Via Gawker, here’s a candidate for the most crass corporate co-opting of 9/11 ever. With the exception of the event’s hostile takeover by Bush, Inc., of course.
As I was dropping my teenager off at school this morning, the radio announcer spoke the date, September 11th. The kiddo groaned, “Oh god, is it 9/11 today? That means we’ll have to watch boring movies and talk about 9/11 in every class. Again.”
She doesn’t remember 9/11. She was a toddler then, and now she’s a lanky high schooler. 9/11 feels like a dim artifact of history to her, like the Kennedy assassination felt to us Gen Xers — an event that scarred our parents but was experienced by us kids as an iconic video. Maybe this is a good thing.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
flukebucket
I dread it every damn year. And this 2 million Easy Riders ride to DC to battle the Muslims ain’t making it one damn bit easier.
chopper
days like 9/11 make me thank god i’m not on facebook.
dan
I AM NOT GOING TO FORGET, OK? SO STOP POSTING IT ON FACEBOOK. I SWEAR I WILL NEVER EVER EVER FORGET. CAN WE MOVE ON NOW???
shawn
Is every Marriott doing that, or was it just one? As fun as it is to dump on big corporations, that just seems like the work of one obnoxious employee who just wouldn’t pestering the manager about how important it was to do something to commemorate the date, and the manager finally just agreeing to it in order to get them to go away.
Like the one person at the office christmas party who insists that everyone say grace before eating any of the food.
Ben Cisco
You have a candidate. I have a winner.
Rosalita
I’m with Jenny:
Jenny Johnson @JennyJohnsonHi5 2h
Most people don’t realize this, but you can quietly remember September 11, 2001.
BGinCHI
Free full-sized muffins for an hour would have been ok though.
Rorgg
My ex txted me this morning after dropping our 8 year-old off at school:
“N was almost completely oblivious to what today was, when I asked her about it. Says they don’t discuss it at school.”
I pointed out that it happened 3 years before she was born … how in-touch with the MLK/RFK assassinations was she in 1979?
Point was made, I think.
Big R
This is the only day I ever feel like I’m a veteran. Not because I suffered,or bled, or really, did anything other than act like a confused and scared college freshman, which makes sense, since that’s what I was.
I feel like a veteran ONLY because people ask me where I was, and when I tell them I was in Washington less than a mile from the Pentagon, they look at me like I left a leg in ‘Nam.
It wasn’t that traumatic, I promise!
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Meh, the mini ones are easier to eat fast as long as you don’t bother removing the paper.
LarryB
Betty, it’s the same everywhere, only different. Here in Berkeley, I bet you they give 9/11 30 minutes, tops. On the other hand, If I had a dollar for every time I heard my kids groan, “Oh no! Not Indigenous Peoples Day”…
Betty Cracker
@Ben Cisco: That’s pretty bad. But giving people free muffins to stuff in their faces between the times the first and second planes hit the towers strikes me as even worse. But at least the muffins are free, so maybe you’re right after all. Anyway, they both suck.
ruviana
I remember JFK, being a boomer, but I teach college students and our freshmen this year were in the first and second grade when 9/11 happened. We’ve been speculating about what it’ll be like when the freshmen born in 2002 get here.
Mudge
Many innocent people died possibly because of the Bush administration’s incompetance. Every year we are asked to remember the dead (who are now heroic instead of really unlucky) and I see wreaths guarded by soldiers. Except at the Pentagon, soldiers were not involved. We are not asked to remember the shame of being so unprepared.
It the hagiography of 9/11.
Big R
@Ben Cisco: I can top that one. A local newspaper here in north Mississippi offered a special one-day-only subscription rate of $9.11 per month today.
Which is more expensive than their everyday rate.
James E. Powell
First thing. You’re Generation X? I never get anyone’s age correct on this blog.
Anyway. I teach high school. I know this sounds like that ‘this year’s freshmen’ thing that some college does, but here it is.
My students were four or five on 9/11/2001. They don’t know much, but what’s really weird is that they know much more about the conspiracies than they do about the events themselves. They also don’t really care.
They know almost nothing about the invasion of Iraq. They are only vaguely aware that it occurred. They have little if any memory of George W Bush.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
I post the same thing on Facebook every year: “Where was I when the Republican president totally screwed the pooch and presided over the worst terrorist attack in history and then made up a pack of lies to invade Iraq? Who fucking cares?”
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: Your eating habits are really taking shape in your posts of late.
You better be riding that goddamn bike.
SiubhanDuinne
Umm…doesn’t Marriott “give away,” i.e., include “free” muffins and coffee in the lobby every morning as part of your room rate, whether you want them or not?
Also, IIRC (don’t really care enough to look it up), Mitt Romney is on the Board of Directors of the Marriott Corporation.
BGinCHI
@Big R: What’s a “newspaper”?
Bill E Pilgrim
The worst part is that that sign makes it seem like what they’re memorializing is having lost muffins in 2001.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Just got back from a short 10 miler.
Belafon
@Big R: On the golf course one, 9 holes were $9.11, 18 holes were $19.11.
Major Mel Funkshun
I was raised by Christian parents, who taught me to forgive and forget. That’s what I’m going to do. Or we could keep on butchering each other for 2,000 more years….
BGinCHI
@Omnes Omnibus: I hope their are no micro-muffin stains on your jersey.
raven
It annoys me until I think about the impact one friends death 45 years ago has had on me. People deal with shit in different ways.
Thunderbird
I was watching the USA v. Mexico World Cup qualifier last night, and after it ended, I suddenly realized that it was Disaster Porn Christmas Eve, and I let out a very loud, “AW, FUCK!”
I live alone, btw.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
.. in memory of the president that made a hash of anti-terrorism efforts and then attacked an unrelated country of brown people, please have complimentary hash brows..
Pococurante
It is. It’s the whole point of culture.
Omnes Omnibus
@BGinCHI: Some grease. But that ain’t coming out. Stupid dryer.
PurpleGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: (1) Yes, he’s on the Board; (2) he’s named after dear family friend J. Willard Marriott who founded the chain.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
hash brows sounds much more high brow.
RandomMonster
I once had to fly on business on 9/11 a few years back. LAX was a ghost-town and the TSA lines were short. It was great! Anybody know if air traffic is still lower on 9/11?
Bubblegum Tate
There’s probably going to be an editorial position open at Esquire after this one.
Betty Cracker
@James E. Powell: @James E. Powell: Yep. My high schooler remembers Bush as the devil, having been raised by a pair of liberals, and while she doesn’t remember the invasion of Iraq, she knows BushCo lied us into it, and there’s a level of personalization around that since we’ve had family who served.
The evil of BushCo and the catastrophe of Iraq is like catechism around here. I’ll have to ask her about conspiracy theories, though. My greatest fear is that she’ll rebel by going wingnut on us, but no signs of that so far.
HR Progressive
I was 15 and in high school on 9/11.
I remember caring a great deal at the time, and feeling really tense and cautious for the first couple of years afterwards.
I didn’t lose any family members in the attacks, and I don’t really know anyone who did, so it doesn’t have a personal connection to me.
I am more jaded than anything, because a lot of people feel the need to beat their chest and shout “Murica!” more than ever on every Sept 11th from now on, however everyone conveniently forgets that dimwitted and/or grievously malevolently calculated actions were taken in Iraq on our behalf, and that many more thousands of American service men and women have needlessly died fighting a war they did not need to fight, because the Bush Administration seems to have blatantly ignored, either through crass stupidity or cold blooded self-serving, the warnings about Osama bin Laden.
“Bu-but Clinton did too!”
Shut up, that’s why.
But seriously.
9/11 is little more than a day for neocons to bleat even more about how awesome we are, and for a lot of slacktivists online to feel warmth in their loins as they post some faux-patriotic platitudes about the loss of life that day.
Sigh.
schrodinger's cat
On thing that changed after Sept 11, was the proliferation of flags, everywhere.
bemused
I have been avoiding msnbc when there is some biggie going on, esp in the evening. As much as I regularly watch Rachel, Hayes, O’Donnell normally, I just can’t stomach it when, for hours, there are panel get-togethers including nincompoop Matthews (thanks for the perfect word, Iowaoldlady) and other assorted annoying folks on msnbc I’m not a fan of. I was very happy to have skipped the dissection last night of Obama’s address and 9-11 coverage today. It’s been 24/7 Syria for days and I am beyond tiring of hearing any more “experts” on the issue and I have no desire to revisit how I felt on 9-11. I’ll probably take a peek this evening but if it’s going to be a Syria/9-11 mashup, I’m out of there.
schrodinger's cat
I also couldn’t believe how Bushies and their friends in the media, including NYT pushed for the Iraq War using this incident.
Ridnik Chrome
I was in New York the day of the World Trade Center attacks, and I have roughly the same reaction to the anniversary as your teenager (particularly when politicians and media people refer to it as “9/11”). But then I can afford to be cynical about the whole thing because it really didn’t affect me much on a personal level. If I had lost a friend or a loved one that day, I am sure I would feel much differently. So out of respect for those who did lose friends and family in the attacks, I try to keep my cynicism in check, at least on this date.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bubblegum Tate: Holy fuck.
Roger Moore
@schrodinger’s cat:
Mostly by assholes who didn’t know how to treat a flag properly. I don’t know which bothered me more, finding a ragged, bedraggled flag lying in the gutter after it fell off somebody’s car, or going to a restaurant that had flags printed on their napkins.
coin operated
@flukebucket: This. The ride itself doesn’t bother me…the us-vs-them mentality that’s been projected into this event flat pisses me off. I attended Rolling Thunder in DC over Memorial Day this year…500K bikes and a fraction of the thinly-concealed racism that is being associated with the run happening this weekend.
Amir Khalid
@Bubblegum Tate:
Good God.
Ms. D. Ranged in AZ
Wow, 30 minutes of free sh*tty coffee and styrofoam-like muffins–Marriott must be breaking the bank on that!
Rosalita
@Bubblegum Tate:
Holy website fuck up
hitchhiker
Shite, I didn’t even experience it as that traumatic when it happened — probably because just exactly six months earlier my spouse broke his neck in a freak skiing crash.
When all those pundits got on the tv and somberly informed me that from now on, their whole world would be different, I just rolled my eyes. Really?
There were thousands of people who had every right to speak about tragedy and loss, but they were busy experiencing the real thing. They weren’t getting into their pundit suits and going to makeup and blabbing into a camera.
My own kids were in middle school at the time. Nobody is ever going to have an easy time getting them to enjoy catastrophe porn.
I’m 61, so I remember watching the television on the day that Lee Harvey Oswald got shot right in front of everyone. Also Robert Kennedy falling into a screaming crowd. It’s the video record that makes NOT getting all mawkish so hard for some people.
scav
@schrodinger’s cat: was everywhere afflicted with the paper flags with the corporate logos (often newspapers) pasted in windows? I especially enjoyed the ones reading “These Colors Don’t Run” in which the cheap ink faded nearly immediately. And then everyone leaving up their 9-11 memorials while putting up schlocky halloween ghosts and tombstones all around them, left me really wondering if people were that clueless about context. (a store putting its memorial one top of a bbq grill was another poser.)
bemused
@Bubblegum Tate:
How the hell could something like that happen? Unbelievable.
IowaOldLady
@Bubblegum Tate: Oh wow. Just…wow.
ranchandsyrup
AT&T did themselves no favors with their version of Never forget
Tractarian
This does not look like “crass corporate co-opting of 9/11”, it looks like a dumb-ass joke made by an underpaid, pimply-faced teenager whose recollection of 9/11 is roughly equivalent to your daughter’s.
Life goes on.
Elizabelle
Have to take a moment and remember the actual families and loved ones of those killed and injured on September 11, and all damaged by our resulting wars.
They are real, even while all this fucking fake patriotism and political remembrance is not.
September 11 has been co-opted. It stands for a war we did not need to fight, and people we did not need to lose. And a generation or two whose prospects will never be as bright (save for the wealthiest among them). Untold suffering in the Middle East.
A huge tragedy was turned into an even greater one by the worst president in American history, bar none, and the Republicans have turned even more shithouse crazy since.
9/11 is a parade of ugliness.
I am not surprised we have 9/11 fatigue. Or that it’s an occasion to profit.
9/11 is an even uglier mirror than the Kennedy assassination, because too many were Dallas in the aftermath.
schrodinger's cat
@Roger Moore: Oh and don’t forget those flags on the lapel pins.
Elizabelle
@Bubblegum Tate:
Whoa.
That’s Captain Wee Too Low (Asiana crash) territory.
Pray it’s hackers.
geg6
@dan:
Seriously. I wouldn’t mind it so much if any of the people posting about remembering 9/11 had any sort of connection to 9/11, even a tangential one like having served in Afghanistan or Iraq. But not a single person who posted on my timeline about it has any connection to it. Drives me crazy because I know two people who died that day and many soldiers who served and none of them or the families that I know who lost loved ones are posting anything. It’s ghoulish, AFAIC.
@flukebucket:
This, too. I had no idea what it was about and thought why didn’t I hear about a million Muslim march? Then I googled and found an article from HuffPo from months ago about how this is all some discredited fringe American Muslim group that has no followers. My stupid older sister posted about this stupid biker thing (along with about a dozen other FB “friends”) and I went and had a bit of a rant on her page. Finally, I posted the link to HuffPo and she was horrified that she was cheering on a bike rally based on a racist fantasy. Told her that would teach her to read the shit she posts and likes.
geg6
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
I’m totally stealing that. For real, in case you were actually kidding.
kindness
I remember when JFK was assasinated. I didn’t understand it. I was in Kindergarden and I remember all the adults were crying and we got sent home from school early that day. And the only thing on TV for the next several weeks was a dull (black & white mind you, no color tv yet then) funeral. How many times I saw JFK’s little son salute that hearse I can’t say. So I guess I can relate to your daughter.
Some of us are Boomers ya know.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: I remember how genuinely shocked everyone was and wanted to do something, anything to help.
Anya
I was 13 years old when 9/11 happened, and I feel the same way as your Betty’s daughter. I am not being callous or indifferent to the suffering of the families but I can live without the 9/11 porn. I also resent the assholes who use 9/11 and turned it into kill the browns.
geg6
@kindness:
Hey, me too! Except we only had half-day kindergarten because, well, because I’m a Boomer (thought I prefer Gen Jones) there were too many kids in the kindergarten class to have full-day. I was getting ready to catch the bus and my mom suddenly burst into tears and wouldn’t let me go to school. Older brothers and sisters were sent home though.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bill E Pilgrim: Oh SNAP.
Gene108
2013 is to 1980 as 1980 is to 1947
Or
2013 is to 2001 as 2001 is to 1989
In other words time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
Jebediah
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Well, to be fair to Bush, how could he possibly have known that bin Laden was determined to strike on US soil?
Anya
@Elizabelle:
This is why it’s extremely offensive, not to mention short sided when so called progressives compare Barack Obama to Bush. It minimizes Bush’s crimes and wrongdoings.
WaterGIrl
@Bill E Pilgrim: You are so right. I must be a bad person because I laughed out loud when I went back and looked at the muffin sign.
Elizabelle
@schrodinger’s cat:
I remember the generosity and concern.
I remember how it got coopted and superseded, too, and it was “support the troops or you’re unAmerican.”
joes527
@schrodinger’s cat: Yeah. This was only a joke because it captured exactly what you are talking about.
The Onion’s post 9/11 issue (the Holy Fucking Shit issue) has got to be the best it (or any web site) has ever done.
Ben Cisco
@Betty Cracker: True.@Big R: Aw, Jeez…
Belafon
@Jebediah: lol.
RandomMonster
Ugh. The number of 9/11 posts on Facebook is just too much. If I see one more flag-Photoshopped-onto-something-else I’ll platz.
Chris
@HR Progressive:
Exactly. I was in middle school on 9/11 and after growing up in a decade defined by the reaction to it, “jaded” is exactly the right word for it.
Maybe if the response to 9/11 hadn’t involved a massive, tens of thousands of people sized war crime, the commemoration would mean more to me. But it was, and it wasn’t.
Maybe if there had been an actual patriotic revival, in the “pull together, sacrifice for the common good, and remember we’re in this together” sense that I was always told happened after Pearl Harbor, the commemoration would mean more to me. Instead, Bush told us to go shopping, put all our “efforts” on the national credit card, and called us traitors and cowards if we didn’t vote for him. So it doesn’t.
The memory of 9/11 is far too tainted by the seven years that followed it.
BruceFromOhio
Hate this day. Those fucking criminals wanted to be remembered, and Gaia save me, that’s exactly what the fuck we’re doing to ourselves. I’m with Rosalita, it’s okay to remember it quietly. Plus, its my friends’ birthday, and what should be a happy, joyous occasion is instead a re-re-re-re-rerun of a day I’d rather not remember in prime time.
Villago Delenda Est
@shawn:
These people need to be crucified. Or at least cruciated.
schrodinger's cat
@Villago Delenda Est: Agreed, I hate enforced religion.
MikeJ
@Villago Delenda Est: It’s crucia tus, not crucia to.
Gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
I was dropping my car off at the dealership to get something looked at.
I went to work to make sure a coworker would follow me there so I did not have to wait for the dealers shuttle to drop me back at the office.
Another coworker was coming in and said a plne hit the WTC. I figured it was small plane that had an accident.
Man at the dealership said it was a commercial plane that hit the WTC.
I went back to get my car in the afternoon. They did not charge to look at it.
Something bigger had just happened that made everyday things small in comparison.
Bush&Co squandered that comradery.
patroclus
@Big R: I feel so sorry for you. And thank you for your service!
StringOnAStick
I had an email buddy that I’d never met and was only slightly acquainted with who died on 9/11; I cried when I realized that he was in that first building. I cried because I knew someone, I cried because a lot of people knew someone who wasn’t going to come home that night, and I cried because I knew the cry for revenge was going to be loud, and it was going to be fulfilled, good and hard, by the neocons.
As the months passed I cried because it was so goddamned obvious that Bush/Cheney were co-opting those deaths to get their war on, and because it was so obviously a mistake and yet the media and half the public went along with it. At the time it boggled me, and now all the maudlin flag-waving by the people who were more than happy to go to war with the country of PNAC’s choosing just offends the hell out of me. Jaded and cynical about 9/11? Yep.
schrodinger's cat
@Gene108: When I first heard about it, I thought it was some small plane and that is was an accident.
BBA
The World Trade Center Hotel, next door to the towers, was a Marriott. I don’t know if this makes it better or worse.
James E. Powell
@Chris:
Maybe if there had been an actual patriotic revival, in the “pull together, sacrifice for the common good, and remember we’re in this together” sense that I was always told happened after Pearl Harbor, the commemoration would mean more to me.
It was actually worse than Bush telling everyone to go shopping. The Bush/Cheney Junta used the 9/11 terrorist attacks with brutal efficiency to demonize Democrats, divide the country into “patriots v. traitors,” and to justify all kinds of things having nothing whatever to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism. And the whole of the corporate press/media and most of the Democratic Party “leadership” went right along with all of it. See, e.g., Gephardt in the Rose Garden. The whole thing made me sick and still does when I think about it.
Seanly
I think the $9.11 greens fee special ($19.11 with a cart!) posted by Wonkette a few days ago takes the cake. The golf course starting getting arson & death threats and decided to not open for today.
Ted & Hellen
Your kid is a brat.
Historically speaking, 9/11 was yesterday. Maybe someone should tell her that.
Villago Delenda Est
@MikeJ:
I was thinking Bellatrix Lestrange and a wand. “Crucio!“
D.N. Nation
Age note: I’m 30. 9/11 happened a few weeks into my first semester of college.
9/11 memorializing, and the removal of the event from its context, had become ridiculous enough to ignore when it comes from the hoi polloi (our media is another thing entirely), but as my friends grow older and start having children, it’s gotten plain ghastly. Every other post is talking about where they were on that day and how sad it still is but how happy they are now to have grown older with a lovely spouse and adorable children and here’s a picture!, and on and on and on. Even people I truly like and respect and who should plain no better are doing this. I can only hope that their children Forget 9/11(TM), at least the absurd trappings of it. The lessons of the decade + that followed, though? I hope we can teach them to remember that.
scav
Watching a woman take time out from the national moment of silence to scream at a passing arab immigrant that he didn’t understand being the victim of terrorism was pretty iconic for me. (And even at the time I was expecting and prepared for the self-indulgent. Total media blackout for months.)
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Ted & Hellen: Your dogs are stupid and ugly*.
*But yer kids are pretty hot.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ted & Hellen:
You really are an obnoxious, unthinking asshole on a 24/7 basis, aren’t you.
By cosmic standards, civilization on this planet started 5 minutes ago.
Sly
Tell her that her teachers like it even less, if for different reasons.
Villago Delenda Est
My parents were both in their late teens/early 20’s when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
I asked them, in 2005 or so, if people reacted (back in the 40’s) on December 7th the way people were reacting (in the oughts) to September 11th.
They both sadly shook their heads and said ‘no’.
Today is The Wallow.
srv
Maybe the Marriott will have Freedom Fries for dinner.
scav
@Villago Delenda Est: It’s all he’s got going for him. Work with your strengths.
Villago Delenda Est
@schrodinger’s cat:
My reaction as well.
Hal
@RandomMonster:
But if they don’t post that eagle you’ll forget all about 911. I just love that so many random people think they are the keeper of the memory of 911 when they watched the events unfold on tv pretty much like almost everyone else in the country.
Villago Delenda Est
@MikeJ:
On second thought, I see what you did there…
Ted & Hellen
@Mudge:
Soonergrunt goes pre-Postal on here when one mentions how utterly unprepared the military was on 9/11, especially the air force which in all its awesome splendor sent jets east over the Atlantic to intercept planes coming from the west.
Don’t ask any questions though. That’s not allowed either. If you do, wise people here say wise things like “troof” and “derp.”
Oh well, maybe I’ll ask anyway: Where was the military response on 9/11?
raven
@Villago Delenda Est: My old man was standing in front of the San Diego YMCA when the broadcast hit and they were all told to get back to their ships. He did and they shoved off the next day. He knew what day it was.
Svensker
@Bubblegum Tate:
Oh my God.
I still just can’t…
My hub was in lower Manhattan and I didn’t know for hours whether he was alive or dead, we were right across the river and our town lost more people than any other spot in NJ, a friend was watching folks jump out of an adjacent building, we know five families who lost loved ones, a friend was a cameraman for CBS and he would come home to NJ every night and go to church and pray to wipe out the images from his brain. Still, we were peripheral to the horror compared to a lot of people.
And yet I’ve got mild PTSD from it. So my (mostly winger) family and friends who live in Arizona or Washington State post all this patriotic crap and it upsets me. I asked one of them who had posted a really awful image on FB to take it down — she said she “wanted to remember.” I told her people who were there would never forget and they didn’t need crappy images once a year to remember it by.
It was an awful day. Worse things have happened in the world, many of them perpetrated by us. If we were learning the right lesson from the day, then good. Otherwise, pray quietly (or whatever, haters) for those who died or suffered, and move on.
GregB
If we don’t offer free coffee and mini muffins for a half an hour the terrorists will win.
Ted & Hellen
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader:
Well, one of them is not terribly attractive, but they’re both rescues so we overlook that.
Yes, my kids are hot. They’re legal too, so feel free to continue stalking my FB page. Anything beyond that will be met with restraining orders.
Ted & Hellen
@Villago Delenda Est:
You’re projecting. Thus into the tumbrels with you! You don’t mention those anymore…
I guarantee you I’m far from the only one here thinking the kid and those like her need to be smacked.
Glad to know you see 9/11 as historically unimportant. Explains a lot of other things about your babblings here.
Ted & Hellen
@Villago Delenda Est:
YOU ASSHOLE.
How obnoxious and narcissistic of you to reminisce about your whereabouts on 9/11!!!!!!
Quit fucking wallowing, douche bag!
Oh boo hoo….
Ted & Hellen
Oh my god, T&H is trashing the thread, just coming in here and trashing the place, and IT’S NOT HIS THREAD!
Redshift
@Ridnik Chrome:
I did and I don’t. None of this is about “respect” for the people who were killed (well, almost none.) “Never forget” is for people who can forget.
The most sickening thing about all of this “commemoration” is that the things that aren’t included in “never forget” are the incompetence and malice that let it happen, and the awful things that happened in our country using it as justification.
Thoughtcrime
Glenn Greenwald is honoring the day by getting in bed with the Oathkeepers:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42504_Why_Is_Glenn_Greenwald_Promoting_an_Extreme_Right_Wing_Militia/comments/#ctop
[…Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
A coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials place huge pro-Snowden ad in Metro http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/24/oath-keepers-place-massive-pro-snowden-a …
Who is this “coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials” Greenwald is promoting?
It’s the “Oathkeepers,” one of the most extreme right wing militia groups in the US, and one of many offshoots of the Patriot movement, with numerous ties to white nationalist and xenophobic anti-immigrant groups. Their founder, Stewart Rhodes, believes Barack Obama is plotting to disarm American citizens and turn US cities into “giant concentration camps.” He explained the goals of the group like this:
“We say if the American people decide it’s time for a revolution, we’ll fight with you.”…]
I like this comment:
“When you only have 140 characters to work with, why would he use ‘A coalition of current and former military, police, and other public officials’ instead of ‘the Oathkeepers’?
I suspect it was not because he thought people would not recognize the name. More likely he thought people would recognize the name.”
different-church-lady
In a way your teenager is kind of right: Sept. 11 should be commemorated with a minute of very solemn silence, and then going about our business without any other mention of it at all.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ted & Hellen:
You need to be smacked. With a serious clue-by-four.
Repeatedly.
mai naem
I knew a woman who got married on Pearl Harbor Day. They lived in a small town in Nebraska and had to travel to the big city to get married. It was a very small courthouse wedding – basically them, the living parents and a couple of siblings. They said they heard Roosevelt’s address at some point, but everything had been planned so they just went ahead and got married.
MikeJ
@different-church-lady:
If we could find something for October 11 we could have a whole fall run off moments of silence on the elevenses.
Villago Delenda Est
@Thoughtcrime:
Greenwald is now, officially, in bed with the fascist enemy.
different-church-lady
@Ted & Hellen: So… being a gigantic asshole all the time, without any real need for it… does that pay well?
eemom
@Redshift:
Yup. A FB friend who REALLY ought to know better (another mutual classmate) put this “we’re still an AWESOME nation” shit up this morning and I just wanted to slap him.
Worse, he mixed it up with a pic of his kids and 93 year old mother, so I’d have looked like a jerk if I called him on it. Schmuck.
Jebediah
@Svensker:
My brother was living and working in Manhattan at the time, and my wife and I had an awful time trying to get hold of him. My youngest brother had died two years previous and I didn’t think I could handle losing both my younger brothers. It turned out he was safe, but yeah – I don’t need stupid facebook posts to remember.
Villago Delenda Est
@Redshift:
This this THIS.
It’s bad enough that we fell, so far, so quickly. But to learn nothing from the fall…well, that is truly a sin.
Ted & Hellen
@Villago Delenda Est:
Ah.
More violent imagery. You’ve never done that before. Not.
Ted & Hellen
@different-church-lady:
You tell me. You out-comment me ten to one here.
Mike in NC
@Roger Moore: After 9/11/2001 a whole lot of people felt the need to put flagpoles on the roofs of their damn cars, and if 1 wasn’t enough, some would fly 3 or 4 of them. Soon enough some enterprising individuals were selling kits especially designed for this and advertising them in various magazines.
From time to time you still see them, although lately football team flags seem to be more popular.
JGabriel
I was at a Cisco conference on the 31st floor of the Madison Square Garden building, in a room with a southern wall that was all window from the waist up. I watched the planes fly into the buildings as it happened.
I would give almost anything to have not seen it live like that.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ted & Hellen:
Because appealing to your reason is as futile as it is with any teatard.
They only register things in their lizard brains.
As is true with you.
pat
And the stupidity and incompetence continued as the rescuers spent WEEKS working on the rubble without adequate respirators to protect them from the toxic dust. More firefighters have died since then than died on that day.
And I totally forget where I just read that. Could have been right here on good ol’ BJ.
Mike in NC
9/11 really is the most favorite day of the year for our pseudo-conservatives, right after St Reagan’s Birthday and Benghazi Day.
Chris
@different-church-lady:
That’s how my high school (which wasn’t even American, but was in America) did it. It was fine with me.
Is it just my memory or have the commemerations actually gotten more obnoxiously in your face rather than less as the years go by? Maybe it’s just that they increasingly stand out as the world changes and tries to move on, or maybe it’s because there wasn’t as much of a social media scene immediately after 9/11, but that’s my impression.
Ted & Hellen
@Villago Delenda Est:
So why don’t you pressure your (fucking!) president to do so, along with other nationally prominent Dems, instead of kissing the GWB/Cheney ass and protecting them from the consequences of their criminal negligence?
The most valuable thing to have come from even a failed impeachment prosecution against GWB would have been the airing of dirty 9/11 laundry, and subsequent corrective activity.
But we can’t have that because something.
Thoughtcrime
@Villago Delenda Est:
“Fashion” ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA27aQZCQMk We are the goon squad and we’re coming to town.
or
“All The Young Dude(bro)s” ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rajof9Qigos All the young dudes carry the news.
pat
And the fact that a golf course that puts up some insensitive “special” on this day gets arson and death threats for it….. I’m speechless.
JGabriel
@Redshift:
Yep.
Never forget? I wish I could.
Ted & Hellen
@Villago Delenda Est:
To the tumbrels with you, troll.
KXB
I was living in DC at the time. I remember the weather was a perfect autumn day. I was a student at GW’s business school, and also an employee there. I worked in a small office, by myself, turned on my computer, went to Yahoo.com, and saw a headline about a plane hitting WTC. I then turned on my radio to NPR to get some more news. Since my dad lived in NY, although he did not work in Manhattan, I called him at his office. He told me that he heard about a plane hitting the Pentagon. I did not know that at the time, and I told him as such. At that very moment, NPR reported the attack on the Pentagon.
I was not sure what to do. I went to the student center, and watched for awhile on TV, while the towers were still standing. But I felt wrong just sitting there, watching. So, I went back to my small office, kept the radio on, and starting calling relative around the country. One of my cousins was living in Pittsburgh at the time. Once I heard about United 93, I called her up, and she told me that one of the towers completely collapsed. I was incredulous – something that size could not just collapse. But she kept exclaiming, “I am telling you – it is completely gone!” When I called my brother on the West Coast, he was driving to work, and had not heard the news. He was all cheery, “What’s going on, bro?!” The moment I told him what happened, he got all serious. I told him our parents were OK, I was OK, and I would keep him posted.
I ran back to the student center. The room was filled with dozens of people, but not a sound aside from the giant TV. Feeling sick to my stomach. Meanwhile, the streets of Foggy Bottom were bumper to bumper with cars, filled with people trying to get home. Drivers were honking their horns. I stayed on campus until mid-afternoon. I cannot remember if I took the Metro home, or walked the 1.5 miles because I was worried about a subway bomber. I do remember sleeping with the TV on all night.
With 12 years gone by, that terrible day still lingers, when I actively think about it on the anniversary. The rest of the year, I go about my day, with its many frustrations, disappointments, and little pleasures. I take comfort in the fact that our national bloodlust has subsided, that we are skeptical of going to war, even against a guy who actually used WMD versus someone who was rumored to have them.
SiubhanDuinne
@MikeJ:
There must be something useful in here.
Mike in NC
@Thoughtcrime: I thought the Oathkeepers were a bunch of hyper-evangelical but relatively harmless God-botherers who met in stadiums to cheer the Baby Jebus. Is there another group by that name running around in the woods with guns?
Davis X. Machina
I think it’s perfectly logical for a country exposed to the dramatic application of weaponized mean-and-crazy to resolve that it will never, ever, be caught on the wrong side of a mean-and-crazy gap again.
And we haven’t. We’ve been turning our the mean-and-crazy with Stakhanovite gusto ever since.
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
Those are the Promise Keepers, and they’re every bit as loathesome.
MikeJ
@Mike in NC: You’re think of the Promise Keepers.
Davis X. Machina
@Mike in NC: Promise Keepers.
piratedan
@Mike in NC: nah…these guys are the ones who “refuse” to obey “unconstitutional” commands…. thing is, they get to decide what is and isn’t Unconstitutional… naturally…. also some nice neo-confederate stuff in their 10 point manifesto…. I refuse to give it a click or promo, but as always, google is your friend if you’re curious
gbear
I have to make at least one posting on facebook on 9/11 because it’s the birthday of the spouse of one of my oldest friends. I posted it on the site he set up under the name of his seeing eye dog, Paddy.
I also posted a comment on someone else’s 9/11 remembrance saying I laughed when I first heard the news about a plane crashing into the WWTs because I thought it was funny that someone in a small plane could be so bad a pilot as to hit such a large target.
I worked in a government building directly across the street from the MN state capitol, so once we knew what was going on, we weren’t laughing. We were looking at our capitol dome and wondering if there was an airplane on the way.
Thoughtcrime
@Mike in NC:
Mike,
Try these “Oathkeepers”:
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2009/03/03/declaration-of-orders-we-will-not-obey/
raven
I see dickhead is dominating another thread.
Thoughtcrime
If this universe had a sense of ironic justice, on this day, the anniversary of 9/11, Darth Cheney would go hunting in Florida with George Zimmerman.
Amir Khalid
Living as I do on the other side of the planet, I’m not exposed to the humbug and the inappropriate “patriotic” preening that you guys rightly find so embarrassing when this anniversary comes around. As I remember, America didn’t get anywhere near this obsessed when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building only five years before. But then the Clinton administration didn’t play up that incident to gin up support for any wars.
Thunderbird
@gbear: I remember having a similar reaction when I saw the breaking news on CNN’s website when I got back to my dorm room after breakfast, and turned on the TV. And then five minutes later, the second plane hit.
Chyron HR
You can take the farm boy out of Kansas, but you can’t take the Kansas out of the farm boy.
PopeRatzo
@flukebucket: I didn’t hear nothing from the Anti-Muslin Trike Force. Are they still doing their thing in DC today?
Jane2
@different-church-lady: Exactly. My Facebook feed is littered with pictures of eagles, soldiers, flags, stylized towers (and sometimes all combined into one picture). It was a terrible thing, but so were the things that criminals like Cheney used to perpetrate more terrible things.
James Parente
@Ted & Hellen: Dear Ted & Hellen, you truly are a monumental asshole. I lost people on this horrible day. You are a disgusting individual who enjoys wallowing in nasty, ill-informed, meanspirited B.S. I really wish that your spleen, which you so enjoy smearing in other’s faces, tries to leave your body through some orifice, other than your mouth.
hells littlest angel
The proper way to commemorate 9/11 is with decaf soy-milk mochaccinos and anise biscotti.
Pococurante
@Villago Delenda Est:
So the day after Pearl Harbor onward there was no explosion of nationalistic jingoism, no concerted government media blitz to gin up support, no….
oh that was sarcasm. /apologies
gogol's wife
@James Parente:
I usually adhere to don’t feed the troll, but that was a good one.
Trollhattan
Hey everybody, we have a late entry from The Donald his ownself.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/377753834954981376
Take that, losers.
different-church-lady
@Ted & Hellen: Merely commenting is being an asshole?
[makes note]
different-church-lady
@pat: You gotta leverage stupidity if you want to get anywhere in this world.
nellcote
Remembering Sept.11 and the first responders…remember when the goopers in congress refused to fund health care for those same first responders? Remember when Ann Colter called the widows “fame whores”?
Villago Delenda Est
@Pococurante:
Well, the problem was, the US actually went after the enemy that attacked, not some other country that had nothing to do with it.
It would be like using Pearl Harbor as justification to invade Brazil. Makes all sorts of sense.
It’s a sad commentary on contemporary America that so many went along with that rationale for Iraq and even after all the revelations about the propaganda build up, still think that invading Iraq was going after those responsible for September 11th.
That, and the maudlin crap that continues to this day.
Fuck Tom Brokaw, but at least the “Greatest Generation” behaved with some decorum when it came to remembering “their Pearl Harbor”.
Thoughtcrime
@piratedan:
One of Glenn’s friends:
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2010/06/09/man-with-napalm-bomb-is-latest-oath-keeper-to-face-trial/
Villago Delenda Est
@nellcote:
Ann Coulter also publically advocated genocide and religious conversion at gun point.
Her greatest regret in life is that she was born decades too late to be the Bitch of Buchenwald.
different-church-lady
@Thoughtcrime: It really is remarkable how a man with a mind as brilliant and intellectually consistent as GG’s keeps accidentally aligning himself with some of the most scum-covered bottom-feeding cretins on the planet, I must say. Snake bitten, to be sure.
Chris
@StringOnAStick:
I don’t know anyone who died and I was too young to really have a political “side” on 9/11 (actually believed at the time all the “politics stops at the water’s edge” stuff… boy, did the next few years teach me otherwise), two reasons why the politicization didn’t offend me on quite as personal a level…
… But damn if I didn’t have that exact visceral reaction a year ago after the Benghazi attack. Didn’t lose anyone in that one either, but I’m an FSO brat whose parent has done several tours in places exactly like that (had a thing for postwar zones, “postwar” as in “right after major combat operations are over, but long before the area’s actually safe and stable”) and, if not for retirement, I could totally have seen getting sent there. I’ve never been as enraged at a conservative (and yes, I know how strong a claim that is) as I was to see Mitt Romney the next morning so happy that he literally (in the literal sense of “literally”) couldn’t keep the smirk off his face as he paraded the corpses through the media – because just like the Bush admin after 9/11, all he could think of was “this just saved my political career.” He’s still one of the few people I sincerely don’t think I could be in the same room as without smashing his face to a pulp with the bluntest object in reach.
Mike in NC
Thanks for the clarification about the Promise Keepers. I once had one working for me as an Assistant Training Officer, and when he got excited or ticked off he’d exclaim “Golly gee!”, which the rest of us found sort of amusing.
different-church-lady
Holy christ… someone is going to get Twitterbombed!
Villago Delenda Est
@Mike in NC:
The eyerolls alone would have probably powered the entire Northeast.
Chris
@nellcote:
Remember when the right wing’s two biggest religious activists (Falwell and Robertson) were on the TV that very night, gloating that God had punished New York for having so many fagz and feminists?
Remember in 2010 when the mosque controversy came up and the polls in Lower Manhattan (the area that was actually attacked and where the mosque was actually being built) showed that they were fine with it, but people in Bumblefuck, Kentucky thought it was incumbent on them to register their offense?
Remember in the run up to the Iraq war when one of the victims’ relatives was on Bill O’Reilly and it turned out he actually wasn’t comfortable with his relative’s dead corpse being dragged through the streets in defense of a dubious war, so Bill just dismissed him and ordered his mike cut?
Yeah, that. If there’s one group in America whose feelings we cared even less about than the Muslim community in the wake of 9/11, it’s the people who actually lost someone. Odd, that.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
At least the left wing yahoos of 1930s Germany had a lame rationalization for it – “Nach Hitler, uns.”
Greenie doesn’t seem to even have that.
Davis X. Machina
@Chris:
Howard Dean is from Vermont, not Kentucky.
Villago Delenda Est
@Davis X. Machina:
Also, I have it on good authority that Bumfuck is in Egypt, not Kentucky.
On edit: Oh, Bumblefuck, Kentucky. That’s very different. Never mind.
opiejeanne
@SiubhanDuinne: no, Marriott charges for everything. I try to avoid them.
Ted & Hellen
@James Parente:
You’re a tool. Off you fuck.
Ted & Hellen
@Villago Delenda Est:
You know, your oft-expressed loathing for rudeness and vile language depends entirely upon, not what is actually written or said, but at whom it’s aimed.
Why don’t you acknowledge that when you pretend to be offended at my comments, mmmkay?
Ted & Hellen
@different-church-lady:
Your president hangs with George W Bush at the White House and slobbered over him at the dedication of his gargantuan monument to douche baggery in Dallas.
If you want to pretend to be offended at who public figures align themselves with, why don’t you start with people who actually hold power?
Liquid
I would have contributed sooner but I was too busy soaking up the rays —
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
9/11
9/11 who?
You said you’d never forget!!!1!
— Hardly original but it usually gets a laugh. Then there’s this as food-for-thought: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-weirdest-things-weve-learned-since-911/
Long Tooth
“Maybe this is a good thing”.
No “maybe” about it by my lights. It might even figure as the reason the human race has got as far as it has.
I was 8 years old when JKK was killed. When I got home from school I asked my mother and sister, both of whom were crying, if they heard that President Kennedy had been shot.
Damn, seeing that in print makes me aware of just how very stupid I was at that age.
Ripley
In the closet, right beside you.
Bex
@Ted & Hellen: The military response to 911 was in Afganistan and Iraq for all the good that did.
JoyfulA
@Mike in NC: We called those cars mounted with flags “the ambassadors.”
Citizen Scientist
@Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader: Uhm, great title for a country song?
Betty Cracker
@Long Tooth: You weren’t stupid; you were eight. There’s a difference.
Tehanu
@Chris:
What you said. I didn’t lose anybody; a friend’s son actually escaped from one of the towers; what I mourn is the sense of solidarity that sprang up so immediately, and that was then totally trashed by Bush/Cheney’s “go shopping” crapola. That by itself is enough to make me hope there is a hell for them to go to.
Tehanu
@Ted & Hellen:
What amuses me is that you obviously don’t realize that the guy who says “mmkay” in the movie is the jerk asshole that everybody hates.
Hugely
@Jebediah: this is exactly what I taught my family at dinner today
amy c
I don’t know if I’ve just managed to construct this magic Bubble of Non-Douches around my Facebook account, but I’ve not seen the nationalistic-bald-eagle-U-S-A stuff at all this year. I saw one brief “where were you on 9/11?” post, one link to a really well-written article by a WTC survivor, and a few friends encouraging people to participate in a 9/11 Day of Service project. (Which is a great idea and a far better thing to do than posting “Never Forget” next to a picture of a flag. We can’t undo the horrors of the Bush Era. We can at least bring something positive to the day.)
The vast majority of my FB friends, though, didn’t say anything about the day. Maybe it’s just this way inside my bubble.
I don’t have any claim to particular sadness; I lost nobody, I was not in range of debris, etc. Still, for years afterward, I would briefly think of the attacks on beautiful, cloudless fall mornings. (We don’t get many of those where I live now, it is almost always cloudy, which makes them all the more striking.) I suspect that was pretty common, at least for those of us who lived in the Northeast on 9/11 and experienced the same pristine weather as NYC had that day. Just this reflexive instinct. It doesn’t happen anymore, though. A pretty fall morning is just a pretty fall morning now.
It’s not really forgetting. Until dementia gets me, I’ll remember the weirdness of seeing Boston evacuate en masse (we didn’t know if more attacks were coming) and the frustration of trying to get any page on the internet to work or call anyone on a cell phone. And that episode of Mad Men where the characters experience the JFK assassination was shockingly potent because now we Gen Xers had experienced a similar terrible thing.
But there has been….a fading. For sure. I don’t know if my 6 year old even knows about the attacks. Eventually he will talk about them in history class. He will be bored. Beautiful fall mornings will continue to be beautiful fall mornings.
goblue72
@Ted & Hellen: Show us on the doll where Obama touched you.
Boss
@Dickface: Oh, it’s such a contrarian, isn’t it. But that adds SO MUCH to the conversation.
THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE!
kindness
Wait a minute. Wasn’t 9/11 Obama’s fault?
cleos_mom
@Ted & Hellen
Yes, the kid is a brat, but remember, it grew up in a society that strongly disapproves of remembering anything much past last week, unless it takes place on some reality TV trashfest. And also remember, good parents *always* obey their children and assume that the children know best.
fidelio
@Amir Khalid:
McVeigh’s actions raised a lot of questions too many people in this country really don’t want to think about, just as Eric Rudolph’s did. So it’s into the memory hole for him, because taking a long hard look at ourselves is never high on people’s to-do lists.
Gb123
I was going through medical training for special forces when the towers fell. We were in EMT class when our commander came in to tell us that one jetliner had crashed into the towers and minutes later, another one crashed into the other tower. He told us. “Men, this what you are being trained for. This is what you are preparing for.” Everyone was shocked and silent. They let us out of class and we watched the disaster on a big screen in another room. We were let out early and I rushed home to my wife, because they were closing up Fort Bragg and locking everything down. When I got home to our little house, she was sitting in our living room crying. I sat next to her, watching the TV. We both knew this was going to change out lives forever in a way we never thought it would.
My first combat tour was Iraq. It has always been known to me that this decade would be our equivalent of the bright shining lie. It has been horrible to see what has happened to our country since those towers fell.
LanceThruster
9/11 is the litmus test.
So many of the things that reverberate to today are based on the unwillingness to demand full,
open and transparent investigations of the attack, the crime scene forensics,
and the apparent response failures. Anyone not in lockstep with the coming
“payback” was a traitor, and anyone questioning the official
narrative was a nutter. That the people so readily dismissing the skeptics, did
not heed to call themselves to demand what the commission itself determined;
that a proper investigation was needed to uncover the truth.
Remember, the alternate explanation to deride conspiracy, was the supposedly comforting
notion that incompetence, an unrelated type of criminality (the destruction of
evidence), the desire to cover your butt, and a string of bad luck and/or
remarkable coincidence, explained the seeming contradictions and that the right
enemy had been targeted anyway, so no time to navel gaze as we needed to get
our bloodbath up and running.
My recollection is somewhat shorter as to what I saw and what we lost. I live in
So Cal and commute to downtown LA, and have for over 20+ years. For *exactly* a
day and a half (the same amount of time the air stays smog free after a good
rain), the normally selfish and inattentive motorists drove in manner virtually
unseen before or since. Over that two day period, they actually showed noticeable
consideration and no longer drove oblivious to those around them, not caring
who they cut off or didn’t let in or honked at for going too slow, or not getting
out of the way fast enough…they treated the other drivers as fellow Americans
that were also possibly traumatized or numb and that the default position might
be that they would appreciate a random act of kindness from a stranger who
might just cut another person a break for no other reason than they thought the
anonymous person could use one.
And then, as if it never happened in the first place, it was over. That was how long it took
to revert back to type, and embrace dysfunction as normalcy.
And that’s how we got to where we are today.
There are some things in life that we can’t turn back the clock on, but tragically that
is true even on those things we could turn back the clock on. We’re just not
that smart or that caring, and I don’t think it’s overly pessimistic to say
that we never will be.
mere mortal
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Ah, but they did lose muffins in 2001. There was a Marriot in 3 World Trade Center, and it was destroyed when the towers fell.
Also, too, there is nothing crass or wrong about free muffins.