Open Thread

On the sixteenth anniversary of 9/11, David Harsyani writes that the country is divided and may never feel again the same (largely fictive) unity it did post-9/11.

So here's a depressing thought on the anniversary of 9/11: What if those two or three weeks of harmony 16 years ago will be the last we experience for a very long time? Considering our trajectory, this seems more likely than not. After all, surveying the coverage of the anniversary of 9/11 this morning, it's difficult not to notice that Americans don’t really share a coherent, unifying cultural or idealistic value system anymore.

"Never forget" feels like a hollow slogan when much of America began the effort to forget 9/11 weeks after it happened.

And on that, Ed Driscoll has additional thoughts.

A couple of pieces on 9/11: one from Esquire last year on the shocking Falling Man picture (and its eradication from the record), and remembering a fireman killed by one of the 50-200 falling bodies on 9/11.

A reader asks you take a moment to remember FDNY Battalion Commander Brian Hickey, lost on 9/11.

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Other topics:

Via Mark Hemingway (@heminator on Twitter), this review of a movie about Chappaquiddick (called "Chappaquiddick") seems... a very odd choice for Hollywood.

Forty-eight years later, let’s be clear on what the meaning of Chappaquiddick is. Ted Kennedy should, by all rights, have stood trial for involuntary manslaughter, which would likely have ended his political career. The fact that the Kennedy family -- the original postwar dynasty of the one percent -- possessed, and exerted, the influence to squash the case is the essence of what Chappaquiddick means. The Kennedys lived outside the law; the one instance in American history of an illegally stolen presidential election was the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. He in all likelihood lost the race to Richard Nixon, but his father tried to steal the election for him by manipulating the vote tallies in (among other places) Illinois. That’s the meaning of Chappaquiddick. too.

I don’t say any of this as a right-wing troll. But those are the facts, and they are facts that liberals, too often, have been willing to shove under the carpet. And they have paid the price. Ted Kennedy became known as "the Lion of the Senate," and did a lot of good, but when you try to build a governing philosophy on top of lies, one way or another those lies will come back to haunt you. (Hello, Donald Trump! He’s an incompetent bully, but his middle name might be "Liberal Karma.") As a movie, "Chappaquiddick" doesn’t embellish the incidents it shows us, because it doesn't have to. It simply delivers the truth of what happened: the logistical truth of the accident, and also the squirmy truth of what went on in Ted Kennedy's soul. The result may play like avid prose rather than investigative cinema poetry, but it still adds up to a movie that achieves what too few American political dramas do: a reckoning.

Republican Senator Bob Menendez, a man so Republican he once shot a man just for snoring in Spanish, had a bad day in court today, by which I mean, "Evidence was presented."

I think this news might be more important for readers of this site than others: Beware, your sex robot may one day murder you.

Finally, watch the dog in the extreme lower right of this video:

posted by Ace at 08:33 PM

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