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Twin fates on a towering day; Thoughts on September 11th 2001 on September 12th
By Horace Coleman
[Printer-Friendly Version] I fall asleep watching the late news: The mews of a teenage girl with 10 pairs of low-riding jeans and the means to buy thong panties. I wake to scenes seen around all the clocks: fluttering, heavy, human leaves and stacks of unbalanced blocks that used to be floors in buildings toppling in unseasonable falls. And, Pentagon puzzles being spilled.
I, you, we, see packs of staggering, fleeing, and rescuing people powdered with dust, blood and screams intercut with four (count 'em, 4!) views of planes plunging into the skyline. Sure enough reality TV for survivors now. A headline says: War has come home
Whip that National Missile Defense on those suicides swinging knives and box cutters and making sighs. "I can't believe it," people keep saying. Meaning, "My mind won't accept it until the T-shirts come out."
It'll take a little while for easy and vacuous smiles to reappear like spring flowers or frivolous weeds and to build new towers of smugness.
Timothy McVeigh's been outdone. Some foreign scum won the trashing championship. But the stock market will open tomorrow so we can get back to business as usual. And, we're gonna get 'em 'cause We're #1 and too good to die!!
But you can't win playing defense . . . . Or, without knowing the real rules of the game called Empire.
And Boy George, with training wheels on his boots, staggers toward more war.
Horace Coleman
A Coast Guard vessel with plenty of firepower patrols a 500-yard perimeter set up around a large portion of Manhattan after the attacks.
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