Exploiting 9/11

Yesterday's New York Times went all out to exploit the horror of 9/11, filling many column inches reliving that day. Several of their uber-liberal columnists used it as fodder for nonsense, one of them linking the falling of the Twin Towers to making America's men more macho and another blaming that event for the storming of the Capitol last January. But what really irked me was all the whining in the Letters to the Editor grouped under the heading, "Readers offer their 9/11/ memories."

One woman who escaped unscathed wrote that, "20 years later the tears still come unexpectedly and the smell of jet fuel lingers." Another, who was in a hotel near the Pentagon, fretted that "the death-laden odor will always remain nested in my brain." A third, the wife of a funeral director, tells of her husband's "white and pasty" face after he buried one of the victims, saying, "I'd never seen him like that." (Apparently all the other dead people he had embalmed during his entire career never bothered him.)

Someone one else who saw the event on TV related a recurring dream he had at the time (and still has occasionally) about riding on a New York City commuter train seated next to a skeleton "wearing a suit and tie. I realized he was a ghost of 9/11." A woman 3,000 miles away in California, "was haunted by visions of the surrounding building pancaking" for months after. Perhaps the most offensive letter was from a man booked on one of the flights that crashed into the towers who decided he wanted to sleep a little later and so changed his flight the night before, saying, "My travel agent saved my life!"

Naturally there were no letters from any of the children whose parents never came home again, or those poor souls who suffered third degree burns on their faces and bodies, undergoing multiple skin graft surgeries for years, or were permanently crippled or disfigured, or went insane from grief and pain, and certainly none from all the suicides who jumped to escape a burning office, their bodies splattering on the pavement so many floors below. Now those would have made for interesting, compelling and heart-wrenching reading.