Murder and Mayhem on the Bluest of Blue-Sky Days

As you know, I write about art and the preservation of heritage, but today’s topic is the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, so I’ll venture a bit further afield. The attack 25 years ago, after all, is still a thick, gnarled, black thread running through politics as well as culture. I’ll never forget the innocents killed on the planes, the random life and death of people in the towers, the heroic firemen and cops, and the poor people jumping from windows. Horrifying then, still horrifying. September 11 is a teachable moment as well. Evil exists and so does Satan.

People from academics to cab drivers have told me we deserved it, that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and that Dick Cheney fomented it to trigger a war since he was our Dr. Strangelove, blah, blah, blah. You can’t beat dumb animals. Some ideas are so preposterous that only a tenured humanities professor — or a museum curator — will espouse them. What horrifies me today, aside from those 9/11 memories, are Harvard and Columbia students, many, many hundreds of them, embracing Hamas. Add the horror of those bourgeois people on the Upper West Side tearing down posters with photos of dead Israeli kids just days after October 7.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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As you know, I write about art and the preservation of heritage, but today’s topic is the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, so I’ll venture a bit further afield. The attack 25 years ago, after all, is still a thick, gnarled, black thread running through politics as well as culture. I’ll never forget the innocents killed on the planes, the random life and death of people in the towers, the heroic firemen and cops, and the poor people jumping from windows. Horrifying then, still horrifying. September 11 is a teachable moment as well. Evil exists and so does Satan.

People from academics to cab drivers have told me we deserved it, that there were no Jews in the Twin Towers on 9/11, and that Dick Cheney fomented it to trigger a war since he was our Dr. Strangelove, blah, blah, blah. You can’t beat dumb animals. Some ideas are so preposterous that only a tenured humanities professor — or a museum curator — will espouse them. What horrifies me today, aside from those 9/11 memories, are Harvard and Columbia students, many, many hundreds of them, embracing Hamas. Add the horror of those bourgeois people on the Upper West Side tearing down posters with photos of dead Israeli kids just days after October 7.