A year ago today, the then-governor of the state of New York, Eliot Spitzer, spoke at an official September 11th commemoration in New York City. He said words including the following:

We stand on this terrible threshold remembering all that happened. We feel today as we felt then, that we belong to one another, not because we are inhabitants of the same city or same country but because we are all part of the same human story, part of one community of our fellow human beings.

I had a reaction to these words, which I put into writing the following day:

Now, I think I’m a pretty non-violent chap, as crazy right-wingers go. But if I had been present on the dais when Governor Eliot Spitzer said those words, I do believe (or at the least I firmly hope) that I would have had the presence of mind to drag him from the podium and beat the bastard to a bloody pulp.

Spitzer was riding relatively high back then. About six months later, in March of this year, he resigned his office after it emerged that he had been using the services of a prostitute. However, his dalliances with call girls remain to me as nothing when compared with the horrendous remarks above. Let me be clear: many others might speak such wishy-washy words as his and warrant no notice at all. People are entitled to their sentimentality and to their illusions. But this was the governor of the state of New York — my governor at the time — recalling an attack made on the city of New York, and deliberately and explicitly ruling out the relevance of our identity as New Yorkers. “We feel today as we felt then … part of one community with our fellow human beings.” No. We were one particular community of human beings, a community called New York City, part of a larger community called the United States, which was under attack by agents of another community (a community organized and led by Osama Bin Laden). Even if we didn’t then know the names of the hijackers, we knew we were under attack by a foreign enemy. And they did not choose New York City as their target at random, no more than they picked the United States at random. New York was attacked because it represented American vitality in practice, in its most ostentatious and almost perversely beautiful form. Buildings stretching to the sky; commerce being carried on constantly at an insane pace; men and women of every ethnicity and faith mingling, socializing and working together; more Jews in residence than any place outside of Israel; culture of every refined and vulgar sort being promulgated, and a greater number of “genders” visible on a walk down the street than many countries have tolerated religions. We in New York City made a juicy target to these Islamic terrorists for all of those reasons and more. And New Yorkers responded to the attack as New Yorkers. Members of the New York City Fire Department and the New York City Police Department, the best in the world, were on the scene instantly and with their calm, bravery and professionalism they effected perhaps the greatest rescue operation in history, at an unspeakable cost to themselves. This attack was not going to be made on any other city, and it was dealt with like no other city would have dealt with it. Others may forget that or brush it away. The governor of the state of New York cannot be excused for doing so. Eliot Spitzer’s shenanigans with hookers made headlines all over the world, and generated countless pages of newsprint and hours of worthless TV time. His words of September 11th, 2007 generated, to my knowledge, no comment whatsoever in the mainstream media. But it is hereby demonstrated again that they did not go unnoticed.

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