Everything Has Changed

The psychic toll of the Sept 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the recent plane crash of an American Airlines jet in Queens New York may well be incalculable.

Still there are signs everywhere that mental illness and morbidity are the toll so far.

In a recent column I read somewhere on the internet, Christopher (“How I learned to stop worrying and love bombing”) Hitchens flippantly berates the left for its squeamishness about indiscriminate bombing in Afghanistan or against any enemies of western civilization.

If you didn’t see the by-line you would have thought you were reading another racist PJ O’Rourke outburst. But it could be that since Hitchens has been bedding down at the American Spectator there’s been some kind of mind-meld occurrence.

This is the same Hitchens who once wanted a war crimes trial for Bill Clinton for bombing Afghanistan and Sudan–or is it? I demand a DNA test!

Then there’s the New York Times whose new motto might well be “All the Morbid News Fit to Print.”

EXTRA! EXTRA! HOT BODIES ON THE BEACH

In a story on the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Queens New York, written by N.R. Kleinfield(11/13) we are provided in morbid details that Hannibal Lecter could well appreciate that,

“Rescue workers pulled bodies, and body parts out of piles…”

“..transported them up to Beach 130th st in orange bins wrapped in black body bags.”

And were those bodies hot!

“Dozens of bodies were too hot to wrap..”

As Ed McMahon might have asked the Lecter Times:

“How Hot Were They?”

Answer:

“..They melted the body bags.”

So you are asking, what did they do with the bodies so hot they melted body bags?

“..They were left on stretchers in the street to cool.”

One wonders what was edited out of this story.

“One man was so charred you’d of thought he was a human burnt cork!”

“One woman’s forehead was so hot you could have thrown slabs of bacon and eggs and eat breakfast right at the scene.”

“Unlike the evaporated bodies of those who died at the world trade center and pentagon, these were hot charred corpses, resembling nothing so much as an over-microwaved piece of chicken.”

All has indeed changed since 9/11. CP

 

Jack McCarthy is a writer in Tallahassee, Florida. He can be reached at jackm32301@yahoo.com