Stay mad
September 11. This fucking day again.
My boss went to ground zero about a week later. Yeah, you wouldn’t think so, but the art department is among the second responders. Somebody has to take pictures of the damage and make PowerPoint presentations about where the bodies were found.
I kid, I kid. There were no bodies. The ‘morgue’ was a bunch of five-gallon buckets under a tarp. As workers filled them with gobbets of meat, they were taken away to the geneticists and new buckets were brought in.
The scene was heavily controlled. Access credentials were placards they wore around their necks, like backstage passes. My boss said the hardest thing was walking the blocks from the inhabited parts of the city to the cordoned area wearing his pass, knowing what he knew. Hundreds of people desperate for news mobbed him, pressing bubblejet prints into his hands. Graduations pictures. Wedding pictures. Smiling, blurry faces. Secretaries, janitors, junior managers.
Yeah, the fatcats aren’t in at eight in the morning. The dead were working doofuses like you and me. In fact, a bunch of our guys were in the building that morning for a meeting; a few didn’t make it out (nobody I knew; I’m not trying to horn in on that kind of celebrity).
He’s a stoical, Scandihoovian type, my boss. I was surprised a few months ago when he told me he still has nightmares. The smoke and the stink and the thick, pervasive, clinging dust of burned paperwork and vaporized modular cubicle furniture and office worker. There was paper, perfectly intact, everywhere. Like drifts of snow.
He brought back thousands of pictures (including some he wouldn’t let us see). I didn’t know about emergency worker graffiti. There was a symbol for “plane parts found here” and another for “body parts found here” and another for “unsafe inside” — warning marks and numbers left on all the buildings that had been searched (and they all had to be; bits were scattered far and wide) in colorful spraypaint.
That stupid fat cunt up there is a bzillion times more likely to die a ghastly terrorist martyr’s death than I am, and yet she celebrates this thing. That’s fucked up. That’s too fucked up to learn better. That’s fucked up beyond all fixing.
Why do they hate us? It’s what they do. It’s what they are. It’s all they have. They don’t have the adult temperament and the simple skills required to be office workers, so they kill and die and dip their hands in the blood and ululate in the streets. Savages.
They have to go, every last one of them that can’t learn better.
Stay mad. We aren’t finished.
Posted: September 11th, 2008 under history, international, personal, war.
Comments: 13
Comments
Pingback from No Runny Eggs » Blog Archive » The Morning Scramble/Open Thread Thursday – 9/11/2008
Time: September 11, 2008, 1:51 pm
[…] S. Weasel […]
Comment from PS
Time: September 11, 2008, 3:54 pm
No, we are finished. All these years later we still haven’t paid back 9/11 while “representatives” from Iran and other cockroach countries are allowed on the same stage today as their victims, not to mention half the U.S. sincerely wants a pacifist, socialist state along the lines of Eurabia. I’d say we’re pretty much done.
Comment from JimboMcGillicutty
Time: September 11, 2008, 3:54 pm
Get out of my head!!!!
Comment from memomachine
Time: September 11, 2008, 4:10 pm
Hmmmm.
It’s why I support the fight in Iraq. We have to try something to change their culture now while we have the chance. Because the American people don’t have infinite patience and we’re not that far removed from the generation prepared to utterly annihilate the Japanese.
A lot of people don’t realize it but the core of the American people is an uncompromising generosity coupled with absolute ferocity. We’ll love you as our friends and neighbors right up until you prove beyond any doubt that you’re neither. Then we will kill you, bury the bodies and no longer give a damn.
This is why the Germans and Japanese are still so anti-war. They learned it from -us-. They learned at first hand that Americans are not to be trifled with. That fucking with us is a one-way ticket to fuckedville and that’s a road you don’t get to travel twice.
The problem with muslims and Arabs in specific is that WWII bypassed them. They didn’t experience what a truly enraged American public is capable of. Even Iraq wasn’t ever an example. We still have patience left, but it’s not infinite.
If we are faced with an endless supply of Beslan attacks or terrorist murders of our citizens and children. Then Americans will make the calculation between enduring and saying “f–k it, time for them to die”. That’ll happen with or without leadership from above.
And we are not only the one single culture/country on the planet that could make that decision but who could actually see it through.
Tamerlane is the historic terror of the Islamic world.
Compared to Americans prepared to kill, Tamerlane was a pussy.
Comment from XBradTC
Time: September 11, 2008, 4:30 pm
Memo, I think the difference is the attitude towards killing. Terrorists and so much of the Arab world consider killing to be the end objective. Americans are generally reluctant to kill, save to achieve a specific objective. It is what we accomplish by killing that’s most important. And usually what we want to achieve is to be left the fuck alone.
Comment from PS
Time: September 11, 2008, 4:56 pm
memomachine: I fully agree with your assessment of the American, and Western, way of war. It is entirely ruthless to a degree muslims can’t begin to imagine because, as you said, they haven’t experienced it even remotely. But will they ever? That’s the issue. In the event of more attacks against us, will America ever hold an entire country accountable, as it should, and launch a punitive strike targeting cities and civilians, as it should? I doubt it. And what if Russia soon formally aligns itself with Iran? Our appetite for Pearl Harbor-type revenge remains as strong as you say, but I think our will and options are disappearing fast.
Comment from eddiebear
Time: September 11, 2008, 5:16 pm
And yet The Deciders don’t want us to see what happened that day by embargoing a lot of the footgae.
Comment from S. Weasel
Time: September 11, 2008, 5:33 pm
I think we might get motivated if there were a series of attacks, or one attack with a substantial body count (if neither of those things ever happens, then — w00t! Mission accomplished).
There was a tremendous current of rage for months after September 11. Remember? Then there were the anthrax letters and the Virginia snipers — which turned out to have nothing to do with al Qaeda, though we didn’t know it then. I think people were gearing themselves up for some serious whupass.
It’s the lack of activity on our soil since that has allowed people to relax. AND THAT’S A GOOD THING!
I keep breaking into all caps, because my experience with doomsday cultists tells me they long and yearn for the doomsday. I don’t, and I don’t want to be mistaken for it. If Americans can go back to a life of Cheetohs and Seinfeld reruns and never be hit again, I will be deeply and entirely happy.
Comment from Muslihoon
Time: September 11, 2008, 9:28 pm
It’s good for us to be calm.
That said, my rage has not subsided. Sometimes I’m ashamed — I shouldn’t be provoked so easily — but such it is. As such, I avoid many things related to September 11. I won’t watch certain videos, and avoid certain pictures and depictions.
For the sake of many millions, I am glad we have not been pushed to the limit. We have nukes, and we have used them. When it comes to our survival, no option is off the books. Our opponents think they can stymie us with diplomacy, but the invasion of Iraq showed that that won’t work.
Comment from Fennec
Time: September 13, 2008, 4:23 am
Great post, Weasel.
I’m still a raging ball of fire toward the enemy. I was listening to the 9/11 ceremonies on my way to work the other morning, and I almost had to pull the car over. I was shaking and trying hard not to cry.
That said, I think it’s imperative that we select the proper people to lead the country. I’m convinced that this is not the last we’ll see of domestic terrorism. It scares the hell out of me to think about it. o.o
Write a comment
Beware: more than one link in a comment is apt to earn you a trip to the spam filter, where you will remain -- cold, frightened and alone -- until I remember to clean the trap. But, hey, without Akismet, we'd be up to our asses in...well, ass porn, mostly.<< carry me back to ol' virginny