Don't forget the weather

When I heard a snippet of Glenn Close's 9/11 remarks on the radio, it made me laugh.

It was the whiny, overly dramatized voice, the repeated demand that we "never forget that it was a particularly beautiful morning" (why is the weather important?), the grammatical weirdness of "never to forget coming out of the sky that crystal day the unspeakable horror, the disbelief, the shock" (OK, the horror came out of the sky; I'll give her that. But disbelief came out of the sky? Shock came out of the sky?).

She sounded like a high-school speech student getting tangled in her own rhetorical flourishes.

Then I saw the video. It works much better with her face. The long pauses make more sense because she is speaking to a large hall of a lot of people. So she wasn't funny on video. My questions still hold, though. Why is the weather important? What does it mean to say disbelief came out of the sky?

The other question that remains after seeing the whole thing is What exactly were we to never forget again? The weather, the disbelief, the working together, the mourning, the large sympathy cards from France and Germany (she didn't mention those, but you get the idea). Never to forget the flowers. And never to forget, just in case you forgot already, that it was a beautiful day.

Not mentioned as something we ought to remember: 19 young men hijacked four airplanes and flew them into three large buildings of people going about their everyday workaday lives; that 3,000 people died that day; that the passengers and crew of one of the planes took it down rather than be used as riders on a living bullet.

Remember the feelings; forget the actions, seems to be the message.

Maybe I'm making too much of it. Anybody who would launch "never to forget coming out of the sky that crystal day the unspeakable horror, the disbelief, the shock" on an unsuspecting audience is pretty much out of control of her message anyway.