Put your game face back on
A couple things stuck in my mind about the Al Qaeda attacks on 9.11.01 and recently in Madrid. Both involve the horror of eye-witness accounts. The New York Times Magazine published one by a Spaniard who witnessed the Madrid bombing. It reminded me of something I heard about the rescue workers at the Madrid scene. What really got to them was the sounds of cell phones ringing amidst the carnage.

Perhaps it's all a little morbid, but I imagine the look on the rescue workers' faces was similar to the facial expressions of the firefighters in the French documentary 9/11 (narrated by Robert De Niro and Steve Buscemi). On that day, two French brothers happened to be making a documentary about the NYFD - tough, tough boys, the firefighters. After the World Trade Center had been hit and the firemen received the call, they allowed the filmmakers to tag along. At one point, the firemen are inside the first floor of one of the towers and they're standing around waiting for a strategy to be hashed out. You can hear bodies periodically hitting the ground outside the blown-out windows nearby - people jumping to escape being burnt alive - and you can see it's really messing with the firefighters who are trying to keep their composure.

In a recently published book about the Bush dynasty by a married conservative couple, there's a quote from an unnamed source: "[President Bush] doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this war is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know." If Kerry's elected, I hope he agrees with this except for the religious stuff. Dean certainly didn't.