It happened. It was awful, tragic. It's neither a credit to the US nor something we should be ashamed about. It was has been used since by politicians and others for their own purposes. And, since it has been so royally misused by so many to sell their own agendas, the sooner we get away from memorializing it the better. Repetitive memorials serve political agendas to a far great extent than they comfort the grieving.
It’s a terrible thing to ask those still missing the dead of 9/11 to forgo the public spectacle that accompanies their memory, but worse is what we have: repeated solemn ceremonies to the ongoing health of the American war state and the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden.
This belief is shared by a number of us -- I don't know how many. Here's more of an eloquent statement by Tom Engelhardt.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 -- who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used -- as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.
Isn’t it finally time to go cold turkey? To let go of the dead? Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we’ve proven that we, as a nation, can’t handle it -- and worse yet, that we don’t deserve it?
We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could. We can’t, of course. But we could stop the anniversary remembrances. We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later. We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are. We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.
Charles Dickens, many of whose characters were loathesome hypocrites, says of Mr. Pecksniff ("Martin Chuzzlewit"): "Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there." That pretty much sums up the custodians of American democracy over the past 30 years or so.
(I wonder what Dickens would have made of, say, Mitch McConnell? Or is McConnell a descendent of Uriah Heep?)
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Slightly edited for clarity. 9/9/11
