If you listen to B96 here in Chicago, you've probably heard the new Bruno Mars song in remembrance of the September 11 attacks. Producers took the chorus from "Lighters" and filled the verses with audio clips from speeches by Michael Bloomberg and George W. Bush from the weeks and months after 9/11.
This thing is shockingly painful to hear. A more successful project would have simply used audio honoring the heroism of those who lost their lives that day. And I think that's what the original intention probably was. But by the middle of the song, we've swerved directly into Bush II's original spin: by coming together and fighting for freedom, the American people have regained their dominance as world superpower.
The very last thing I want to commemorate today is the fact that 9/11 put us on a path to international war and domestic division. But by rehashing the shallow argument that the people of this country have somehow been brought together in the decade since 9/11, all I can think of is how that assertion is just one big shortsighted lie. Don't most agree at this point that we had a moment of unity in the immediate aftermath, and then we blew it? The most false thing you could do to remember 9/11 a decade later is pretend the last decade never happened.
Like I said, they could have just made a song in tribute to our fallen civilians and emergency workers who lost their lives before all this turned to shit. Wait, someone already made that song. In 2002.
No comments:
Post a Comment