So the 6th anniversary of the WTC bombings has come and gone. I didn’t want to write anything about it yesterday, because perversely, it felt better to honor those victims and the firefighters and police who died there with a silent prayer than with some half-baked exposition. When the whole world is beating its chest, it feels more sincere to honor their lives for what they were, than to use them to measure how deeply we can grieve.
That kind of selflessness, of course, couldn’t survive in the swamp that is Washington, and so we had the spectacle yesterday of Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker testifying before Congress, the latest pep talks designed to make it look like progress can be made in Iraq, however glacial and bank-breaking it may be. It’s of course no coincidence that they testified on 9/11, because the White House, in its New-Coke efforts to get us all to see what they see, never passes up a marketing opportunity, however tasteless. As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman wrote, as quoted in James Wolcott’s blog:
“The symbolism of getting General David Petraeus to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the anniversary of 9/11 appealed to the White House. It should not have. It is crass.”
Which goes without saying, or should. But the ghouls and marketeers who run the White House wouldn’t know crass from ground glass. What was it Bush told us just after the WTC bombing? That we should get on with our lives, and show our enemies they can’t destroy what’s good about our way of life? Remember what he told us to do?
Go shopping.
No more confirmation was needed for me that W and those pricks in Washington were a step removed from the rest of us. In their eyes, honor equals money, specifically keeping the economy rolling so portfolios remain high and they stay in the graces of campaign contributors. In an enormous application of that “Prosperity Gospel” claptrap, America is good because it is wealthy. And we can be gooder if we just keep getting richer.
Now the memories of the WTC victims are smudgy and threadbare. They’ve been relegated to the status of those people who died at Gettysburg and Bunker Hill, trotted out for rhetorical purposes and chest beating but far removed from the present reality. Only problem is, they’re only 6 years gone. Real lives are still in pain because of their loss, and hundreds of New York police, firefighters and citizens are still sick from what they inhaled in those weeks after the disaster. And all the pledges of federal help in helping NY rebound are so much debris from a distant time. Did even the most cynical among us realize how badly Bush & Co. would screw things up in this country, in the September weeks of 2001? How they’d piss away our goodwill in the world with the invasion of Iraq? Wipe their asses with the Constitution? Exploit our national resolve for justice to keep themselves in power?
I don’t want to go off on a litany of their mistakes here. It’s been said before, and by better writers. I’ll just say it beggars the imagination what they’ve done in the past 6 years, supposedly in memory of the people who died on 9/11. And what will be done in the next 50.
Well said.