This sucks.

I don't much like celebrities or celebrity culture, and bad things if they happen to good people happen a lot more to anonymous ones. Bad things, when they happen to celebrities, I shrug my shoulders and if someone mentions that Former Heartthrob Simon or Lovely Princess Diana died, I let go with an insta-screed against our pop-drenched society

I suppose I'm no different though. I'm taking this kind of hard, and that's surprising, given what a hard week this has been on the emotions to begin with. Zevon was (well, still is; like Michael Palin, "he's not dead yet" and he'd probably appreciate the reference) the anti-celebrity, with a great warped sense of humor--already joking about his impending death, which is something I wouldn't have the mettle to do--and he was a hell of a songwriter. You put the two together, and you get "punching out Chryslers in the factory/breathing polymetalchloride in the factory." (Given this bad news, was Zevon priescient with this lyric?) I always thought Springsteen's song "Factory" from "Darkness" was moving; then I heard Zevon's take, and I could never again listen to Bruce's without thinking a wee bit, well ... sentimental. As in "Sentimental Hygiene."

One of my favorites, off the same album, is "Bad Karma": "I took a wrong turn/On the astral plane/Now I keep on thinking my luck is gonna change/Someday/Bad karma/It's uphill all the way." The idea of karma, the stuff of millions of phonies propounding on half baked metaphysics while fingering beads, bracketed by lines like the last, straight out of a C&W song back when C&W was sung by ... well, people like Zevon. Hearning Zevon sing about bad karma is kind of like hearing Celine Dion sing about seducing the milkman. The difference, of course, is that Zevon did sing about that stuff, and about a whole lot of other things few other people did, and he did it, to borrow from another memorable performer (two, if you count Sid Vicious, who was kind of like an untalented Zevon, I suppose), his way.

I've seen him three times; once, around 1990, in DC's Lisner Auditorium, he orchestrated (and that is the word, literally) the most memorable concert opening I've ever seen. No big laser show, of course, no fireworks, just synthesized music that was like the soundtrack from some movie like "Soylent Green," and this semi-modulated, disembodied voice, part haunting and part cranky, that spoke German over for a few minutes. It could have been directions on the Metro, it could have been a lecture in chemistry, it could have been ... well, it was German. I understand a little German, but I couldn't make much of it out, so maybe it was pidgin German. Well, anyway, what it did was, it drew you in, like a good opening of anything should, and in a way that surprises you, even in retrospect. My description doesn't do it justice.

Little Bennie Shapiro, in his little smug cocoon of right wing christianity and disdain of our amoral and godless society, should let his hair down a bit, get drunk, not waste his youth on being a scold, and learn a thing or two about living from Zevon. We all probably could.

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

I spend too much time brooding about the munchkins like Shapiro, and not enough contemplating the giants.

Like Melville. This from his poem, "The Martyr," on Lincoln's assassination. Quite apt for the Slaughter, though.


"There is sobbing of the strong,
And a pall upon the land;
But the People in their weeping
Bare the iron hand;
Beware the People weeping
When they bare the iron hand."

And then there's little munchkins like this . I've got more respect for the average Tailban. At least they've got the stuff to live in the desert and go through military training for their allah. This little derisive nonentity sits at home having intelligent conversation with Mother dearest. Hint, dork: real 18-year-old patriots are humping it in Parris Island, not bravely berating liberal arts professors.

Oh, and one more thing.

How should we go about "commemorating" today?

How about by disposing of these cretins.

How's that for introspection?

We've had days of sadness and reflection and crying, and it's all very edifying and civilizing.

Now it's time to start licking our chops again.

I read somewhere once that we write things down because it helps our thinking. I probably read it several times, ii fact, since chances are if I only had read it once, I wouldn't have remembered it. I've always been intimidated by those essays that begin by some multitasker braying, "once, thirty-seven years ago, when I contemplated at dawn the mulberry tree in my backyard while scratching my armpit and reading Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn," I was struck by ..."

We write things down to tell us not what to think--christ, there are enough pretenders to that task among us--but to bring order to our thought, which invariably starts off chaotic and primordial, full of biases and little known facts and eddies of conversations and snippets of things we've read, and we have to sort through all this as we pursue the primrose path of logic (or Dianectics {sic) if you're a Scientologist.). And there's a lot of sorting out when it comes to the ... Event.

So one way I've -- and better writers than me -- have tried to do it, has been to put fingertip to keyboard, and pound away until the chemic of sense precipitates out of the volume of inspiration.

I remember Leon Wiestieler (sic) of the New Republic, writing even before the bellow of the towers' collapse had been silenced in our minds, "beware of attempts at fine writing." He's a fine writer, himself, and I'm never wary of him, but I thought this was a rather cheap or at least ungenerous sentiment. But I did remember it after having read it only once; the cuts closest to the bone are the ones that bleed the most.

So in writing about It ... well, that's the first thing. By what name shall last year at this time go by? 911? Convenient shorthand, but, in the end, a hotel room number. I stayed on the ninth floor in a Dallas hotel recenlty, and whenever I passed room 911, I looked at it, sure, but there was no essential revelation. Just a hallway with faux art and faux carpet; comfortable, I might add. But the gods or monsters of inspiration were not summoned. Not even in the city JFK was shot in, a city 230 miles south of where the Murrah building used to be and where McVeigh may or may not have had the help of Iraqi intelligence. A state that houses Waco, the Alamo, the Texas City explosion of 1947 that killed around 600, one of the great civilian death tolls in the 20th century.

These threads can lead the unbalanced mind anywhere.

So what other name do we name these dreadful things, other than, say, "Dreadful Things," which could be nightmares or cancer. "Attacks"? "Attack" implies something that was being defended at the time. We weren't defending ourselves; the nature of these ... events ... is that they won't, can't occur to something that's defended. "Terrorist attacks" is, to me, an oxymoron, if you buy a certain meaning of attack. I'm sure think tanks citywide are full of people who'd disagree, and some who'd say that's a dangerous way to think. Well, fine.

And, then, "terrorism". That's a weasel word here; this isn't the IRA or Basque Separatists, as many have pointed out. It's radical Islam, and maybe a lot more of Islam--it's up to them to prove that to me, and not incumbent upon me to apologize for that. That's a debate that should be over, unless of course you're on the campus of SFSU or in the Bush Administration. Such strange bedfellows there are in these times.

How about "slaughter," then? Yeah, that'll do. But even that implies a crime. Well, it was a crime, the biggest one ever perhaps, but it was much, much, more, and anyone those who say, like the National Review, that if we look at it as a crime we respond to it with legality and not war have a very good point. Me and the National Review; another strange partnership. But then against, Christopher Hitchens is being published by Front Page.com, so up is down and black is white

But writing it down helps, and its therapeutic, and the need for some kind of reflectiveness shouldn't be lost even though I'm grinding my teeth at hearing 60s peacenik anthems as background music for some 911 memoriums. Writing it down, grappling with the immensity of the horror, is probably most of the reason blogging has become such a phenomenon. Lots of folks were doing it before, of couse, just like lots of people had cars before World War II; but the automotive age didn't start until afterwards, and the Blogging Age, if there is such a thing, will be marked from September 11th. All the sudden, there were these shattering, horrid events, ravishing symbols and killing thousands (and this in a country where only four times in its history had more than a thousand civilians been killed in a single event); being thinking, rational people, we turned to this wonderful creation the I-net, which allows us to explore the very nether regions of opinion which exist because every fact can be turned inside out and refracted, and it allowed us to learn much more and much more quickly about this than any other like minded group of people have ever assimilated a similarly arresting event.

But thinking is not and never should be just a means to an end, even if that end is opinion. Opinion is necessary, of course, if we are to order the world and not have it simply reflect our internal chaos. But some are taking that too far, and demanding certainty everywhere, iron bound and commanded by some smoldering Diety whose traditional values, and by the way, Eminem in jail and post the Ten Commandments in every public place in the country and block any website that has a naked breast on it. Uh-huh. Remember all that jabbering about postmodernism, and the decline of the west, and feeble academics? They're the ones shilling hardest for the march on Baghdad now, even with al Qaeda's top leadership still lurking in the shadows of the Karakorams.

And what about this? Everyone is screeching all Chomsky, all the time, how feckless he and Sontag and Fisk and a lot of other people no one had ever heard of before last September were so warped, and very good sport at the time it was. But now, what about this -- while Noam was manufacturing dissent, that shining star of the American patriot right, Representative Dana Rohrbacher, was hobnobbing with the Taliban two years after their house guest Osama had called for the slaughter of Americans. Type in "Fisk" or some of those other names in Google, and you'll get web page listings that crawl with invective, and for good reason. Why doesn't that happen when you type in Dana's name? Katha Pollit gets her panties up in a bunch at the idea of flying the American flag, and she's zinged for being a creepy-crawlie leftie, and she should have been. Lots of people, myself included, who'd never flown a flag in their life put one on the 11th and have left it and will leave it up ... well, forever. It's called taking back love of country from the demogogues like Whorebacher who've made it unappealing in the first place. Well, the left is in sorry disgrace; will Whorebacher be sent packing?

But these opinions, whether from the left or the right, it's just hobnobbing with the demogogues, and are just slightly less worthless than a plunger in a port-o-john. Besides, on any given topic, in any given lifetime someone will usually change their opinion on the margins, and might even rip their opinion out by the roots once or twice and think something else. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds; another bromide that can sink a thousand arguments.

This is an issue so vast, so inclusive, so transmogrifying in so many ways, that the habit of what the gloomy might call introspection or the precise call scrutiny should never conclude. My wife got me five books on it for my birthday, which I'd pointed out to her just a week before; all of these have been already supplanted on the best-seller lists. We think we have a lot to assimilate now, just wait a few years.

Some sharpie might say, if you think there's no argument about how huge this Slaughter, this Crime, this Act of Sadistic Insanity, then doesn't that right there kind of dent the edifice of my theory, which is that real debate should never end. Yet here I am, proposing the end of debate, saying no one should ever stop thinking about it. And so on this can go -- you can see where it will go -- into an infinite regression of dialectic, which invariably brings up postmodernism and them thar hateful libs, and then j'accuse from the libs who complain how they're being suppressed, and there it is, the Free Republic v. Media Whores Online, round ninety-eight, blue v. red, Bush caused 911 to get oil for his buddies v. the only thing Clinton did was send over a few rockets to get people's minds off that slut Monica. The extremes are always entertaining but, Christ, sometimes, I get sick of all that hooey.

I keep thinking to the scene in "Casablanca"--all right, it's a cliche, fuck it, it's always been a cool movie, and now more relevant than ever--right after Bogart sends Ilsa off with Lazlo, and Louie, no slouch in panache, says, "well, Rick, it seems you're not only a sentimentalist, but you've become a patriot," and Rick replies, "well, it seemed like a good time to start." Shrugs his shoulders. Damn right. Good a time as any, lefties. But, righties, before you start gambolling in ultimate victory, it's worth remembering that Bogie was called a commie in his time and haled before the House Un-Americans Activity Committee. A sign of someone who's not thinking is someone who doesn't see some unsettling parallel betweens Joe McCarthy and John Ashcroft.

've always believed it's a good thing if you talk to yourself, not to mention unavoidable, and if you move your lips doing it, so what? I remember being told when I was kid not to do that because people would know you were crazy and they'd scorn you and make fun of you. Well, they did that anyway, until I got to be bigger than them; then I could move my lips and if anyone looked at me funny, I'd glare back at them, and that was that. Of course, the lesson took, in its own way; I'm always finding myself humming some idiotic tune, like the old "Batman" theme, instead of thinking about whether the Islamic world is salvagable, or what if any blowback there was from our support for the mujuhadeen in the 80s to al Qaeda today. So, yeah, hold the opinions, and defend them, but remember it's usually not a bad idea occasionally to question them, to yourself if to no one else, and if you put all down in a blog, even if no one reads it, it's part of the record, and we're all part of that.

So does this mean the journey is all, not the destination? (Another shopworn phrase, uh-oh, but I've been bureaucratizing over the past two weeks, and I've got the fever but good.) Then think back to last year on this day and, in that case, it was the destination which was important, tragically so. How nice it would have been, after all, if the planes had just kept flying, or just landed where they should have, and the 11th would have gone down as just another noneventful pleasant late-summer day, and not the defining act of our times.

But then I'm reminded that if Al Qaeda or some other group of god fearin' loons had kept its powder dry a few more years, so to speak, they might have obtained some bad-ass biological "agent" or some horrible toxin or a nuke, and then we'd have had a six-figure death toll. Not a flippant rumination if you do it five miles from the White House. Would we have woken up to the danger of Islamic fundamentalism without a 911 occurring? You say "yes," but the evidence is sparse, if not non-existent. There's were the Iranian hostages, fatwas against Salman Rushie, the first WTC, the African embassies, the destruction of the Buddist temples, the USS Cole. None of those were the "tipping point," in the popular parlance, that the 11th was.

But you say "no," and that's ... I don't want to go any further down that path of inquiry. Not today.