Liberal Talk Radio

The image that in part stirred Frank Rich to write about 9/11 taboos is here, on David Friend’s website for his Watching the World Change book. It’s a doozy. If you were to activate your super-sharp pre-9/11 acerbicism, you’d castigate these Williamsburg hipsters for not paying attention to what was happening literally right in front of their faces. Did they even go to work that day? Do these trust funders even have to work at all?

The photographer explains why he withheld the photo for so long, in part confirming our worst fears about the group:

“It’s a kind of troubling picture,” Hoepker says in Watching the World Change. “The sun was shining….It’s possible they lost people and cared. [But] the idyllic quality turned me off.”

Rich adds in his column:

Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. “They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon,” he told Mr. Friend. “It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.” The photographer withheld the picture from publication because “we didn’t need to see that, then.” He feared “it would stir the wrong emotions.” But “over time, with perspective,” he discovered, “it grew in importance.”

On Sept. 11, after watching hours of the same lame coverage (and hearing Sandy Berger cluck about the need to go to war against Al Qaeda just hours after the attack — obviously now we now why) a friend of mine asked if I wanted to go to a bar. “What bar?” I asked, “all of Lower Manhattan is on fire!”

I felt pretty good about my initial response to the weightiness of the events of that day — this was serious! — but what I usually neglect to mention is that my initial initial response earlier that morning was to fret that my plans later that night would be foiled. Of course that was when I still hoped that it was just an Empire State Building sort of mistake — some sort of wayward aircraft, say. Even two could do that by accident, right? I hoped against hope. It wasn’t until the plane crashed into the Pentagon that I realized that this was probably a bigger deal than previously thought. And that my plans that night definitely would be postponed.

At the same time, an older gentleman who volunteered where I worked — a WWII veteran, I think, or at least from that era! — seemed remarkably serene as we listened to the radio coverage. He kept working quietly. I wondered if he’d be going home, or what, because this was all pretty scary stuff. He shrugged. He’d go home at the end of the day.

The next week he came back and apologized. He hadn’t realized the full consequence of what happened that morning. He added that he had a feeling in him that was similar to how he felt after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And that didn’t go away until the war was over, he explained. Great, I thought. That’s kind of a long time.

My other friend apologized, as well. The next time I saw her she was wearing a flag pin on her lapel. You know, the same kind that you hear people mocking five years later.

In a way I understand the photo of the five people just hanging out in Williamsburg on Sept. 11. I’m sure they’ve thought about 9/11 at least once or twice since then. Besides, it’s not so much what you thought in the confusion of that particular day than in the days, weeks, months and years after that that matter.

Which is why, to me, the 9/11 conspiracy theorists are the ones we should really be worried about. The Williamsburg people were just dumb — we probably all were (except for Sandy Berger, that is; he knew right away that Clinton-era legal remedies were B.S.!) — but the conspiracy theorists — now those idiots are just plain stupid. And it’s much better to be dumb than stupid.