The Onion commemorates 9/11

NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole

NEW YORK—New York Governor George Pataki thanked President Bush for providing "ample, unquestioning financial support" for the $175 million pit.

The Onion has a new "Blog" feature (well, new to me, anyway) that allows you to paste headlines, blurbs, and a small picutre into your blog. The Onion's novelty has worn off somewhat for me, but sometimes they just hit the nail right on the head. I thought this 9/11 story would be a great first use. It echoes the sentiments in the Olbermann editorial I just linked to and in this Billmon post. Billmon takes the most despondent pessimism about our country and makes it fun to read:

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

Mahablog once described a different Billmon post in the following way:

This bleak but brilliant post by Billmon exemplifies why we bloggers are either the last, best hope of civilization, or the last, best chroniclers of the end of civilization.

Let's hope it's the former. (I've used this quote before, and I think it applies here, too.)