December 03, 2002

Some days, outrage flows easily, as though from a tapped vein. Other days, I'm just...tired.

There's a pedestrian pathway that runs along the South side of Ground Zero, between the edge of the pit itself and the crippled DeutscheBank building, still draped in a black shroud, still abandoned over a year after the massacre. The pathway itself is largely covered by scaffolding, and the side of the scaffolding that faces the DeutscheBank building has been boarded up with plywood. Over the past few months, visitors from around the country and around the world have written on that plywood. I've seen messages from the U.K., Australia, Germany, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, from members of our armed service and from fire departments across America. Nearly every one of these writings expresses unconditional love and support. There is the occassional attempt at critical expression--one reads, "No war anywhere will rebuild," printed over a stubby drawing of the two towers. To which I respond, well, duh. That's sort of completely and utterly not the point.

There are a few other expressions af anti-war sentiment as well, many of which are perfectly respectable. There's one that uses the word PEACE as a kind of acrostic, and I don't mind that one, because the words the author used convey a kind of regretful sadness, rather than pedantic accusation.

Then there's the big scribble I saw yesterday, high up along one of the panels, in 2-inch black block lettering: BLAME BUSH. REPUBLICANS FAULT.

Ignoring for a moment the author's apparent unfamiliarity with the concept of the apostrophe, I must ask: where do these people come from? What sort of thumb-sucking dolt feels the need, when confronted with a wall full of support and sympathy that is literally one hundred and fifty feet long and ten feet high, to inscribe such a fatuous, pointless declaration of their own stupidity? It's not the simpleton partisanship that offends me; I would be just as irked if the cretin had written BLAME CLINTON. DEMOCRATZ FAULT.

On the other hand, there's an amusing side to this...somewhere out there, this thick-witted troglodyte scribbler is still furrowing his brow in a vain attempt to understand how the REPUBLICANS gained control of the House and Senate last month, and deciding that it must be that whole oil industry thing. He'll wait with eager anticipation for the inevitable scandal that will erupt next year when it's revealed that hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil profits are going directly to Dick Cheney! And, when that doesn't happen, he'll decide that it's that whole conservative censorship of the media thing, and so on. Always with the furrowed brow, always the utter failure to make sense of the world as it exists beyond his wall of certainty, his fortress of How It Is.

OK, that's all. The vein is tapped out. Now: coffee, and perhaps a nice, semi-stale danish-style fruit-gel cake-thing.