A few things, quickly, because we’re out of wine at Casa Athenae and I don’t want to get too into all this until I’ve fortified myself further, but GOOD FUCKING GOD ALREADY.
1. No one cares about your relationship with God. Or your family. Or anything else, really, about you. You’re a journalist. You’re not the story. Fucking go back to school.
2. Horrible things that have happened are never learning experiences until much later, so quit telling everybody how there was a silver lining to 9/11. It’s too soon. When we’re all 95, then we can talk. Right now it’s just gross.
3. In that vein, tragedies of other people are not learning experiences for you, and to say so publicly is just so fundamentally human-tone-deaf boneheaded that I almost don’t know what to say in response. I’m sorry, if 9/11 made you a better person then you needed to rethink your life long before 2001, and it’s not the responsibility of 3,000 dead people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania to be your therapists from beyond the grave.
4. Do these people even listen to themselves? 9/11 made him respect his father? Again, what on earth was so fucked-up about Russert’s life that he didn’t respect his father’s service before that? And why on EARTH, if he was so fucking ignorant, would he proclaim his former ignorance to the skies? Why would you point out about yourself that you were a punk-ass idiot? WHY?
5. Let us kill with fire and bury the ashes of this notion that we all deserve some kind of cookie for showing up at the human party at this point. “I used to take my family for granted but now I don’t!!!” Which entitles you to exactly what kind of parade float, is what I want to know? It’s not that you can’t tell me a heartwarming story about something that brought you all closer, I love that shit, but for the past six years almost now we’ve been treated to this kind of recitation of stories about people living apparently grey colorless lives in which they were numb to everything before planes slammed into buildings and woke them up. And implied in them is the notion that if you didn’t have a similar awakening, well, you must be made of stone or kidding yourself, which just passes right over the square for WIN and goes directly into FAIL.
6. And no, okay? Just … no. “How does my faith influence my judgment as a reporter?” Well, for starters, there’s a whole COMMANDMENT about bearing false witness, and I seem to remember some stuff in my Bible about the great and the powerless, the meek and the mighty, but I think we’ve conclusively established that me and mine read some kind of hippie Bible that doesn’t exist anymore, so maybe this question of Timmeh’s really is legit. Or he’s admitting to illiteracy, the overcoming of which would be a much more heartwarming story than any “9/11 brought me closer to my non-horn-honking kids” or whatever he’s really on about in there.
7. Schmuck.
A.