Things That One Would Not Otherwise Do [Updated]

[A Day By Day remix.]

I posted this last year, and it’s what I want to say this year as well. Because people like Chris Muir think that they’re ‘entitled’ to 9/11 as their cultish emotional lodestone, when it was a real event that involved real people. 9/11 isn’t a symbol; it was something that happened in real people’s lives.

This is a Day By Day strip, featuring someone Muir never knew but only picked out of a list of 9/11 deaths as part of a right-blog ‘we honor the victims’ campaign:

091106.jpg

This is Wayne Russo:

dbdremix0911061.jpg

The caption would be nearly identical (Marsh & McLennan Cos. Inc., Confirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building), except that Wayne was an accountant there instead of an executive secretary. And there’s more that isn’t nice to speak about.

The remains of [Lynne’s] brother, Wayne Russo, 37, of Union were identified six months after Sept. 11. His remains were found at the landfill, but the family does not know what was found, only that his entire body was not recovered.

And that’s why.

I couldn’t describe Wayne’s family’s suffering, but a token might be that I’ve gone six years without having any idea where and when it’s proper to mention Wayne’s death, and the act of mentioning it now, even today, makes me want to go shut up and hide in a freaking hole. With a big bag of Funyuns and an AM radio softly playing a Yankees game — which was Wayne’s only major fault as a person.

Not the Funyuns, the other thing. But admittedly, Phil Rizzuto lived nearby, and the kids in Union used to go visit him. I might even forgive him that eventually.

[One pic below]

wayne-1stshowb.jpg
Above: Wayne with Stetz (audio link)

I try to find things to say, and I think that all of history is like this: An indiscriminate tide, a waste of the best, a slaughter-bench.

Update: Hooray! For us, this day is like Christmas!

 

Comments: 67

 
 
 

Excuse me, but I am tired of liberals trying to hijack 9-11 for their own partisan ends. This is OUR day, Patriot Day, and we will observe it with remeberrance, vengence and support for troops and USA power of freedom the world over.

 
 

Thanks for sharing, fake-Gary.

 
 

We measure our lives by the love of others, for that is what gives us purpose.

But we trace our history by the prices we pay.

It’s hard, sometimes, to saddle up your shit and just keep going.

And it’s ok, sometimes, just to remember, and to weep.

But then, in spite of the burden, we go on, for it is the pain that makes the joys real.

I wish you what peace you might find, Gavin…

mikey

 
Fishbone McGonigle
 

I remember this from last year, and it still gets to me just as much as it did then. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend – especially since it looks like he rocked.

 
 

Well, principle. Offending us doesn’t qualify as a bannable act.

Also, my upset today isn’t special or unique, so etc.

 
 

The troll didn’t/won’t/can’t read “Antigone.”

I’m sorry, Gavin.

 
 

“Damn you, partisan liberals! How dare you try to hijack OUR national tragedy!”

You forgot to say “The fact is”.

 
 

Hey Gavin, the grade-A douchebags of the world do not like being called out… And they’re only such douchebags because they do not know what it is to have a friend… cerntainly not what it means to lose a friend.

If they were capable, they would be liberals.

 
 

Gavin, thank you for sharing with us. I don’t think anything else I could say would help, so let me leave it at that

 
 

All I can really say is I was in the city before, I was here that day, and I’m still here now.
I know some who died, but not well enough to dishonor their memory by using their names. (In no way, shape, or form is that a dig at Gavin.)
….

I keep trying to think of more to say, and blanking.

To those who try and use this date as a political football, stop.
All you’re doing is proving you don’t care about the people who died.
If you truly honored this day you’d shut up, for once, on it.

 
 

Landfill? That really sucks. At the risk of sounding stupid, how did that happen? (Can we blame Rudy?)

 
 

Rock on, Gavin.

Fuck you, Gary.

 
 

Yes, landfill, HW. And I don’t really think we can blame Rudy. I think we can blame the brutal efficiency of the chosen weapons system.

I too remember this from last year, Gavin, and I recall the first time thinking, Shit, there’s a guy I would have liked to know. Sometimes you can just tell from looking at a face that the soul it houses is a good one.

In a completely unrelated bit of useless trivia, I am marking today as the one upon which I am submitting a comment in the actual time zone of SN, so I don’t have to think about how long ago the last comment appeared.

Oh. And fuck you, fake Gary.

 
 

Cora Holland was Stephen’s wife. I worked at the healthcare software company that he owned with two other guys. I met Cora at a couple of company parties. She was a very gregarious woman. She and Stephen were both from the LA area. Her parents were born in Mexico. Cora had 2 daughters and a son.

 
 

Did Cora die in the towers?

 
 

diff brad–

Nice point, not exploiting someone’s death for one’s own purposes, no matter how “legitimate.” Years ago a famous guy I sort-of worked with died, and I could have gone to the funeral. But I didn’t really know him, and I sensed that if I went, it would have been to hobnob with the other famous guys and be part of the scene. So I didn’t go. Yeah, yay me. But still.
Which is why the exploitation of today’s remembrance is all the more contemptible. These people love it when other people die. It makes them feel profound.

 
 

The Rude Pundit has a powerful item on exploiting 9-11 today. Sorry, I don’t know how to do that link thing.

 
 

Agreed with Smiling Mortician. Although according to the firefighter’s video at http://therealrudy.org/blog/5400-rudy-s-9-11-failures-of-leadership-exposed-by-fire-fighters?play=1 Giliani called off the search for bodies once missing gold from the Bank of Nova Scotia was recovered, I agree that the nature of the disaster would have made human remains ending up in the landfill sadly inevitable.

There’s plenty more in the video which is was responsible for.

A truly horrible day. My sympathies to all the victims.

 
 

“Did Cora die in the towers?”

She was on AA Flight 11, the first to hit.

Carol Flyzik was also on that plane. Carol worked for MEDITECH, and was heading out to her marketing territory on the west coast. MEDITECH doesn’t have branch offices – everybody flies out to cover their territories.

I never met Carol, but I worked for MEDITECH back in the 80’s and had that same territory. That’s not to imply that I’ve got some kind of vicarious thing going, but just to emphasize that pretty much everybody who died was just going to work, or at work, or in Cora’s case, going out to spend time with family and friends. It was just another day…

 
 

Hysterical Woman, wreckage was moved from the WTC site to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island for sorting and disposal. (The landfill had that name before 9/11) Many human remains that weren’t readily identifiable at Ground Zero were discovered there. Mortician is right about the mechanics of the destruction. Fortunately, there were trained forensic eyes at the landfill. Giuliani can’t really be blamed for the decision to move wreckage to Fresh Kills, but it’s arguable that the wreckage should have been subjected to further searches, and many have argued that the interred debris should be reopened to investigation. Clusters of remains are still being discovered within and without the WTC’s footprint, the most heavily searched and trafficked area of all, and it’s there that Giuliani’s mandate to speedily dismantle and rebuild has proved, in human terms, the most costly.

 
 

Kills is dutch for stream, just fyi. Many, many, many places in NY have names ending in Kills.
Every now and then a clueless housewife starts a campaign to change the name of her town to not celebrate violence, and they have to be sat down and spoken to slowly.

 
 

She was on AA Flight 11, the first to hit.

Dude, stop me if I’m wrong, but I think no one who lost a friend in 9/11 seems to like to talk about it, because the grief doesn’t belong to us. What right do we have, etc…

 
 

Dude, stop me if I’m wrong, but I think no one who lost a friend in 9/11 seems to like to talk about it, because the grief doesn’t belong to us. What right do we have, etc…

I do have that feeling, Gavin, although I, like you, have felt compelled to mention it at times.

As Atrios says:

The political blogosphere grew in the aftermath of 9/11, and quickly bored of the not exciting enough war in Afghanistan, self-styled “war bloggers” quickly turned on the enemy at home. It’s useful to remember, in this imagined time of national unity, just how quickly the Right claimed the tragedy as their own and used it as a cudgel to beat their fellow citizens with. It only took Andy Sullivan 5 days to publish this in the Times of London:

The middle part of the country – the great red zone that voted for Bush – is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead – and may well mount a fifth column.

The fact that New York City is generally considered to be one of the enclaves of the “decadent Left” wasn’t enough to dissuade him from putting those words into print.

 
 

“What right do we have, etc…”

Good point, and like I said there’s the danger of being (or being perceived as) a little too vicarious / voyeuristic about the whole thing.

But I think, for me, the challenge is not so much to try to construct a connection, as it is to just understand that this isn’t about blurry TV images or abstract symbols or overwhelming numbers or lofty rhetoric or other peoples’ problems.

Everyone who died deserves to be remembered as a person – whether neighbor, relative, acquaintance, or even stranger.

And it’s not about appropriating someone else’s grief, but rather it’s a way to acknowledge, or witness, someone else’s grief; and to acknowledge how fleeting life is, and how close we all are to loss, and what that kind of loss actually means.

Sometimes such existential matters as these are best brought to bear by making them more tangible, by giving them names and faces, by saying “Yeah, I met her at a party.”

But it’s a fine line between witnessing and exploiting.

 
 

There’s nothing worse than some asshole telling you how you should grieve. Grief is the single most personal of emotions, and eff the right wingers for their repeated attempts at making it a commodity.

 
 

Gary must hate Rudy for hijacking 9/11 for his own partisan ends…

I almost forgot. Gary, FOADIAF.

 
 

Gavin M. said,

September 11, 2007 at 18:32

Well, principle. Offending us doesn’t qualify as a bannable act.

Also, my upset today isn’t special or unique, so etc.

I think we can all agree that this is one of the classiest comments ever. Wisdom and humility in the face of crassness. The sort of humanity the Garys of the world cannot pretend to aspire to.

 
 

Yeah, but I actually do want to hide in a hole.

I don’t know an emoticon that means ‘really’ with enough emotive force.

 
 

I’m a little over caring about what those too cowardly to pick up a gun and fight (i.e. Gary), think about my personal reaction to 9/11 and how I think and feel about it. I was there, and I don’t need band of emotionally underdeveloped bed-wetters who spank it to the delicious possibility of more hate and death, to remind me.

You are no more than a collective *John Rocker* on the 7 Train.

 
 

Hey guys, OT, but I just got a friend request from Gary Ruppert on Facebook.

The real Gary.

That means I can see his profile.

Gary works for the RNC (‘Strategic Analysis’). Surprise surprise.

Gary’s also single and interested in whatever he can get!

Screenshot here, Printout (PDF) here.

 
 

Huh. Interesting.

The real Gary posts from a collegiate server in. . .um, a Mark Twain sort of state, as it were.

 
 

But I think, for me, the challenge is not so much to try to construct a connection, as it is to just understand that this isn’t about blurry TV images or abstract symbols or overwhelming numbers or lofty rhetoric or other peoples’ problems.

Everyone who died deserves to be remembered as a person – whether neighbor, relative, acquaintance, or even stranger.

I think this is very important. Too much tragedy has been abstracted to the point of losing all meaning, and that makes it very easy for people to exploit it for their own gains, to force their own meaning onto it.

And this still boggles my mind: the very people who claim to “own” this event and contort it to fit their personal agenda are the same people who cheared on “shock and awe” and pumped their fists at each airstrike.

Can they not see the similarity? Regular people, settling in at their jobs on a regular day at work…there’s the whine of airplanes, it gets louder…then the building shakes and the roof collapses and the fires start…and thousands of miles away, the perpetrators congratulate each other and laugh about “more rubble, less trouble” and celebrate the “victory” and never once stop to think that there were people under that rubble. Just plain old regular people.*

What does it take to make those victims turn back into people? Did you have to be there? Did you have to know someone in the building? Did you have to wander the city searching, posting flyers and pictures of loved ones? Did you have to hold your breath while you waited to hear exactly which planes your flight-attendant-friends were on that day? Did you have to implement the disastor recovery plan for your company because the main office and all your distant co-workers were suddenly gone?

Or maybe you just have know someone who knew someone, to hear the detailed story of a life interrupted, to face that awkward, awful slience as someone whose life was also interrupted struggles to regain control and continue the story.

Maybe you just have to stop pounding the podium and chanting your slogans just long enough to hear–and really listen to–the people who are remembering their relatives, friends, neighbors, coworkers, roommates, or casual acquaintances.

And Gavin is right: this isn’t about you and how this scares you or makes you angry or give meaning to your otherwise pointless life. And RubDMC is right: it’s not about symbols and speeches and special reports:

It’s about people. Everyday, regular people.

* This is a poor summary of one of Riverbend’s posts that compared the events of 9-11 to an airstrike in Bagdad.

 
 

There’s not a lot that one can say about 9/11/01 without seeming to drag it to one side of the ideological divide or the other. These last two years, I’ve just put up the same simple post – a picture and a short poem. I’ll leave the poem here for anyone who feels a personal loss from that horrific day. It may not be the absolutely perfect sentiment but it seemed to appropriate to me.

The Absent

They are not here. And we, we are the Others
Who walk by ourselves unquestioned in the sun
Which shines for us and only for us.
For They are not here.
And are made known to us in this great absence
That lies upon us and is between us
Since They are not here.
Now, in this kingdom of summer idleness
Where slowly we the sun-tranced multitudes dream and wander
In deep oblivion of brightness
And breathe ourselves out, out into the air-
It is absence that receives us;
We do not touch, our souls go out in the absence
That lies between us and is about us.
For we are the Others,
And so we sorrow for These that are not with us,
Not knowing we sorrow or that this is our sorrow,
Since it is long past thought or memory or device of mourning,
Sorrow for loss of that which we never possessed,
The unknown, the nameless,
The ever-present that in their absence are with us
(With us the inheritors, the usurpers claiming
The sun and the kingdom of the sun) that sorrow
And loneliness might bring a blessing upon us.

– Edwin Muir

 
 

Someone on that Wizbang post linked to a Lileks post from 9/11/02.

It is truly the worst piece of shit I have ever read.

 
LA Confidential Pantload
 

That post doesn’t look like Christmas – more like a ghouls’ orgy.

 
 

Wow, that’s really exploitative and hollow. Thanks, Chris Muir, for making us laugh about love. Again.

 
 

That “Woo-yay!” link. Ugh. Mark it not safe for humans. Pure terror-porn.

Within 1 week of the original event, I had a cow-orker try to show me an emailed slideshow – pics I purposely avoided, and still haven’t sought out, such as the bodies falling outside the towers – interspersed with Marlboro-Country pix of the steely-eyed codpiece in chief.

Fuck.

 
 

Tell ’em, Dorothy! Well said.

Gavin, I’m very sorry for your loss, and hope that the hiding with Funyuns brings peace.

 
 

Just to clarify — obviously the specific codpiece event hadn’t happened, but the Marlboro Man thing was clearly already going on…

 
 

Hard to imagine Gary’s single when he freely admits on his facebook page that his hobby is being a troll…

 
 

Dorothy is exactly right. Anyone remember the entire extended family living in an apartment house that our dispassionate cruise missiles wiped out because Saddam was reportedly in a restaurant in the building? Oops. (Collateral. adj. Of a secondary nature; subordinate.) It seems none of these victims were actual people; we didn’t read their personal stories in special sections of the NY Times, no one reads their names aloud on the anniversary of their Shock & Awe deaths. Just a handful of what, 100,000? 500,000? Our benighted leaders exacted vengeance on the easiest “target-rich environment” they could hit, while our real enemy still produces videos. The anguish inflicted in our name we can never redress, but our nation will forever be accountable for it.

 
 

There’s only one important question concerning the attacks, did the US gov’t allow/participate in 9/11?

The answer to that query would explain the illegal wire-taps, suspension of habeas corpus, banning of books like “America Deceived” from Amazon, detaining of dissenters in fences miles away from events, and multiple wars based on lies.

How can the gov’t be innocent in 9/11 when we have caught it lying so many times (WACO, Ruby Ridge, no WMDs, USS Liberty, Operation Northwoods, Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbor, ETC.)?

In law, if you determine a person lies ONCE during his testimony, it can be assumed that he lied in the remainder of his testimony. How come we do not hold the gov’t to the same standard as it holds us to?

The gov’t lied to us about Iraq and more Americans have died there than in 9/11. If the gov’t lied about Iraq then why is everyone so reluctant to believe that the gov’t lied about 9/11?

Final link (before Google Books bends to pressure and drops the title):
America Deceived (book)

 
 

Simba
I think that pic is John Dolittle, the California Rep under investigation. http://doolittle.house.gov/ Or else he and Gary are twins.

 
 

Kills is dutch for stream, just fyi. Many, many, many places in NY have names ending in Kills.
Every now and then a clueless housewife starts a campaign to change the name of her town to not celebrate violence, and they have to be sat down and spoken to slowly.

Dutch or not, Fresh Kills is an incredibly grotesque name, especially for a landfill, especially for a landfill where human remains have been found. If there is a God, he/she has a sick sense of humor.

 
 

Michael:

Please. No.

 
 

Fresh Stream Landfill isn’t exactly appetizing either.

Michael: Shut the fuck up. Now ain’t the time.

 
 

All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.

George Bush, August 6, 2001

You conservatives sure do own this day Gary.

 
 

mikey – I don’t mean to offend, but did you write that (“We measure our lives by the love of others…”. It’s beautiful.

– Jim (who for today just can’t post as Senator Ted)

 
 

Gary are you one of those people so staggeringly ignorant that you think Saddam Hussein ordered 9/11?

 
 

Sorry about your friend. A fine piece.

And the loaded term “Patriot Day” still pisses me off. If anything, it’s a “Remembrance Day,” and always will be for me and many others I know. Now of all days, I’m not in the mood for emotional blackmail.

 
 

Too much tragedy has been abstracted to the point of losing all meaning, and that makes it very easy for people to exploit it for their own gains, to force their own meaning onto it.

Indeed. This is why I couldn’t bring myself to watch more than an hour of so of the Petraeus Show (Now with 30% more Petraeus!!). I said it this way over at the Great Orange Satan:

Behind it all is an utter lack of humanity. People– formerly living humans with hopes and dreams and families and worries about the future– are collapsed into colorful bar graphs. See? The colorful bar that stands in for their corpses is a little shorter than the one that represents those who were killed last month! That’s “progress!”

What? Your son was shot in the head? Well, which side of the head? Its terribly important, you know, because if it was on the front side then it doesn’t count. He gets left out of the colorful bar chart representing “sectarian violence” because that shows even more “progress”.

Its utterly inhuman, insane, disgusting, and absurd in the worst possible way. Its the Ultimate Bad Craziness, yet everyone plays along because its so much more comforting to squint at a bar chart, or argue over data collection methodology than to contemplate the faces of the dead, and how they got that way.

As for your friend, Gavin, I really don’t know what to say. He’s gone, but his music is still here. Maybe bust open the windows and crank his music up to 11. Share what he left behind.

 
 

One person three times who he doesn’t know somehow represents two thousand people, including a large chunk of first responders?

And what’s with the Clenis and Berger act from last week? I saw neither of them on the news, and when was the last time Berger was in the government?

 
 

Anyone remember the entire extended family living in an apartment house that our dispassionate cruise missiles wiped out because Saddam was reportedly in a restaurant in the building?

Wasn’t that the bombing that injured

Ali Ismail Abbas

 
 

mikey – I don’t mean to offend, but did you write that

Aye-up. Just pulled it right out of my ass.

I’ve found my muse is strong when blood is spilled.

It’s beautiful.

Thanks, m’man…

mikey

 
 

Gavin, hope the funyuns helped some. My dear friend, the man who officiated at our wedding, is still alive because he used his birthday as a reason to sleep in that day. We didn’t find out until late in the evening that he’d emerged from the subway to find that his 93rd-floor office… no longer existed. Luck is so random, and friends are so precious.
*********************

Gary:
This is OUR day, Patriot Day, and we will observe it with remeberrance, vengence and support for troops and USA power of freedom the world over.

Patriot Day is in the spring, you vile troll, and has been so observed in New England for many, many years. Apparently ‘remeberrance’ is a flavor ingredient in the cheap booze you suck to drown the psychic pain of being a boil on the butt of the human condition, because you’re not even doing your usual semi-competent job of cutting & pasting this morning’s talking-points from the bowels of the RNC. If contempt is the emotion that feeds your tiny, withered soul, you’ve just earned enough to keep you and a half-dozen of your equally parasitic fellow-travellers (I won’t use the word “friends”, because people like you don’t have any) squirming blindly in the dank hell that is your pathetic existence for at least the next several months. Take that as an excuse to go the fuck away, and take your band of sockpuppets and lampreys with you.

 
 

In fact, I’d like to follow up a bit on Anne Laurie’s last.

This is no day. Not a day to celebrate, not a day to come together.

Perhaps a day to mourn, nothing more.

We lost people because things that happened well outside of our purview caused 19 young men to throw away their lives in order to kill thousands of innocents.

What does this day mean? It means something has gone well off the tracks. It means that killing Americans was the most important thing in the lives of 19 young men. It means that those 19 young men couldn’t reach the people who they had been brought up to hate. It means that the coincidence of anger, religion and indoctrination leads to unspeakable acts.

It’s important to remember that unspeakable acts were committed long before september 2001. It’s important to mourn our dead. But it’s important to THINK. Come on, people, this isn’t hard. War forever and ever amen, or find a way to peace. If you want to honor the memory of the people who died that day six years ago, think about what might be acomplished by talking and living together. Think about your sadness, your loss. Multiply that by ten thousand, and that is the sadness and loss we have brought down on innocent iraqis and afghanis.

What will make it stop? You don’t need me to tell you the obvious. You KNOW how to end it. The violence, the killing, the horror. It’s really simple, after all.

The sadness of this day is the lessons not learned…

mikey

 
 

That post by Michael is a robot. The identical post was left at Tbog by Daniel, by Allen at Pandagon.

 
 

I can’t believe (what am I saying, of course I can) Bush wouldn’t offer to pick up the tab to return the remains. He can borrow hundreds of billions to kill people but he can’t fork out a few hundred million for a proper burial of the victims he’s exploited to advance his loathesome war in Iraq.

The only people who truly honour the dead are the individuals who knew and loved them. The rest? Deserve to be interred in a landfill.

 
Fishbone McGonigle
 

And the loaded term “Patriot Day” still pisses me off. If anything, it’s a “Remembrance Day,” and always will be for me and many others I know. Now of all days, I’m not in the mood for emotional blackmail.

I used to work for a company that thought it would be a great idea to have a Patriot Day picnic a few years back. The flyers they circulated were just ghastly – talking about softball games and squirt-gun fights as an appropriate way to mark the day. When I pointed out the utter tastelessness of the whole idea to my boss and to the other company owners, they all just stared at me as if I had three heads. I’m sure it was no coincidence that they were all big Bush supporters – several of them had that fuundraising thank-you photo of the Chimp and his Robowife hanging in their offices.

It was at that precise moment that I decided I needed to seek out other career opportunities.

 
 

I’m sure it was no coincidence that they were all big Bush supporters – several of them had that fuundraising thank-you photo of the Chimp and his Robowife hanging in their offices.

At the beginning of this year, I was visiting my boyfriend, who at the time was working for a small business as a salesperson. We stopped into his office over the weekend to pick something up, and he briefly pointed out his boss’s office, which had one of those fundraising pictures in it as well. I already had some idea about this guy, but it was at that point I knew all I needed to know about him. He was only was quite an asshole, but apparently doesn’t know how to run a business worth a flying fuck—we have been friends with his operations manager (who essentially runs the business for him and gets no credit) and hoo boy does he have stories.

 
 

was only

s/but/and

I can’t blame it on the lack of preview…

 
 

Gavin, you are a more patient man than I. I’d have banned real or fake Gary on the spot.

 
 

thank you for sharing, all of you, and i’m so sorry for each of your losses.

 
 

Why those damned conservative Rethuglicans! They are assuredly the only ones who are using 9/11 for their own political means!

What? You say that there are plenty of leftists who say that 9/11 was a case of America getting what it had coming? They compared the dead to Nazi functionaries? Surely they have no support?

Right?

 
 

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