I read the Journal-World op-ed page the other day and found that Ellen Goodman had written my column. She said things much better than I can say them, but I do want to say something about 2001, even though the subject has been exhausted by now. And maybe sometime my children will find that box full of columns I've written and see what Daddy had to say about the terrible year just ended.
I'm one of a possibly small minority of Americans who are exhausted by Sept. 11 and don't want to see any more photographs of Ground Zero or the planes hitting the World Trade Center. I also feel that it's possible to feel good about your country without flying a flag or saying how great President Bush and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani are. Both behaved just the way good presidents and good mayors should behave. Time Magazine says Giuliani is the greatest mayor New York has ever had, including Fiorello La Guardia. I know a crude word to apply to that belief, and, to paraphrase Patrick Henry, "If this be unpatriotic, make the most of it."
The triple bombings of Sept. 11 were the most monstrous story of our time, and I, like you, have lived through Oklahoma City and Columbine High School.
Recently I've gone through dozens of news clips I copied off television news and looked through newspaper articles and Time. To put together a radio hour on '01 I had to throw away about half of what I had collected.
World Trade Center. All the people singing "God Bless America," and almost no one recalling that the song belonged to Kate Smith, gift of Irving Berlin.The horror of the plane crash in Pennsylvania and bombing of the Pentagon have almost been forgotten, and I was gratified to see Bill Snead's story and pictures of Washington, D.C.
The anthrax scare and many other stories. I had depended too much on Time, which in its zeal to cover Sept. 11 and aftermath simply ignored many other things in the news. Time is no longer a news magazine. It's the CNN of magazines, and I mean the CNN on Channel 21.
Other things did happen in 2001. Bush was inaugurated. We got to see a lot of Laura, who seems a nice lady. Even Margaret Carlson, that staunch Democrat, almost salivated over Laura in writing about her.
A summit in Quebec. A violent kind-of-summit in Genoa. Bush and Vladimir Putin in both Moscow and Washington. A tax cut, and in our sour economy, some people may be wondering about that cut. Going, going, gone, the surplus. Campaign reform touched us briefly, but who wanted to read about that?
Thanks to Jim Jeffords of Vermont, the Democrats are running the Senate. I think. The House is still in the paws of patriots like Armey and DeLay. Can't read about those guys when the big story is still Osama bin Laden.
Timothy McVeigh is no longer with us. And bin Laden is our new Elvis. Maybe he'll show up in the wilds of Argentina with Hitler and Rasputin, the mad monk. Every day I ask my wife whether they (not Armey and DeLay) have caught bin Laden yet.
Cincinnati exploded. India and Pakistan may explode. Argentina is in trouble. Lima, Peru, is maybe still burning. Palestinians are still blowing up Israeli real estate and Israeli people. Colin Powell is scolding Israel for not being nice to the Palestinians.
Japan had a massacre of children, just like some of our massacres. The royal family of Nepal was wiped out. Tony Blair held on to his job. Florida and much of the West were on fire in 2001. I had news clips of at least four earthquakes. Tornadoes. China held one of our planes hostage. Air crashes, one making us wonder whether terrorists had been responsible. A nut made removal of shoes at airports part of the security process.
The great violinist Isaac Stern died. My old friend Perry Como is gone, and Chet Atkins, who played guitar, and George Harrison, Anthony Quinn, Jack Lemmon, Dorothy McGuire, Ann Sothern, Imogene Coca and Carroll O'Connor. "Guys like us, we had it made; those were the days."
A big hot book about John Adams. A smash Broadway musical called "The Producers." Movies based on Harry Potter and the Hobbit stories. The tower at Pisa is no longer a danger to tourists. Russell Crowe. Tom Cruise. Jesse Jackson and a love baby. Girls' jeans lower and lower. A scooter called the Segway. And many other things we didn't get to read about or see on the tube.
Calder Pickett is a professor emeritus of journalism at Kansas University. His column appears Sundays in the Journal-World.
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