Trivialising murder
Posted on September 11, 2009
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Donald Douglas strikes a chord with this comment on the political exploitation of 9/11:
I admit, Rachel Maddow is infuriating. She basically spouts off netroots lies as fact and assumes she’s got some kind of wisdom from on high. It’s always pretty pathetic, but it’s especially bad to hear her attack Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Project with a load of distortions and untruths. Maddow claims 9-12 tea parties are politically exploiting September 11, 2001. The events, of course, are commemorations of freedom and protests against Democratic Party tryanny; but the left hates lliberty, so Maddow excoriates concerned citizens for standing up for American values…
Especially pay attention to the Maddow’s question to Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell at 4:20 minutes: “What’s the connection between disrupting the president during his speech about healthcare and the day after 9/11?” Professor Lacewell’s response is typically despicable, that the healthcare crisis, like September 11, is “similarly facing down our country,” and it’s a time to be “supporting our president regardless of ideology.”
This makes me sick, frankly.
Me too. I’ve no idea who Rachel Maddow is or Professor Harris-Lacewell, but I don’t think I care to know either of them anyway. Apart from anything else, where 9/11 is concerned, there is no tragedy to exploit. I’m reminded of Mark Steyn’s comment from 2006: 9/11 was not a shipwreck – it was an act of war.
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”
The whole article is worth reading again, but it’s no longer at the website of the Chicago Sun-Times. Kenneth Anderson has helpfully preserved a copy here.
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