Following Conason's link to the Schama essay. Fantastic. Even when he reiterates the known provenance of the administration flaks so often seen in the papers today, it serves as the underhand lob needed to crush their mediocrity out of the park. Conason quoted the end of the article:

Never have the ordinary people of America, the decent, working stiffs whose bodies lay in the hecatomb of Ground Zero, needed and deserved a great tribune more urgently. The greatest honour we could do them is to take back the voice of democracy from the plutocrats. So it is altogether too bad that this Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki, both liberal Republicans, both decent enough men, shrinking from the challenge to articulate such a debate, have decided instead to read from the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address and Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms speech. Those words - often sublime - derived their power from the urgency of the moment. To reiterate them merely to produce a moment of dependable veneration, is to short-change both history and the present� Starting in New York, starting now, we need to do what the people of this astoundingly irrepressible city do best: stand up and make a hell of a noise.

Tremendous. I prefer Schama's reflection on last fall from the same essay:

Others bore the unmistakeable marks of helpless, uncomprehending sorrow: red-rimmed eyes; cheeks pale with distraction, or bearing layers of repeatedly and hopelessly applied make-up. During the service, heads would suddenly bow as if bent with unsupportable feeling. At no point in particular, shoulders gently shook. An arm would reach round to do what it could. Body language was everything that day and that week. Words had never seemed so redundant; so incapable of carrying the weight of trauma. Explicitly acknowledging this, knowing that simply showing up counted for more than any eloquence, the prime minister kept it brief. A gaping, blackened ground zero had opened inside every New Yorker (and everyone who had, through the catastrophe, become a New Yorker) and at the smoking core of the misery were, instead of words, images: spools of them, the ones you all know, looping mercilessly. The implausible glide into the steel; the blooming flower of flame; the slow, imploding crumple; the rolling tsunami of dust and shredded paperwork; the terrible drop of bodies, falling with heartbreaking grace like hunted birds.

The mark-ups are mine, highlighting my favorite parts of my favorite sections.

I am grateful for such superb writing.
- posted by levinson @ 9/11/2002 10:35:00 AM