9/11 and David Petraeus

Tom Ashbrook:  Tomorrow’s 9/11.  What do you think about 9/11 these days?

Garrison Keillor:  What do I think about 9/11?  I think that it happened a number of years ago and it was accompanied by a great deal of genuine grief – much of it private on the part of people who lost people.  And then it was exploited.  It was exploited in ways that we can disagree about but it surely was.  I was in New York.  I was up around 90^th and Riverside, a few miles north of ground zero.  For me it was a very different experience than it was for people just like me who happened to be going to the Twin Towers that day.  They have a right to that difference.  It was entirely different for them and I have no right to that experience.  That’s my feeling.  There was a lot of talk about how, you know, the country would never be the same again.  The country is the same.  Except for some reason the Constitution has been put off to the side.  But we’ll get it back!  We’ll get it back!

Tom Ashbrook:  What do you expect from General Petraeus tomorrow?  How do you feel about the whole drama of this “progress report” on Iraq? 

Garrison Keillor:  It’s not a drama.  They’re playing out parts that have already been written for them and there’s nothing surprising to come out of that…  All of the lines are going to be exactly what you’d expect people to say.  We seem frozen with this war and we need another election in order to resolve this…