I've probably told this story before, but when I saw the second plane hit (I was playing hooky from work), I called my father, who immediately said it was Bin Laden. my own guess had been that it was obviously the '93 bombers who'd promised to 'finish the job." so the idea that we were "manufacturing enemies" because it was "an inside jo…
I've probably told this story before, but when I saw the second plane hit (I was playing hooky from work), I called my father, who immediately said it was Bin Laden. my own guess had been that it was obviously the '93 bombers who'd promised to 'finish the job." so the idea that we were "manufacturing enemies" because it was "an inside job" (which I recall didn't take that long to develop "legs") struck me as foolishness (even if "follow the money" at times in the following years was capable of arousing a second or two of suspicion)...suddenly every schmuck and his brother was an expert on explosives, stress analysis, metallurgy, whatever.
a few years later, I was walking in my school's hallway with very little to do because we were in the middle of one of those high-security lockdown "objective tests" when I saw one of our beautiful special ed. teachers on the phone shouting "NOOOOO" in a way that let me know she wasn't howling about missing dinner. actually, it felt like my blood froze when I heard it, so I ran into the classroom of one of her close friends, who said that her new husband-to-be was in Iraq (he'd thrown her a big lunchtime engagement party a month or so before. the story was that he'd broken up with his longtime girlfriend, enlisted in a state of despair, then met Olga (the teacher in question), fell in love, got engaged, then was deployed. it was one of those typical Iraqi deals...Humvee hit an IED and everybody was blown to pieces. when this was confirmed an hour or so later, my first reaction was "those motherfuckers," which was followed by someone else saying something like "yeah those fucking Arabs," at which point I wheeled on him and said that the motherfuckers I was talking about were "Bush, Cheney and the whole motherfucking bunch."
after that, a few teachers didn't want to talk to me for a while (one or two forever), and my attitude was, basically, "fuck them." I like to keep my work colleagues friends, but in that case, I couldn't have cared less.
I've probably told this story before, but when I saw the second plane hit (I was playing hooky from work), I called my father, who immediately said it was Bin Laden. my own guess had been that it was obviously the '93 bombers who'd promised to 'finish the job." so the idea that we were "manufacturing enemies" because it was "an inside job" (which I recall didn't take that long to develop "legs") struck me as foolishness (even if "follow the money" at times in the following years was capable of arousing a second or two of suspicion)...suddenly every schmuck and his brother was an expert on explosives, stress analysis, metallurgy, whatever.
a few years later, I was walking in my school's hallway with very little to do because we were in the middle of one of those high-security lockdown "objective tests" when I saw one of our beautiful special ed. teachers on the phone shouting "NOOOOO" in a way that let me know she wasn't howling about missing dinner. actually, it felt like my blood froze when I heard it, so I ran into the classroom of one of her close friends, who said that her new husband-to-be was in Iraq (he'd thrown her a big lunchtime engagement party a month or so before. the story was that he'd broken up with his longtime girlfriend, enlisted in a state of despair, then met Olga (the teacher in question), fell in love, got engaged, then was deployed. it was one of those typical Iraqi deals...Humvee hit an IED and everybody was blown to pieces. when this was confirmed an hour or so later, my first reaction was "those motherfuckers," which was followed by someone else saying something like "yeah those fucking Arabs," at which point I wheeled on him and said that the motherfuckers I was talking about were "Bush, Cheney and the whole motherfucking bunch."
after that, a few teachers didn't want to talk to me for a while (one or two forever), and my attitude was, basically, "fuck them." I like to keep my work colleagues friends, but in that case, I couldn't have cared less.