The despicable side of 9/11

I've refrained from commenting until now on Paul Krugman's appalling display of pettiness, conceit and disrespect for the victims of 9/11. Frankly, I couldn't figure out how anybody, of any political persuasion, could be so oblivious to reality, so cut off from the real world as to believe that what he said was true. In case you missed it, you can read his column here. His follow-up column yesterday didn't improve matters. I won't dignify such literary excrement by reproducing it here.

Mr. Krugman's attitudes and opinions appear to be widely shared across the Left of the political spectrum. This is tragic indeed, because the remembrance of 9/11 shouldn't be a partisan political matter at all - something the Right of the political spectrum would do well to remember also. The anniversary of 9/11/2001 is an occasion to mourn the dead; to commit ourselves anew to the defense of what makes America great (even if we disagree on what that may be); to remember the reality of terrorism, nihilism and religious fanaticism, and determine, once and for all, that we shall never allow them to rule us.

Both Left-wing and Right-wing commentators have tried to co-opt 9/11 as 'theirs', using it as a symbol of all that's right with their perspective and/or all that's wrong with their opponents' views. Both sides are equally wrong to do so. Those who died on 9/11 were killed by terrorists. To try to appropriate for political purposes their agony as they were burned to death, pulverized against the pavement as they fell from the Twin Towers or finally crushed when the towers collapsed, atomized in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 . . . that's sickening, and despicable, and utterly abominable. The '9/11 Truthers' are even worse. Their insane denial of the reality of that day, and their insistence that the whole tragedy was some sort of US government plot, are so deranged as to poison the air that the rest of us breathe.

The real tragedy of such commentators, deranged revisionists and partisan political pundits is that they've become prisoners of their own ideology, their own world-view. They intellectually try to force reality to conform to their perspective, rather than judging their perspective against reality. It's the same problem exhibited by religious fundamentalists (of any religion you care to name), who manage to deceive themselves that anything not conforming to their particular framework of belief is 'evil' or 'un-Godly' or 'Satanic'. In that sense, those (on the Left or the Right) who seek to exploit 9/11 for their own ends are very like the terrorists who carried out the attacks of that day. They're all equally deluded, whether they undertook, or are merely using the memory of, the attacks. They all want to use 9/11 to advance their particular cause(s). In that sense, they all bear some share of the guilt for that day.

That's perhaps the saddest thing of all.

Peter