Mementos Mori

For many years I avoided posting about 9/11, and posting on the 11th of September altogether, having said all I wanted to about the attacks in the years immediately afterwards. I almost reneged on the twentieth anniversary, posting about it a week later. Maybe it’s time to renege properly on the twenty-fifth. This anniversary lands differently than 2021’s, thanks to the even darker cloud hanging over America and the world in 2026. Just as he’s been the worst possible figurehead for the country on its 250th anniversary, which has been such a damp squib compared with the celebrations of 1976 (which even I dimly remember from my vantage point half a world away as a kid), the ridiculous and repellent 47th President of the USA—whose name I’m sick of hearing and I’ll spare you from reading yet again—is the worst possible representative of America on an anniversary like this. On 9/11 itself he was publicly observing that one of his buildings was now the tallest left in the city, inserting…