Look: I am eager to learn stuff I don't know--which requires actively courting and posting smart disagreement.

But as you will understand, I don't like to post things that mischaracterize and are aimed to mislead.

-- Brad Delong

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Sunday, September 11, 2011

September 11 Thoughts

I'm a patriotic guy - a real patriot who actually loves his country knowing full well that it is full of flaws and imperfections, not a phony who places some partisan ideal above the good of the country - as you have seen for several years now from the Repugnicant party, nor a flag-waving purblind zealot.  So I wonder about how my countrymen react on this day. 

I'm not much of a fan of the Zits cartoon, but if I could have embedded today's entry here I would have.  It's thoughtful, poignant, and can interpreted in a variety of ways.  SoBe looks at 9/11 in a way that would not have occurred to me, but I think she gets it about right.

Yes it was a tragedy.  Maybe even a day that will long live in infamy.  And we shouldn't forget.  Not that anyone really can.  But we take too many of the wrong messages from the event, and our country's misbegotten reactions to it.  I will leave pondering those things as an exercise for the interested reader.

And we are wallowing in 9/11-itis.  Every sports event of the weekend had some ceremonial remembrance.  It's all over the newspapers and television.   I don't know how much of this is genuine, how much of it is knee-jerk hearding behavior, how much is exploitation, how much is sensationalism, and how much is cynical commercialism.  So I'm really torn about how to react.

But I don't think this wallowing is healthy.
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2 comments:

fried said...

I realize this is an old post, but it really caught my attention. I live in Manhattan, lived thru the day, lost one friend and cannot agree with you more. The saturation coverage was overkill, with politicians of every stripe looking to make points with their patriotic photo ops. Meanwhile, the first responders, many of them dying from cancer, keep getting shafted. This is the culture of victimization...and if we forget to wallow in 9/11, then we might question why, at the ten year mark, we are still in the sand boxes. And that would never do.

September 17, 2011 at 12:42 PM
Jazzbumpa said...

fried -

Welcome, and thank you for your thoughtful comment.

Please come back again.

Cheers!
JzB

September 17, 2011 at 12:46 PM

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