Letters to the Editor
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"Greengrass"
I feel like I need a lawnmower after reading that article. Did you count the mentions of "Greengrass"??? Thirty (30) !!! Ouch! Was that necessary?
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Too soon?
I'm amazed it took this long to rape the corpse of 9/11.
Does the movie explain why Osama Bin Laden is still allowed to live? Oh, I forgot. We don't talk about him anymore.
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Tough job
Stephanie Zacharek's, I mean. First of all, she had to see the movie -- a difficult experience. Second, she had to review it -- and writing is always like bleeding onto the page, though sometimes it's more like opening an artery than others. I'm grateful that when I see this movie, and someday I will in some form, I will be able to see it and respond to it in private, whether in the small community of a theater or in my own home.
The bigger issues -- should the movie have been made, how should it have been made, should someone profit from it, etc. -- will always be with us, no matter what art form humans use to contemplate and respond to events. Investigating hell is what artists do; it's what they should do.
The genocide in Rwanda, the terrorist attacks in 2001, wars throughout the Middle East, the tsunami -- they all happened, whether or not movies are made. My opinion: it's a good thing when artists are ready to look at an event. As individuals, we can choose to participate in their art, or not. But the work of artists -- however imperfect, biased, naive -- is good for us as a society.
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Sounds good to me
Call me crazy, but I want to see this movie. I'm even a New Yorker with my own harrowing tale of what happened
to me, my loved ones, and people I know/knew on that day. Does that make me bad or something? It's the most
incomprehensible, unbelieveable, shocking event of my lifetime and I was there. I want to understand it better.
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Quick hits...
1. Three of the clinical signs of narcissistic delusion are that you feel that you are one of the few people clear-headed enough to see the "real" truth, that the possibility of being wrong never enters your mind, and that those who don't think like you are ignorant dupes. Just chow for thought.
2. Americans tend to wallow in our tragedies because we're an inward-gazing, self-obsessed people. Grow up. 9/11 is fair game to talk about, write about, film about. The world moves on. And in 20 years, people would still scream, "It's too soon!"
3. It's amazing. We don't want to talk about 9/11, yet the reason the Holocaust has remained (justifiably) the grim shadow over the last 100 years of humanity is because groups like the Anti-Defamation League won't let us forget. Maybe there's a lesson in that, as well as in the fact that Nazi groups still exist in spite of it. Hate and fanatics will always exist. We're not special.
4. Unless you lost someone on 93, in the WTC or the Pentagon, you have no business wringing your hands and wailing. Get over it.
5. Maybe Steph and Greengrass have a little sompin' goin' on. That was the most obsequious, fawning treatment of a director I've ever seen. He's a good one, but c'mon. SZ, got a picture of him in your locker or what?
6. Anti-government conspiracy theory wack jobs are still chewing on the JFK assassination 43 years later. The 9/11 conspiracists will still be swapping physics equations and titanium melting point figures in the old folks'home in 2049. I'll simply say what a good friend of mine, who spent years in military intel, told me: it would be IMPOSSIBLE to cover up a covert op as huge as the sabotage of several major NY and DC buildings and the prearranged hijacking or takeover of 4 passenger jets. Hell, these neocon clowns can't even cover up the Valerie Plame leak.
7. And finally, to the poster who implied that the phone calls from flight 93 to loved ones were somehow made by shadowy government agents in an attempt to make us THINK the flight was full of good Americans who were the victims of Muslim terrorists, two words: dandelion break.
Peace, all. This here is what we're fighting for.
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Concerning this movie.
All of the family members of all of the victims of United flight 93 gave their permission for this movie to be made. Everyone who has said that they flat out refuse to go see this movie should think about that for a while.
-- poeslygeia
I congratulate them for the courage of being able to face this directly.
I would also like to address one other issue that has scraped at me for a while: the '3000 victims' concept. Yes, that was about the number of people who died in the collapse of the Towers. It is not the number of victims. The number of victims includes the families of those killed in the Towers; the people whose jobs disappeared as a result of the attacks and their families; the people who had to face the rubble and the clean-up and the health issues from them. That is a large number more than three thousand; we may never know how many there really are, but we should not dismiss them out-of-hand.
Living can be harder than dying. The dead are done; the living continue on with a hole where the dead used to be.
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sorry if someone's posted about these already...
Not to cast aspersions on the tragedy depicted in "United 93," but:
Along with films like this, we should take care to consider that, once the evidence available to the public is examined, a lot of stuff just doesn't add up. "Loose Change" and "9/11 Revisited" both jolted my sense of well-being and my already-cynical worldview. Watch those movies; you can view them online at Google Videos or at loosechange911.com and 911revisited.com.
You will be shocked and disgusted, but I hope you'll be moved to action, moved to spread the word that the "truth" we've been given simply can't hold up to simple analytical scrutiny. What's scary about these investigative pieces isn't so much the possible evidence of a depravity so foul at work on such a large scale, but the fact that most regular Americans don't know and, if they did, wouldn't care.
We should approach all media, no matter whose viewpoint they espouse or whose interest their opinions and slants may benefit, with a critical eye. The words of our government are no different.