Monday School Day

First day of School! The first day of real school in about 18 months. That is, a 6 hour day, five days a week. Only in the last few days has it occurred to this blog that we're going to have to redo our schedule. We might experiment with posting here at night. We shall see. 

Our district's school year was put off another week by Ida. Bitch. For foreign readers, in many parts of the country school starts in early September. In the South and Midwest school starts mid-August. We have no idea about the West, Mountain West, and West Coast. 

We didn't watch a single snap of sports ball yesterday and we didn't miss it. We don't need to turn on the TV and be told out flaws by millionaire athletes who allegedly attended college but dance like morons for simply doing their job, and can barely say they're own names during the Sunday Night Football intro. Let's check rap sheets before we lecture, shall we? 

What will did watch: Star Trek Voyager, Season-2. This season was decently written and kept surprising us. The season ended with a cliffhanger that led into season-3. Overall we'd give Voyager Season-2 a B+. Also we finally figured out why we've  seen so few of these episodes. Season-2 aired during the 95-96 TV season. Back then we attended a non-Jesuit university in Washington DC and took a lot of night classes.  These were War and Diplomacy: Napoleon to Bismarck, War and Diplomacy: Bismarck to Hitler,* and Roman History. We never caught Voyager in syndication. Was Voyager even rerun?

It is said W compared Islamic terror with domestic terrorists. The right assumes he meant the Q Annon shaman guy. W could just as well have been talking about BLM/Antifa. But we all jumped to conclusions and rightfully so. If W left Patriotic Americans with the impression that he was talking about them, that's his fault. 

Long time reader(s) know this blog has vociferously defended W. His record is this: 53 straight months of economic growth, handling 9/11, liberating Afghanistan, winning the Iraq campaign, handling the financial crises. We're not sure what we think of W or his people anymore. Did they make mistakes? Of course. 

But we always thought the Democrat-Media complex was treating him unfairly. We still think that. The media are a lot of communist perverts, and if we saw a CNN reporter drowning, we would be hard pressed to give him a hand. Good people everywhere think the opposite of whatever a BBC producer thinks. Lurn to coad, anal reprobates.

The mere fact that the likes of CNN and the NYTs hate W should give one great pause before turning on the man. If they ever start praising him, that should give one even greater pause. 

Below, your Monday (not) Metal, dedicated to the days, weeks and months after 9/11:

*Holy crap, the prof is not only still alive but still teaching. We still have the books he assigned. He taught us everything we know about the Congress of Vienna, Metternich, Castlereigh, Cavour, Bismarck, etc etc. Can you see 

can you see this 

Will's Latest Russian

Over at Inforos:

After the September 11th terrorist attacks, Americans came together in a way not seen since the Second World War. The nation determined the rubble must be cleared, the dead buried and mourned, the Taliban punished, al Qaeda destroyed, and Osama bin Laden brought to justice. American country music singer, Toby Keith, captured the national mood when he memorably wrote ‘it’s gonna feel like the whole world’s coming down on you/brought to you courtesy of the red, white, and blue.’ The United States struck back with righteous fury against the Taliban, al Qaida, and Osama Bin Laden. According to Gallup, Americans rallied to the government, with 83% reporting that they trusted the government to handle international problems. At first, American’s trust in their government was well founded...

Click on over:

9/11 What Should have Happened

Eighteen years after 9/11, you're goddamn right we're angry.

As the great Ralph Peters said, after 9/11 we should have hit Afghanistan with everything in our arsenal, created a smoldering ruin - and left.

Instead we're stuck in this god awful quagmire in a god awful not-a-real-country that not even Pakistan wants full of closeted homosexuals and goat molesters.

[Ok, so what would you have done?-Ed]

I would have irradiated Afghanistan with neutron bombs and then nuked it just to be a dick. I would have offered a million dollar bounty for the head of anyone named bin-Laden. I would have seized Saudi Arabia's oilfields. I would have surrounded the Saudi embassy in Washington and arrested the ambassador.

Then I would have gotten really mean...

9/11 Here or Everywhere?

It was cold in New Jersey that autumn and winter, maybe becuase we had just moved up from Northern Virginia. The next months had almost...a weariness, but also a healing attained through pain and suffering. 

This. 

That's The Mayor, Paul Simon and NYC heroes on SNL. Remember that? Aired 9/29/01. I watched it.

The attacks were not only on New York, the Pentagaon and PA of course. The 9/11 attacks were an attack on the entire country. 

We have over the years attempted to describe what 9/11 was like personally and on the edge of the event, the flavor and essence of the moment.

Was this confined to NYC and the metro area? Or did you feel it too in California, Texas, Tennessee and points in between?

Empty Sky

For reasons we do not understand, we find this day getting harder with each year. We watched some footage last night which prompted...that damn emotional reaction. The footage gets more horrifying every time.

That July Mrs. Stroock and ourselves had just moved to Peapack NJ, about 30 minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel. The town lost four men killed at the World Trade Center.

As previously explained we were in a field hitting baseballs and found out about ten after ten, when we hopped in the shower and turned on the radio to listen the local sports talk about the previous night's Giants game.

We spent the morning tracking down relatives in Manhattan. The phones actually jammed. Our grandfather watched the second plane go in from NYU University Medical Center, where our grandmother was being treated for cancer.

A week later we crossed the Hudson at the mighty Tappan Zee Bridge, about twenty miles upriver from Manhattan. All one could see looking south was a cloud of smoke. It looked like goddamn Hiroshima. A week after that we took the train into Manhattan for the first time, there was a great gap in southern Manhattan.

The towers were used all over the area for advertising. One of our local stations, Channel 11 liked to use them, obviously. Almost every episode of every TV show ever set in NYC had a shot of the towers, every movie too. Now for all time those shots will evoke images of destruction.

Bruce Springsteen captured something here, Empty Sky...empty sky...I woke up this morning, to an empty sky.

The Statue of Liberty w/ Southern Manhattan in the background 

Mike and the Mad Dog and the Jews

The other day we talked about listening to Mike and the Mad Dog on the 2nd 9/11 anniversary.

Readers from outside the NY metro area should understand that host Mike Francesa and Chris Russo were sports-talk gods in New York. Their top rated radio show had the absolute final say on what was happening in NY Sports. They changed policies and even engineered trades on air.

Fate put Mike and Chris on the radio during the terrorist attacks and after. 

Their remarks vis-à-vis 9/11 and Jews were controversial and what they actually say remained unclear and controversial.

ESPN's 30 for 30 has a good summary:

There's no audio recording of the pair calling for a Jewish loyalty oath, but people said they heard it.

We didn't, though days after we did listen to a lengthy on air discussion and argument they had on the matter. Mike and Chris insisted over and over again that their remarks were misunderstood.

Can we agree that a couple of sports guys might be a little tongue tied after a terrorist attack, and their thoughts not fully fleshed out?

Also, Mike's right.

Green Book Author Black Listed

So the screenwriter of the film Green Book has been unpersoned becuase he Tweeted that he saw Muslims celebrating the 9/11 attacks in Jersey City-four years ago.

Now this is interesting.

Muslims celebrating after 9/11 has grown into a yuuuuge urban legend or un-legend.

Before going further, one should understand that things were little weird around here for a while. 

God the crater must have smoldered for months afterwards. Ground Zero was a great physical, emotional and spiritual wound for the region.

People were jumpy.

One night in December we woke up to the sound of helicopter blades low overhead and thought that Al Qaida must have nuked NYC. Turns out the cops were chasing a car thief.

One saw helicopters in the canyons of Manhattan too, and armed National Guard troops at Penn and Grand Central.

Mosques got observed and infiltrated by cops.

That November a small plane crashed in Queens and well, everyone wondered for a while.

We all kept our eyes open. and had a few encounters ourselves.

About 3 weeks after 9/11 we saw a squad of NYC flatfoots stop a dark man driving a U-Haul toward the Lincoln Tunnel. 'Right here, sir. Over here!'

In early 2003 we saw a couple of obviously Muslim men videotaping our local Walmart. We told the manager.

People generally gave Muslims the bug-eye.**

The first 9/11 anniversary was cathartic, we guess. Bush spoke at Ground Zero on a wet, cloudy day and then went to the UN to talk about war.

The second 9/11 anniversary was weird. That day had the same clear skies and sunshine. We recall it vividly, we were listening to Mike and the Mad Dog on the way to work. Because it was 9/11 Dog cooled his usual ebullient opening.

We were driving to our teaching gig at a Yeshiva in Passaic, a town from where one could see the towers. Passaic is a real melting pot.

That autumn a Yeshiva employee told us about the local Dunkin Donuts on 9/11. She said on that day the Muslim employees were jumping up and down and shouting for joy. The cops showed up and made arrests. The Dunkin Donuts closed and never reopened.

That employee was the Yeshiva principal.

Here's a report on Jersey City Muslim celebrations from the New York Daily News:

Here's the NJ.com report with this intriguing paragraph:

* [Witness, Ron} Knight was one of two Tonnele Avenue residents who said they witnessed a crowd celebrating on John F. Kennedy Boulevard not far from Masjid Al-Salam, the mosque where Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the "blind sheikh," preached before the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Our own thinking on the matter is that most of the Muslims seen 'celebrating' 9/11 were either jumping up and down in the over-excited fashion typical of Mediterranean types or kneeling in prayer. Most, not all.

*We wouldn't dare see something, say something today. Who needs the trouble?
**Pucker up buttercup. It was 9/11.

Europe Steyned

Yesterday the esteemed M Steyn republished one of his classic post 9/11 pieces. Like most Americans we only became Steyn-aware after 9/11*. The above linked piece is one of the reasons why.

Of NATO's post 9/11 commitments Steyn wrote:

The Nato declaration was impressive, but, even as the press release was coming off the photocopier, a big chunk of America's 18 allies were backsliding. Norway, Germany and Italy said they had no intention of contributing planes, ships or men. Even as purely political support, the first ever invocation of Article Five was written in disappearing ink. The Italian Foreign Minister – speaking for Europe's most conservative government – said "the term 'war' is inappropriate". "We are not at war," said Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel, his nation's signature on that Nato document notwithstanding. Belgium holds the current Presidency of the EU and was last seen apologizing for slavery, colonialism, etc at Durban's recent UN Conference Against Whitey, Hymie And Capitalism. 

It was during this time that we realized NATO was useless. European shrugs, Token contributions,  'Oui mon General. Perhaps a company of gendarmes?'

European smug indifference kind of made one feel unappreciated. Do they not know about the huge American military cemeteries across Western Europe?

The French should have said, 'The people of Les Republique are outraged, Mr. President. the Foreign Legion is at your service. And sorry about not letting your F-111s flyover in '86.'

*Turns out our intro to Steyn was his 1999 review of The Phantom Menace in NR. As with all things, Steyn was right. He hated it.