What the (Bleep) Just Happened? by Monica Crowley

Author:Monica Crowley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

DR. STRANGELEADER

Or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love American Decline

GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.

—From Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Our Enemies Are People Too

* * *

September 19, 2001, dawned cloudy and cool in New York. Eight days after the most lethal Islamic terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, the city of New York remained in a stunned near-silence. People passed on the street, nodding quietly to one another and blinking back tears for loved ones lost and the pain of the survivors. Ground zero—where the tall, proud towers of the World Trade Center stood just days before, full of life, ambition, friendship, and love—smoldered with the burning, twisted wreckage of the attack. Emergency personnel made their way through the smoking steel, hoping they could rescue someone—anyone—still alive. Family members and friends posted photos of their missing loved ones. The distinct smell of deadly destruction wafted over the city. A dark cloud of grief hung over New York, as well as the two other locations where the terrorists had struck, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The country was paralyzed by the surreal terror of the surprise attack, the nature of its execution, and the growing awareness that our national reality was now far more dangerous and uncertain. Fear, anger, dread, and mourning gripped the nation, but so did a sense of pride in the heroism shown by so many and a deep-seated faith that America would smash the enemy and emerge stronger.

On that day, an undistinguished state senator from Illinois published an article in a nondescript Chicago-area publication, the Hyde Park Herald. The Communist-mentored community organizer began his piece with a call for heightened airport security, more effective intelligence operations, and a “dismantling” of the “perpetrators’” organizations.

Then the Hyde Park agitator let loose with his deeply rooted anti-American kooksense:

“We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness.”

[Not difficult at all: it’s totalitarian Islam.]

“The essence of this tragedy” [it was a personal tragedy for those who lost loved ones, but for the nation it was an act of war], “it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others.” [They were jihadists, driven by their clearly articulated faith to kill the infidel, not “empathize” with them.] “Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” [As if we should have responded to the attacks by airlifting food stamps and subsidized housing to al-Qaeda.

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