Bill posts one of the more powerful of the 9/11 photos, and asks — nay, demands, as does any sense of honor and integrity any of us may possess — that we not forget. The penultimate bit of this related article explains further:

Is Jonathan Briley the Falling Man? He might be. But maybe he didn’t jump from the window as a betrayal of love or because he lost hope. Maybe he jumped to fulfill the terms of a miracle. Maybe he jumped to come home to his family. Maybe he didn’t jump at all, because no one can jump into the arms of God.

Oh, no. You have to fall.

Yes, Jonathan Briley might be the Falling Man. But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 A.M., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky–falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame–the Falling Man–became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soliders everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.

That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.

I’d say we have. I’d also say we — some of us, too many of us — are guilty of flirting far too promiscuously with forgetting, or worse, of wilfully discarding, of ignoring. And I’d say we’ll all be taught, over and over again, until the lessons stick.

Freedom ain’t free; we all know that. The question is whether enough of us, cosseted as we are here in what Lincoln called “the last, best hope of earth,” still consider it worth the asking price.

Update! Lileks:

It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years – Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran. The idea that it would have stalled and ended up in diffuse oblique arguments about political timetables would have been immensely depressing. There was a model for this sort of thing, a template. Advance. But that requires cultural confidence, a loose agreement on the goals, the rationale, the nature of the enemy and the endgame. We don’t have those things. Imagine telling someone six years ago Iran would be allowed, by default, to make nuclear weapons. They would wonder what the hell we’d done with half a decade, plus change. What part of 25 years of Death to America didn’t we get, exactly?

The important part, James; the part we never did get, because it’s easier not to face. The part that MEANS EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS, and that is not susceptible to reason or logic or negotiation or diplomatic initiative.

Some of us don’t get it yet; some of us never will.

Updated update! In sum:

Evil is not like us.

I have done bad things. So have other people. So has the United States government. So has Israel. But not this Evil.

Hitler, may his name be obliterated, was Evil. The Allies fought Evil in World War II. They destroyed Evil then because they had to. They had no choice.

These Islamic death cultists who attacked the United States were Evil (and they are now dead, thank G-d).

At 11:00 AM, on September 11th, 2001, I knew that this Evil must be wiped out and I was afraid. I was afraid that our government, the government of the United States of America, would not not wage the same total war that we waged during World War Two, regardless of the consequences.

At 11:00 AM, on September 11th, I thanked G-d that George W. Bush was President of the United States. I had voted for Al Gore…

On September 11th, I knew that, whatever his other failings were, I wanted a leader in office who would not hesitate to use the full force and might of the United States to attack any place in the world that supported this kind of Evil.

I knew that my children; my wife; my closest friends; my community; and my country are direct targets for these monsters. If these Islamist scum are not stopped dead, one might as well paint a big red bullseye on my house. Because this particular Evil was out to kill me, personally…And that is a bad thing.

My fears turned out to be well founded.

These are two quotes from the Letters to the Editors page in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that appeared that week:
“The problem all along has been that evil visited upon a people has been interpreted as proof of the victim’s absolute good.”

“Rather than asking ourselves, ‘What should we do next?’ and without much consideration coming to the conclusion that we should go to War!, we should instead be asking ourselves, ‘What have we done?’ and ‘What are we?’ We need to come to understand what it is about America and our arbitrary international policies that has produced such extreme hostility towards this nation.”

The above bizarre quotes have turned into a raging disease that has infected the Democratic Party and a large portion (of) the people in the United States of America.

Pretty much says it all, I think. And this repellent slug provides a perfect example of the kind of thinking this commenter so worries about — and the kind of thinking that is so much a part of the reason this blog exists in the first place.

Updated to the updated update! Via Glenn, Major John helps explain it to the thicker-skulled among us.

Updates, forsooth! The last word on all this, really: I’m with Kim. And Ace too.