaining the futility of the Democratic Party. My perception is that the proprietor is too weary to sustain the effort
There is truth in what you say, Kemo Sabee.

Lots of folks recognize the futility of voting for Democrats, and are weary. It's hardly the fault of a single website; and it's hardly possible for the same to vanguard a movement. (Fuck vanguards, anyway.)

The imperial project is half way through a wave of overreach. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is stuck in the trough of that wave. Its managerial class doesn't know how to pull back, and can't afford to do so anyways. Without the forward momentum of conquest and/or corporate colonization, the competing and governing factions will be left in deadly contest with each other for control of a population they've spent a generation beggaring, universal edumacating and taylorizing into exchangeable parts, but who still have expectations of high wages and the comforts which accrue to imperial subjects.

It's never a bad time to be part of the ruling class, but these are unstable and fatally wobbly times for them all the same.

Everyone is weary. Even the proto-fascists with oak leaves and stars on their collars.

Vanguarding up a website as a beacon in the darkness isn't going to change any of that.

Al Schumann:
Growing rutabagas in the sidewalk to prove green purity?

Go ahead and laugh. Mock all you like. But the cultivation of sidewalk rutabagas is the vanguard task of green purity. First, however, we must crush the curbside parsnip revisionists.

Chomskyzinn:

Jack, lots of folks vote Democrat, are recognizing the futility of it, and are weary. Therein lies the hope, such as it is.

Op:

To the extent one needs a strategy these days for next fall
It looks like throw the bums out suffices for the congress

Potus watchers and handicappers
Who cares if we get four more of Barry
Or a for years of Perry

Attacking Barry only raises the useless antinomy of lesser ism

Op:

Jack's portatit of uncles am as recovering overreacher
Is right on target
Though he prolly. Draws different inferences from that proposition then I might

Perry
would inherit a hoss in need of more stall time

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