ANOTHER ANNIVERSARY. Well, of sorts: It’s the 50th installment of Charles Austin’s popular “Scourge of Richard Cohen” series.

N.Z. BEAR WRITES ELOQUENTLY about the lessons we should be drawing on this anniversary.

I’VE ACTUALLY WATCHED SOME TV coverage. ABC’s, despite a bit of ass-covering by Peter Jennings regarding his anti-Bush slant of a year ago, has been the best, because they seem to be focusing more on what happened, why it happened, and what’s being done to keep it from happening again. I did catch some of the Flight 93 memorial service, too. I notice that the choir sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and not “Amazing Grace.”

THE REAL ENGLAND SPEAKS: And it’s not in the voice of Robert Fisk or Chris Patten. Read this and look at the photos. It’s the spontaneous reflection of real people’s feelings. The anglosphere is a reality. And this, very literally, brought tears to my eyes.

HERE’S A VERY COOL PHOTO from the U.S.S. Belleau Wood. Here’s a link to the story that goes with it.

(Via Craig Schamp.)

HEY, we’re getting our own TV series set in Knoxville. I bet Brad Renfro and David Keith wind up in starring roles. (Whatever you do, don’t ask David about the shoe incident, though.)

VICTORY CONDITIONS: Here’s something from last October:

HOW TO TELL IF WE’RE WINNING OR LOSING; some pointers from reader Eric Bainter:

Katie O’Beirne blows off anthrax anxiety with mild profanity and stiff “bio-drink”: Win.

House of Reps gets panties in a wad and runs for cover: Lose.

Fly to Canada on vacation as planned before 9/11 and have good time: Win.

Canadian government apparently wrestling Belgium for last place in line behind – way behind – America: Lose, at least for the Canadian government.

Canadian independent muffler sign (big lighted one) says “God Bless our American Friends.” Win. If it hadn’t been a rental car, I woulda bought a new muffler system right then.

Rosie O’Donnell cancels shows: Big Win! no wait, lose. No, um, which is it – damn, tough to call this one..

During vacation fondue dinner, wife suddenly asks, “I wonder what Osama’s having for dinner in his cave? Rat fondue?” triggering near-asphyxiation through giggling with mouth full: Win.

Get up, retrieve newspaper and mail, go to work, do job, do lunch, do work, go home, kiss wife – like usual: Win.

Local TV station airs story on how Cipro is cheaper in Mexico – lose.

Turn off losers on TV, face in general direction of Afghanistan, wave appropriate finger, say “Anthrax this!”, go to bed, sleep soundly: Win.

Realize this war’s battleground is between my ears, and I control the battle’s outcome: Big Win.

By this standard, we’re doing pretty well.

KEN LAYNE REFLECTS:

The flags went up, of course, but it was especially pleasant to see the flags go up in my immigrant-heavy neighborhood of Armenians, Filipinos, Central Americans, Middle Easterners and Russians. I had never thought much about displaying a flag, and after the terrorist attacks I was much more worried about my beat-up old revolver and its 15-year-old ammunition. But I recall driving through the neighborhood a few days later and seeing all those flags sprouting from car windows and front lawns and apartment balconies. There was a grim-faced middle-aged black guy getting out of a mechanic’s pickup down the block, and as I drove slowly up the street I saw his American flag on the ladder rack, and he looked at me and waved and gave a little nod and it would’ve been laughable in a John Cougar Mellencamp video from the 1980s. But I just started weeping like a jackass. . . .

I learned more than a few things, especially about this country I call home. Like spending a year abroad in some hellhole little nation, Sept. 11 made all the American stuff I take for granted seem shiny and new. (If you’ve lived abroad, you know what it’s like to come home and see how goddamned great this nation can be.)

Why isn’t Ken Layne writing for the New York Times, instead of, well, pretty much all the people who actually are writing for the New York Times? Yeah, I know.

MICKEY KAUS has a worrisome update on the situation at TAPPED.

I promise that if TAPPED is eliminated I will taunt Kuttner and Moyers mercilessly. Er, and Mickey probably will, too. . . .

READER BILL RUDERSDORF is going all Anglo-Saxon on me with this anniversary quote:

“It is better to avenge a friend than to mourn him long” –Beowulf xxi,1-4

Has Osama read Beowulf? Too late now, I imagine.

ANNIVERSARY POST: This column by Brad Todd from September 16 is still one of the best things written from that first week.

SORE LOSER: Billy McKinney says he lost because black people didn’t turn out for him:

“I did not expect this because I expected black folks to turn out for me,” said McKinney as he left J.R.’s Lounge on Fairburn Road. “They did not turn out for me. They wanted a Klansman, a son of the Confederacy.”

McKinney (D-Atlanta), who has become infamous for anti-Semitic remarks, was referring to Noel’s membership in Sons of the Confederate Veterans.

Noel, at his victory party, shrugged off McKinney’s comments.

“That’s the kind of crud we don’t need anymore,” said Noel. “The days of divisiveness are over.”

When you’re losing black voters to a white guy who belongs to Sons of the Confederate Veterans, you might want to face up to the possibility that you’re doing something wrong. Or you could just blame the jews, I suppose.

ANOTHER ISSUE the Democrats have been too lame to pick up on: Byron York writes on the Bin Laden family’s great escape.

JAMES LILEKS writes a letter to the James Lileks of a year ago. It’s terrific even by Lileks standards.

LOOKING FORWARD: My TechCentralStation column is up. There’s an illustration of a NERVA engine for some reason, though. That’s not connected with the subject of my column, really.

UPDATE: Fixed now. By the way, the streaming video of the Orion tests is very cool.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Hey, check out this post by N.Z. Bear, too.

LOOKING BACK: Here’s something I originally posted at about 10:30 in the morning on 9/11. It’s held up pretty well, I think:

TOM CLANCY WAS RIGHT: (Reposted from earlier today) And we’re living one of his scenarios right now. Not much is known for sure, but it’s obvious that the United States is the target of a major terrorist assault. There’s a lot of bloviation on the cable news channels, most of which will turn out to be wrong or misleading later. Here, for your consideration, are a few points to be taken from past experience:

The Fog of War: Nobody knows much right now. Many things that we think we know are likely to be wrong.

Overreaction is the Terrorist’s Friend: Even in major cases like this, the terrorist’s real weapon is fear and hysteria. Overreacting will play into their hands.

It’s Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new “Antiterrorism” legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats’ wish lists. They will be things that wouldn’t have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That’s what happened in 1996. Let’s not let it happen again.

Only One Antiterrorism Method Works: That’s punishing those behind it. The actual terrorists are hard to reach. But terrorism of this scale is always backed by governments. If they’re punished severely — and that means severely, not a bombed aspirin-factory but something that puts those behind it in the crosshairs — this kind of thing won’t happen again. That was the lesson of the Libyan bombing.

“Increased Security” Won’t Work. When you try to defend everything, you defend nothing. Airport security is a joke because it’s spread so thin that it can’t possibly stop people who are really serious. You can’t prevent terrorism by defensive measures; at most you can stop a few amateurs who can barely function. Note that the increased measures after TWA 800 (which wasn’t terrorism anyway, we’re told) didn’t prevent what appear to be coordinated hijackings. (Archie Bunker’s plan, in which each passenger is issued a gun on embarking, would have worked better). Deterrence works here, just as everywhere else. But you have to be serious about it.

For now, the terrorists have won. They’ve shut down the U.S. government, more or less. They’ve shut down air travel. They’re all over TV. But whether they really win depends on how we deal with this; hysterically, or like angry — but measured — adults.

Last night I was reading over the archive pages for the week of September 11. It’s quite shocking to start at the bottom of this page, where the subjects are French coffeehouses with no-loitering policies, and disputes about who had the best abs at the Video Music Awards (I still think Alicia Keys should have won), and then scroll up into, well, a whole different world.

But, of course, the world wasn’t really different. While Alicia Keys was sporting her fine abs, people who wanted to build a society where women would be stoned to death for doing that very thing were putting the final stages of their plan into action. We didn’t actually wake up into a different world on September 11. We just woke up.

NO 9/11 MEMORIAL PAGE HERE: I’ve thought about what to do to observe the anniversary of last year’s atrocities, and I’ve concluded that the main thing I can do is to keep on blogging. I could have put up a fancy photo page or quoted the Bible or Winston Churchill or, following a suggestion actually aimed at the TV networks, rerun all my coverage from this time last year.

But, what I did last year was blog about what was happening, as it was happening — something that won me (rare) praise from Jim Henley, which because of its rarity (and believe me, it’s rare) is not to be taken lightly. And besides, it’s what I know how to do. Fancy memorial pages aren’t what I’m good at. (Go here for one of those.) So while I’m going to post a couple of retrospective items, I plan to spend today thinking about today, and tomorrow — not last year.

EUGENE VOLOKH reports on a “September 11 teach-in” at UCLA that sounds more like a predictably anti-American preach-in. How lame. (Scroll up from this post for more updates).

BILLY MCKINNEY HAS LOST the runoff, gaining only 35% of the vote despite the advantages of incumbency. Challenger John Noel has been declared the winner.

A TERRIFIC OBSERVATION BY ANDREW GREELEY:

On Sept. 11 last year, up to 1 million people were evacuated from Lower Manhattan by water ”in an emergent network of private and publicly owned watercraft–a previously unplanned activity.” It was an American Dunkirk, like the epic rescue of the British army at Dunkirk in 1940 by an armada of similar craft.

Yet you most likely never saw this astonishing event, reported last month by Professor Kathleen Tierney at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, on television and never read about it in the print media. It would have made for spectacular TV imagery; yet, as an example of calm and sensible and spontaneous action, it did not fit the media image of panic, an image that will doubtless be re-enacted next week.

Yeah, I remember the media telling us all that we were scared and that we’d have to give up our freedom in the days and weeks following the attack, though it seemed to be them, not us, who were so scared. (This Michael Kelly column from October is a priceless window into the past.)

HERE’S A FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT of Robert Fisk’s speech at George Mason University. In keeping with the post-9/11 crushing of dissent in America, he spoke without rioting protesters shutting down the event, the way they do in progressive countries like Canada.

UPDATE: Fisk, Fisked — reader Marc Intrater writes:

Reading through Amsoapundit’s facinating account of Robert Fisk’s speech at George Mason, I was struck by his comment that Arabs “wonder why the word “massacre” is never used in the Western press to describe the killing of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla camps in southern Lebanon in 1982.” This seemed odd, because I generally recall seeing that word used. I checked Google News for the words Sabra and Shatilla, and found the following quotes from the Western press

Three major Western periodicals:

Newsweek: Seething over the massacre that Lebanese Phalangist militias had just committed against Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under Israel’s watch

The Scotsman: After the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps

The New Yorker: The massacre of seven hundred to eight hundred Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila [this in an passage by Bernard Lewis, describing how media coverage was unfair to Israel]

One Israeli web-site:

Israel Insider: Next there was the occurrence of the notorious massacre of many hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps

Two hits for IndyMedia (one a review of a Chomsky book) which are neither major, nor slanted pro-Israel.

The other hits were all Arab publications (Palestine Chronicle, Beirut Daily Star, IRNA)

Thus in the universe covered by Google News (most major newspapers and magazines for the past few months), all of the Western media references to Sabra and Shatila used the word ‘massacre’ or much worse. So easy to check, and completely wrong. And Fisk is billed as a Mid-East expert.

Yes, I recall hearing the term “massacre” used in this context nearly every time it comes up. Fisk’s reputation as a serious journalist is, to me, difficult to explain.

ANOTHER BLOW TO HISTORIANS’ CREDIBILITY: The Denmark Vesey slave revolt conspiracy, taught as fact for decades, apparently never happened. This is appalling.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall emails that this is not in the same league as Bellesiles’ scholarly misrepresentations. That’s true. But it looks to be an example of politically inspired wishful thinking presented as fact. And this kind of thing is probably far more widespread than reliance on nonexistent sources.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Geitner Simmons has some more thoughts. Meanwhile Josh emails again:

Trust me, I’ve spent years working through court records from 17th Century New England. And I make a fetish of exactitude in the way I work with documents. But this is something that was taken for true at the time. The old-school Ulrich Philips historians of the South thought it was true. The newer, post-Kenneth Stamp guys thought it was too. Now Johnson *seems* to have shown — I haven’t given it a close enough reading yet — that historians assumptions led them to take too much at face value the accusations the court alleged, etc. That’s not a scandal. That’s just solid revisionist history writing. Assumptions about black resistance probably played a role in preventing earlier scholars from seeing this. But this is the normal process of historical investigation at work.

Well, okay. But the professional historians quoted on the subject seem to see it as a bit more than that.

A READER sends a link to this quote:

“Am I embarrassed to speak for a less-than-perfect democracy?” asked former Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan. His answer: “Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.”

Well said.

BILLY MCKINNEY, with 39% of the vote in, is getting hammered. He’s got 4%. I wonder how he’ll explain this. . . .

UPDATE: With 65% of the vote in, he’s now up to 36%. Hmm. I guess it’s a rather heterogeneous district.

ANOTHER UPDATE: It’s 55/45 with 74% of the vote in.

SOME INTERESTING THOUGHTS on the historians’ diversity problem.