R.I.P.? No chance

James Wolcott: The 9/12 Afterture

The never-ending shame of September 11th is that the souls of the dead have not been allowed to rest in peace but have been conscripted again and again into the garish rationales of fools and knaves for unending war and conquest. For the neocons, those original 9/11 deaths have compounded nicely, provided an impressive rate of return. With each anniversary, 9/11 becomes harder to disaggregate, analyze; the smoke-pouring towers have optical landmarks purged of historical-cultural-psychological-political-human context.