John at Drexel Dems notices that the Pennsylvania College Republicans have no plans to celebrate Labor Day or Veteran’s Day or Martin Luther King Day, but that they do have a plan to commemorate Rudy Guiliani Day 9/11. I still find it strange the way the right fetishizes 9/11. This was an attack on New York City and Washington DC. That the attack nailed two of the most liberal cities in the country was partly obscured by the fact Flight 77 struck the Pentagon across the Potomac River in Virginia and that Flight 93 never reached its intended target in the Capitol. Early on, some on the right like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, saw the attacks in liberal terms. For them, the attacks had succeeded in killing liberals because of liberals’ godless behavior. It never made good sense, since the Pentagon and Wall Street are not normally associated with liberal ideology. The 9/11 attacks could be somewhat accurately described as attacks on right-wing institutions in left-wing communities. I say ‘somewhat’ because it’s not really true that the Pentagon and Wall Street are right-wing institutions. They are both American institutions whose interests are tended to more assiduously by the right-wing than by the left.

It’s frankly insulting to analyze the 9/11 attacks in terms of whether they killed more Democrats or Republicans. But that’s the kind of analysis that is encouraged by the fetishization of the attacks by the right. It’s doubly strange to see this fetishization coming from College Republicans who were only eleven or twelve years old when the attacks occurred. A commemoration or remembrance of 9/11 coming from people who were pre-teens at the time of the attacks just seems odd to me. I guess I could see the College Democrats having a remembrance for the recount in Florida as a way of highlighting election reform, but it would still strike me as somewhat off kilter.

In any case, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and as someone that grew up in the New York media market, I was surprised and grateful for the outpouring of support and respect from Red Staters for the suffering of usually reviled New Yorkers. That gratefulness passed quickly when I realized that Red Staters were going to use our tragedy to run roughshod over the Constitution and completely ignore the opinions of Washingtonians and New Yorkers about the best way to keep those cities safe. Somehow, the liberals in New York and DC suddenly became unserious about their own safety simply by refusing to support the invasion of Iraq and the erosion of civil liberties.

I’d like to be able to commemorate the dead from the 9/11 attacks, which included brothers of co-workers, husbands of neighbors, and members of my parents’ church, without feeling like I’m taking part in a Republican rally that is being co-opted to support a foreign policy opposed by the vast majority of New Yorkers and Washingtonians, and presumably a majority of the dead.