9/11 is a joke in yo town

On the Upper West Side, near a tony school.

Q.v.:

[real!]

All right, so, this thing on the Muni Meter: is it a joke? I mean, obviously it is a joke, but exactly how offensive is this joke? How ironic is the writer being, I guess you could ask instead. Or: should we be very, very upset or angry?

A smiley face and a "HA HA HA" after "9-11-01" could easily express:

• a kind of anti-American (or anti-human) Schadenfreude, sort of a Nelson Muntz laugh from an Al Qaeda sympathizer,
• a kind of extreme dark comedy designed to get laughs out of total shock or a different kind of extreme comedy, designed to get laughs from saying the Wrong Thing (i.e., ultimately actually in no way anti-American),
• a punk-rock sentiment like that which led Sid Vicious to wear his swastika T-shirt, which (I think—maybe I have this wrong) was not about endorsing Nazis but more about saying fuck you to people's sensitivities and sensibilities, not pro–National Socialism but pro-nihilism* and anti-conservative in a way that I can't help but almost sort of respect and enjoy?—and...
• I don't know, what else? Something I just don't get?

Is he fucking kidding?

Either way, it raises an important question. To what extent is it simply not OK to say something like this if it's going to upset people? Is it OK to express something in an ironic way if the irony will be missed, as the ADL believes? Or is it maybe the case that irony/non-irony and getting-it/not-getting-it aren't even the questions, that there are some things you cannot stand for even if you know they're ironic? That kind of thinking makes me bristle, but I'm not totally sure I'm right to.

I will say this: when I saw "9-11-01 :) HA HA HA"—and I was in New York, in Manhattan, on that date, let me just note, and know people who loved people who died in those attacks, which let me note too are singularly unfunny†—I found I was tempted to laugh. Of course even that can make you ask whether it was a nervous, uncomfortable laugh, or if maybe, the way my mind works, I immediately want to explain away the horrible thing so that it isn't so horrible, as a kind of self-defense, making excuses for people so I don't have to—I don't know, fight them?

Probably it's all of these things. But I do maintain that there's a certain dark comedy in it that on some amoral level does have a certain value, and here maybe is what that value is in a weird way: literary. I'm not sure the vandal deserves any of the credit. Maybe the best way I can express what I'm trying to express here is that in a weird tangential way it sort of reminds me of the subtitle of Nabokov's "new" novel:

Again I'm tempted to pull out the Agee and hit myself with the same line: "It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death..."

But then I'm probably just full of shit. Question mark.

* Say what you want about National Socialism, at least it's an ethos.

† Or is this sort of like defending a racist joke by saying, "I've got a black friend"?