Er, not exactly. Nice video satire.

Embarrassing disclosure: when the Paris Hilton video first hit the news, I was a bit baffled by all the fuss about it on the Web. Who would be interested, I wondered, in a sex orgy taking place in a Parisian hotel? Eventually, a friend took me aside and explained that Paris Hilton was a person. Sigh. I really should get out more.

It’s such a cliche. And yet cliches express truths, even if they are sometimes banal. I’m of an age when I can remember where I was when Jack Kennedy was assassinated. (I was in my bedroom, dutifully doing school homework.) Maybe it made a deeper impression because I had earlier that year seen him in the flesh.

For the generation who are now in their twenties, 9/11 will have the same kind of memorability. According to the Pew Research Center’s national survey, conducted Aug. 9-13 among 1,506 adults,

nearly every American (95%) can still recall exactly where they were or what they were doing when they first heard the news of the Sept. 11 attacks, and roughly half (51%) say that the attacks changed life in America in a major way.

For me, September 11, 2001 has a special resonance. It was the day Sue underwent the operation that we hoped might give her a chance of beating her cancer. She was first on the surgeon’s list, due to go down to theatre at 10am. I got the kids to school early and set off for the hospital to see her before she went under the knife. The traffic that morning was indescribable. I had to invent a crazy, circuitous route to avoid the city. When I got to the hospital, I dumped the car and ran up to the ward. She was sitting up, quite composed. When she saw the state I was in, she told me to go home, do something to take my mind off the operation, and come back at lunchtime, when she would be coming out of the anaesthetic. “Stop making such a fuss” was the hidden message. So I obediently kissed her goodbye and went off to collect examination scripts for a Masters course for which I was then an External Examiner.

The strategy worked — for a while: marking the scripts took my mind off what was happening up at the hospital. I got back to the house at 12.30pm and rang the ward. No, Mrs Naughton wasn’t back from theatre yet. I rang again at 12.40. Still she wasn’t back. Stifling panic, I asked to speak to the senior nurse on the ward. She explained that there would probably be a simple, non-sinister explanation. She checked, and there was — an emergency operation that had taken precedence. “Come in around 2pm”, she said, “Sue should be back by then”. I put down the phone, choking with relief.

As I replaced the handset, it rang. It was an old friend who had recently gone to visit her son in his New York apartment. She was phoning to see how the operation had gone. I told her what had happened and we talked about the whole business. She told me she was standing by the window and that it was a beautiful morning. She had plans to visit a bookshop and then to buy food. She was going to cook that evening. Then the line went quiet. “Are you still there?” I asked. “I’ve just seen a plane fly into the World trade Centre”, she said.

While we talked, I launched a web browser. It took an age for the program to load. I typed “www.cnn.com” into the address bar. No response. The site was already buckling under the load. We continued talking — about the density of air traffic over New York, about the fact that a terrible accident like that was bound to happen, one day. Then my friend went quiet again. “I’ve just seen another plane fly into the tower”, she said. “I’m going to move away from the window”. We said muted goodbyes. I switched on the TV. The BBC had a news flash — and then cut to live footage of the two towers, smoking in the sunshine. My friend spent the rest of the day on the roof of the apartment building, watching the disaster unfold. The worst thing of all, she told me later, was seeing the people who jumped to avoid the flames.

At the time, another old friend had just taken up residence in New York, living in an apartment on Washington Square. I rang the number. He answered, sleepily — still jetlagged. “Do you know what’s going on?” I asked. “What’s going on?” he responded. “The Twin Towers have been attacked”. “Come off it”, he snorted. “Can you hear anything?” I asked. “Now that you mention it”, he replied, “I can hear a racket down on the street”.

At the same time, a third friend who is a professional colleague of Cherie Blair, was in a meeting with her. Her mobile rang. She picked it up, listened and then put it down. “What’s up?” said my friend. “There’s been a terrorist attack in New York”, she replied. “Is it bad?” “Must be”, she replied. “Tony was on his way to speak at the TUC Conference and he’s turned back”.

Matt, the Daily Telegraph‘s cartoonist, is a genius. For a fee, you can get his daily cartoon downloaded to your PDA every day.

Interesting Whiskey Bar meditation on George Bush (aka Shrub in this context)…

When [Isaiah] Berlin divided writers and thinkers (which leaves Shrub out) and human beings in general (I suppose we have to include him) into two categories — the hedgehogs and the foxes — he didn’t mean for either label to be taken pejoratively. After all, his list of hedgehogs included Dante, Plato, Dostoevsky and Proust, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Erasmus were among his foxes.

What Berlin meant, I think, is that hedgehogs try to integrate all of their experiences and thoughts into a single, overarching concept of life and their place in it, while foxes, as he put it, have ideas about the world “without . . . seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”

At this point, I would say Shrub is acting like a hedgehog on hallucinogens. His one big integrative idea — exporting American-style “democracy” to Iraq at the point of a gun — has proven fatally, disasterously wrong, but he can’t let go of it, because it’s the only idea he’s got. He’s fully vested in it, like a ’90s e-trader who decided to throw caution to the wind, empty his retirement account and bet it all on pets.com.

I think if Shrub were ever forced to let go of his vision, his one big idea, it would not only crush his fragile ego, it would leave him completely incapable of making any sense at all out of his presidency, out of America’s role in the Middle East, out of the universe.

So now he’s imitating the hedgehog as literally as any human being can — he’s rolled himself up into a defensive ball, spines out. He has nothing useful to say and absolutely no strategy beyond hunkering down and passively defying reality. Which leaves the generals and the troops no choice but to hunker down with him.

The next two and a half years are going to be very long ones…

From Overheard in New York | The Voice of the City…

Sassy flight attendant: In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will be released from the overhead above your seat. After the screaming subsides, please place the oxygen mask around your nose and mouth. If you are traveling with a child or an adult who is acting like a child, place your mask on first before attempting to help put theirs on. –Flight out of LaGuardia

From an email reporting an exchange overheard in New York:

Old lady, to woman speaking on Bluetooth headset: “Excuse me, but are you talking to yourself?”

Woman just looks at her and keeps talking.

Old lady: “Because, if you are, you should be nicer to yourself.”

Reminds me of the time a colleague of mine was walking down a long, deserted corridor in Denver airport at night. Coming towards him was a very large black guy who spoke thus: “First I’m gonna whip your ass, then I’m gonna kill ya”.

Just as my friend was composing himself for sudden death he noticed the hands-free wire dangling from the chap’s left ear.