I know I'm late with this, but I just didn't know what to say about the anniversary of 9/11, or whether I wanted to say anything at all. It's not as if there weren't plenty of voices filling that particular space, and if I didn't have anything that seemed original or worthwhile to add, better to keep quiet. No one has to have an opinion on everything, not even bloggers.
But this morning I happened to come across this old clip of Jon Stewart's post 9/11 speech, and it struck me that this was exactly the kind of thing that I wanted to remember about 9/11—how for a while it brought out the honesty and the emotion, the sorrow and the hope and the love, that survive beneath our culture's slick and cynical surface. In trying to remind people of what satirists do,the freedom that satirists enjoy in this country, Stewart reminded us that we can use the vehicles of our culture to express not just irony, but passion. And eloquence: At the end of his monologue, Stewart explains that the view from his apartment had been the World Trade Center, "and it's gone." But what view had taken its place? The Statue of Liberty. Just saying those words makes Stewart choke up. "The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty," Stewart says, "and you can't beat that."
