BREATHING THE AIR

“It probably still takes a country like America two years to recognize, fully, that we are in a war–even given the attacks on our own soil, in two of our greatest cities. If CNN’s reporters run out of ways to introduce context for the war America has undertaken, they can always air tape of the New York City memorial Mr. Isaacson spoke of.
There they would find, after the crowd had nearly all departed, the stony-eyed boy of 17 or so, still holding his father’s picture up to be seen–a sword in the air. They would find the moment recorded by one of CNN’s own reporters, who talked to one of the bereaved families wandering dazed around the ruins, and, like a lot of others here, clutching face masks they hardly bothered to wear. Why had she come here today to this difficult place, correspondent Gary Tuchman asked the woman whose husband was one of the Aon employees killed September 11.
She had to be here, came the swift, agonized answer. “I had to breathe the air–I had to fill my lungs up with him,” she told the reporter in that wasteland filled with mourners. In this place a news director could find enough context for several decades.” – Dorothy Rabinowitz’s beautiful rebuke to the David Westins and Wolf Blitzers of this world.