Op-Ed Column: It's 9/11! Bring On the Death Porn!

Another year, another opportunity for the GOP to use 9/11 to pump fear into our populace while "honoring our dead."

As a New Yorker, while that day and weeks and months that followed will always be with me, I'd long grown numb from the Bush administration's and Republicans Party's branding of 9/11 for their own despotic aims: an America in which democracy has been gagged, waterboarded and renditioned to a dank faraway cell for its own protection, while our "heroic" protectors of freedom fight against a noun -- terror -- and something that's been around since the dawn of time -- terrorists.

For a brief moment, however, during the Republican National Convention's "9/11 tribute" film, I was viscerally reminded of the lengths to which our current leadership will go to terrorize their own citizens into handing over their liberties for another four years. I watched the towers fall again, that deceptively blue sky, the dust and smoke and people running for their lives. An impeccably edited piece of GOP death porn.

If Barack Obama's campaign can be summed up in two words -- hope and "Enough!" -- then two words can also encapsulate John McCain's -- fear and "Boo!"

Under this cynical and fascist canard, the Bush administration and their traitorous partners in Congress, including both former and some current Democratic members, have driven our ideals, our hopes, our economy, our environment, our soldiers and many fellow citizens of the world into the ground. Literally.

Hopefully the act of this seven-year-old hijacking of our country begins and ends with today's anniversary. Or, at the very least, with the final day of George W. Bush's immeasurably lethal and nightmarish presidency.

I won't watch the ceremonies today. I cannot sit and listen to Bush and John McCain pretend to care about my fellow New Yorkers who lost their lives on 9/11 or my fellow Americans who lost their liberty right after that. Instead, I'll honor their memories by spending the day working on an investigative piece that seeks something that also died on that ironically clear day in September: truth.

To all the families and friends who lost loved ones seven years ago today, you're in my thoughts and prayers for a brighter future.

Comments

[Brad Jacobson]

It's 9/11! Bring On the Death Porn!

[JF]

"We are watching a poorly staged rendition of Wag the Dog , interpreted for the morbidly stupid and performed by the criminally insane." - Jules Carlysle

[Greg - Danville, CA]

Agreed on the ceremonies today. I tried to listen to Rumsfeld on C-SPAN radio giving his speech at the Pentagon and got so nauseous with anger that I had to turn it off.

Instead I watched Zeitgiest (www.Zeitgeistmovie.com) and "Loose Change: Final Cut" to continue to think about what really happened that day.

[Jane Hawes]

I didn't watch the ceremonies either - or anything else on TV about 9/11. I watched the towers fall the first time (on CNN; I wasn't in NY), and that was enough. It is outrageous (not to mention cynical and downright cruel) the way the Repugs have used this tragedy over and over again for their own twisted and evil political purposes.