SOME PEOPLE WISH WE’D GET OVER 9/11. In a way I agree — I don’t want to wallow in remembrance. But I want to avoid wallowing in remembrance in order to take action. I think that they want to avoid remembrance in the hopes of not having to.

UPDATE: Justin Katz says it’s all about them. As usual.

DAN HANSON has a nice tribute to the passengers of Flight 93:

In their calmness and obvious resolve, they sent a message to all of us. A message that said, “This is who we are. This is how free people live, and this is how they die.” And from that moment on, we all knew what we were capable of doing.

In the dark days that followed September 11, it would have been easy to cower in fear, to believe that our generation was not up to this fight. Had it not been for the heroes of Flight 93, we might have been reading articles today lamenting the past, telling us how the stuff of “The Greatest Generation” of WWII had been lost. We might have questioned our resolve, and even looked for an easy way out.

But the doomed and valiant passengers of Flight 93 reached out to us with a different message, and lifted a great weight off our shoulders. They told us that the Greatest Generation is every generation that is forced to stand up and be counted. Our time has come, and in the final heroic acts of those 39 people, the example has been set.

On one of the TV programs I watched today (I’ve forgotten which network it was) someone said that the Flight 93 passengers hadn’t gotten much attention. That seemed odd to me. I think they’ve gotten a lot. But maybe the point was that while some people have noticed, not everyone has gotten the message. Yet.

CLAYTON CRAMER SUGGESTS AN AL QAEDA ANGLE to the growth of Nigerian scam-spam.

I think he’s wrong here. My Nigerian extended family is in the non-Muslim south, and they have many stories to tell of email scammers in Lagos. I think that’s where most of these things come from. I think the increase in volume is evidence of increasing Internet penetration, and bandwidth, more than anything else. But hey, I could be wrong.

A PERFECT MORNING is a weblog collecting remembrance essays relating to 9/11.

HERE’S AN AP STORY BY ANICK JESDANUN on how the web is responding to the 9/11 anniversary.

I WAS DEFENDING SUSAN SONTAG THE OTHER DAY. Today, Andrew Sullivan is Fisking her. Yeah, there’s plenty of dumb stuff there, as is sure to be the case in any piece written by Sontag and using the word “metaphor” — which is to say any piece written by Sontag, I suppose. But I still think that he and Jonah Goldberg are missing the non-stupid parts, and the significance of her move toward the center.

RULE BRITANNIA: Daniel Drezner writes about being in London on and after 9/11.

HERE’S A 9/11 BLOG by John Paczkowski at SiliconValley.com.

READER RICHARD AUBREY EMAILS:

I thought about explaining the current US position to some friends in Mexico. I finally settled on this:

From the end of World War II to today, every military thing we’ve been done has been…just business. We were trying to manage a global chessboard where victories had little immediate impact, and losses no immediate cost. Many years later, perhaps, the aggregate of our efforts would prove useful. The fighting cost the fighting men and their families. But it wasn’t personal.

This is personal.

There was the F14 pilot who wrote of dropping a packet of wake cards from the funerals of New York firefighters and police over Kabul with the warning that “this is why you die”. There are the ordies on carriers who decorate bombs and missiles with decals from New York police and fire units. There are plane captains who make sure the name of a dead firefighter or cop is stenciled on a combat aircraft.

There is the special ops helicopter squadron which was donated the wings of a stewardess killed in the attacks, and which makes sure those wings fly on every combat operation.

“Let’s roll,” now combines the aspects of a prayer and an exhortation. Not to mention a warning.

This is personal. Last time it got personal was a very bad time for those who had attacked us.

I think a lot of people feel that way.

THE FOOL AND THE WISE MAN: Toren Smith knows the difference.

BEETLE BAILEY: Yep. Click here.

SEVERAL READERS HAVE EMAILED this lame oped from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Yeah, it’s self-absorbed and dumb. I prefer these sentiments.

HERE’S LARRY SUMMERS’ SPEECH at Harvard today:

As we grieve for each innocent life lost, we cannot evade the truth that what we commemorate here today is more just than the tragedy of human lives lost multiplied thousands of times over. It is the result of a calculated plan to murder unsuspecting people, innocent people – not because of anything they did or even anything they stood for — but because they were members of this national community enjoying the fruits of freedom.

Those who killed on September 11 and those who celebrate the killing remind us of the eternal existence of evil. And we regard the world with understanding and openness, but we must also face it with moral clarity. We may debate the nature of truth, but there are truths beyond debate. Pursuit of that truth is OUR particular objective.

On Sept 11th, our generation learned, as generations before us have had to learn, that the values of life and liberty we venerate cannot be taken for granted but must be the constant object of our common purpose. For we saw that there are no ivory towers or impregnable fortresses — we are bound together. . . .

Let us honor those who are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend our freedom and show our support for those among us who have the courage to make that fateful choice.

Let us manifest our common purpose by renewing our commitment to this nation and, above all, to the values for which it stands.

Harvard is lucky to have Summers. Luckier, perhaps, than it realizes.

DON’T MISS SUSANNA CORNETT’S REPORT from New York today.

UPDATE: Reader Michael Hill emails:

I don’t know if you are aware that the striking statue under the image of the burning twin towers in Ms. Cornett’s post is a monument to the Katyn forest massacre. That area in Jersey City was once predominately Polish and still has a considerable Polish population. The image encapsulates the horrors of the 20th Century as it shows its end.

I didn’t know that.

A MESSAGE TO AMERICA, from the Iranian student movement. The regime currently in power feels differently.

MARTIN PRATT sends this link to a story on 9/11 remembrances around the world. He’s apparently miffed that I made such a big deal about spontaneous British demonstrations.

But what struck me was this passage:

“Events like Sept. 11 are sad but it is an opportunity for the American people to feel what bombing could do to nations,” said Ali Ahmed, a 47-year-old who owns a Baghdad stationery shop.

I’ll let you compose your own reply to these sentiments.

UPDATE: Jim Bennett emails:

I read the Yahoo link and it wasn’t clear that any of the other tributes were spontaneous, exept possibly the Australian. Perry’s point was about people putting up flags and handwritten notices without anybody organizing it. Maybe this was also done on the Continent; if so, that’s nice too. Anyone out there with a digital camera recording it?

Well?

DONATE ONE OF THESE to Gerhard Schroeder.

SGT. STRYKER has a photo of the Pentagon that I hadn’t seen before. It’s striking. So is this, in a very different way.

JEFF JARVIS has a firsthand report from the Ground Zero memorial service. Here’s the part that really got me:

Here and only here, we could hear the ceremony. Across the wide street, on the platform, I could see the people reading the names and a young woman playing her violin.

The names continued.

My God, they are only up to F.

I stood and listened.

I heard the bell ring when the first tower fell. A year ago right now, I lived.

I heard the name of my neighbor, who died.

He blogged it from a Starbucks nearby.

YOU KNOW THOSE SNEERING EUROPEAN REFERENCES TO HIGH NOON? Orrin Judd says they may be righter than they know.

JOHN HAWKINS hasn’t forgotten Palestinian celebrations a year ago. Then there’s this item from In Context.

READER DALE LEOPOLD sends this passage from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, which he says he’s reading at my recommendation:

He [Frank Chalmers] studied the [Arab] men’s faces as they talked. An alien culture, no doubt about it. They weren’t going to change just because they were on Mars…Their thinking clashed radically with Western thought; for instance the separation of church and state was wrong to them, making it impossible for them to agree with Westerners on the very basis of government. And they were so patriarchal that some of their women were said to be illiterate–illiterates, on Mars! That was a sign. And indeed these men had the dangerous look that Frank associated with machismo, the look of men who oppressed their women so cruelly that naturally the women struck back where they could, terrorizing sons who then terrorized wives who terrorized sons and son and so on, in an endless death spiral of twisted love and sex hatred. So that in a sense they were all madmen.

A pretty good description of what we’re dealing with, and of what must be changed.

ERIC S. RAYMOND says that we haven’t learned enough from 9/11.

HERE’S A GREAT Nielsen-Hayden post. And here’s another. Read ’em both.

AIMEE DEEP has set up a September 11 person-to-person memorial.