That anniversary is coming
Social issues, remember?
This morning NPR had Art Spiegelman on to talk about his first cartoon book since Maus. If you don't know what that means, start googling. Art, great name for a cartoonist, works with the New Yorker etc., and did the all black cover that appeared after the world trade centers fell where you could only see black until you looked really closely, and then you could see the outline of the towers. AAAAANYWAY, he was talking about how that anniversary was coming up, and on the day the towers fell he had to find his 9y/o son and 15 y/o daughter, and afterwards his head was all screwed up, and now he equates Osama and our buddy W as being equally ... inclined to incite terror.
his new book, with link to the interview, which was GOOD.
I know a guy, a sheriff actually, who is getting married on 9-11-04. There appears to be an epidemic of marriages occuring on that date, in fact, there was an article about it in the newspaper.
There also seems to be some issue with chronic health problems associated with 9-11-01.
I was not able to share in the "everyone remembers what they were doing when Kennedy was shot" phenomenon. Everybody remembers what they were doing when the planes crashed:
I was on my way to work in NoVA, listening to the local shock jock who had Ben Folds on. Ben Folds had just stopped playing and Elliot was babbling about something, only to be interrupted by Ben Folds with "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center." That was surreal. I have two sisters. At that time, one lived (and still does) in Brooklyn and worked in the shadow of the towers. The other was at Cornell and went TO the site to help with the rescue efforts. I worked down the street from the NOVA CIA headquarters, in sight of the pentagon (I actually responded to being told by a co-worker that the pentagon had been hit with a plane by laughing and ridiculing that we were in the most restricted airspace on earth. I turned around to see a plume of smoke out my office window and added... "but I could be wrong". My parents were freaking out. No one could get a phone call out consistently, no one knew what was going on. It was crazy.
Some countries-- Israel -- deal with terrorist events all the time. This was the biggest ever, and it seems to have been seared onto not only America's collective consciousness, but the whole world's. Too bad we squandered the goodwill attached to the aftermath.
9-11-01 is becoming an issue in the presidential campaigns, and the Republicans forced a vote on an anniversary resolution deliberately, and dishonestly, linking the event with the war in Iraq. Will we ever allow this to fade into memory below the surface? Will it ever stop being a social, political, economic, religious etc. tool? I open the floor to discussion.
This morning NPR had Art Spiegelman on to talk about his first cartoon book since Maus. If you don't know what that means, start googling. Art, great name for a cartoonist, works with the New Yorker etc., and did the all black cover that appeared after the world trade centers fell where you could only see black until you looked really closely, and then you could see the outline of the towers. AAAAANYWAY, he was talking about how that anniversary was coming up, and on the day the towers fell he had to find his 9y/o son and 15 y/o daughter, and afterwards his head was all screwed up, and now he equates Osama and our buddy W as being equally ... inclined to incite terror.
his new book, with link to the interview, which was GOOD.
I know a guy, a sheriff actually, who is getting married on 9-11-04. There appears to be an epidemic of marriages occuring on that date, in fact, there was an article about it in the newspaper.
There also seems to be some issue with chronic health problems associated with 9-11-01.
I was not able to share in the "everyone remembers what they were doing when Kennedy was shot" phenomenon. Everybody remembers what they were doing when the planes crashed:
I was on my way to work in NoVA, listening to the local shock jock who had Ben Folds on. Ben Folds had just stopped playing and Elliot was babbling about something, only to be interrupted by Ben Folds with "A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center." That was surreal. I have two sisters. At that time, one lived (and still does) in Brooklyn and worked in the shadow of the towers. The other was at Cornell and went TO the site to help with the rescue efforts. I worked down the street from the NOVA CIA headquarters, in sight of the pentagon (I actually responded to being told by a co-worker that the pentagon had been hit with a plane by laughing and ridiculing that we were in the most restricted airspace on earth. I turned around to see a plume of smoke out my office window and added... "but I could be wrong". My parents were freaking out. No one could get a phone call out consistently, no one knew what was going on. It was crazy.
Some countries-- Israel -- deal with terrorist events all the time. This was the biggest ever, and it seems to have been seared onto not only America's collective consciousness, but the whole world's. Too bad we squandered the goodwill attached to the aftermath.
9-11-01 is becoming an issue in the presidential campaigns, and the Republicans forced a vote on an anniversary resolution deliberately, and dishonestly, linking the event with the war in Iraq. Will we ever allow this to fade into memory below the surface? Will it ever stop being a social, political, economic, religious etc. tool? I open the floor to discussion.
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