Take your candlelight vigil and shove it
You know, I meant to do a proper September 11 post today, but I don't have the spit.
Every year this damn anniversary rolls around and I get more and more wadded up and pissed off about it. I'm going to feel prickly and impossible all day. The memorials make me fucking insane. They're all "boo hoo" and tinkly piano music and kumbafuckingya and it all Could Not Be Farther from the way I feel about what happened that day.
I'm ashamed at the body count. We didn't do right by those poor bastards in the towers. Not much to do about the people who were vaporized on contact (except prevent the whole damn thing in the first place), but they were the lucky ones, anyhow. We should've gotten it together and evacuated the whole area the moment the North Tower was hit. It was bound to collapse eventually; that was reason enough to clear the block even before a plane struck the second tower and cut off hundreds more.
Have you listened to the 911 calls? It's hard to take. Like the scared secretary who hides under her desk and whispers into the phone while the heat and smoke sneak up on her. An angry man tries to get some straight answers, right up to the moment the floor crashes away under his feet. "Hold tight. Help is coming," the operators said over and over, knowing that help damn well wasn't coming. No help could possibly come. But what else could they say?
There were as many as two hundred jumpers. Cubicle dwellers who went in early on a Tuesday morning to catch up on some paperwork found themselves smashing their ergonomic swivel chairs through the glass to suck in a little cool oxygen. They leaned out the windows for a moment and then launched themselves straight into the thin September sky. How awful was the thing behind them to make a hundred storey fall look better? How bad does it have to hurt to work up the nerve?
Spare me your moments of silence and .gif files of crying eagles. Osama loves your tears; to him they are like sweet, sweet candy. You don't answer evil with a Hallmark Card. This calls for an ugly black cloud of vengeance and death to roll over our enemies — and anyone unlucky enough to be standing too near our enemies. It calls for wildly and crazily disproportionate response, so that even the dimmest cave monkey gets the idea Uncle Sam is a little too bad and too crazy to fuck with. Why not? The 'international community' hates us as hard as it can already. Only…the moment passed and we still send millions in aid to that ugly ululating Palestinian cow with the glasses.
For maybe a week after the story of Flight 93 went around, people realized that government isn't always going to be around to protect us, and we have to grow up and butch up and look out for each other sometimes. And then everyone gradually fell back into a government-issue haze of Czar this and identity card that and pointless, humiliating airport security rituals.
I stared at my clock radio this morning and fantasized about lobbing it out the window when some random Rhode-Islander-on-the-street whined into the microphone "Iraq, Afghanistan…when will the killing end?" This is a neighbor. Somebody — however blessedly remote the prospect — I might need to watch my back some day.
God, I hate September 11. It gets harder every year…
Posted: September 11th, 2007 under history, personal, war.
Comment from porknbean
Time: September 11, 2007, 1:42 pm
Then, today, you have Barbara Boxer (D-CA) telling Petraeus that he is a liar. And Code Pink is let in once again to spew their menopausal insanity.
Your democrat party in league with those who like to incinerate the infidel. Fucking ignoramous, disgusting pig fucks.
You just know Boxer and co. will drop to their knees first if jihadiville gets the upperhand in this country.
They let Code Pink into the hearing room again? I'm kind of cut off from news today.
Well, twice is no accident…
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/091rhesh.asp
…"MoveOn.org has been working closely with the Democratic congressional leadership –as an article in today's Sunday New York Times Magazine makes clear. And consider this comment by a Democratic senator from Friday's Politico: "'No one wants to call [Petraeus] a liar on national TV,' noted one Democratic senator, who spoke on the condition on anonymity. 'The expectation is that the outside groups will do this for us.'…
Comment from bmac
You hit the nail right on the head for me weasel. I'm tired, tired of these Oprah-esque teary reactions to everything. We're not allowed to be pissed off anymore. We've lost something in this country….BALLS.
Geez, Ackerman (D-NY) just asked Petraeus if alQaeda was a threat to us. He thinks al Qaeda began in 02 and is not in Iraq.
Comment from Steamboat McGoo
What? You folks are determined to push every f'ing emotional button I have that's still operational???
You all hit the box of nails on its' collective heads – if that makes any sense.
On 9-11 I don't want to feel all squishy and quiet and sad: I WANT TO ROAR!!!!!!!!! I WANT TO SCREAM, "HOW DARE THEY!!! I WILL NOT FORGET!!"
It's not much, but maybe it'll cheer some folks up:
http://www.nraila.org/Legislation/Federal/Read.aspx?id=3228
Comment from Muslihoon
In the language of the brown people: wah, wah.
I.e., bravo.
Comment from Gibby Haynes
And yet some people – we'll call them people for ease of reference – maintain that 'ZOMG teh govermint did teh 9/11s!!1!' still.
The goodbye/help calls are awful, of course, but the worst thing for me is the people who had to come to the decision that they were going to leap to their deaths rather than be burnt alive. I still don't think that the human mind – remarkable under pressure though it is – has a way of dealing with that kind of thing.
I watched Gen. Petraeus' intitial report and the politicking before he'd even had a chance to speak by certian elements of the Democrat Party was truly disgusting. If I were being briefed by a full general, with 33 years military experience who'd been in Iraq since the invasion, was a combat veteran and had more ribbons that Paris Hilton has had crabs, who's opinion, I might add, I'd demanded; then by golly, I'd sit down, shut my trap and listen to the man. Not give him a hard time, and try to score political points and attack his personal integrity before hand.
Oh, and the Code Pinkos? Holy fuck. Did you see the last one to be removed? She was literally dragged away kicking and screaming. Those people are mentally unhinged and they should be dealt with with the full authority of the law.
There. Picture added. That's better.
Driving in to work, I saw where some worthless toe-rag had thrown a "9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB" banner over the rails of an overpass (I won't repeat the URL). Those assholes make me WILD with irritation.
This was after a morning spent punching the snooze bar with rather more force than strictly necessary to get my nine minutes rest from the prattling morons of local radio.
The engineering company I work for was involved with evaluating the twin towers structurally, years before and again immediately after September 11. After the first trade center bombing, our structural engineers concluded that any catastrophe big enough to pull down one of the towers would likely pull them both down. So that idea was out there semi-officially for quite some time.
About a week after the towers fell, we sent a team to the site to help evaluate the integrity of the buildings all around. My boss was part of it; he took the pictures. He's a very stoic, buttoned up Scandihoovian type, but he was clearly very shaken by the things he saw. "Bodies" weren't recovered, except for some of the rescue workers who were smothered at the foot of the buildings after the collapse. The "morgue" was a series of five-gallon buckets. Workers would put gobbets of meat in the buckets as they picked through the wreckage, then label each bucket and put it under a tarp when it was full.
Doors and buildings had chalked or spray-painted symbols on the sides, indicating whether and how many airplane parts or body parts had been found (and perhaps were still) inside. Other important evidence was found on rooftops and fire escapes. Everything smoked. Everything stank. People lined the streets up to the police barricades holding bubble-jet pictures of loved ones, hoping those few who had passes to go near Ground Zero would see and recognize someone…something…anything.
And then there are the dreadful stories of looting by…less heroic first responders. There are always those stories after a disaster.
'ZOMG teh govermint did teh 9/11s!!1!'
Probably the same who believe in ZOG. As in ZOG.
The jumper pics, dear sir, are the worst.
I try to avoid studying the events of That Day. As worked up as I am, it completely breaks me down. It makes me see a side of me I try very, very, very hard to keep hidden. It frightens me.
But I swear upon my life – if a terrorist were before me, I would slay him with my hands. I know, I know, it's not the right or legal thing, or the Christian thing, but I would rather rot in prison or die at the gallows than let one of those cretin survive.
Now…I am not as trigger-happy, so to speak (I have no gun), when it comes to Truthers. But in my hierarchy of value assigned to beings, Truthers and others who undermine the West and support Islamism are tolerated only because their parents were human. They, of themselves, have lost all value and consideration in my eyes. If Bach turned out to be a Truther, I would burn all of his CDs that I have.
Which is interesting, seeing as I understand why they believe what they believe. But as with Islamism, understanding doesn't solve anything. It just equips us to formulate realistic expectations and to draw up practical proposals. That is, when and where and how to shoot.
Well, there goes my cover of civility and peaceableness.
Comment from Christopher Taylor
When will the killing end? You should have shouted "when they stop murdering innocent people in the name of Allah!"
Comment from nbpundit
Comment from Snapple
I am still very angry, too.
Comment from Sophist, FCD
Time: September 17, 2007, 2:18 am
This calls for an ugly black cloud of vengeance and death to roll over our enemies — and anyone unlucky enough to be standing too near our enemies. It calls for wildly and crazily disproportionate response…
A question? What's the exchange rate for dead Americans? How many random foreign people do we get to murder for, say, one murdered securities trader? And do other countries have the right to murder random foreigners in retaliation too, or is it just us?
You people are fucked in the head. There is something that should be there, but isn't, or doesn't function correctly if it is. You're broken.
I doubt it was ever very convincing anyway.
Hm. FCD. Mister Google, he offers "Final consent denied" or "Fuel Consumption Display" or "ferrous conduit distribution" as possible definitions, but none of those have the right resonance.
On the other hand, I'm broken. What do I know?