It's that time of year again. We memorialize and pontificate, endlessly, about the attacks of eight years ago. There's little more to be said, really, except to note the new skyscraper in the World Trade Center "footprint" - meant to defiantly announce to America-haters everywhere that we won't be bowed by a bunch of suicidal student pilots - isn't getting built... At least, not as quickly as everyone hoped back in the days when we were so shaken by the hideous atrocities we waved the flag like WWII gold-star mothers and allowed our nation and sons and daughters to be hijacked into wars that benefit this country not at all. The slow economy, it seems, will respect no emotion, no matter how deep, and assuage no memory, regardless how scarred and painful.

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Given the degraded nature of our sense of right and wrong - and the relentlessness of showy, shallow, shabby "catwalk morality" we parade before the world - the credit card companies have missed a bet by not prattling that they've "gone green". The economic downturn has diminished their come-ons in my mailbox, from at least a half-dozen a week to about two a month, now. Think of all the trees left alive - pumping out oxygen, unpulped... unrecruited to sucker the hapless to join Debtor Nation.

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