California: The other America
: I see a divide in this country over September 11. It cuts north-and-south right at the California line.
Californians don’t get September 11 — because it’s not about them.
And isn’t everything supposed to be about them?
Here are two pieces printed in LA, each with its own cynical, sick, disgusting, and wrong take on this week’s anniversary.
First, here is Norah Vincent in the LA Times:
Scratch most Americans these days and you’ll find that many of them have made a big change in their lives in the last 12 months, something not obviously attributable to Sept. 11 but a response to it nonetheless.
It might be something as outwardly trivial as finally sticking to the Atkins diet, quitting smoking or taking up yoga. Then again, it might be something monumental like ending a decades-old bad marriage or quitting a cushy job to pursue a life in the arts. But whatever it is, the impetus behind the changes we made is essentially the same for everyone.
Deep down we all did it because we knew that it might have been us in those towers.
What horrid, self-absorbed Californiathink that is! Mass murder becomes an excuse to pamper yourself with a diet or a divorce or a yoga class! Arrrrrrgh! Can’t she hear herself? Can’t she hear what a California cliche she is? And they wonder why the rest of us laugh at them out there.
If anything, September 11 should perhaps motivate you to try to better the world rather than yourself.
Now move to this hateful blob of bile from Jill Stewart in LA’s New Times.
She complains — with typical left-coast knee-jerk (or just jerky) PC logic — that because we have not mourned enough over victims of earthquakes in India or floods in Nigeria, we have no right to mourn our American victims of September 11. I would have loved to have read what she would have written in 1946 about the Holocaust: You can’t mourn the Jews if you don’t mourn the comrades, eh?
She complains about the families of the victims suing the Saudi government. I say again: arrrrgh! I can imagine no better legal cause to root for today.
She complains that the rescue effort of New York’s police and fire departments wasn’t good enough. Well, lady, they saved thousands of people… including me. And I shall forever be grateful for their effort and for their sacrifice.
She would begrudge us even a year’s mourning.
Indeed, I say without shame to America’s ever-growing, increasingly troubling and loudly throbbing Cult of Nine Eleven, “For God sakes, get a grip!”
Get a grip, people, before this unholy rapture gets its grip on you.
And she complains about Lisa Beamer getting TV time. I note a small, cruel, and truly offensive trend in Beamer backlash and even Beamer bashing here; I saw something attacking her as a mother in a blog last week; my computer mercifully died in the meantime and I can’t find the link again, so I can’t prove that this, too, came from a Californian. Stewart just has something against widows and orphans; she doesn’t like the widows and orphans of New York cops and firefighters getting sympathy, either. Heartless bitch. (And yes, I know that’s unPC. I don’t give an S or an F.)
Stewart’s advice:
So, on September 11, I suggest that you not light a candle for the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Plenty of others will do so for you.
Perhaps we should instead light a candle for the cold, dead soul of Jill Stewart.
: Matt Welch notes the contrast between Stewart’s California claptrap and James Lilek‘s heartland heart, exhibited in this simple, brilliant piece about the death of a little girl — the same age as his own Gnat — at the hands of those evil terrorists:
Little Christine was Gnat
