bitterlyclingin
Silver Member
- Aug 4, 2011
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(And just yesterday, the WaPo's E J Dionne advocated that America just "forgeddaboudid" regarding 9/11 remembrances. The lads frolicking in the NYT's all male conga line heartily concur.)
"I was pleasantly surprised when the country came together after 9/11, even though the sense of unity only lasted for a few weeks. I vividly remember commentators confidently stating at the time that the attacks had made America a more serious nation. There was even a theory that irony was dead. While no one would want to live in an America devoid of fun and humor, I too saw 9/11 as an opportunity to reverse our national spiral towards silliness.
I now long for the days prior to 9/11, because Americans are even more inane now than we were then. We are more celebrity obsessed, our news media has stopped even pretending to try to educate the masses and our people are less interested in and knowledgeable about current affairs than ever (hence the election and possible re-election of President Obama).
There may be no better proof of this than Tim Pawlentys appearance on Comedy Centrals Colbert Report this week, where he joked that he considered shooting sparks up his butt to get attention in the all-too-entertainment-oriented presidential race he was forced to withdraw from despite being the most electable candidate in the field. Fittingly, few people paid attention to him saying this.
Or, consider that our schools systems have largely abdicated their responsibility to teach students about what happened on 9/11. My wife is a middle-school teacher who each year around 9/11 gives her sixth-graders a short quiz about what happened 10 years ago. The results have never been remotely good and, as you might expect, they get worse each year.
Today, if 10 percent of her students can tell her how many planes were hijacked or which cities were attacked, she is pleasantly surprised. Most of her students dont even know why the school has a moment of silence every September 11th. Since 9/11 is not on the approved curriculum, she has no expectation that the results of her yearly quiz will do anything but get worse in the future."
Read more: 9/11 | America | The ways post-9/11 America has failed | The Daily Caller
"I was pleasantly surprised when the country came together after 9/11, even though the sense of unity only lasted for a few weeks. I vividly remember commentators confidently stating at the time that the attacks had made America a more serious nation. There was even a theory that irony was dead. While no one would want to live in an America devoid of fun and humor, I too saw 9/11 as an opportunity to reverse our national spiral towards silliness.
I now long for the days prior to 9/11, because Americans are even more inane now than we were then. We are more celebrity obsessed, our news media has stopped even pretending to try to educate the masses and our people are less interested in and knowledgeable about current affairs than ever (hence the election and possible re-election of President Obama).
There may be no better proof of this than Tim Pawlentys appearance on Comedy Centrals Colbert Report this week, where he joked that he considered shooting sparks up his butt to get attention in the all-too-entertainment-oriented presidential race he was forced to withdraw from despite being the most electable candidate in the field. Fittingly, few people paid attention to him saying this.
Or, consider that our schools systems have largely abdicated their responsibility to teach students about what happened on 9/11. My wife is a middle-school teacher who each year around 9/11 gives her sixth-graders a short quiz about what happened 10 years ago. The results have never been remotely good and, as you might expect, they get worse each year.
Today, if 10 percent of her students can tell her how many planes were hijacked or which cities were attacked, she is pleasantly surprised. Most of her students dont even know why the school has a moment of silence every September 11th. Since 9/11 is not on the approved curriculum, she has no expectation that the results of her yearly quiz will do anything but get worse in the future."
Read more: 9/11 | America | The ways post-9/11 America has failed | The Daily Caller