Thirteen Years After

I would be most remiss not to remember that day in September when the skies were filled with pillars of smoke where the New York City Twin Towers once stood before. It is still too early to make light of the event, but to be honest the day would have completely slipped by me hadn't I seen several mentions on facebook. Apparently, these casual onlookers weren't so distant as Frank Rich thought. Walter Sipser, one of the men in the photo, said they were all in "a profound state of shock and disbelief," as many were that day to see such a famous architectural icon go up in smoke. The photo by Thomas Hoepker just made them look distant. Even Hoepker seemed to question his own photo, not releasing it until five years later, when it became a "whipping postcard" for pundits and columnists alike looking to seize on anything to justify their moral outrage. It seems the moral of this photograph is be careful how you are pictured in front of a tragic event.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum is now open, and the new Freedom Tower nears completion. It would seem that we have reached some kind of closure on the event, but then Islamist extremism rears its ugly head again and all that moral outrage rises to the surface once more with everyone a critic of President Obama's reaction to the rise of ISIL, or ISIS, or whatever it calls itself. Fox has been flashing videos of George W. Bush telling us "I told you so," and the Republican House is in a huddle with Dick Cheney as to what the best counter plan is to that which the Obama administration finally unveiled this week. So, it seems we are right back to Ground Zero.

Fox & Friends pondered how hard would it be for Obama to ask Bush and Cheney for advise himself. These pundits seem to forget Bush's profound statement came "true" largely because he chose to take out his self-righteous indignation on Iraq in the first place. Even still, Obama did keep Robert Gates on board as Secretary of Defense to provide a bridge between the two administrations, and has been consulting the same military leaders as Bush and Cheney. I'm surprised Steve Doocy and company didn't blame Obama for 9/11. As it is, Obama is being blamed for a weak response to illegal immigration, which Rick Perry says has ISIS right at our back door.

Thirteen years later, I find myself pretty much in a similar state of shock and disbelief at how badly we botched the whole thing. As Al Gore said when the Bush administration chose to go to war in Iraq, we squandered the world's goodwill. We also squandered the world's trust, which Obama has had a very difficult time winning back. The sooner we put 9/11 behind us the better.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

TripplerSeptember 15, 2014 at 1:26 AM
ISIS, like al-Qaeda, would not be a blip on the screen if it had not been for Bush's treasonous war on Iraq. As for its current makeup, one need look no further than members of the CIA and army as shown here:

https://fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/10612554_1461030617504638_6220202092846192831_n.jpg?oh=cefb7a5d60e3a783c554f191004f873d&oe=54A27A76&__gda__=1419079933_4918b5d57c2cc864f755d556bc20b4e4

and then there's this:

http://moroccantimes.com/2014/07/nsa-documents-reveal-isis-leaderabu-bakr-al-baghdadi-trained-israeli-mossad/

Mossad, CIA, and US Army in the ranks of ISIS. And so many wondered where did the TRILLION dollars the USA wasted in traitor Bush's war go. Obviously the trillion went into building up the USA's enemies in order to insure perpetual war and perpetual war profits.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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