CSotD: Looking back at the conversation
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Colleges in rural areas have a problem each fall, when freshmen from urban centers show up and find that they can't sleep without the normal background noise of a city. So they turn on their stereos at night, which works, unless they have a roommate who is used to quiet and can't sleep with rock music playing in the room.
I feel a little that way at the moment. It is a major principle of grief counseling that nobody can tell someone else how to grieve, but there is also a major conflict among families when some want to talk about the absent member while others find the conversations too painful.
I'm in the camp of "let's move on," and that means (A) I resent the idea that this means I've "forgotten" and (B) I also resent having to avoid all media because the "Never forget!" group is sleeping with the stereo cranked up and insisting that we talk about our losses.
To choose a Comic Strip of the Day today under these circumstances is impossible. I didn't like any of the commemoration strips but they sure spoiled my appetite for the ones that didn't mark the occasion.
Instead, here is a selection of panels that I used in my presentations to students in the months after 9/11. Many of these are scanned from overhead transparencies, and often I was hitting "print" on my way out the door and didn't make notations of who did what, though I remembered for that day's presentation.
Technical and bibliographic shortcomings aside, it's a conversation worth remembering. We'll start with one that David Horsey did before 9/11, on the topic of the USS Cole, that he could have done after as well:
There were so many truly lousy cartoons on 9/12 that I lost count after 30 weeping Statues of Liberty. But Clay Bennett, not surprisingly, turned out a quiet keeper:
It's important to remember, today, how much the world was behind us then. A good cartoon by Peter Schrank made the point with a familiar image that, though overused, sure worked well in his hands:
But the moment of unity passed, as not everyone was buying what happened next. This is by Luojie of Beijing's China Daily:
Nor was Norwegian cartoonist Herb (Herbjørn Skogstad) impressed with the partnership that grew up between Bush and Blair:
But we went to war, with, as Tom Toles noted, the army we had rather than the one we might have wished we had:
Though, in the opinion of New Zealander Malcolm Evans, equipment wasn't necessarily the issue:
Meanwhile, on the home front, we had to make a few adjustments, as Ann Telnaes noted:
Though, as Jim Morin pointed out, they were simply some necessary tweaks in the system:
And, after all, everything was carefully thought out, Clay Bennett noted:
And we had some successes, like the first time we knocked off Qaeda's Number Two Leader, marked here by Bulgarian cartoonist Christo Komanitski, who proved a bit prophetic, as killing Al Qaeda's #2 became a regular event and the whole thing began to feel like an episode of The Prisoner:
Alas, I don't have the name of this cartoonist, since the copier trimmed the cartoon, something I didn't notice until later. My recollection is that this came out of Jordan or Lebanon in the wake of the execution of Saddam Hussein, but, whoever did it, it's a chilling bit of analysis:
Still, as Jim Morin noted, there was plenty of success to be celebrated:
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