Deserved It Still Travels

I already had the sentence, the day after the anniversary. We still hear people say we deserved it. Treating the dead as a receipt. Changing the subject from the people at their desks to a running argument about everything America has ever done.

The clip is not a pundit discovering that line. It is George Pataki, governor of New York the morning of 9/11/2001, still circling it twenty-five years later with Maya Sulkin of The Free Press. The mayor fight comes with it. The sentence is the same one.

Watch it here: VIDEO

The cut is titled What New York’s Governor Saw on 9/11. The written version asks the question from his 2020 book: did the terrorists win.

He will not retell the morning as a highlight reel, and I won’t either. His daughter called. The second plane ended the accident theory. He shut the airspace, the bridges, and the tunnels, and refused the bunker in Albany. By afternoon he and Giuliani were at the same table downtown. He names Welles Crowther, Zack Zeng, and his friend Neil Levin, who was at breakfast in Windows on the World.

The interview is not about that morning. The morning produced a unity he still calls the only silver lining. He wrote Beyond the Great Divide because it did not last. He tells Sulkin it is still unclear whether the terrorists won. He will not say we did. “We are a house divided against ourselves right now.”

That is his sentence. Mine was simpler, and I already wrote it. Sulkin puts the current form in front of him: more young Americans think we had it coming. Then Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that America deserved 9/11 and later walked back the word “deserved.” The original line is what travels. Pataki calls it a disgrace. Anyone tied to that man, he says, should be kept out of office.

That is the heat around Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has shared a stage with Piker and would not, for a long stretch, put enough distance between them. A petition asked him to stay off the Ground Zero plaza. Pataki agreed. Mamdani went anyway. So did Pataki. So did Giuliani, who had said the mayor’s presence offended him and then shook his hand. The names were read. Both things happened on the same stone.

Quieter than the mayor fight is the language fight. Pataki went off on a CBC memo that told staff not to call 9/11 a terror attack. He said they knew what the day was. They had decided the word would insult someone. You keep the buildings. You sand the noun off the event.

I am not answering his book question for him. The towers came down. The government did not. There has not been another attack on that scale here. That is not nothing. It is also not what either of us was pointing at. He is pointing at a house divided. I am pointing at a sentence that used to be basic: this country was the target of a terrorist attack. The dead did not bill us for it. Once that sentence is negotiable, the rest is inventory.

He will not call it won. The people who say we deserved it no longer have to whisper.