How DARE they??

Curse
by Frank Bidart

May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your
head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor
collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten
floors descend upon you.
May what you have made descend upon you.
May the listening ears of your victims their eyes their breath
enter you, and eat like acid
the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath.
May their breath now, in eternity, be your breath.
*
Now, as you wished, you cannot for us
not be. May this be your single profit.
Of your rectitude at last disenthralled, you
seek the dead. Each time you enter them
they spit you out. The dead find you are not food.
Out of the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter
the skin of another, what I have made is a curse.

Jeff Jarvis says Californians don't get it. THIS Californian gets it, though I heard a friend say he'd just wash the ash off his car and get on with things. Nope. Never forget.

A Perfect Morning.

Charles Hitchens last September 26.

Of course, again, The Slide Show.

From my newspaper: The Sonic Memorial, Images from Ground Zero, Shattered, One Year Viewed from Space, NASA, Newsday collection, All Available Boats, CNN, September 11 Digital Archive, Why the Towers Fell, Inside the Terror Network, How Stuff Works, My Story, You Will Never Be Forgotten, Avalon Project at Yale Law, Interactive Publishing, Families of September 11.

Peggy Noonan. Renee. Damian Penny takes on a Toronto idiot.

Mark Steyn, Flying the Flag:

Underneath all the "coping" and "healing" and the rest of the Dianafied soft-focus blur this Wednesday, you won't hear a lot about anger. But quiet, righteous anger is what a lot of Americans still feel.
...
I feel sorry for the 55 per cent of Europeans who, according to a poll last week, think falling secretaries and atomised infants are something to do with "US foreign policy". Mohammed Atta and his chums were wealthy, privileged and psychotic, yet feeble British churchmen line up to say the people who did this did it because they're impoverished, downtrodden yet rational.
...
By "distancing yourself" from the victims of September 11 you move yourself closer to the perpetrators, closer to barbarism. It may be "reasonable and moderate", but it's also profoundly self-corroding.

This isn't a "clash of civilisations" so much as a clash within civilisations - in the West, between those who believe in the values of liberal democracy and those too numbed by multiculturalist bromides to recognise even the most direct assault on them; and in the Islamic world, between what's left of the moderate Muslim temperament and the Saudi-radicalised death-cult Islamists.

I don't want to be "moderate and reasonable" in the face of Mohammed Atta. A world that "distances" itself from the US to get closer to him is a world that's more misogynist, bigoted, corrupt and superstitious. On this anniversary, I'll have a new flag on my truck and Neil Young's great September 11 anthem in the CD player:
No one has the answers,
But one thing is true,
You got to turn on evil,
When it's comin' after you.

Charles Johnson has been showing pictures all week. Photodude's tribute to Bill Biggart with many more pictures and links. Television Archive. Reason Online. And Dave Barry has two: On Hallowed Ground, and last year. James Cramer is mad. Steven Sharkansky.

James Lileks:

Little Christine was Gnat’s age, give or take a month; bin Laden’s lackeys killed her - and did so to ensure that other fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters died as well, preferably by the tens of thousands. This little girl’s death wasn’t even a comma in the manifesto they hoped to write. They made sure that her last moments alive were filled with horror and blood, screams and fear; they made sure that the last thing she saw was the desperate faces of her parents, insisting that everything was okay, we’re going to see Mickey, holding out a favorite toy with numb hands, making up a happy lie. And then she was fire and then she was ash.

I feel the same anger I did on 9/11; I feel the same overwhelming grief. Nothing in my heart has changed, and God forbid it ever does.