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The Nineleven Memorial Car, etc.

By Michael J. Smith on Saturday April 9, 2011 02:13 PM

You can't make this stuff up, as the man said. There's more, much more, to delight those of us with a mean sense of humor at the Nineleven Theme Park site.

Of course, the Families -- God help us, the Families -- are raising the usual geschrei about how it's not enough (though I personally would have said it was way too much). It's never, ever enough for these folks:

For 9/11 Museum, Dispute Over Victims’ Remains

... 9,041 pieces of human remains — mainly bone fragments but also tissue that has been dehydrated for preservation — are still being sorted through by the city’s medical examiner for DNA...

Now, a dispute over what to do with those remains is simmering between some of the victims’ families and the officials...

Officials plan to take the remains seven stories below ground and place them in the new museum behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil about never forgetting, studded in letters of World Trade Center steel. But the families, appalled by the idea of remains that could belong to their loved ones being turned into a lure for tourists, want them kept in a separate above-ground memorial that would be treated like hallowed ground.

Some very American stuff here: our nauseating, diseased preoccupation with corpses, or even scraps of corpses, and our love of a grievance. How we cling to a grievance, as if it were a piece of particularly valuable real estate! The country is overrun with self-promoting grievers and survivors, like fleas in the pelt of a wharf rat, trying to trade up the value of their asset while they can. The stockholders of Nineleven Grief, Inc., in fact want to trade theirs up in the most literal sense -- about seventy feet up, from a dank subbasement to grade level. They've learned from the POW/MIA entrepreneurs -- all those poor schmucks got was that stupid flag all over the place. The Nineleventers want some fucking masonry. With street frontage.

Comments (15)

Man, that's just too far away for me. Can't I send away for a relic, I'm sure they've got plenty extra.

Michael Hureaux:

Makes perfect sense to me. As feudal as the old guard is becoming, the reliquary(sp)is the next logical step.

Chomskyzinn:

So very true how we cling to grievance. Continues to fascinate how this relentless sense of grievance conflicts with and undermine the national self-image of forward-looking, positive, can- do spirit.

Op:

Father S has a dark age love of relics

See in a dark age who's checkin' on the provenience eh ?
It's pure p t barnum paradise
Or is that burn 'em


To me it's all a bit musty and abandoned spider webish

The 9/11 NASCAR however

Amerikas love affair with the stridently vulgar mixes well with a certain
Grudegful menacing
Canned sentimentality
Like most process results it has inflections and other morphs
Like the state of minnesota
There are oddly refreshing mordancies
Out thete
A certain volkish razz berry is often the next act
It ain't all soap opera
That wouldn't be human

I've always like Reverend Billy's name for Ground Zero: "The Sacred Pit".

Oh, yeah, and there's that magic phrase "hallowed ground" again.

Y'know, sometimes I think I could play a drinking game with ten years' worth of 9/11-related news footage and the phrase "hallowed ground".

sk:

las fantasías norteamericanas or the need for victimhood.

HB Franklin kicks ass.

op:

hey daws
h bruce was an early REV UNION guy

i once read a stalin selection by the brucer

he really is kinda nifty on the mia mirage

his take on super weapons lacks properly
variable flight altitude

in fact you need a transport
that beams you around
with a three second sequy

but i never trust
a science fiction reader
any more then i trust
a who done it writer

Well, live and learn, right, op-san?

Op:

I didn't make it clear maybe
I like h Bruce a great deal

sk:

Heh, first came the Cruise Missile Marxists, and now right on cue the Marxists for Obama show up. One can understand why Alex Cockburn is already longing for Glenn Beck.

Hey, now, sk; just read the Robert Paul Wolff blog post, and eeeeewwwwwwww. Now I need a good, long shower. What a frickin' tool. I posted the following reply in the comment thread beneath that post:

-----------

No single-payer health care? Check.
Bankers enriched? Check.
Labor rights crushed? Check.
Patriot Act extended? Check.
Guantanamo still open? Check.
Up to our ass in war? Check.

Are You In?

Looks as if you are -- illegal surveillance, Predator drones and all.

sk:

Mike, another item ticked off in the last few weeks:

Launch a new war? Check.

Michael Hureaux:

Any marxist who endorses Obama doesn't understand a god damn thing they've been exposed to in Marx.

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