9/11 Special Programming

It's only September 4, but the special programming to mark the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is already underway. There are two such features tonight, one a documentary about the week after 9/11 in New York, and the other a television movie about Bush's response to the attacks.

Let's dispense with the latter right now. DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a movie made by right-wing morons for right-wing morons that airs tonight on Showtime, presents George W. Bush as a purehearted superhero who knew that international terrorism was a major problem and tried to get congressional Democrats and ordinary citizens to understand that this was so. In fact, Bush mostly downplayed defense policy in his first seven months in office, and he was publicly touting a missile defense strategy instead - and his foreign policy team was rudderless as well. This is something even the conservative journalist William Kristol has conceded, saying that if you looked at Bush's defense or foreign policy on September 10, 2001, you wouldn't be able to find much clarity or sense of direction in it.

The movie - its screenplay written by an avowed rightist - ignores the federal government's inability to connect the clues and evidence that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. It also insists that Iraq was a major staging area for terrorists (WRONG!) and overlooks the possibilty of some of Saudi Arabia's wealthiest families donating money to al-Qaeda. Bush is presented as a gallant, prophetic leader whose presence in office we should be thankful for because his leadership got us through 9/11, even as it insists that previous administrations - particularly Clinton's - didn't care about terrorism. (The role of previous adminstrations in the fight against terrorism is more complicated than that, but don't expect the geniuses behind this movie to acknowledge such a thing.)

The weird thing here is that Timothy Bottoms plays Bush, after having played Bush as a stumbling fool on the sitcom satire That's My Bush! on Comedy Central, though the irony was lost on the people who made this movie. Even more ironic, Timothy Bottoms appeared in the 1979 thriller Rollercoaster as . . . a terrorist.

Seven Days in September, a theatrically released documentary from 2002, is more in the spirit of the brotherhood and sense of national identity that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in New York. The movie captures various moments of life in New York in the week following 9/11, showing scenes like someone covered in ash stopping to light a cigarette or a woman returning to her Lower Manhattan apartment and finding ash and soot throughout. Many of the scenes make the point that random people in equally random situations have been thrown together as New Yorkers, and as Americans, to get through this crisis together.

The movie's centerpiece is a scene from Union Square Park involving an argument between those who think America must acknowledge that the anger its foreign and economic policies cause fueled the attacks and those who think the terrorists attacked America more for its freedoms than for its deeds. Members of opposite sides of the debate are ready to come to blows at any moment , but a moment of Springerian proportions is avoided when they suddenly break down and hug one another. They realize that it's more important to turn to, rather than on, each other.

This is the 9/11 movie to watch tonight. Seven Days in September airs tonight at 9 PM, Eastern Time, on the Arts and Entertainment (A&E) channel.