Slouching Towards Sweeps Week

The weather has taken a turn for the awesome in the past few days: sunny and dry and the skies an immaculate back-to-school blue. M. and I figured out at drinks last week that the reason we had been feeling uneasy lately was because this brand of perfect weather that we have come to think of as "9/11 weather". As you may or may not know, the weather could not have been nicer that day, and this particular shade of unmarred sky always me feel a bit antsy and sick. In this regard, the terrorists have won.

I dread the coming plague of “Five Years Since 9/11” programming: I saw something on CNN the other day, using a "softer" font – still somber, but not the “ATTACK ON AMERICA” typeface that had been so popular. I could give a fuck about 9/11 anymore, since it no longer has any particularity or meaning in the public discourse. The ads for World Trade Center make me ill. I can’t help but feel that the fictions that spring up to kitschify the particular event are of a piece with the utter lack of empathy of these times. It is all negation: the Descartes blanche that is one’s birthright in the U. S. of Fuckin-A.

The tiny window of opportunity that this country had to reflect upon itself collapsed into a five year tantrum, a howling fugue of primary narcissism. If there is anything about that event I would remember, it was the immediate outpouring of generosity from one citizen to another, when teenage national guardsmen who had never set foot in our city were trying their best, and when drag queens and doctors lined up with signs along the West Side Highway to cheer for the firemen. It lasted almost two weeks, everyone huddled together in that grace period, that fermata, that caesura akin to the moment the plane goes so fast that the astronauts-in-training catch air and yield to nearly six precious seconds of flight.