Sunday, November 8, 2009

It’ll Be 9/11 x 8 Years

The next week will be filled with stock footage of the attacks on the World Trade Centre, because it was the most important event in history ever. Disregard everything that’s happened after and the mistakes made and remember that we’re all victims of the same tragedy, even though we were in no way connected to the events in any meaningful, or even imaginary way. If you know a guy who knows a guy who almost got on a plane that day, then you’re the greatest hero ever.
If anything, I think that 9/11 proved that seeing a giant skyscraper collapse makes for really good propaganda/TV.  It’s all well and good to say that x number of people died in y disaster, but these days you need to sex things up a little. No one really cares if 10,000 people died in a tsunami if there’s no HD pictures of people running from a giant tidal wave. If you can’t put it on a movie poster, it’s not saleable.
9/11 will be likely be remembered 100 years from now like the sinking of the Lusitania. Remember the Lusitania? Neither do I, and I just mentioned it. 100 years from now we’ll have space leeches to contend with, so there won’t be much time for remembering. The two events will remain similar in history as they mark the beginning of war.
What’s today’s score in the war on terror? U.S.A.: 0/Terrorists: 0. It’s a war that can’t be won, because it has no endgame. The U.S.A. could turn the Middle East in a parking lot, but the next day some nut job with an accent could set off a cherry bomb in a mailbox, and it would start all over again. Here’s a fun fact: in two more years, the war on terror will have lasted longer than WWI and WWII combined. What does that mean? Are we getting worse at fighting wars? The Cold War/Vietnam would indicate that: yes, we are.  

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