The two 9/11's

Bouncing around the progressive blogosphere, I've found a lot of people with ambivalences similar to my own about all the 9/11 memorial activity. This one on Legal Fiction captures what for me is a very important distinction:

But then I figured it out — there are actually two 9/11s. The first one is — the day. The attacks themselves with the lost lives and the tragic heroism and everything else we remember all too well. But that 9/11 no longer exists. Or more precisely, it’s been pushed aside by the second 9/11. And the second 9/11 is the political prop — a mangled, grotesque doppelganger of the first one that has been whored out on the political street for over four years now. The second 9/11 is the source of policies that have made the world far worse, and have killed many times the number of people who died in the Towers. And so, what’s truly tragic about the second 9/11 is that it threatens to forever stain the legacy of the first 9/11. Specifically, given the policies that have been (or will be) taken in its name, I fear that history may not care about what happened to us on the first 9/11, but will instead care only about what we did in response to the second one.