I’ve experienced several historical events, but nothing quite like 9/11. I lived in D.C. when 9/11 happened and I used to drive right past the spot where the American Airlines jet crashed into the Pentagon. That particular day I passed by twenty minutes before it happened. I still remember the morning DJ joking about “some idiot who slammed a Cessna into the World Trade Center” (“how can you not see the World Trade Center?”), and I remember the horror in his voice when he learned it wasn’t a Cessna. Then there was actual panic and confusion and people talked about the Capitol being destroyed and the White House. It took me six hours to get home, fifteen minutes away, as they closed the bridges and soldiers set up road blocks.

I also remember the shock and disbelief that this was happening in our country. And I remember feeling sick upon seeing people jump to their deaths in New York. All of this is vividly etched in my brain as it is for so many of us.

When I heard that Oliver Stone would do a film about 9/11, I had high expectations. Stone is a leftist nut, but he had undeniable talent at one point. Platoon was brilliant, as was Wall Street. Platoon was so good it literally broke the Vietnam spell in our country and ended the tension between the public and the soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Wall Street (ironically) inspired an entire generation of kids to become Gordon Gekkos. Heck, even The Doors was great and turned me into a fan of the group. So I expected something pretty incredible from World Trade Center, even if it was likely to be liberal.

In fact, I expected something that would mirror the shock, the disbelief, the panic, and the horror that people felt. I expected something that highlighted the selfless bravery we saw on our televisions that day. I expected something that caught both the grand scale of what this meant to the country and also something that captured the personal effect this had on so many people and so many families.

Instead, I got a remake of The Towering Inferno.

It’s not that World Trade Center is a bad film as far as disaster films go, but it completely lacks context and it has nothing like the impact it should have had. It is a small film. It follows a small group of first responders, a brave group of Port Authority police officers, who arrive at the WTC after everything has already begun and it never moves beyond them. There is no doubt their story is heroic and deserving of being told, but this came nowhere near capturing the emotion of the moment. There’s never any sense of how shocking these events were, or how far ranging. There’s little attention given to the three thousand other people who were killed that day or the tens of thousands more who came close. Nor are the characters given much chance to become personal to us before they are thrown into the action. This is like doing a film about Pearl Harbor by focusing on a small group of firefighters aboard one of the battleships and starting the film after the battleship has already been hit without even explaining that the attack was a sneak attack and the country was at peace moments before.

For a guy with the talent of Oliver Stone, this was a total failure. For a film about an event that remains so raw in so many people’s minds, this was a total failure. For a film about a great national tragedy and outrage, this was a failure.

Obviously, I can’t read Stone’s mind, but I think he was afraid of this topic. Stone has tremendous talent, but he’s also got a horrible reputation. I think he feared that anything he did beyond the very narrow confines of this small story would result in a backlash by one side or the other, and he apparently wasn’t prepared to experience that backlash. But in succumbing to this fear, Stone blew his chance to do something truly inspired and that is the real shame here.

To this day, I think 9/11 still waits for THE film that will give Americans closure because something this horrible calls out for our culture to digest it and explain it to us in a form we can contemplate. But that film will take a lot more courage than Hollywood has shown in quite some time, because such a film will require showing real people and real suffering, and that will anger people and hurt feelings.

And admittedly, it might not even be possible for a film to compete with reality, now that reality comes with its own video images. Could a film really show the raw horror of people jumping to their deaths? I don’t honestly know. Seeing actors pretending to die certainly doesn’t have the same impact as seeing the real thing caught on tape. But Hollywood has some advantages. It knows what images have endured in the public consciousness and it can manipulate the story to be more coherent. And it can bring us closer to people we never actually met, but whose fates we know. I guess we won’t really know if this can be done until someone gives it a genuine try. But Vietnam was the first televised war and there are miles of footage about every aspect of it, yet we remain so fascinated with it that we still watch the movies about it.

I think 9/11 needs a definitive film. And if liberal icons like Stone can’t or won’t do it, maybe some young conservative screenwriters or directors should give it a try?

Thoughts?

 However, Obama is animated by seemingly crude gestures made powerful by his position.  He and his motivated White House staff, without explanation, used a black painted piece of plywood to cover up the letters IHS (Latin for “Jesus Savior of Men”) when he spoke at a Jesuit University (Georgetown), but while speaking abroad, our president deftly referred to the Koran as “ holy,” a descriptive primarily used by followers who believe in the Islamic faith. Why?

These choices are thoughtful, not thoughtless, and symbolic of current White House ideology. When Obama was simply a candidate, and not yet our chosen leader, he had already attempted to use a circular symbol suspiciously reminiscent of the presidential seal to signify that the prize was all but attained before the fact. It was adolescent pop psychology, symbolic and laughable, but a telling trait that should have warned us that we were dealing with a symbol-holic, and a degree of hubristic thinking that had danger written all over it. 

Human symbols are the glue for his “green” and very radical political testament. It’s humorous to listen to the apologists excuse the appointment of Van Jones as a failure of vetting procedures. Jones is a soul mate, not a soul mistake. He’s a beloved symbol and a disciple who habitually uses the required neo-com radical lingo.  Catch phrases such as “redistribution of wealth” or “redistributive justice” are the common symbolic logos of all of Barack’s brothers and sisters like Carol Browner, Cass Sunstein, John Holdren, and Valerie Jarrett.  

Manipulating words for symbolic effect is an important aspect of Barack’s background skills. He proclaimed September 11th “a national day of service and remembrance” … service first and remembrance second. Service is an unnecessary little addition to that horrible anniversary that we certainly did not need, but for it to precede remembrance in the spoken or written phrase is an affront to our national dignity. Can you imagine every news report mentioning Joe Biden first whenever referring to our national leadership? It would be demeaning to the president.

Obama symbolically and purposefully diminished the real meaning of that day, the remembrance part, for his egotistical linguistic and ideological needs.  In America we don’t have a problem with service, our problem is remembering certain truths that are self evident and remembering those who first enunciated those truths to the astonishment of the entire world.

Obama has traveled that world denigrating his own country wherever and whenever possible; bowing to a Saudi king and listening to communist Daniel Ortega savagely berate the US for an hour with nary a word offered in defense of the American people are just two examples. He also smiled warmly in the direction of Hugo Chavez, a porcine tub of human excrement who happens to be presently allied with holocaust deniers and killers of our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

If Obama treats his own country with such obvious disdain, can we really be surprised by the way he treats new Eastern European allies? Betraying them on the 70th anniversary of the Polish invasion was not a mistake any more than the gift of 25 dvd’s was a mistake. It was for Barack a perfect degree of respect! They will deny it, but reneging on our missile treaty agreement on this specific historical date will always remind us of the harm done to our new relationships,  and of those who so arrogantly chose to abuse symbolic remembrance.

And then, while I sat there in my comfortable American home watching my big screen television on my recently purchased couch with my coffee in hand, in real time, I saw a second plane hit the other tower.

At that moment, I knew:  This is an attack.  And everything changed for me, utterly and completely.

The war that had been going on without our acknowledgement, a war waged by crazed extremists from countries I had never thought about, came crashing into our homes, killing our citizens, destroying one of our country’s landmarks, and re-orienting, in various ways, all of our lives.

I lost no one close to me on that horrible day.  A close friend who was a paramedic in New York gave me a very harrowing account of her experiences, but she survived.  But I still felt such grief, such a horrible sense of loss, at the fact that thousands of my fellow Americans had lost their lives that day just by going to work.

I remember talking to a Canadian friend who called me out of the blue from Montreal to share his feelings, and to tell me how he felt like an American that day, that his sense of loss and grief was overpowering, and he shared that with me, and offered his love.  Over the next few days, I called my closest friends and my family members, purportedly to talk about the events of 9/11, but actually just to tell them I loved them and cherished them.  And all of us shared a sense of resolve: we must, as a nation, confront these people, and make sure that it never happens again.

But that resolve is simply not shared by our current administration.  We are being governed by a President who will not make a speech about the meaning of 9/11.  Instead he will try to rebrand 9/11 into a National Day of Service which will have nothing to do with the attack on our country.  He might  make a speech about how Americans are lying about his health-care plan, and how Americans are behaving badly in town hall meetings, and implying that Americans are liars and racists if they disagree with him.  But he will not mention the terrorist attack that occurred eight years ago, and he will not vow that it will never happen again.

Let us all remember what we felt on that day, even though our government and our media chooses to forget it.  Our survival as a nation depends on it.

The kids from the Bronx with the accents became fireman.  The kid from Queens with the gaudy chains and the girlfriend with the big hair became cops.  People who worked with their hands, people who risked their lives, I am now terribly embarrassed and ashamed to say, were thought of as just of another kind, the kind that my Leftist friends continue to deride as being from “fly-over country,” or from Kansas where the people have something “the matter” with them.

9/11 made that narrative impossible for me to cling to any longer.  It may have taken days, weeks, months and years for all my ingrained bigotries to subside, but in those horrific moments when the Masters of the Universe were helpless, and those I had been culturally bigoted against ran up those stairs it became impossible for me to cling to them any longer.

The lies of the Left would never be so clearly exposed – except in their future defense of those lies – as they were that day when those heroes did not call in sick as they saw the morning news, but answered the call, and did not stand by as they would have had there been any truth to Leftist dogma, clapping and shouting about “The chickens coming home to roost.”  They risked it all – many gave all – because that’s what heroes do.

On that day, eight years ago now – their children of ten now almost twenty – my heart goes out to their loved ones and I thank them.  And I ask them to know, how many others their loved ones may or may not have been able to save, on that day, eight years ago today, they saved me.

Within days of the attacks, it began. Without a word, those who had endlessly looped the video of the beating of Rodney King stopped airing footage of Americans jumping to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center. Not long after, those who would later sear the images of a few misfits at Abu Ghraib into the hearts and minds of the enemy, began the inevitable murmurs of “being responsible” when it came to airing footage of passenger planes exploding into the towers.

Soon, and predictably, the footage all but disappeared. 

Step one at chipping away at our resolve was complete, and all in the name of a few sophisticates doing what was best for us.

What followed was also expected.

The Leftists, these Enablers of Evil, stopped at nothing. Skewed coverage, front-page CIA leaks, taking it to the streets, Hollywood’s unholy brand of patriotism…The list is as endless as the dirty work was relentless. And yet, as they wielded their worst, 50 million people in two countries were liberated and we have not been attacked again … because of something else we’ve come to expect.

The valor and bravery of those charged with keeping us safe: The United States Military, the CIA (especially the interrogators), the FBI, our first responders and finally, something that was not expected…

The mettle of President George W. Bush.

“He kept us safe” is not an argument of last resort after the other side has finished ticking off well-rehearsed talking points, it is why George W. Bush is a great man.  

He Kept Us Safe.

And while he did, while the Enemy Within rained hell on him, this uncommonly decent man stood firm as he grew old before our eyes.

Where this country would be had he not possessed such unexpected grit is unthinkable.

And we now know what it is to live with the unease of him not being there.

God bless the men and women who guard the wall. God bless President Bush. God bless the grand and noble experiment that produced them.

The anniversary in the mainstream media will be muted, as always – and we’ll come back to that. And even though three thousand people died that day, I want to concentrate on two – not to exclude the others, but simply to show you that they were not some abstract number but individual lives. 

Kevin Cosgrove

One of the people who died that day, eight years ago, was a businessman working in the World Trade Center. His name was Kevin Cosgrove. Kevin Cosgrove stands out from the other three thousand because he was on the phone to 9/11 when the tower he was in collapsed around him. (Fast forward to about 4:00 if you are pressed for time) And I’m warning you, this is not for the faint hearted. 

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The most telling and poignant thing I felt when I hear the sound of a man, as the floors of his office fell away around him, is simply that this voice – recorded on tape – was only one of thousands of identical screams of terror that went unrecorded in the floors above and below, and in the other tower. I try to imagine what that must have been like, and how repugnant to their memory the entire idea of 9/11 “trutherism” is.   

There’s somebody else I would like to remember today. In the years since that beautiful clear morning, many people have tried to identify the people who leapt to their deaths to escape the flames. The most famous of these doomed people has been called “The Falling Man.”  

A newspaper article, followed by an exceptional documentary called The Falling Man, attempted to identify him and many of the others who took control of their final moments and plunged to their deaths that day. 

Jonathan Briley

The Falling Man was named Jonathan Briley, and I’d like to remember him today as well. To get the essence of who Jonathan was and the consequences of the decision he made, watch from about 3:15 to from about 3:15 to about 5:15 in this clip from the truly remarkable doc, The Falling Man… 

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The media won’t show these images. They say they don’t want to rile up the population. I say we should be riled up. There was talk that the current administration plans to “re-brand” 9/11 into a National Day of Service in order to chill out this nation of children they are trying to create. But I’m not going to calm down and “get over all the anger” of 9/11. I promised myself that morning that I would never forget what I saw that day, and I never will. 

Just a few days ago, British Intelligence interrupted a plan that was days away from fruition, and convicted these three Muslim terrorists on charges of attempting to blow up seven airliners in mid-Atlantic. I said Muslim Terrorists because that’s what they are. Throughout the past eight years they have been foiled time and time again by British and American intelligence agencies – the same nameless heroes the Obama administration now wants to prosecute.  I’m sure that will end well. 

We’re not allowed to be enraged, you see? 

Actually, you know what? That’s not true. We are allowed to be enraged, but only about certain things. You can’t be outraged when America is in the right, but you can be outraged when she is in the wrong: about Abu Graib, for example.  Likewise, you are encouraged by the media to be outraged at corporate transgressors like AIG, but outrage at the politicians who caused this mess is given a “dangerously un-American howling mob rabid pack of animals” dismissal. 

It’s a RAGE RATCHET, and it goes one way only: to the left. Well, I refuse to be controlled by these sons of bitches. If what happened to Kevin Cosgrove and Jonathan Briley doesn’t fill you with outrage and anger, not only are you not my moral superior… but your inability to see right and wrong is an indication of deep-seated, delusional psychosis.   

Never forget what happened that day.

Nearly three thousand souls perished.  Not combatants on a battlefield, but average everyday citizens like you and me, starting their days like any other, working to earn a living to feed their families.  Along with them were hundreds of valiant firemen and policemen rushing in to the buildings to save lives. 

The images of those New Yorkers the next few days wandering the streets around Ground Zero with pictures of their missing loved ones, hoping beyond hope that perhaps it was a simple bump on the head and temporary amnesia that kept them from phoning home to tell them they were okay…  These thoughts suck the wind from my soul. 

Like most Americans, I was profoundly moved and shaken that fateful morning; and I knew instantly that our lives as Americans were forever changed.  The surreal unfolding of events took me from shock to horror…to fury.  I remember calling the Marine recruiter the next morning and asking where I go to enlist.  He asked a few questions, and then informed me I was too old by two years to join the military.  ‘But I’m a wonderful hand with a rifle,’ I argued, ‘versed in everything from pistol to shotgun to rifle to machine gun.  I’m your boy (okay I’m not quite a boy), but trust me, you guys want me on your front lines.’  The answer remained a polite but firm ‘No thank you, sir’.   So I sat helplessly like so many millions of us — glued to the TV screen, hoping for some positive news, praying something good to come from this horror.

I remember that anger, that blind rage, that boiling fury I held deep in my bowels that day.  But when John Nolte asked me to write something about 911…I couldn’t think of a thing to say.  I, like so many Americans, had pretty much forgotten that awful day.  Oh sure, I remembered the images, the newscasts, …the movie, ‘United 93,’…but I really had to struggle to remember what I was going through, what we as a nation were going through on September 11, 2001.  And I know I’m not alone.

How can that be?  How could we have let one singular event that reshaped an entire foreign policy, altered a national zeitgeist, and changed the very way we view the world…how could we have let that memory dim?   Is our selective memory just a survival mechanism that chooses to dwell on the happy and pleasant and let the trauma and terrors of life fade into a merciful fog; like a flesh wound that hardens and clots, then forms a thick, crusty scab, only to fade eventually leaving scarcely a mark?

There are some, of course, who don’t want anyone to remember 9/11.  The reasons they would obfuscate the meaning and redirect the focus of the attack are varied and insidious, and they are the topic of a different essay.  Here I will simply take a few moments to register my reflections on the real meaning of 9/11.

We have been attacked, we suffered a grievous loss of humanity, and we are at war.  Here, in America, we are under assault.  We have vicious enemies abroad…and determined enemies here among us.  People who want to destroy the America we cherish so dearly, and for whom so many brave souls have made the ultimate sacrifice. 

They hate us because we’re rich.  They hate us because we’re exceptional.  And they hate us most of all…because we’re good.  We’re by no means perfect, but more often than not, we do the right thing.  We defend innocent life.  We oppose tyranny.  We offer aid and support to disaster victims.  We give in vast abundance, more than any other nation has done since the dawn of time.  But most importantly… we offer the world that ‘shining city on a hill’ image that President Regan so famously coined, to serve as the model to liberty-loving people worldwide…and a beacon to draw them nigh.

The Islamic fascists who hate us and wish us ill?   They want us to suddenly alter our lifestyles, throw ourselves on our knees, pray to Allah and accept Sharia law.   They want us to atone for our past ‘sins’ as a nation and pay penance for the ‘evils’ we have perpetrated upon the world.  They want to change America.

As the events of 9/11 taught us…. Not all change is good change.  There are many enemies to our great nation – from without and within.  They hate America and want to re-fashion it into their concept of utopia.  

God grant us the wisdom to tell friend from foe! 

Do you hear the pounding of the drum yet?   It’s your neighbors, your friends, the grocers, the trucker, the doctors, the businessmen, the students, the citizens of this great country…Americans like you –  speaking out, by the tens of millions, shouting in a unified and deafening, resounding cry… This is our country!  This is America, dammit!!  

Stand up for what America is.  And don’t let anyone sell you what America is not.

Smoke billows rolled
As planes shattered glass
Concrete and steel
The trees and the grass 

An enemy attack
On the Land of the Free
How could this happen
How could this be 

Our hearts gripped with fear
In sheer disbelief
Unbearable sorrow
One hardly could speak 

As evil sought triumph
Through catastrophic strife
Towers fell and buildings crumbled
Tragically ending innocent lives 

We cried out to God
Fell down on our knees
Hugged our families, friends, and strangers
Helping anyone in need 

It was a day where we placed
All our differences aside
We were Americans facing tragedy
With courage, tears, and battle-cries 

We remember 9-11
Those who paid the highest price
Those who bravely tackled evil
Those whose courage rescued lives 

Unfathomable terror
Unfolded before our eyes
A day where heroes would die
And warriors… would rise. 

We remember 9-11
Our lives forever changed
Those whose heartbeats too soon ended
Shall not have died in vain 

Though evil fought for victory
The death of freedom was their prize
Americans will not bow to terrorists
And Our Freedom… Will… Survive

We remember 9-11
Yet our hearts, our hopes our dreams
Remain alive
Now hear our cry
AMERICA, LET FREEDOM RING 

We remember you, the sons and daughters, the fathers and mothers, the sisters and brothers, the aunts and uncles, the cousins, nieces, and nephews, the neighbors and strangers… the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the weak and the strong… 

We remember you, the firemen, the policemen, the paramedics, nurses and doctors… the pilots, and passengers, the flight attendants, and co-workers… the citizens of New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania… and all those whose lives were forever changed because of the atrocities thrust upon this nation by a group of terrorists hell-bent on destroying our freedom and democracy, and our American way of life… 

We remember you, our men and women in uniform, in the United States Marine Corps, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force and the Coast Guard… 

For those who gave their all and for those continuing the fight for freedom to keep our Country safe… May GOD BLESS YOU and may GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Eight years later, and we still haven’t begun to do what needs to be done.