…And Heaven Wept
Karen Hathaway
Pittman
familysecuritymatters.org
Down it
pounded – a nerve-scalping war dance of rain, pummeling its drums and
refusing to let up. Like a tribe of ghouls, the uninvited gusts howled
around the pit. If, as the Native Americans believed, the wind really is an
instrument through which the souls of the dead commune with the living,
what, then, on this day of all days, was it trying so hard to say?
Friday
marked the passing of the first anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks
without George Bush. The man who for seven years stood strong as our graying
father figure and Condoler-in-Chief was nowhere to be seen, though he was
with us in
spirit,
to be sure.
And I
don’t think it was just me. Surely it was obvious to anyone who was paying
attention: something crucial to the ritual was missing. There was a palpable
absence, a great gaping hole in the day, reminiscent of the holes left in
the ground in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. Throughout, the
ghost
of George Walker Bush hung like a pall over Barack Hussein Obama’s bony
shoulders. It stalked him as he strode with chin held high onto the White
House lawn, bowing his glistening head a hair too late; and it towered over
him as he stepped up to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver his strangely
tearless yet dripping eulogy. Afterwards it over-shadowed him as he shook
survivors’ hands – smiling a mite too broadly for my taste.
Truth be
told, we weren’t just missing the man: we were missing the feeling he
brought with him. Tellingly, there was far more raw emotion and brio in
Obama’s overwrought remembrance of the Lion of the Senate than in all his
remarks about the more than 3,000 American lives wasted that day by Osama’s
crazed cult of Islamic lunatics. Gone was the shower of empathy, evaporated
were the choked-back tears. As with the man, the rain was a poor stand-in.
In his
elegiac
article, “Flight 93, the Crater
and the Open Book,” Jerry Bowyer relays a little-told tale of a miraculous
relic retrieved from the wreckage rammed deep into the Shanksville dirt.
Remarkably, not everything disintegrated: there was an open
Bible
in the middle of the field. Where steel had been shattered, a book remained
intact. The first responders were not able to find any piece of metal larger
than a pie plate, and yet they found a Bible. Where human flesh had been
instantly cremated, paper was only slightly singed.
Bowyer’s
account comes as eerily close to prophesy as you can get in this world. He
goes on to note that the Bible recovered from that smoldering Somerset
County field was found by the local Fire Chief lying opened to I Kings
12-16, a passage describing how Israel descends, after “a golden age,” into
"a long period of oscillation between good and bad kings."
Sound
familiar?
The story
strikes this reader as salient less for of its macabre overtones, however,
than for the timing of its release, aimed by Bowyer to coincide with
Friday’s proceedings – ceremonies jarringly different, both in tone and
temperament, from those held in years past.
Consider:
Friday marked the first year since 2001 that it actually rained on the day
of 9/11, the sun being as elusive as George Bush’s tanned face. To add
insult to injury, for the first time ever, the observances at Ground Zero
were forced to carry on gamely with nary an appearance by the American
President. Instead, the otherwise-omnipresent Obama chose to keep himself
scarce, for once, deigning to touch down only momentarily at the Pentagon
Memorial, where his soulless speech offered slim comfort to the grief-soaked
crowd. Given his outsized reputation as a stentorian orator, Cicero’s words
were pat and patently unconvincing, grudgingly given, wet and yet dry,
pinprickingly personal and yet soaringly aloof. (Rather like the man
himself.)
But
perhaps the single most jolting and uncanny thing about the entire day was
not so much a difference as a foreboding likeness: on September 11, 2009,
the DOW Jones Industrial Average closed at 9605 – exactly where it had
closed eight years and one day earlier, on September 10, 2001.
I don’t
know which is more chilling – that DOW number or that Bible flapping open in
that smoking field.
What, if
anything, I can’t help but wonder, do these bizarre
planetary
alignments
mean? Could Heaven possibly have been crying with us, and was the DOW (of
all things) speaking to us in tongues still more mysterious than the wind’s?
How in
the world, would somebody please tell me, did that Bible eject itself from
all that rubble in one piece? And why do we keep looking to conjure up some
hidden import in all these vaguely portentous atmospherics, anyway? Are we
still so vestigially superstitious that we really believe nature joins us in
our bereavement? Can it actually reach out to us and warn us?
Or is the
truth simply that some events in the history of a society are so utterly
devastating that they forever sear themselves into the very air that the
culture
breathes?
So what
are we to do – just shrug off these oddities as coincidence? Are all these
niggling little occurrences that appear to point to some grand, cosmic
significance (beyond the superficial fact that they took place) really
merely the fluff of fluke and chance, the fevered fantasies of fate-minded
flakes over-inclined to read patterns in the tea leaves? Or do we earnestly
try and make sense of them – before it’s too late?
All
right, I’ll ask: are we not now, just like the DOW Jones Industrial Average,
right back where we left off on the afternoon of September 10, 2001? Have we
not forgotten our watch and fallen asleep at the wheel, slumping back into
that twilight slumber? Are we not once again stuck in the mud of the
pre-9/11 mindset?
And most
ominous of all, are we not propping ourselves up, tower-like, for the next
big fall?
Read the
handwriting on the wall, America, and weep. Heaven did, if her Chosen One
did not.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Karen Hathaway Pittman is a freelance writer and poet whose political commentary is widely published on the web. She lives in London, England with her husband and cat. Her work is archived online at http://karenhpittman.blogspot.com. She receives email at karen.pittman@sky.com.