I COULDN’T AVOID THIS. I had to write it. And there’s no better title than that. I know every bonehead with a computer and a forum has held forth on this anniversary. You may be sick of it. I may be sick of it. Except that I’m not. I’m drawn to it again and again. You don’t say a prayer just once, you say it every day, twice, thrice, ten times a day. You don’t say “I love you” once to someone, you say it over and over again; forever, I believe.
I’m supposed to be funny with these columns. Forgive me. I don’t feel so funny just now. When is it time to be funny again? I don’t know. Next time? Maybe. I don’t know.
I’ve been moved constantly for a year, surprised each time, then filled with remorse at thinking I had seen and heard and read enough. Every story has shaken me: the widows, the children, the parents, the babies, the heroes. You’ve heard them all, yet they’re new each time, aren’t they? Each story of the woman praying for guidance and being filled with the presence and the light of her dead husband and hearing his voice, audibly, saying, “Don’t worry. I’m with God. Don’t dwell on what happened to me.” Astonishing. I believe them. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn’t.
There’s a lot I’ve had to complain about over the years with the New York Times. But after 9/11 they started running a series of profiles of the murdered–short bios with pictures. Each one so beautifully written, so plaintive, so lyrical, so movingly sparse. Shattering. Whatever the Times has ever done or ever will do, for good or bad, they have, in my mind, paid for it many times over with those gorgeous pieces. So many. Each one crushing. I couldn’t read another. I read another. I can’t do it again. I did it again. Just like you. Like all of us.
And the hardest, the worst, the most painful? Those photographs. Small. Perfect. Those smiles. You know them. You can see them now. Every one. Sweet. Kind. Loving. Optimistic. Innocent. Godly. In other words, American. There, I’ve said it. American. Does anyone else say it? You do, many of you do, don’t you?
Too few, though. So many of our own people on the wrong side. You’ve heard their voices and read their bile: “We deserved it, we always have, we always will.” Crap. Forget about them. They will never understand. Leave them to their mewling, torn self-loathing, their blocked, granite refusal to see the truth, to see what’s right.
And our enemies. What of them? Talk to them? Seek to understand? Get the approval of the United Nations? Turn the other cheek? Sorry. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not soon. Not for a long time. I can’t. I won’t. Forgive me, God.
I’ve seen a bunch of architects’ drawings for rebuilding on the site of the Twin Towers. Naturally, they all stink. (I don’t get contemporary architecture, anyway. It’s like modern and post-modern music and art to me, indecipherable and undistinguished.) Besides, has no one noticed? It’s a graveyard, a holy ground of pulverized human bodies, a shrine forever where thousands of souls ascended in a great, mass apotheosis. Are we going to put a Starbuck’s there? Leave it alone. People will come to pray. And if we’re all worried about the loss in commercial land value–nothing wrong with that, by the way–the Americans (and others) who visit in the future will more than make up for it when they stay at hotels and buy food and raise a glass.
That’s it. That’s all. No insights, nothing new. Sorry. Just another bonehead weighing in. I had to do it. Back to funny next time. I guess. I hope. I don’t know. Just not now. Not today.
Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer and actor living in Los Angeles.
