You might have noticed the ad running here for
United 93. Says a lot, I think:
When America was attacked
They were the first to defend
HONOR THEM
...by paying $9.50 to watch a fictionalized account of 9/11. Alright, kids, pile into the SUV and Let's Roll!
Let's suppose for a moment that 9/11
wasn't a psychological operation perpetrated with the complicity of some elements of the so-called Government. It's a stretch, I know, but let's just suppose. Ruling out such a conspiracy (which would, after all, be so extraordinary in the annals of human experience that I'd hardly believe a televised confession by George W Bush himself), I have to marvel at the symbolic perfection of that day. Not only did we get the searing trauma of
two of the world's tallest buildings exploding into pyroclastic flow,
and a brazen strike at the heart of the sacred complex of military industry, but to top it off, in the one plane that failed to strike its target (likely the White House) we were provided with a model of patriotic response.
They were the first to defend. Honor them.
There's a lot of talk on this site about framing, but it seems to me that the concept of what this means is at something of an amateur level. We're an empire now, we create realities. In hoc signo vinces. I'm starting to believe that the Emperor (naked or not) is indeed a sort of god in his ability to create realities on the ground; which we might then analytically frame to our heart's impotent content.
From Let's Roll!, the paradigmatic response of heroic National Defense, we were led into Afghanistan, and onward - Christian soldiers - to the by-golly-the-President-ought-to-have-such-powers Iraqi War Resolution, and thus into quagmire of a generational War on Terror that was but a glint in PNAC's eye a few years earlier.
It's almost enough to make you think. But I suggest, being decent, rational, Americans, you honor them instead.