Right Wing Nation

The 2,996 Tribute Project. Update: the original site is down (not surprising), so Jen has graciously reproduced the entire list here. Thanks, Jen!

Always Someone You Wanted on Your Team

Tarel Coleman’s family knew when he was just a youngster that he was destined to be a firefighter. Not content to witness a fire from afar, little Tarel had to see one up close.

“At 5 years old, he stuck his head inside an incinerator to see a fire,” said his older brother, John Coleman Jr. Tarel had his eyebrows singed and lost some hair, but was otherwise unharmed. “That’s when we basically knew he was going to be a firefighter,” his brother said.

Tarel Coleman grew up to be a sports-loving, hip-hop music-loving member of Squad 252 in Bushwick. On Sept. 11, he died at the World Trade Center. The father of a teenage girl, Coleman was 32.

His brother said he and Coleman did everything together while growing up in Astoria and Rochdale Village. They were active children but never strayed far from the watchful eye of their mother, Laurel, he said.

“We were inseparable, mostly because our mother wouldn’t let us go out without one another,” he said. “He was very wild-eyed, very fiery … He was always someone you wanted on your team.”

Coleman graduated from Springfield Gardens High School and took the firefighters exam at age 18, though he wouldn’t join the department until several years later. In 1987, Coleman married Michelle Brown, and they had a daughter, Danielle, now 13. They later divorced.

Coleman joined the fire department in 1993, fulfilling his lifelong dream. He was an avid Giants and Knicks fan, played defensive back for a fire department football team and played flag football for a local club known as TNP (Take No Prisoners).

His no-holds-barred style of play earned Coleman the nickname “Prozac.” He also played softball for three teams, the X-Men and the Troublemakers of the Bricktown Softball League, and the L.I. Hitmen of the Nassau-Suffolk Softball Association, his brother said.

Tarel used his remarkable speed to become the “best outfielder there was,” said John Coleman, a member of Battalion 35 in Brooklyn, who followed his little brother into the fire department. “He batted leadoff. He was a switch hitter … He literally ran a 4.3 in the 40 [-yard dash].”

Running wasn’t the only thing Coleman could do with his feet. “He really did love to dance,” especially to hip-hop, R&B and salsa music, John Coleman said. “He would not leave the dance floor.”

Coleman also is survived by his father, John Coleman Sr. of Rochdale Village; two stepbrothers, Melvin Jackson of Bryans Road, Md., and Troy Jackson of Rochdale Village, and his fiancee, Kilsi Ciprian of Rochdale Village. A memorial service will be held tomorrow at 11 a.m. at Rochdale Village Community Center, 169-65 137th Ave., Rochdale Village.

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I thought about how best to memorialize Tarel Coleman, and the others murdered five years ago. I decided against poetry. I finally decided the way to memorialize these men and women was to take us back to that day five years ago when we were attacked on our own soil, by republishing Lance Morrow’s essay from Time, “The Case for Rage and Retribution.”

The Case for Rage and Retribution
What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury — a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two
By LANCE MORROW

Posted Wednesday, Sep. 12, 2001

For once, let’s have no “grief counselors” standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.

For once, let’s have no fatuous rhetoric about “healing.” Healing is inappropriate now, and dangerous. There will be time later for the tears of misfortune note.

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage. What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two, wandering off into Prozac-induced forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J. … Elián … Chandra …) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, “Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn’t he, about modern technology?”).

Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness—and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred.

As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity—the sort that impels even such a prosperous, messily tolerant organism as America to act. Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company.

It’s a practical matter, anyway. In war, enemies are enemies. You find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that that’s what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for a procession of black Tuesdays.

This was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form. Never has the evil business had such production values. Normally, the audience sees only the smoking aftermath—the blown-up embassy, the ruined barracks, the ship with a blackened hole at the waterline. This time the first plane striking the first tower acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought cameras to the scene so that they might be set up to record the vivid surreal bloom of the second strike (“Am I seeing this?”), and then—could they be such engineering geniuses, so deft at demolition?—the catastrophic collapse of the two towers, one after the other, and a sequence of panic in the streets that might have been shot for a remake of The War of the Worlds or for Independence Day. Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by the power of horrific images.

It is important not to be transfixed. The police screamed to the people running from the towers, “Don’t look back!”—a biblical warning against the power of the image. Terrorism is sometimes described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of voice) as “asymmetrical warfare.” So what? Most of history is a pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause history to happen—an obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant perplexity puts too much emphasis on the “asymmetrical” side of the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real warfare. Asymmetry is a concept. War is, as we see, blood and death.

It is not a bad idea to repeat a line from the 19th century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: “The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the prudence of statesmen.” America, in the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American priorities was rearranged. The presidency of George W. Bush begins now. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media, at least) became instantly trivial. If Gary Condit is mentioned once in the next six months on cable television, I will be astonished.

During World War II, John Kennedy wrote home to his parents from the Pacific. He remarked that Americans are at their best during very good times or very bad times; the in-between periods, he thought, cause them trouble. I’m not sure that is true. Good times sometimes have a tendency to make Americans squalid. The worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the uncivilized. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started.

Linked to Stop the ACLU, Don Surber, Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, Michelle Malkin, LaShawn Barber, Hugh Hewitt, California Conservative, Sister Toldjah