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Steyn: Coverage of 9/11 anniversary was too wimpy
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"If 9/11 had really changed us, there'd be a 150-story building on the
site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial
in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve,
and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there's a
pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by
the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building
took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again,
but we don't. And we don't seem interested in asking why."
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn17.html#
Coverage of 9/11 anniversary was too wimpy
/September 17, 2006/
*BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST *
A lot of the 9/11 anniversary coverage struck me as distastefully
tasteful. On the morning of Sept. 12, I was pumping gas just off I-91 in
Vermont and picked up the Valley News. Its lead headline covered the
annual roll call of the dead -- or, as the alliterative editor put it,
"Litany of the Lost." That would be a grand entry for Litany of the
Lame, an anthology of all-time worst headlines. Sept. 11 wasn't a
shipwreck: The dead weren't "lost," they were murdered.
So I skipped that story. Underneath was something headlined "Half a
Decade Gone By, A Reporter Still Cannot Comprehend Why." Well, in that
case maybe you shouldn't be in the reporting business. After half a
decade, it's not that hard to "comprehend": Osama bin Laden issued a
declaration of war and then his agents carried out a big attack. He
talked the talk, his boys walked the walk. If you need to flesh it out a
bit, you could go to the library and look up a book.
But, of course, that's not what the headline means: Instead, it's
"incomprehensible" in the sense that, to persons of a certain mushily
"progressive" disposition, all such acts are "incomprehensible," all
violence is "senseless." Unfortunately, it made perfect sense to the
fellows who perpetrated it. Which is what that headline writer finds
hard to "comprehend" -- or, rather, doesn't wish to comprehend. The
piece itself was categorized as "Reflection" -- dread word. No
self-respecting newspaper should be running "reflections" anywhere
upfront of Section G Page 27, and certainly not on the front page. But
it has exactly the kind of self-regarding pseudo-sophistication the
American media love. The proper tone for 9/11 commemorations is to be
sad about all the dead -- "the lost" -- but in a very generalized
soft-focus way. Not a lot of specifics about the lost, and certainly not
too many quotes from those final phone calls from the passengers to
their families, like Peter Hanson's last words before Flight 175 hit the
World Trade Center: "Don't worry, Dad. If it happens, it will be very
fast." That might risk getting readers worked up, especially if they see
the flight manifest:
"Peter Hanson, Massachusetts
"Susan Hanson, Massachusetts
"Christine Hanson, 2, Massachusetts"
No, best to stick to a limpidly fey, tastefully mopey, enervatedly
passive prose style that suggests nothing very much can be done about
the incomprehensible lost. This tasteful passivity is the default mode
of the age: Five years ago it was striking, even in the immediate
aftermath, how many radio and TV trailers for blood drives and other
relief efforts could only bring themselves over the soupy music track to
refer vaguely to "the tragic events," as if any formulation more robust
might prove controversial.
Passivity is far slyer and more lethal than rabid Bush hatred. Say what
you like about the left-wing kooks but they can still get a good hate
on. Sure, they hate Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Halliburton and Fox
News and Rush Limbaugh rather than Saddam and the jihadists, but at
least they can still muster primal emotions. Every morning I wake up to
a gazillion e-mails from fellows wishing me ill, usually beginning by
calling me a "chicken hawk" followed by a generous smattering of words I
can only print here peppered with asterisks, and usually ending with
pledges to come round and shove various items in a particular part of my
anatomy. There's so much shipping scheduled to go up there I ought to
get Dubai Ports World in to run it.
The foaming leftie routine seems to be a tough sell to a general
audience. I see that, a mere three weeks after I guest-hosted for Rush,
the widely acclaimed and even more widely unlistened-to Air America is
going belly up. Coincidence? You be the judge. But I doubt the "liberal"
radio network would be kaput if anti-Bush fever were about to sweep the
Democrats to power this November. I think I said a few months back that
the Dems would be waking up to their usual biennial Wednesday morning
after the Tuesday night before, and I'll stick with that.
But there's more to the national discourse than party politics. And,
whoever wins or loses, the cult of feebly tasteful passivity rolls on
regardless. As part of National Review's fifth anniversary observances,
James Lileks wrote the following:
"If 9/11 had really changed us, there'd be a 150-story building on the
site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial
in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve,
and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there's a
pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by
the National Association of Grief Counselors. The Empire State Building
took 18 months to build. During the Depression. We could do that again,
but we don't. And we don't seem interested in asking why."
Ray Nagin, New Orleans' Mayor Culpa, is a buffoon but he nevertheless
had a point when he scoffed at the ongoing hole in the ground in Lower
Manhattan. And whatever fills it is never going to include those "stern
stone eagles." The best we can hope for is that the Saudi-funded Islamic
Outreach Center will only take up a third of the site. But in our hearts
we know whatever memorial eventually stands on the spot will be rubbish
-- tasteful rubbish, but rubbish all the same. Last year, I criticized
the Flight 93 memorial, the "Crescent of Embrace," whose very title is a
parodic masterpiece of note-perfect generically effete huggy-weepy
blather. And in return I received a ton of protests pointing out that
the families of the Flight 93 heroes had "approved" the design. All that
demonstrates, I think, is how thoroughly constrained our society is
within its own crescent of embrace: The cult of passivity has insinuated
itself deep into our bones. Behind those "IMAGINE PEACE" stickers lies a
terrible failure to imagine.
At what point does a society become simply too genteel to wage war?
We're like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who covered up the legs of
their pianos. Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic
music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace. We fight
tastefully, too. Last week one of America's unmanned drones could have
killed 200 Taliban big shots but they were attending a funeral and we
apparently have a policy of not killing anybody near cemeteries out of
sensitivity. So even our unmanned drones are obliged to behave with
sensitivity. But then, these days the very soundtrack to our society is,
so to speak, an unmanned drone.
/C Mark Steyn 2006/
*Copyright C Mark Steyn, 2006*
_________________
"May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't." -General George S. Patton
Psalm 82-8: Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You inherit all the nations.
