September 21, 2010
"Two days before the march, as I’d wondered what to wear, I was suddenly seized by a bad idea and went into the Footaction USA store on Seventh Avenue to ask if they had any Pat Tillman jerseys. “Who’s he?” the clerk had asked. Nobody else was wearing a Pat Tillman jersey either. There were a few isolated shirts with sentiments like “These Colors Don’t Run,” but mostly the Freedom Walkers were wearing their Freedom Walk shirts. They plopped down on the parking lot to wait. On a stage, a country-and-western band in Air Force uniform played Warren Zevon’s “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me.” Then it played Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” It was Sept. 11. In a clear blue sky, planes from National Airport—Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport—were rumbling low over the Pentagon, low enough to be once again unpleasant to think about. I lined up with other Freedom Walkers for a mini-tour of the rebuilt crash site, in a long, single-file line. The line had inched forward some 50 yards before I overheard the people behind me wondering what it was they were waiting to see. They had lined up on faith. In front of me, a couple of young African-American kids ate prepackaged apple slices supplied by McDonald’s, a march sponsor. The crowd was white, but not all-white—not as white as a Republican National Convention, or a Pavement concert, to be fair. A military crowd. Some had buttons or iron-on transfers with photos of dead loved ones: Pentagon victims, war dead. On its own narrow terms—the only visible terms—it was critic-proof. It was one thing to have seen George Pataki grandstanding about Sept. 11 at the Republican convention, turning the civilian slaughter at the World Trade Center into a brief for the Bush administration. But the Pentagon attack was an attack on the armed forces. On the banks of the Potomac, the military has victims’ rights, from the commander in chief on down: We were attacked, we are fighting back. The mingling of the Iraq dead with the dead of 2001—the scandal in the run-up to the march—is not an issue. And who am I to disagree? Where was I that day? Where have I been since then? A young Air Force guy, striding backwards, led our group around to the one charred stone preserved in the rebuilt building wall. The jet had first hit right over there, he said, pointing, then short-hopped into the building. The stone looked sooty. No pictures, please. My wife had been in the Capitol, not the Pentagon. By noon, I had known my family would survive the day. Anthrax struck a little closer; we ended up with Cipro in the medicine cabinet. But nobody cares about anthrax. I recalled it while the President’s men lied and dithered about Hurricane Katrina—how they’d lied and dithered about anthrax, too, blaming it on dirty stream water. I couldn’t think of anything they hadn’t lied and dithered about, these four hideous years. Bad thoughts, again. I skulked through the crowd. A young man sat on the asphalt, reading The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society. How big was the gathering? A few thousand? A minor-league ballpark’s worth. If I’d been up on the press riser, I probably could have done a quick count. I spotted another MEDIA tag, on a woman in a striped top. She had a familiar expression, familiar because I know how it feels to wear it: the pained, ingratiating look of someone on work-the-crowd-for-quotes duty. I studied her face a moment too long and saw her start to slow and veer my way. Sorry, sorry, no—eyes front, subway face, lock out the peripheral vision. What would I have possibly said? “Well, ma’am, I’m here because I’m an American citizen, and because I care about Sept. 11, and because I want to know what’s wrong with this country.” The truth, really. I was on the other side of the world when I read about Al Qaeda seizing the town of Qaim, and also about the New Orleans police spokesman who shot himself in the head. Now I was back and what the hell was going on? A deputy something-or-other of Homeland Security took the stage and gave thanks for the people who wear “the cloth of our nation around the world” and defend our liberties. I had turned on a small digital recorder in my pocket. “Hooah! Hooah!” someone called out beside me. The deputy something-or-other then told two stories. The first was about meeting the President the night of Sept. 11, 2001. “The President said get, get ready,” he said. “He said get ready, he said this is not gonna be like removing a mole, this is gonna be like removing a cancer, it’s going to take a long time, it’s going to be a hard struggle, he said it will take diplomatic actions, it will take financial, he said, but at the end of the day, the military will have to do their job for our nation to be protected and defended, and of course that’s exactly what the military has been doing these last four years. And then he went around the room and the President said, ‘Never forget,’ and he pointed at everyone, he said, ‘Never forget, never forget what happened this day,’ he said, ‘I will never forget, and you can never forget, and the American people can never forget what happened,’ he said, ‘but especially us, because we are charged to protect and defend the United States of America and liberty and freedom,’ he said, and I will never forget, and I remember that from that day, because ever since then, everything I’ve heard the President say has been that resolute, about never forget 9/11 and what that means to America, so I thank all of you for helping us to never forget 9/11.” What I remembered the President saying on 9/11 was substantially shorter. I remember him saying something like “My fellow Americans,” and then saying “glz blkz zizrp” and staggering backwards away from the podium in a hail of wrong-colored pixels, because he was off in a bunker and somebody couldn’t properly cue up the videotaped message he’d left behind. I remember this very specifically and with horror, but nobody else ever talks about it at all."

— Tom Scocca, “Armies of the Right,” the New York Observer, September 19, 2005.

9:45pm  |   URL: http://choiresicha.com/post/1164655628/two-days-before-the-march-as-id-wondered-what-to
(No. OF NOTES: 21)
  
  1. langer said: Woke up thinking about this. SO GOOD.
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  4. artyucko said: …….Rend It “ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T NEED A LOGIN” meltdown in 5,4,3,2,1:
  5. choire posted this