12 years ago on 9/11 I was there. Now I’m here.
I’ve published versions of this before on daily Kos, it’s done well. So well that people were nice enough to ask permission to send it to others. I welcome your doing that. This version is changed quite a bit.
I am only glad that this can now be (partially) in the past tense.
Everyone has a 9/11 story. I won’t bore you with mine. But I’ll just remind you all of the hundreds of non Americans who died at ground zero including 69 Brits, more than have ever been killed in any other terrorist atrocity, more than the 7/7 London tube bombings in 2005
NYC is a capital of the world. It belongs to the world. And our whole lifestyle, liberalism and internationalism were under attack. It was literally an attack on modern western secular values – and we all have a stake in them.
But while I can’t forget those 3,000 victims, the spiral of reaction and counter reaction has amplified those deaths many times over, all the victims of other Al Qaeda atrocities in Bali, Madrid, Baghdad, Lahore, Tanzania. And of course the civilians caught in the cross fire of counter-insurgency and invasion, hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I’m happy this morning, but I don’t feel like partying. I feel like breathing again…
It feels like a ten year nightmare might finally be over…
Once again John Stewart proves something that ever sane Al Giordano and our own sage Shaun Appleby have said:
Cable TV political shows on Comedy Central – The Daily Show and The Colbert report – have become far more relevant to the national political discourse than any host on MSNBC or even Fox, which has gone down the Glenn Beck rabbit hole in a manner that only increases the dysfunction inside the GOP.
Al Giordano – A Primer on the 2010 US House and Senate Elections The Field 1 Sep 10
Or as I said, in full Bardic emulation mode, perhaps we’ve reached that strange decadent point in our politics “when sooth sayers sound like fools, and only fools speak the truth.”
The obscene and inflammatory 9/11 commemoration promised by the ridiculous moustachioed demagogue Terry Jones (no, not the Monty Python guy) richly deserves the most withering satire your political wits are capable of.
I can’t view or embed Comedy Central videos in the UK (help Moosefather!), so hat tip for Bruinkid on DKOS for the transcript below the break….