The Pentagon

"Seven years ago today, a doomed jet fell from the sky, split the rock and steel of this building and changed our world forever." - President Bush, who has always had great writers.

+ photo by Reuters +

Seven Years Later

It's that time of year again.

There were lots more people milling about the World Trade Center this morning, tourists, cameras, camera crews, a little more security.

I didn't have time to see what was going on in and around the site, as I had to get into the PATH station to head to work. It was, however, frightening to actually think about it - that that very spot where I waited for my train used to be the basement floors of 1 World Trade, a.k.a. the north tower, which collapsed this very minute - 10:28 am - seven years ago.

(Photo from today's NYT.)

A brief AFP report:

11 Sep 2008 10:20 EDT DJ Sept 11 Memorial Held At Ground Zero

NEW YORK (AFP)--Ceremonies began Thursday at New York's Ground Zero, also due to be visited by White House rivals Barack Obama and John McCain on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

A choir sang the US national anthem before participants, led by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, observed a first minute of silence.

Commemorating the almost 2,750 people who died when hijacked airliners struck and demolished New York's two World Trade Center towers on 11 September, 2001, Bloomberg said the day will "live for ever in our hearts and our history."

The anniversary, he said, was about "New Yorkers, Americans and global citizens remembering the innocent people from 95 nations and territories that lost their lives that day."

Survivors of the 9/11 attacks then read out the names of the dead, as a cello played mournfully in the background. Further minutes of silence were to be observed to mark the destruction of each of the Twin Towers.

McCain and Obama - expected by staff to be arriving later in the day, after the official ceremonies - have promised to bury the hatchet in honor of the anniversary.

Over the last week the White House contest has degenerated into name-calling, climaxing with the row over Obama's branding of the Republican campaign of McCain and running mate Sarah Palin as "lipstick on a pig."

But Obama set the tone for the Ground Zero event, saying Wednesday that 9/11 showed "that here in America, we all have a stake in each other; I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper; and we rise and fall as one nation."

A (Blessedly) Short-Term Memory

New York is in Hollywood's crosshairs again.

If you happen to be standing around in the subway these days, you might've noticed not one, but two movie posters for films - I Am Legend and the upcoming Cloverfield - that use a ravaged NYC as a shock-tastic marketing ploy as well as a catastrophic plot point.

This has struck me as odd. Most of us may not remember anymore, but after 9/11 New York was a sensitive topic. Just a teeny bit. People all over the country claimed to "be New York" and "love New York"; as cheesy as it sounds there was extraordinary national unity, much of it centered around the plight of metro-NY citizens who had suffered losses or witnessed unimaginable destruction on that day.

Entertainment, too, was itself a sensitive topic. The frivolity of it all! Who, in those serious times, could seriously think about entertainment? Our sensibilities - our society's sensibilities - would be altered by 9/11. The industry, on a whole, was entering an existential crisis. Look at the kinds of things Entertainment Weekly was reporting just two days after the attacks - this is how reactive we were:

Questions remain about such upcoming films as Ben Stiller's ''Zoolander,'' a comedy about a male model who uncovers an assassination plot; ''Serendipity,'' another Manhattan-set romance, and ''The Last Castle,'' about a prison riot led by a jailed general. Bombing and terrorism figure prominently in the plots of three new TV series about CIA agents. Promotions have been yanked for the Ocotber 30 debut of ''24,'' which features the bombing of a Los Angeles-bound jetliner. The first episode of ''The Agency'' contains a reference to terror suspect Osama bin Laden, and the lavish Washington party for its premiere next week has been canceled. A five-hour ''Law & Order'' miniseries planned for later this season, which would deal with a terrorist act in New York, is also up in the air. Then there's next summer's action blockbusters, including ''Spider-Man,'' whose trailer and posters have already been pulled because they prominently feature the World Trade Center's twin towers, and ''The Sum of All Fears,'' the Tom Clancy adaptation that has terrorists rigging a nuclear bomb to blow up a crowded football stadium.

Of course, it turned out to be more a hiccup than a seismic shift in the zeitgeist. Escapism, it seems, is better medicine than CNN.

Then, in 2004 - many terrorist movies and TV episodes later - Hollywood got back into the New York-wrecking game with a spectacular specimen of summer fare, The Day After Tomorrow. In that ridiculous(ly fun) romp through death, destruction, and monumentally bad-ass climate change, the city gets it good. Smacked around. Uninhabitable. (See movie poster at right. Hey, it almost looks like the Cloverfield poster... with snowflakes instead of bullets!)

So. We're back where we began, or, at least, where we were before, in the era of Independence Day (a rousing spectacle in its own right). And I don't really have a problem with it, despite how I say it's "odd" that we've reverted after such earnest soul-searching and serious contemplation of our vulnerability, and after such mourning.

I mean, I figure I'll be the first in line to see Cloverfield. How eerie and foreboding is that poster?

My point? We were serious back then. Wounded, together, humble. And it's funny that to appreciate that time - to appreciate what now seems like a fleeting moment - it somehow helps to see it in relief, next to the cartoonish, grotesque, irresistible fantasies we recoiled from just six years ago.

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Read & Watch: This is almost hard to relate to now, but I think it's good sometimes to try to remember how things felt.

EW's great issue, "What Lies Ahead," just three days after the attacks.

Jon Stewart's return on the Daily Show (click here to go to site and view larger), one week and two days after the attacks. Funny and moving.