Nine Eleven Two Thousand Ten

Well, it's September 11th again, and nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the unknown third target, the big news is the fight over a mosque to be built in Manhattan (sometimes called the "Ground Zero Death to America Mosque and Terrorism School" by people who don't have enough real problems to get worked up about in their own lives.) The latest zany turn in the fight over whether people have the right to buy a building and use it for lawful religious purposes is the national furor over whether a deranged mustache in Florida, acting through its human puppet-avatar, has the right to burn a pile of Qurans (or possibly Korans.)

I'm not writing about this because I think there's anyone who might read it today who will say "Really? I hadn't heard about that!" It's all anyone is talking about today. I'm just recording that fact here so that, in the next few years, I can check a hypothesis. I think once the Mad Mustache gives up on book-burning (at least book-burning that makes terrorists angry) and the Westboro Baptist Nutty-Butter Church of Crazy burns an even bigger pile of books while chanting and holding up signs (such as "God Hates Everybody" and "What Does It Take to Get Martyred in This Country, Anyway?) the whole thing will die down. I think the mosque will get built, and the world will turn, and it'll probably turn out to be just another "community center." And I think that once that happens, the whole furor will be more or less forgotten by most Americans. Maybe by me, too, with the damage 24-hour news and internets have done to my precious, irreplaceable attention span. I just want to have a record here so that on future 9/11 anniversaries I can look back and remember that in 2010, we gave up on the idea of commemorating the attack that killed thousands of innocent Americans in one day, made us question everything we had assumed we knew about our own lives, and launched two wars. In 2010, we decided 9/11 was a good day for trivial bullshit, and I can't even pretend to be above it all because my own blatherings are recorded in my own archive in the post prior to this one.

At the very least, no matter how far I got sucked into the triviality and foolishness, even if I bought the hype just a little, let the record reflect in my defense that I managed to remember the real reason today matters in time to be a little ashamed.