Ten years later, and 89 years, 4 months, & 26 days before that

On this tenth anniversary of 9/11, I share a striking comparison from Christopher Hitchens's 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, between a horror of that occasion and one of a much earlier incident [April 15, 1912]:

There was something else from the "Devil's Decade" of the 1930s that I was struggling to remember and soon enough it came to me. Remembering the last moments of the Titanic, George Orwell had written that:

In all the long list of horrors the one that most impressed me was that at the last the Titanic suddenly up-ended and sank bow foremost, so that the people clinging to the stern were lifted no less than three hundred feet into the air before they plunged into the abyss. It gave me a sinking sensation in the belly which I can still all but feel. Nothing in the [First World] War ever quite gave me that sensation.

"Look, teacher," the New York Times reported a child shrilling as the Twin Towers were becoming pyres: "the birds are on fire." Here was a sweet, infantile rationalization of an uncommon sight: human beings who had hesitated too long between the alternatives of jumping to their deaths or being burned alive, and who were thus jumping and burning, and from much more than three hundred feet. Nothing that I have witnessed since, including Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and various scenes in Afghanistan and Iraq, has erased those initial images of the deep and sick relationship between murder and suicide, or of the wolfish faces of those who gloated over the horror....[pp. 246-247]