What did you do last Sunday?
Since it is at best a couple of days ago, you will not have any problem remembering.
But what about this question by way of a follow-up: What did you do on the same day fifteen years ago? Under normal circumstances, most of us would, quite literally, draw blank.
My late mother, a very intelligent but also at times somewhat over-cautious woman, occasionally painted the frightening scenario of the police knocking at your door to ask about your whereabouts at a certain time on a certain day in the more or less distant past. To be able to answer this, my mother would tell me, make sure to keep a diary and to hold onto it for years. You never know when you might need it...
So, without consulting my good old Filofax calendar - yes, this timeless monument to the art of "organising" still exists; and yes, I still use it for personal entries, much to the amusement of my kids of course, OCD and all that - of 2001 (and I just hope it has survived our latest house move and the drastic down-sizing, disposing, and de-cluttering that went with it) I would normally be in trouble.
Except in this case of course I wouldn't. I don't need any props, records, or reminders; nor would my mother have needed them; nor will you. Because, you have long guessed it, last Sunday was 11 September. In short, normally written 11/09 by most of us, and 9/11 by the Americans. But this particular eleventh day of the ninth month in the Gregorian calendar is universally referred to as 9/11 and has been since those fateful events back in 2001. And, just to save you from looking it up, it was a Tuesday.
Gregorian? Yes, that's what it is. It was introduced in 1582 as a refinement to the Julian calendar put in place by none less than Julius Caesar, amounting to a 0.002% correction in the length of the year. By the 19th century it had become widely adopted, first and foremost in the interest of convenience in international trade.
Trivia alert:
The last country to introduce the Gregorian calendar was Greece in 1923. Those modern Greeks were probably still smarting from the painful embarrassment of their ancient ancestors having missed in their Classic heyday the unique opportunity to implement once and for all a universally accepted way of organising the solar year while far too busy with giving the world Democracy and the Olympic Games and Philosophy and Drama and all that good stuff. Go figure.
So - we all remember 9/11 and what we were up to when those planes flew into the World Trade Center at the southern tip of Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth one, on its way to the Capitol, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania because its passengers bravely tried to overcome the hijackers.
Maybe you saw the film, United 93 released in 2006. It was nominated for two Oscars and won two BAFTA Awards, for Editing and for Directing (Paul Greengrass).
Famous last words of the character Todd Beamer as he hurls himself at the terrorists: "Come on, guys, what are we waiting for? Let's roll!" 44 passengers and crew died, including the four terrorists. No-one survived.
One of the most prized possessions of the Gietz family is a photo, now framed and prominently displayed, alongside others, in our living room, taken of the five of us on a visit to the Observation Deck of one of the Twin Towers on 08/25/99, together with an entrance ticket stamped 12:38 pm. Of course I mostly recall suffering from my customary bout of vertigo as we stepped outside, but it's a good thing we kept them, right? Priceless.
Memorabilia - things that are worth remembering. Souvenirs, mementos, keepsakes.
Two years later, we had just moved to Belgium, and the children were still in the process of settling in at their new International School when the attacks happened. You can imagine the extreme security measures taken immediately by the Belgian authorities to cordon off the school perimeter with armoured vehicles and evacuate the 1,000-odd students hailing from over 60 different countries, many of them of course Americans, and including a genuine Belgian Princess, niece to the King and Queen and classmate of my son's.
And no, they never got close, he was never invited to the Palace, much to the disappointment of my mother-in-law. But for their High School Graduation dinner, we happened to sit at the next-door table from the Royals, and she had the most wonderful time observing them all night.
For all of those kids, it was of course quite a traumatic experience, and after reopening a few days later, the previously carefree atmosphere on campus and around the school was never really the same again, and understandably so. Fifteen years on, cowardly, inhumane violent terror has reached Belgium too, and the international schools especially have mutated into high-security compounds.
"Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
The end of the Innocence".
Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence" (1989)
On 9/11, I was at the office and alerted to what was happening by one of my team who had received a phone call. No social media back then, and the only TV set around which we then all congregated to watch CNN was in the Board Room. Ever since, I've made a point of having one installed in my office. Fortunately, momentous disasters of this scope don't happen every day, but since then have done so far too often anyway to justify this modest extravagance.
And I'm the first to admit the TV comes in handy every two years for the European Championships and the World Cup...
Of course I had no idea at the time that less than a year later, in the night of Monday 1 July 2002 and over the rest of that week, I would personally be handling another fatal airplane crash myself, this one with 71 dead. DHL Flight 611. But that's another story.
However, for me and everyone else involved at the time, it will always be 7/1. And I swear the identical figures for the date of the accident and the number of victims (our two pilots, Captain Paul Phillips, who left behind a wife and four children, and First Officer Brant Campioni; and 69 crew and passengers, mostly kids, on the other plane) has only just now revealed itself to me.
And yes, there have been a number of film dramatisations produced about this mid-air collision as well. If so inclined, among others check out the episode "Deadly Crossroads" (2004) in the Discovery Channel Canada series Mayday. Air Disasters. And the German-Swiss motion picture, Flug in die Nacht. Das Unglueck von Ueberlingen (2009).
No spoilers, but the tragic story doesn't end with the crash. Still this year, a Hollywood production starring none less than Arnold Schwarzenegger is to be released - entitled 478 and "based on the airline accident that occurred in July 2002 and on the events that took place 478 days later" (IMDb).
In retrospect, under "Crisis Management" it all looks great on my CV, but it's an experience I could well have done without.
So this year, for its sad 15th anniversary, 9/11 fell on a Sunday - not just any given Sunday (hold the term), but the Opening Day of the new NFL, professional American Football season. Well, to be precise, the opening game itself was already on Thursday 8 September when defending champions Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers 21-20.
But the first Game Day proper took place on the Sunday. And unsurprisingly, in a nation where every sports event - and I mean, every sports event - is preceded by a rendering of the national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner", the celebrations in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" were of course up to the special occasion. And who can blame them?
To me, Football is the American sport, no matter what proponents of Baseball will tell you about the proverbial Boys of Summer:
"I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone."
Don Henley, "Boys of Summer" (1984)
Football reflects the way the American continent was conquered - the game is all about gaining territory, yard by yard, and "inch by inch". So having retained "Any Given Sunday", here's the context. In the eponymous movie about an ageing professional football coach and his struggling team, actor Al Pacino as Tony d'Amato gives what is often regarded as one of the greatest locker room pep talks at least in film history. Check it out, best by watching the whole picture, released in 1999, directed by Oliver Stone and co-starring Dennis Quaid and Cameron Diaz. Here's the gist of what Coach d'Amato tells his players before the all-deciding play-off clash:
"In either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. The inches we need are everywhere around us. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the fucking difference between winning and losing, between living and dying." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myyWXKeBsNk
Over 3,000 innocent people were killed in the attacks on 9/11, another 6,000 or more were injured, like all victims of random terrorist acts simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as they went about their daily lives.
Its impact on all of us cannot be exaggerated. If you are looking for a Turning Point in History after which things were never the same again, look no further.
Fortress America penetrated. Only one other day compares in terms of national trauma - the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 12/7/41. To quote the memorable words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his address to a joint session of Congress the next day, "a date that will live in infamy". The lawmakers passed a formal declaration of war against Japan, and the United States finally entered into World War II.
Turning Point.
This is of course one of the most famous speeches in American history. Well, at least until Coach d'Amato came along...
To round off the Top Three of Turning Points, yet again, 11/22/63 is right up there, maybe less in terms of its immediate consequences than in its impact on the collective American psyche.
I've just finished reading an intriguing book, given to me by my children, so for a welcome change not on my Kindle: Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents. An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders (2016). The most interesting chapter I found was "Eternal Flame. On John F. Kennedy, the City of Dallas, and What Ties Them Together Every November 22". That assassination still today proves to be very bad PR for Dallas.
And then the Cowboys just lost their opening game on 9/11 at home 19-20 to the New York Giants. I mean, how bad can it get?
Declaration of interest: I think they do still have world-beating Cheerleaders and are as proud of them as they are of their exploits on the playing field, and rightly so. If you want to know more, and for a number of other good reasons, read Ben Fountain's novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, published in 2012. What's it all got to do with 9/11, you may now ask. Well, it poignantly explores the trauma inflicted on young American soldiers sent to fight in Iraq. There is now a film adaptation in the making, to be released still this year and directed by two-time Oscar winner Ang Lee.
Coming back to the theme of assassinations (and calendars) - remember Julius Caesar? For the ancient Roman world, and that meant more or less for everybody at the time (except for the Native American nations who were still one-and-a-half millennia away from being discovered and subsequently invaded and all but annihilated - I hope they enjoyed their Splendid Isolation while it lasted, then finding themselves at the receiving end of that "inch-by-inch" mentality) 3/15/44 (BC) wasn't exactly such a great day either.
Another Turning Point in History that plunged the world into decades of strife and upheaval.
Q: "But is there a plan, Cassius?' A: "Of course there's no plan."
The Ides of March, anyone?
For an interesting take on developments leading up to the political murder in the Senate of Rome, read the eponymous novel by Thornton Wilder, published in 1948. The author himself called it "a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman Republic", adding that "historical reconstruction is not among the primary aims of this work". Love it.
And then, there's a very watchable film of the same title, directed by George Clooney and released only in 2011, a modern-day political drama in which "an idealistic staffer for a new presidential candidate gets a crash course on dirty politics during his stint on the campaign trail" (IMDb). It stars Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti.
All very topical wouldn't you say.
And while we are on the theme of plans, or lack thereof, here's another "date that will [quite possibly] live in infamy": 6/23/16. But, boy, did they have fun - and still are. In the words of Philip Stevens who wrote a very insightful piece in the Financial Times: "Hubristic denial about Brexit is the order of the day... This is not a process promising anything resembling a happy ending."
In case you missed it: David Cameron, who is ultimately responsible for the whole mess, has just announced his retirement from politics. Turning only 50 on 9 October, he is now riding into a very enjoyable long sunset. There's money to be made and money to be spent. And no more need to enact a modest, middle-class lifestyle in order to appeal to the electorate. Enjoy, Dave!
No doubt he and Mrs Cameron, aka Sam Cam, will have the need for state-of-the-art tools to organise themselves and their very busy lives, social and otherwise. I still recommend Filofax.
There's just one caveat for a retired politician:
The brand, first launched in the UK in 1921(!) owes its name to an abbreviation of the term "File of Facts".
But what about this question by way of a follow-up: What did you do on the same day fifteen years ago? Under normal circumstances, most of us would, quite literally, draw blank.
My late mother, a very intelligent but also at times somewhat over-cautious woman, occasionally painted the frightening scenario of the police knocking at your door to ask about your whereabouts at a certain time on a certain day in the more or less distant past. To be able to answer this, my mother would tell me, make sure to keep a diary and to hold onto it for years. You never know when you might need it...
So, without consulting my good old Filofax calendar - yes, this timeless monument to the art of "organising" still exists; and yes, I still use it for personal entries, much to the amusement of my kids of course, OCD and all that - of 2001 (and I just hope it has survived our latest house move and the drastic down-sizing, disposing, and de-cluttering that went with it) I would normally be in trouble.
Except in this case of course I wouldn't. I don't need any props, records, or reminders; nor would my mother have needed them; nor will you. Because, you have long guessed it, last Sunday was 11 September. In short, normally written 11/09 by most of us, and 9/11 by the Americans. But this particular eleventh day of the ninth month in the Gregorian calendar is universally referred to as 9/11 and has been since those fateful events back in 2001. And, just to save you from looking it up, it was a Tuesday.
Gregorian? Yes, that's what it is. It was introduced in 1582 as a refinement to the Julian calendar put in place by none less than Julius Caesar, amounting to a 0.002% correction in the length of the year. By the 19th century it had become widely adopted, first and foremost in the interest of convenience in international trade.
The last country to introduce the Gregorian calendar was Greece in 1923. Those modern Greeks were probably still smarting from the painful embarrassment of their ancient ancestors having missed in their Classic heyday the unique opportunity to implement once and for all a universally accepted way of organising the solar year while far too busy with giving the world Democracy and the Olympic Games and Philosophy and Drama and all that good stuff. Go figure.
So - we all remember 9/11 and what we were up to when those planes flew into the World Trade Center at the southern tip of Manhattan and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and a fourth one, on its way to the Capitol, crashed in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania because its passengers bravely tried to overcome the hijackers.
Maybe you saw the film, United 93 released in 2006. It was nominated for two Oscars and won two BAFTA Awards, for Editing and for Directing (Paul Greengrass).
One of the most prized possessions of the Gietz family is a photo, now framed and prominently displayed, alongside others, in our living room, taken of the five of us on a visit to the Observation Deck of one of the Twin Towers on 08/25/99, together with an entrance ticket stamped 12:38 pm. Of course I mostly recall suffering from my customary bout of vertigo as we stepped outside, but it's a good thing we kept them, right? Priceless.
Memorabilia - things that are worth remembering. Souvenirs, mementos, keepsakes.
Two years later, we had just moved to Belgium, and the children were still in the process of settling in at their new International School when the attacks happened. You can imagine the extreme security measures taken immediately by the Belgian authorities to cordon off the school perimeter with armoured vehicles and evacuate the 1,000-odd students hailing from over 60 different countries, many of them of course Americans, and including a genuine Belgian Princess, niece to the King and Queen and classmate of my son's.
And no, they never got close, he was never invited to the Palace, much to the disappointment of my mother-in-law. But for their High School Graduation dinner, we happened to sit at the next-door table from the Royals, and she had the most wonderful time observing them all night.
For all of those kids, it was of course quite a traumatic experience, and after reopening a few days later, the previously carefree atmosphere on campus and around the school was never really the same again, and understandably so. Fifteen years on, cowardly, inhumane violent terror has reached Belgium too, and the international schools especially have mutated into high-security compounds.
"Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
The end of the Innocence".
Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence" (1989)
On 9/11, I was at the office and alerted to what was happening by one of my team who had received a phone call. No social media back then, and the only TV set around which we then all congregated to watch CNN was in the Board Room. Ever since, I've made a point of having one installed in my office. Fortunately, momentous disasters of this scope don't happen every day, but since then have done so far too often anyway to justify this modest extravagance.
And I'm the first to admit the TV comes in handy every two years for the European Championships and the World Cup...
Of course I had no idea at the time that less than a year later, in the night of Monday 1 July 2002 and over the rest of that week, I would personally be handling another fatal airplane crash myself, this one with 71 dead. DHL Flight 611. But that's another story.
However, for me and everyone else involved at the time, it will always be 7/1. And I swear the identical figures for the date of the accident and the number of victims (our two pilots, Captain Paul Phillips, who left behind a wife and four children, and First Officer Brant Campioni; and 69 crew and passengers, mostly kids, on the other plane) has only just now revealed itself to me.
No spoilers, but the tragic story doesn't end with the crash. Still this year, a Hollywood production starring none less than Arnold Schwarzenegger is to be released - entitled 478 and "based on the airline accident that occurred in July 2002 and on the events that took place 478 days later" (IMDb).
In retrospect, under "Crisis Management" it all looks great on my CV, but it's an experience I could well have done without.
So this year, for its sad 15th anniversary, 9/11 fell on a Sunday - not just any given Sunday (hold the term), but the Opening Day of the new NFL, professional American Football season. Well, to be precise, the opening game itself was already on Thursday 8 September when defending champions Denver Broncos beat the Carolina Panthers 21-20.
But the first Game Day proper took place on the Sunday. And unsurprisingly, in a nation where every sports event - and I mean, every sports event - is preceded by a rendering of the national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner", the celebrations in "the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" were of course up to the special occasion. And who can blame them?
To me, Football is the American sport, no matter what proponents of Baseball will tell you about the proverbial Boys of Summer:
"I can tell you my love for you will still be strong
After the boys of summer have gone."
Don Henley, "Boys of Summer" (1984)
"In either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. The inches we need are everywhere around us. On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Cause we know when we add up all those inches that's going to make the fucking difference between winning and losing, between living and dying." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myyWXKeBsNk
Over 3,000 innocent people were killed in the attacks on 9/11, another 6,000 or more were injured, like all victims of random terrorist acts simply in the wrong place at the wrong time as they went about their daily lives.
Its impact on all of us cannot be exaggerated. If you are looking for a Turning Point in History after which things were never the same again, look no further.
Turning Point.
This is of course one of the most famous speeches in American history. Well, at least until Coach d'Amato came along...
To round off the Top Three of Turning Points, yet again, 11/22/63 is right up there, maybe less in terms of its immediate consequences than in its impact on the collective American psyche.
I've just finished reading an intriguing book, given to me by my children, so for a welcome change not on my Kindle: Brady Carlson, Dead Presidents. An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders (2016). The most interesting chapter I found was "Eternal Flame. On John F. Kennedy, the City of Dallas, and What Ties Them Together Every November 22". That assassination still today proves to be very bad PR for Dallas.
And then the Cowboys just lost their opening game on 9/11 at home 19-20 to the New York Giants. I mean, how bad can it get?
Coming back to the theme of assassinations (and calendars) - remember Julius Caesar? For the ancient Roman world, and that meant more or less for everybody at the time (except for the Native American nations who were still one-and-a-half millennia away from being discovered and subsequently invaded and all but annihilated - I hope they enjoyed their Splendid Isolation while it lasted, then finding themselves at the receiving end of that "inch-by-inch" mentality) 3/15/44 (BC) wasn't exactly such a great day either.
Another Turning Point in History that plunged the world into decades of strife and upheaval.
Q: "But is there a plan, Cassius?' A: "Of course there's no plan."
The Ides of March, anyone?
And then, there's a very watchable film of the same title, directed by George Clooney and released only in 2011, a modern-day political drama in which "an idealistic staffer for a new presidential candidate gets a crash course on dirty politics during his stint on the campaign trail" (IMDb). It stars Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti.
All very topical wouldn't you say.
And while we are on the theme of plans, or lack thereof, here's another "date that will [quite possibly] live in infamy": 6/23/16. But, boy, did they have fun - and still are. In the words of Philip Stevens who wrote a very insightful piece in the Financial Times: "Hubristic denial about Brexit is the order of the day... This is not a process promising anything resembling a happy ending."
In case you missed it: David Cameron, who is ultimately responsible for the whole mess, has just announced his retirement from politics. Turning only 50 on 9 October, he is now riding into a very enjoyable long sunset. There's money to be made and money to be spent. And no more need to enact a modest, middle-class lifestyle in order to appeal to the electorate. Enjoy, Dave!
No doubt he and Mrs Cameron, aka Sam Cam, will have the need for state-of-the-art tools to organise themselves and their very busy lives, social and otherwise. I still recommend Filofax.
There's just one caveat for a retired politician:
The brand, first launched in the UK in 1921(!) owes its name to an abbreviation of the term "File of Facts".
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