He writes long, he writes well, he hits a grand slam with this one. Middle Class Bill, pay attention:
Their Own Separate 9/11
by Hunter
Sun Sep 13, 2009 at 08:30:05 PM CDT
You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families. ... I don't hate all of them. I hate about, probably about 10 of them. But when I see, you know, 9-11 victim family, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh, shut up." I'm so sick of them, because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them.
-- Glenn Beck, 2005
On Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project
There is a certain large block of conservatives that have spent every year milking 9/11 dry, making it as explicitly partisan as they could. There were flag-waving concerts, Sean Hannity riding the whole thing for all it was worth, Fox News making it a prime reason for their existence, and everyone was told that if they were real Americans they would take this significant memorial day and reduce it to at ll the meaning of a Tom Clancy video game. Kick the bad guys' asses! America, hell yeah! Toby Freaking Keith, assholes!
The carnivalesque schtick eventually lost some of its luster; Americans have grown tired of it, and the conservatives are, frankly, fed up with even acknowledging that they even share the same country as everyone else. So what have they done? They've actually divided 9/11 itself up, and split their own "response" to 9/11 apart into an entirely separate day.
That way they don't have to concern themselves with national unity, or respectful memorial services, or any of that annoying stuff that might remind them that it was New York, a liberal bastion, and D.C., that hated base of government, that suffered the most that day.
People like Glenn Beck have made fairly infamous statements about "hating" 9/11 families -- nothing is so infuriating to them as the notion that someone else, and not conservatives, might have valid say in what 9/11 means, how it should be remembered, and how such a crisis might be dealt with in the future. Hardcore conservatives have seemed absolutely enraged by it; from the very first year they considered 9/11 to be their day, a day for flag-waving and telling everyone else around them to shut up.
Not even that is good enough for them, anymore, and so now we have been introduced to the explicitly partisan, explicitly conservative "separation" of 9/11 into their very own version, "9/12". Conservatives and assorted hangers-on want to represent the 9/11 anniversary their way, to such an extent at this point that they're not even willing to share the same day as the rest of the nation. On their day, they can say vicious things, and be as reactionary and bitter as they want, and take all the birthers, teabaggers, deathers, immigrant-bashers and all the other bottom rungs of ultra-conservative society and lump every political grievance all together into something that both is and is not explicitly about 9/11. Because it's not our 9/11, not the one the nation knows, but a different 9/11 of their own making. On a separate day.
What does 9/11 have to do with taxes? With birth certificates? With any of the rest of the conspiracy theories that have so animated the dumb-as-a-post base, this last year? Nothing, to us, but everything to them. 9/11 is about America being "America", and that means America doing whatever they say.
They saw 9/11 as, correctly, a fearsome thing that destroyed a little bit of our country -- but in the town halls they're far more concerned about "socialism" coming. It's the same fear, to them. When they appear in front of the cameras with tears streaming down their faces and say "we just want our country back", talking about whether the first black president is really even a citizen, or whether extending Medicare benefits to a 50-year-old would lead us down the road to Stalinism, they honestly fear those scary things every bit as much as they fear terrorists that they have never seen and that only attacked places in America that they hated anyway. They are that afraid of a black president, or of imaginary "death panels". This is what animates them, as conservatives: the notion that everybody in America, from the spanish-speaking couple down the street to the unfathomable government, is a threat to them and their tiny tribe of like-minded believers.
So why does 9/12 exist? To be 9/11 "done right" in the conservative mind. There is a little mention of terrorism, but a hell of a lot more murmuring about Obama coming to steal guns in the night, and about the absolute certainty that they will be forced to help pay for basic healthcare for brown people, regardless of how many sections of any bill explicitly say otherwise. There are a ton of flags, and the whole thing is orchestrated as an orgy of fear -- fear of absolutely anything and everything, no matter how outlandish, under the absolutely earnest banner of saving their nation, the one they have exclusive dominion over, from everyone in the country that isn't them, whether it be their president, their government, or their neighbors.
That's what they always wanted 9/11 memorials to be, but this was the year they gave up trying. They instead pay token service to 9/11, the day, and instead devote themselves to their own, separate 9/11 -- one they explicitly own, one that they don't have to hold their tongues at, or invite any goddamn liberals to.
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