the rix mix

Channel surfing last weekend, I came upon some 9/11 documentaries & quickly moved on. We commemorate 9/11 in the New York area, quietly for the most part, but I don't think we like to revisit it. That day was local news, & local news for long afterward. Everyone here knows at least one person who knew someone who died, & everyone here knows someone who worked in or near the twin towers. It was personal. For weeks, local nightly news broadcasts had firefighter funerals, for months newspapers listed the names of the confirmed dead. Was anyone not traumatized? I thought I wasn't, until I realized low flying jets made me anxious. About a year passed before that reaction faded away. Afterward, we had a very real underlying anxiety about mass transit & suicide bombers, which the federal government encouraged in order to keep Bush in power. Many of us thought the steps taken to "secure" trains & subways were futile, as if the evil loonies were too stupid to find the exposed ports, railyards, & chemical storage tanks, or step on a train at a suburban station, or blow themselves up inside a shopping mall. A total police state couldn't prevent those. Just as cell phone cameras were becoming common, we were expected to refrain from taking photos of public spaces & buildings. It was getting screwy.

This year, we saw a kind of madness in Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. If this were the decades after the Civil War, we would've said Rudy was "waving the bloody shirt," a phrase I wish we could bring back & apply to any politician who, like Giuliani, climbs on the "True American Hero" pedestal. Some heroes win elections, some do not, most - if they survive their heroic acts - do not run for office at all. In the New York area, no politician since 9/11 has unseated another by waving it. 9/11 seems to have a different political significance away from New York City.

Labels: THE election