You Weren't There on 9/11
You Weren't There
Not surprisingly, most of these people live in California.
New Yorkers, numbed by the horrific death, destruction, stench and chaos caused by anti-religious fanatics, shrugged off such dopey comments; living in a world turned upside down required all the stamina anyone could muster. Nonetheless, the callousness of those who saw the Trade Center leveled on television was fairly startling. Granted, no one would expect Americans who don't live in the Northeast to dwell on the mayhem in this city or Washington, DC. It's not as if those unaffected by, say, fires, hurricanes or floods in distant regions of the country can empathize with the victims beyond the first set of newspaper headlines. But after Oklahoma City was bombed in '95 I couldn't imagine ever telling anyone involved in that terrorist attack to "Get over it."
I don't mean to cast aspersions on the vast majority of U.S. citizens; the continuing support of New York City, the outpouring of charitable contributions and the surge of patriotism were all inspiring. But here's an example of a nitwit who's had his fill of New York. Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), a toothless trade organization (of which New York Press and the Village Voice are members), wrote a letter to Jim Romenesko's media website last Friday. Karpel said: "In yesterday's NY Times, the head of the United Artists film unit, discussing his reasons for moving the division to New York, says, 'It really felt so much more right, especially after Sept. 11.' And today on your Web site, Laurence Jarvik claims that the simple act of choosing to reside in Manhattan constitutes 'physical bravery.' When can we expect a respite from New York's post-Sept. 11 sanctimoniousness."
Never.
While I wouldn't argue that living here is especially "brave," or noble, ostriches like Karpel (who works in DC) refuse to understand how the city has changed. People continue to live in New York because it's their home and it's just not an option for many to uproot their families. Nevertheless, I wonder if Karpel and similar cretins realize that New Yorkers live with the sword of Hamas, Al Qaeda, Saddam, etc., over their heads. Downtown, there are daily bomb threats that aren't even reported in the papers because they're so routine. Many kids who witnessed the carnage of that September morning and were then relocated to other public schools still have nightmares. Residents of Battery Park City and parts of Tribeca are still recovering from months of evacuation. The number of bankruptcies among small-business owners mounts daily. And in 20 years, when there's an outbreak of disease, and more death, caused by the combination of contaminated air, distribution of asbestos and other poisons, I wonder if Karpel will remember his offhand remark about New York's "sanctimoniousness."
Inevitably, the next major attacks will be in New York?while destroying an historical landmark in DC, Philly or Boston, or a mall in the Midwest, is also likely, it's in this city where the most damage, economically and in terms of loss of life, can be maximized. The New York Sun, on July 31, ran a chilling front-page story by Benjamin Smith about possible plans to shut off lower Broadway. He wrote: "Security fears at the main federal building in Lower Manhattan have prompted talks between city and federal governments about closing Broadway and three other streets. But in the meantime, federal agents who work behind the 42-story tower's checkerboard facade are so worried about the risk of a truck bomb they joke about setting up a $10 pool to pick the date they will be attacked."
Michael Kelly, a superb Washington Post columnist and the editor who has retooled The Atlantic within a mere 18 months to make it the most vital magazine in the U.S., wrote an odd essay (perhaps ironic, but I doubt it) in the monthly's September issue. He begins: "There is nothing so comforting as reverting to form. It has been about a year since the day that changed everything, and we are back to normal again."
Kelly then catalogs the admittedly "normal" nonterrorist events of 2002: President Bush fumbling before partisan reporters when asked about the nonstory of Harken Energy; Tom Daschle blaming Bush for everything amiss in the country except the possible baseball strike; fundraisers by both parties raking in as much "soft money" as possible before the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform rules go into effect; corporate executives attempting to justify their fraudulent actions that go back to the boom years of the Clinton-era; and Al Gore shedding his skin for the 118th time in his checkered political career, claiming that if he could rerun his inept 2000 presidential campaign he'd eschew polls, consultants and political strategy.
Kelly concludes: "As I said, it is about a year since the day that changed everything, and we are back to normal. Which, actually, is wonderful."
On second thought, maybe Kelly was being facetious. Nothing in this country is normal?except election-year demagoguery by politicians either fearful for their jobs or hoping to challenge Bush in 2004?and this valued journalist knows it. The escalation of violence in the Mideast, aimed at destroying Israel, is not "normal." The upcoming invasion of Iraq is not "normal." The craven posturing by personal injury lawyer-turned senator John Edwards is not "normal." Strike that: Edwards' transparent ambition and quest for any and all photo-ops is par for the course. The fear of airline passengers is not "normal." Congress' refusal to compel former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin to testify about his Enron/Citigroup knowledge is not "normal." Even The New York Times' rapid acceleration of biased, and misleading, reporting and editorializing, is not "normal."
And the jittery atmosphere in New York City, the world's capital, is not "normal."
At least Kelly is an intelligent and talented journalist, a wartime correspondent who's worked for the Baltimore Sun, New York Times (youthful indiscretion), The New Yorker, The New Republic, National Journal and now The Atlantic. As opposed to a Paul Begala-like hack such as Eric Alterman who, while Kelly was covering the Gulf War, was writing a book criticizing the "punditocracy." In short time, no doubt by design, Alterman became a pundit himself, as well as Bruce Springsteen's stenographer. (Alterman's allegiance to "The Boss" is so self-serving that in the Oct. 29 Nation last year he wrote this whopper: "My patriotism is not about government and armies; it's about unions, civil rights marches and the '69 Mets. It's not Kate Smith singing 'God Bless America'; it's Bruce Springsteen singing 'This Land Is Your Land.'" Hey, Eric, whatever happened to Woody Guthrie?)
But Alterman's a bit player compared to the throng of college professors who poison young minds almost daily. Examples abound, but an Aug. 3 Star-Tribune op-ed piece by Donald E. Winters, a humanities prof at the exalted Minneapolis Community and Technical College, is typical of the recruits The New York Times is having no trouble collecting with its daily smears of the Bush administration and ongoing campaign against an invasion of Iraq. If you read only the Times, it would be unavoidable to believe that the current president and vice president are Ivan Boesky and Marc Rich.
Winters, who could probably use a refresher course in history, came up with this remarkably original thought: "[B]y continuously waving the flag of Sept. 11, Bush hopes that Americans will forget the shadowy means by which he became president in the first place. Under the facade of being a hero in times of peril, Bush can take a light hand with polluters and corporate wrongdoers like Enron while taking a heavy hand to all dissenters and anti-globalization radicals...
"It is the responsibility of all of us to move out of the Orwellian shadow that Bush has cast upon the country with his talk of 'War on Terror' and 'Axis of Evil,' and begin to question the political legitimacy of the president and stand up for our First Amendment rights to dissent and question. The painful memory of Sept. 11 must leave us not quivering with fear and manipulated by jingoistic jargon, but motivated by a renewed commitment to democratic rights."
Pardon me, Professor, but with this high-school quality essay you have successfully exercised your First Amendment rights. As have thousands upon thousands of writers, protesters, elite media editors, reporters and columnists and fellow academics since the events of last fall. Can you name one of these people who has been jailed for voicing an opinion? Of course not.
I don't like being repetitious, but it's tough getting through to blind zealots such as Winters that Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln, both revered patriots, regularly incarcerated dissidents during wartime. And FDR condemned Japanese-Americans to internment camps. Has George W. Bush (or the left's house nigger John Ashcroft) even come close to that sort of policy?
Clinton Enlists
Considering the wave of Bill Clinton-nostalgia clogging the mainstream media in the past month (culprit number one: Newsweek's hack political correspondent Howard Fineman, who wrote on July 24, "But now, precisely four years after his disastrous deposition in the Paula Jones case, he's baaaaack: the Eminem of politics"), it was a pleasure to see the Aug. 2 New York Post front page. The large-type headline read "G.I. Bill," with a subhed of "I'll carry rifle and die for Israel."
Never mind that the Post was cribbing from a four-day-old story that was stale Internet fodder by last Friday. Clinton was at a Toronto Jewish fundraiser on July 29 when he made a typically hyperbolic statement: "If Iraq came across the Jordan River, I would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die." That's rich, so to speak. More likely, the disgraced ex-president would make a deal with Saddam Hussein, for a hefty fee, and escort him by private jet to luxurious exile on an anonymous Caribbean island.
Clinton, who's accomplished the astonishing feat of interfering with a current administration's policies even more than Jimmy Carter has, also said in Toronto that peace in the Mideast would be possible if a treaty allowed the warring sides to "establish a Palestinian state now."
As a consolation, he insisted that Israel's security must be secure. Not surprisingly, Clinton also claimed that the best way to peace is for his friend Yasir Arafat to finally accept the preposterous deal that Ehud Barak was snookered into accepting in the waning, legacy-building days of Clinton's presidency. One can imagine that that Camp David summit must've been a boon for the local phone company, with Clinton alternately taking calls from Marc and Denise Rich, Terry McAuliffe and any number of Hollywood starlets while entertaining Barak and Arafat.
Clinton's now on his high horse defending his administration from politically motivated GOP attacks that corporate abuse took root during his eight years in office. That's a cheap shot: Clinton, like Bush, isn't to blame for the criminal behavior at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing or Adelphia. He may have solicited campaign contributions from those CEOs, but so did his opposition. Just spare me the continuing myth that Clinton doesn't like to make a buck.
Gloria Borger, in the July 29 U.S. News & World Report, wrote: "As for Bill Clinton, forget it. No one can honestly blame him for this mess. Bubba may be a bad boy about certain things, but not money. When it comes to greed, there are lots of bad boys out there."
Clinton, who's made millions on the lecture circuit, is asking the government to pay off his legal fees due lawyer David Kendall for his work on Whitewater-related inquiries. He cites the precedent of former presidents Reagan and Bush receiving reimbursement of $562,111 and $272,352, respectively, for their legal bills relating to the Iran-Contra hearings. Fair enough, but the scale is far larger: Not only did Clinton receive nearly $7 million from a private foundation set up to pay his lawyers, but he still owes several million dollars to Kendall. Typically, Clinton spoke about possible reimbursement to Larry King on CNN in December 1999, saying, "I may be entitled to it, but my instinct is not to do it."
Now that he's finally a multimillionaire, a frequent-flier cash machine, Clinton wants to keep it all. That may be understandable, but let's put to rest the idea that the impeached president "isn't about money."
Father, Son And Bruce
I've never met Bruce Springsteen?although I saw several of his riveting pre-stadium concerts in the early 1970s before he eclipsed cult-figure status?but there's little reason to doubt he's a decent guy. One never knows, but apparently he's a dedicated family man who?aside from a brief sojourn in Southern California?doesn't have substance-abuse problems or the obnoxious ego that defines so many of his fellow aging pop stars.
But Springsteen's recent canonization by a celebrity-besotted media, coinciding with the release of his lackluster The Rising, a collection of Sept. 11-related songs that Time claims "turned America's anguish into art," is one of the most appalling publicity rushes in recent memory. The wealthy New Jersey native, who lives on a 400-acre farm in Monmouth County, sings about blue-collar workers and the no-luck "have-nots" of society, and donates time and money to rebuilding Asbury Park, the site of his youthful adventures and first success as a rock 'n' roller. The very notion of Springsteen turns leftists into jelly, but though his politics are liberal he's not a member of the America Last brigade. For example, he told Time reporter Josh Tyrangiel, "I think the invasion in Afghanistan was handled very, very smoothly."
He's a generous citizen, and doesn't brag about it, but the man is not the twin of Jesus.
You wouldn't know that from the blitz of media adulation in the last two weeks: the cover of Time and Rolling Stone, a long segment on Today with the pea-brained duo of Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, chats with David Letterman and Ted Koppel, feature articles and reviews in publications as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly and The Nation.
(An aside: Further evidence that Rolling Stone, currently bewildered in a Maxim-ized magazine market, lost its edge a couple of decades ago: Springsteen, who famously appeared on the covers of Time and Newsweek the same week in 1975, didn't receive similar cover treatment from Jann Wenner until Aug. 24, 1978.)
Springsteen rarely makes a recording that doesn't include at least one or two gems, and while his later work isn't as consistent as classics like The Wild, The Innocent and E Street Shuffle, Born to Run and Nebraska, even relative duds like 1987's Tunnel of Love contained the exquisite and heartbreaking "Brilliant Disguise." And so it is with The Rising: two songs, "Nothing Man" and "Further On (Up the Road)," rank with his best material. While most of The Rising is at turns mawkish, religiously heavyhanded or simply out of place (the party-happy "Mary's Place" and syrupy "Let's Be Friends"), "Nothing Man" and "Further On" tell the songwriter's impressions of Sept. 11 with near-poetic lyrics and haunting musical accompaniment. In the former, he writes of an heroic survivor who never thought he'd "read about myself in my hometown paper": "Around here, everybody acts the same/Around here, everybody acts like nothing's changed/Friday night, the club meets at Al's Barbecue/The sky's still, the same unbelievable blue."
The way Springsteen stretches out the word "unbelievable"?un-bee-leeeeve-a-bull?is extraordinary, especially for those in New York who remember the cloudless sky on that day.
On "Further On," Springsteen's reunited E Street Band, for the most part superfluous on The Rising?the record would've been more effective if the artist used just a few musicians, like on Bob Dylan's masterpiece John Wesley Harding?earns its pay for the most explosive rocker on the record. ("Lonesome Day" is the combo's one other notable effort.) Their leader's lyrics, seemingly in the voice of a dead man, equal the sound: "Got on my dead man's suit, and my smilin' skull ring/My lucky graveyard boots, and a song to sing/I got a song to sing, to keep me out of the cold/And I'll meet you further on up the road."
The most embarrassing piece about The Rising was written by columnist Jack Newfield, the boxing aficionado/RFK hagiographer who was bounced from the New York Post last year. (That was a dumb move on editor Col Allan's part, for Newfield's left-wing voice was a smart balance to the paper's mostly conservative stance.) I don't think Newfield listened to Springsteen's new album more than once or twice?he doesn't quote from it at all?and his Aug. 2 New York Sun front-page article reflects that.
Instead, we get absurd statements that would probably make Springsteen cringe. Like this: "Frequently, the greatest art is also 'high lowbrow.' The goal of the artist should be to combine high art and popular culture?to uplift the factory worker and make the intellectual jump out of his seat. Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain and Whitman did this. So did Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Sinatra, Gershwin, Brando, Elia Kazan, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, the Marx Brothers, and Chaplin. They are the core of Americana in the arts. [Yes, I do remember that Shakespeare made his bones in working-class Brooklyn.] And Bruce Springsteen...is now part of this rich tradition of both mass appeal and critical approval."
The Aug. 3 issue of The Economist included a snooty "Lexington" column about The Rising. The writer generally approves, even if he describes the record as "corny," "schmaltzy" and "not great art."
The piece concludes: "It is also right 'The Rising' should be a commercial enterprise. For the most part, Americans are untouched by the European shame about money-making. (The current 'anti-business backlash' is a backlash against cheating, not honest business.) It seems strangely appropriate that a record about the destruction of the main symbol of global capitalism should be marketed by a Japanese multinational [Sony]. One day the American establishment will find something to equal the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., or the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Until then, Mr. Springsteen will do nicely."
This condescending tone might offend the likes of Newfield, Matt & Katie, Rolling Stone's Kurt Loder, not to mention Springsteen's loyal fans, but it's an accurate appraisal. The Rising is nice, but after 30 or so listenings, I don't feel "healed."
August 5
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