My ex, with whom I'm still very close, lost her brother in the WTC on 9/11. Here's what I wrote to her last night:

"I'm sorry. I hope you'll be okay.

The whole anniversary has been making me very angry. Not at the hijackers or Al Qaeda – I'm perpetually angry with them.

No, it's made me furious with the American people. It's not just that I think the obsession with 9/11 is morally out of proportion, which I think it is. No, I could accept that if I believed that this obsession was a sincere horror and sadness expressed over the 3,000 lives that were lost the suffering of their families. Disproportionate, I could still live with it.

But what makes me furious without end is that I *don't* think it's legitimate and I feel that these 250 million people are appropriating and fetishizing in their incessant narcissism a grief that rightfully belongs to you and people like you; and in so doing they are disrespecting you and the victims and sullying everyone with this obscene American self-regard. The combination makes me sick to my stomach.

The overwhelming majority of Americans believe that a profoundly appropriate response to the attack and its anniversary is to break into a spirited rendition of "God Bless America", even though, for example, at least 10% of the victims of 9/11 were not even American.

If you don't feel this way at all, then I suppose I'm doing a disservice to you by telling you this. If you do, though, perhaps you needed to hear someone tell you they understand why you might be feeling infuriated lately.

I don't know what it's like to lose a beloved brother, as you did, and I can't ever know until something like that happens to me. It's your grief, and it's your private grief, and the best I can do is to tell you that I try to understand as best I can and that I love you, and that it's not right or fair, and the injustice and tragedy of it cannot ever be understood, and there are no platitudes that can make it better. And, again, that I and many other people love you."

This is personal, but I post it here to provide a bit of *fucking perspective* on this. By fetishizing 9/11 and turning it into an orgy of American narcissism, almost all of you, who have no connection with any of these people, are dehumanizing them by turning them into mere (and, I might add, false) symbols.