TeeWee: "...and the two columns are positioned to represent the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Atop one column is a bronze eagle facing New York..."So now there are two bronze eagles facing in auspicious directions atop monuments in downtown Indy: One atop the noggin of Lady Victory on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument which faces south, towards the ashes of a Confederacy which had barely stopped smoldering when the monument was erected, and one on the 9/11 Memorial, which faces New York, where they have bronzed their craters like a pair of baby shoes.
Me: "It should have been a bronze B-52 facing Mecca."
I was also reminded that the monument features a poem by a Hoosier school teacher, entitled "One", in which the teacher fondly remembers the Wonderful Unity We All Experienced As Americans On That Day. (You know, before the nasty partisan GOP neocon teabagger racists ruined everything. I got an eerie feeling that she thought 3,000 corpses was a small price to pay for the sanctifying group hug of victimhood and the transcendent thrill of Caring A Lot.)
I'm not sure which America she was in ten years ago, but in the one where I was, by sunset, half of the country was wringing its hands and wondering "Why do they hate us so?" while the other half, like my boss at the time, was chewing up the scenery and calling for Arabs under glass.
27 comments:
I think I like your former boss.
Terry
That's the way I remember it to Tam. Shock. Why us. Anger. No real concept to the fact that people hat us for what we are. It's hard to prove you have a better system to rule or enslave other's while we are here, even if our own goverment pull's some stupid stunt's itself.
Tam, thanx for the memory shuffle. At work the next day I got a call that said,"would you like to volunteer to deploy" what a hoot.
Add me to the "I wanna get the [rude words here] that just ruined my sky!" group. I was working as a pilot at the time.
LittleRed1
You know, I still can't get this idea that a 10th/20th/25th/50th/ Anniversary is "More Important" than a 7th/14th/23rd/46th. A Bad Day is a Bad Day.
Glassing over the FATA is still damn good idea...
Tam,
People often build monuments because of deep feelings.
The city or whatever location lets them because monuments get listed in tourist guides. Gatherings bring tourists to town, get face time in front of voters for the local hoi polloi and in front of media.
I suppose one could think of a bronze bird on the girders as a decoy to assure a steady supply of birds-on-monuments moments.
Krugman is really a despicable person.
Some of us are still calling for Arabs under glass.
Better yet, Arabs wrapped in bacon!
in Islam, the pig is an unclean animal, and to be touched by one is to be cast out by Allah if one dies unclean, even if he dies a martyrs death. Legend has it that General Pershing used this to good effect to stop the Muslims from attacking his troops.
Crotalus,
I was going to tease you for that comment, but I suppose we may have a reader who has been in a coma since 9/10/01 and was therefore unaware of that. ;)
Tam, just in passing, you have two "anonymous Terrys".
I'm the "euro one".
I witnessed the attack on the Pentagon in person. I was pissed then, I'm still pissed now.
Terry
Best monument would have been a few radioactive craters in the mid-east.
Euro Terry,
I will go back to signing
Terry
Florida
ps. Seems like we kind of agree on this one.
I would have preferred Arabs turned into carbon shadows rather than under glass.
I still think the Kaaba stone that the towelheads go to every year in Mecca would look just great in the Smithsonian...
cap'n chumbucket
The Freeholder,
"I would have preferred Arabs turned into carbon shadows rather than under glass."
Same thing. (cf. what sand does when exposed to thermonuclear fire.)
I didn't lower my flag yesterday. I couldn't bear to think that group of unwashed sand monkeys would ever get me to lower that flag. Too many good folks sacrificed too many good things so that we could fly it as high as we want. They did what they did in part because we can pretty much fly that flag as high as we want just about anywhere we want, including the moon.
10 years after Pearl Harbor, we used a humiliated, subordinated, & partially radioactive Japan as a base from which to fight off yet another enemy in Korea. Maybe we didn't 'win' there, but we did stop them, with the willing & humble help of our previous enemy. 10 years after 9/11 and we're all supposed to be prostrated before the alter of PC & Kumbaya?
Reading your last sentence, I wondered when it was you were working for me, as I was that kind of boss then, too. I truly thought - and shared aloud - that we had a license to nuke just about anyone for about a week or two that September. And yes, that's what I wanted. I was pissed off, not humbled.
My opinion at the time was borrowed from Campbell's "Who Goes There?" "No hooves & mouths, no hoof & mouth disease." I really don't think I could have shown the restraint that Bush showed that awful day.
I STILL think like your former boss...
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos cognoscet.
As true today as it was in the 14th Century.
Umm, by "glass" did your boss mean "trinitite"? I have long thought, that that region suffered from a mineral imbalance in having too much petroleum and not enough trinitite.
I've always been for a bronze monument with firefighters lumbering up stairs in the world trade centre flanked by soldiers climbing up hills in Afghanistan.
Heaven forbid a monument promotes the courage and sacrifice shown that day and our response to it.
"Arabs under glass"... The Mistress of Snark strikes again.
Gotta stop reading your blog at work, Tam... my cow-orkers keep wondering why I'm snorking out loud.
Tease me, Tam? Girl, you cut me to the quick! ;-)
I guess we all know about Gen. Pershing. The ones in the coma are the ones prosecuting the war. It should be done a lot, and made public. "But that will really make them mad!" They already hate us with all their hearts. It's time to make them FEAR us as well.
We definitly should have glassed Mecca and Medina.
Oh, yeah, Para, a coupla tons of lithium deuteride heated instantaneously to incandescence, right on the Ka'aba!
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