AddieStan

Giving a tragedy its due An extraordinary piece of writing appears today on the New York Times editorial page, a concise explanation of the tragedy after the tragedy that was the attacks of September 11, 2001. It's been some time since we last conferred the "Sentence of the Week" title on the work of any particular writer, and since this comes from an unsigned editorial, we may never know the author of this elegantly rendered nugget of wisdom (Staples?): The moment vanishes, and what we are left with are impressions, recreations and the solid residue of fact, which doesn't merely lie there waiting to be picked up but must be carefully elicited. The tragedy after the tragedy, of course, is the simultaneous reluctance to truly look at the deeper meaning and precipitating events of the viciousness visited upon us while selected images of that day become appropriated as political symbols. The simplistic idea that our nation was hit because "they hate our ...

A belated "by your leave" Out among the denizens of Our Nation's Capital this morning, your blogstress took all manner of guff for having disappeared from the blogosphere for the last week without notice. All she has to say for herself is that Blogstress does as Blogstress pleases, and for some reason, she has not wanted to blog. Perhaps it was the hangover of the hate vibe she ingested while covering the Republican National Convention. She's still not sure what to make of the whole deal, and she's certain that much has yet to be said about what actually transpired last week in the city so nice they named it twice--the hundreds of unnoticed arrests and detentions, the sight of the city where anything goes suddenly becoming the city where nothing went unless the authorities--often in possession of semi-automatic rifles--said it could. Then there was the reality of one's hometown occupied by an enemy that neither understood it nor cared about it, except f...