You love life and we love death.

--Al-Qaeda videotape, March 2004

I'd say this isn't quite accurate. Some in the West -- in America, specifically -- absolutely love death. At least they love the deaths that happened on 9/11. For them, 9/11 is porn -- righteous-indignation porn, sentiment porn.

Most of these people, tellingly, don't live anywhere near Ground Zero or the other death sites. Like, for instance, the nimrod who was responsible for this:

Fla. Town Apologizes for Using 9/11 Calls

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. - City officials apologized for playing a song during Fourth of July celebrations that was mixed with voiceovers of 911 calls from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

About 70,000 people had gathered to celebrate the Fourth of July when the song "God Bless the U.S.A." was played. The version had voices of people recorded during the terror attacks.

One voice on the mix said, "Oh my God, another plane has just hit." Another said, "Some of the casualties are in the collapsed building."

People at the celebrations said the mood of the night changed when the song was played.

"Everybody was in a really good mood, and all of a sudden this cloud of doom," said Siobhan Mangan. "It just seemed terribly inappropriate."...

Actually, more than one person was responsible for this. One guilty party, obviously, was the (unnamed) employee who put this recording on the soundtrack for the event. But beyond that, there's the person or people who thought it was a good idea to graft those cries of horror onto that song in the first place, who thought it was good to use human suffering to try to make the new unofficial national anthem a little bit more stirring.

I suppose I'd know who actually did the remix if I lived in a red state, rather than the state where most of the 9/11 dead actually died. (We don't get much country music up here.) While trying to figure that out, I came across this 9/11 tribute with "God Bless the USA" as the audio track (no 911 calls, though it does have Bush saying "I can hear you") and, for the visuals, a sequence of photos of the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

I find it really hard to watch. I was well north of the towers, I didn't know anyone who was in them, and yet the memory of what happened afterward, the chaos and the rubble and the volunteers and the missing posters, is still raw. It makes me angry to think that anyone would choose to watch this and think, "What a patriotic American am I." For me it's like watching a relative get shot.

A lot of idiots on the right believe that anyone who doesn't support every jot and tittle of Bush foreign policy must have "forgotten" 9/11. But some of us aren't ready to remember 9/11 as a simple patriotic pageant, something we'll reenact eventually, in period costumes. Moreover, we know it's affected virtually every D.C. decision that's come in its wake -- and the decisions that should reduce the likehood of another 9/11 but don't, or actually increase the likelihood, make us mad as hell.