Reliving 9/11
OK, I managed to not watch the made-for-TV stuff. But this morning we couldn’t resist watching the re-run of the Today Show from 9/11/2001. And not just a few minutes, either — we wound up watching two full hours of it, and now I need to get to work!
A few things we found interesting, from the perspective of five years later:
- The rumors of other types of attacks: a car bomb outside the State Department, a bomb in a Manhattan school, “several more” planes unaccounted for after the first four.
- The overall calmness of the commentators. There has been so much hype and drama since then, it’s sort of weird to hear Katie Couric and Tom Brokaw calmly discussing the events as they’re unfolding.
- A London reporter who was the first to say that it was clearly the work of Osama Bin Laden.
- Donald Rumsfeld refusing to leave the Pentagon.
- When the first tower collapsed, the reporters kept saying “a piece” of it had fallen off.
This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 8:42 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
on September 11, 2006 at 10:50 am Tom wrote:
Personally, I’ve been avoiding most of it. 9/11 really was one of the defining moments of my life - I used to turn on CNN every morning when I woke up, and so that day I saw the second plane hit and all the uncensored footage of people jumping. Lizzie was about six to seven months pregnant then, and on the other side of the Chicago metro area. Downtown Chicago shut down for fear of an attack there, so she ended up taking 290 all the way around the city and then back in to get home from work. By the end of the day, I couldn’t imagine why we would bring a new baby into the world.
Some stuff I remember:
Peter Jennings was amazing that day. He worked for something like 24 hours straight. It was akin to Walter Cronkite during the JFK thing (or so I’m told!).
Talking to my mother on the phone while we both watched the first tower fall. It was pretty much impossible to believe what we were watching.
Reports of shots fired on the Mall in Washington (completely false), and sudden evacuations of the Capitol and White House based on reports of more incoming planes.
Reports that President Bush had simply disappeared. At the time it seemed terrible, but in hindsight, he was simply under control of the Secret Service agents doing their jobs. Still, right then it seemed a little hard to imagine.
Two days later, we went to Cuisine of India in Mount Prospect, and everyone of Indian, Pakistani, or Middle Eastern descent was wearing huge American flags, t-shirts, anything that would identify them as not a terrorist. That made me sadder than anything, I think.
The Friday night after the Tuesday attacks, the city of Evanston held a candlelight vigil that ran the length of Ridge Avenue. Fire engines and police cars traveled quietly down the length of the street with their lights on and flags flailing behind the trucks. And then the dumb bastards in hot-rods overtook the fire engines, honking their horns and yelling out the windows about American pride and how we should “kick some Arab ass.” That’s when I started to cry and couldn’t stop for about an hour. It had become apparent that what’s happening now was already on the way.
So that be that. Solemn ceremonies, incessant footage, and endless lists of names don’t bring the dead back. And as we seem to be dead-set on searching for Osama bin Laden in Iraq (so to speak). I’ve never understood people who use 9/11 as a source of national pride, and today just dredges up all that crap all over again. Five friggin’ years, and we’re in more of a mess than we were that day. Maybe I need to switch to the Food network.
on September 11, 2006 at 11:59 am Doug wrote:
Hey, have you heard of a novel called “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”? I heard a panel on the radio Friday discussing 9/11 literature, and the panel of authors all raved about it. So I ordered a copy, which is on the way. It’s a novel that starts on 9/11, and the central characters are a husband and wife going through a messy hostile divorce. He works in the World Trade Center, and she’s on a flight out of Newark that morning, so they both spend the day blissfully believing the other one died at ground zero. But they both live, and the story continues.
The author was trying to make a point about how everyone who died on 9/11 was instantly made into a saint by the media: they were all assumed to be loving parents and spouses, great employees, nice people, etc. His theme is anyone who died that day, like anyone else, is defined by how they lived and not how they happened to die. There was a lot of angry emotional reaction to the author for “not taking 9/11 seriously,” and I heard a quote of his that went something like “I don’t see humor in the deaths of 3000 people, but I do see humor in how we reacted to it.”
I’m not necessarily recommending the book (haven’t even read it yet), but I thought it sounded like a perspective that might be interesting. And inflammatory.
on September 11, 2006 at 5:01 pm Dave Fourputt wrote:
The best 9/11 book I have read is:
“102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers”
I could not put it down.
on September 11, 2006 at 6:15 pm Doug wrote:
Hey Dave, that looks like a good one for firsthand accounts of what happened. I hadn’t heard of it, but I’ve added it to the never-ending Amazon “buy later” list.
on September 11, 2006 at 10:15 pm Doug wrote:
All this NY coverage today reminded me that I took a bunch of pictures in New York a couple years ago. Here’s the one I like best now.