ABSTRACT
Like Saunders, the Times’ editors assume they hold the copyright on a communal suffering. This petulant assertion of privilege is couched in a narrative that sentimentalizes the period immediately following the 9/11 attacks, in which, apparently, “sorrow was merged with a sense of community and purpose.” In this story, less saccharine emotions such as fear and anger are confined to a later time, beginning (one assumes) with the invasion of Iraq and encompassing the present day. Remember the smell that hung in the Manhattan air in the weeks after the attacks? To the decision-makers at the paper of record, that was the aroma of “community and purpose.” Similarly, the Gray Lady groans at “an invasion that never would have occurred if every voter’s sons and daughters were eligible for the draft.” Uncomfortably aware of its current irrelevance, the Times casts a wistful eye at some of recent American history’s worst moments-through a rose-tinted gunsight.
