9/11

"A world ended thirteen years ago," says Mitch Waxman


in his Newtown Pentacle blogpost today, "cold and humorless," Mitch Waxman shares these before and after photos (you can click on them to enlarge), noting: "September 11th is the only thing that can make a New Yorker flinch, a subject which causes all of our carefully cultivated callouses to fall away. City people have thick skins, but the subject is still raw around these parts."

by Ken

Mitch Waxman's Newtown Pentacle blog is always worth checking out for the entertaining record of his curmudgeonly wanderings around the Big Apple, with frequent reference to the Newtown Creek area that has occupied so much of his personal attention, and always returning to his beloved Astoria. But what makes the blog a daily must-see is the photos, and today the photos are pretty evocative.

I figure we really ought to say something about 9/11. I thought about it day before yesterday, which is to say 9/9/, when I set out on the same itinerary at about the same time as on 9/11/2001: to stop in at the public school where I vote to have my say in the Democratic primary and then head on to work.

It was a nice enough day, but not like that amazingly beautiful September day that turned so wrong. We vote in a room in the basement of the school now, accessible via a side entrance, rather than in the auditorium space (or whatever it was), and while I was headed afterward to the same job, it's in a different part of town now -- not that far, in fact, from Ground Zero.

But most of this I've said already, and I'm not sure I have anything new to say. If Osama bin Laden calculated that if he pointed us in the direction of where we could buy some really, really expensive rope, we'd hang ourselves, he wasn't far off the mark.

(The essential source documents, as always, are the three print installments, plus extensive additional online documentation, in the Washington Post's September 2010 "Top Secret America" series, for which you can find links in my January 2011 post "Say, whatever did happen to 'Top Secret America'?," or just go to the washingtonpost.com "Top Secret America" page.)

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