Rodent Regatta

Were Peggy Noonan’s new book to surpass the sales of Hillary Clinton’s latest attempt to rewrite reality and call it history, the world would be a better place.

It will be a challenge. Today is its first day of sales and it ranks #23 on Amazon. Clinton’s book ranks #3, but has been on sale a couple of days or so.

There is simply no comparison between these two women’s views of our nation, its people and our role in the world. While Hillary is still uncertain about how the Rose Law Firm’s billing records ”just appeared” on a table in the White House residence, Peggy Noonan gave us words like this in today’s Wall Street Journal:

New Yorkers themselves have returned to fighting with each other. There’s been plenty to fight over, from the new taxes to the mayor’s new antismoking laws, which are not so much a policy as a non sequitur—New York is in crisis, let’s ban smoking! And there is the declaration of the organizations of World Trade Center families-of-victims that there should not be a statue of the firemen at the WTC memorial site. Three hundred forty-three of them died that day, but to commemorate their sacrifice would be ”hierarchical.” They want it clear that no one was better than anyone else, that all alike were helpless, victims.

But that is not true; it is the opposite of the truth. The men and women working in the towers were there that morning, and died. The firemen and rescue workers—they weren’t there, they went there. They didn’t run from the fire, they ran into the fire. They didn’t run down the staircase, they ran up the staircase. They didn’t lose their lives, they gave them.

This is an important disagreement, because memorials teach. They teach the young what we, as a society, celebrate, hold high, honor. A statue of a man is an assertion: It asserts that his behavior is worthy of emulation. To leave a heroic statue of the firemen out of a WTC memorial would be as dishonest as it would be ungenerous, and would yield a memorial that is primarily about victimization. Which is not what that day was about, as so much subsequent history attests.

But go tell some New Yorkers. They’re all arguing. September 11 didn’t change everything.