9/11 Reflects...

The Rude Pundit

It's funny, 9/11 thinks. She feels weary, worn-out this morning, and it's strange because she believed that she would feel so much stronger than usual. After all, the new building is nearly done and, truth be told, it's so much better than the steel and concrete monstrosities that were leveled a dozen years ago. But, of course, one doesn't wish to do urban renovation through disaster and death.

She looks in a mirror and says to herself, "You think you'd be happy, at least a little." After all, while the candidates for mayor in New York City invoked her name more times than they needed to, including Bill de Blasio in his speech last night, she isn't tossed around as casually. She's been mostly absent from the discussion of bombing Syria. She was used to being paraded around, plastered with makeup, made a whore by Giuliani and Bush, imprisoned and roughly fucked by Cheney and Rumsfeld, burned with cigarettes and pissed on by Karl Rove, who jacked off into her hair after. Most of that ended a few years ago, of course, of course, although she pities her Libyan namesake who is little more than a fuck doll for conservatives who love having exotic tongue on their dicks and clits.
...

She stares back at the mirror. She can see herself. She's sure of that. "I'm not a ghost," she says. "Not yet."

She realizes, though, that she feels as if she is haunting the debate about Syria. She may not be called on by politicians or even many pundits to justify a new pseudo-war, a war lite, if you will. But she's sure that they've been ringing her door buzzer and running away. All of the terrible things done in her name - the Iraq nightmare, the Afghanistan slog, the breaking down of rights big and small, the drone attacks, the torture and indefinite detention, the surveillance state - hang there. She didn't want her existence to change so many things, but they did change. She didn't do it herself, but others say she caused them to do it. That's why, exhausted and used-up as she is, 9/11 feels it is her just punishment to take all who visit into her bed. Or, in the case of Rove, over the radiator, on the bathroom floor, or hanging in the closet.

There are those who tell 9/11 that she's suffered enough, that whatever implied sins she wishes to atone for have been fucked clean. They have it wrong, though. 9/11 says to them that it's not her sins that must be forgiven. It's that she is taking on the sins of others and trying to redeem them. She's just failed. She's failed, but she keeps trying.

Even as the cries of "Never forget" echo through the canyons of Manhattan, through the monuments of DC, 9/11 wants to be forgotten. Because it would be better to be forgotten than to be remembered in this way for all history.

I too wish she could quit being used the way she is, as a handy fuck piece for politicians.