Have you forgotten?

[angus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6yLQRF-cEU

Hard to rhyme with bin Laden.  "Have you forgotten?" isn't bad, but what about au gratin?

Osama bin Laden
Likes potatoes au Gratin.
That means he likes France
so he has ants in his pants.

Or how about rotten?  or down-trodden?  or even John Madden (okay, you have to pronounce his name funny to make it work).  

Okay, I'll grant you that "Have you forgotten?" probably works better.

While we're on the topic of "other" September 11ths, why not remember the 401st anniversary of Henry Hudson's discovery of Manhattan island?  

Or the fact that on September 11, 1941 construction began on the Pentagon?

On September 11, 1777 the American flag was used for the first time on a battlefield.  This was the battle of Brandywine.

On September 11, 1980 President George Bush gave a memorable speech to congress outlining the US position on Kuwait and the first steps toward the First Gulf War.

According to Bishop Ussher's calculations, September 11, 1999 was the 6000th anniversary of Adam, the Hebrew take on the First Man.

According to British cuneiform scholars who have interpreted dates on tablets relevant to biblical events, Jesus of Nazareth was born on or about September 11, 3BC.

And, of course, on September 11, 1922, over Arab protests, the British mandate of Palestine was created to provide, among other things, a homeland for the Jewish people.

But, before you think me a total smart-alek, and in the spirit in which your original post was intended, I'd agree that here in the USA, the most significant event ever to happen on September 11 was the terrorists attacks of 2001.  I don't think we'll forget lost lives and wounded pride.  I don't think we'll forget who did it and I don't think we'll forget about justice.  We may not all agree on the significance or the best course of action, but we haven't forgotten.  Those who fly flags will fly them in the spirit of unity and of liberty.  Those who give speeches will speak not only of crisis, but also of recovery and of hope.  And those who pray will pray, not only for the souls of the victims, but also for the souls of the perpetrators.  And for peace.

[angus]

One interesting forgotten item.  Anybody google today?  On halloween they always spell google with goblins and witches.  On the first day of spring they spell google with flowers and plants.  Even on the birthdays of relatively obscure scientists or on the anniversary of relatively obscure events they spell google with little flags or balls or DNA molecules, as appropriate, and if you click on the Google tag it sends you to links describing the anniversary or event.  Now, don't get me wrong.  I can see them not wanting to spell google with flames atop a buning Koran.  Google probably doesn't want to go there--YouTube, for better or worse, has even decided to censor any movies of burning Korans--but you might think that Tower Number 1 makes for a nice L and the jets of approaching planes make two o letters nicely.  Not to mention the fact that the letter g looks strikingly like twisted metal.  I guess I was struck by no attempt at memorial, given all the hype on most other media outlets and Google's usual propensity for displaying anniversaries in on the header of their search engine.

[angus]

Instead, though, they went with a brazen and uncaring American flag bow thingy further down the page.  

Ah, so there it is.  Now I see it.  And I guess my secret's out.  Yes, I do control+ a few times these days.  It's embarassing.  My wife says I should see an optometrist.  Easy for her to say.  She has had to wear glasses since she was, like, three years old, and is blind as a bat without them.  I, on the other hand, am accustomed to being able to read roadsigns a mile away, and spotting snakes in the grass through my window on the seat of commercial jet airplanes.  Okay, that's an exaggeration, but I've always had perfect eyesight.  For the last couple of years I'm having to hold books about two feet away from my head to read anything, and to resize web pages to read.  I guess I should just accept my own mortality, bite the bullet, get my eyes checked, get the glasses, and just let everyone make fun of my four eyes.  Get over my vanity or risk having an accident.  That sort of thing.  Anyway, okay, I see the little ribbon now.

Edit:  Sometimes not wearing patriotism on your sleeve is best. 

agreed.  In fact, I find most of the little marginals and memorials that Google does a bit creepy.  And in fact I have emailed them in the past to say that I don't like it.  I know it's halloween and don't really need a little witch and tombstone and cowboy to remind me it's halloween.  I was just noting the absence of those creepy things on this particular day.  That is, if you're going to remind me it's Halloween, or Martin Luther King day, or the anniversary of the day that Thomas Edison discovered his first pubic hair, then why not also remind me that it's September 11.  (But as you point out, it isn't absent, just positioned so that if you have grossly enlarged the font it wouldn't show up without a downscroll.)

[angus]

That's not really something to be glad about.

No, it's not.

In a 2009 poll, five percent of British children think Adolf Hitler was Germany's national football coach, while six percent believe the Holocaust was a celebration at the end of World War II.  In the same poll, an impressive twenty percent also mixed up Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels with Anne Frank.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch...

18% of American grown-ups think Barack Obama is a Muslim, 41% think Saddam Hussein was directly involved with the September 11, 2001 attacks, and 31% of American schoolchildren think that in World War II Germany was allied with the United States against the Soviet Union.

In ten years?  Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if people talk about how Saddam bin Laden made that hurricane happen in Los Angeles and that's why we got into a war with Pakistan in the first place.

[angus]

The thing with those types of polls is that people will tend to give "joke" answers to "joke" questions, since they find them annoying.

According to The Vorlon (and other pollsters I've talked to), all people lie in all polls, and that is apparently taken into account.  Script readers are also instructed to press for an answer if it's "don't know" or "don't care," and random samples are hardly random.  I've been called by pollsters myself and ask to give simple yes or no answers to complex questions that really don't lend themselves to that sort of succinct answer, and it's a bit off-putting, which leads me to just give them whatever answer pops into my head since I"m really not paying much attention anyway.  And, yes, there are also the jokers.  Some pollsters have algorithmic ways of trying to deal with this as well.  Still, I've had enough conversations with enough grown-ups all over the world to know that ignorance is fairly common.  What's sad is that in counties that spend so much on education the levels of ignorance is so high.  But some of it, I also recognize, is willful ignorance.  I also think that some folks are going to say Obama's a Muslim just because they want to say he's a Muslim, and it has less to do with ignorance than with disapproval.  And that some just assume Saddam must have been involved with the WTC/Pentagon attacks because he's such a mean sonofabitch.

But none of that means that you ignore all polling data.  Apparently there is some confusion out there, even if we have no good way to quantify it exactly.

[angus]

eh. Something like 15% of the American public supported exterminating the Japanese race in 1941 IIRC. Numbers don't mean much.

Actually, that's an interesting point tangential to the thread.  Probably more relevant in the islamophobia thread.  But some scholars have pointed out that anti-German sentiment in 1917 and anti-Japanese sentiment in 1942 was far worse than anti-arab or ant-hamitosemitic or even anti-muslim sentiment is now.  And some numbers, not only polling data, but frequencies of vandalism or assault have been used to support this idea.  Thus, while we're experiencing some islamophobia, it doesn't rise to the former levels of Teutonophobia or Nipophobia or whatever that we have seen in past wars.  There are some problems with this analysis, I think.  For one thing, we were actually at war against Germany in 1917 and we were actually at war against Japan in 1942.  We are not, I hope, in an actual war against Islam now, so the comparison lacks perspective.