I'm Not Commemorating 9-11

I will not be doing anything, on this blog or elsewhere, to mark the tenth anniversary of 9-11. I say, enough already.

The obsession with 9-11 has been a worse catastrophe for our country than the attack itself. Our fear of attack and lust for revenge became political and moral poison eating away the nation's soul. They enabled Bush to launch his disastrous invasion of Iraq, in which more Americans died than on 9-11 (not to mention 100,000 Iraqis), and they led to our embrace of torture, which I regard as the worst thing to happen to America in my lifetime. Fear of terrorism still horribly distorts our foreign and domestic policies, giving us airport patdowns of feeble old ladies, a Cuban prison that we can't seem to close, and the wasting of the hundreds of billions on dubious security measures and anti-terrorist programs. Plus the maudlin sentimentality makes me ill.

We need to bury this episode and move on. If the families of the victims want to mark the day, then by all means they should, but they have no right to drag me into it. The "never again" posture has become an excuse for everything from warrantless wiretapping to beating helpless men to death in secret prisons. I want no part of it. I prefer the risk of more terrorist attacks to the sick mixture of self-righteous victimhood, aggressive bullying, and security theater that has overtaken America in the past decade. The right way to mark 9-11 is to forget both the terrorists and the memorialists and do the most normal thing you can think of.