{"id":935,"date":"2009-09-11T07:51:15","date_gmt":"2009-09-11T11:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=935"},"modified":"2021-05-07T16:40:24","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T20:40:24","slug":"qotd-eight-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/09\/11\/qotd-eight-years-on\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Eight years on"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9\/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn\u2019t diminished a joule. This doesn\u2019t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then — and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivo\u2019d, and the day is bright and real and true again.<\/p>\n

Or not. It\u2019s all so far in the past, isn\u2019t it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired — seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, they\u2019re like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesn\u2019t even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) We\u2019re used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they won\u2019t rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We haven\u2019t forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in in the pictures — shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow.<\/p>\n

Right after the towers fell, people who\u2019d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn\u2019t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there\u2019s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn\u2019t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.<\/p>\n

\n

James Lileks, The Bleat<\/a>, 2009-09-11<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9\/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn\u2019t diminished a joule. This doesn\u2019t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,41,13],"tags":[256,257],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-september11","tag-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-f5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65583,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions\/65583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}