Stinque, World Condemn Atrocities

So we’re looking for something other than the debt ceiling to riff on, and we’ve already played our Crazy Thomas Friedman card so we can’t play another one, and the Yahoo news blog helpfully offers this headline for our consideration:

Yahoo!, communities across U.S. to honor 9/11 anniversary

There’s nothing unusual about the grammar, as far as headlines go. But there’s something wrong about it. Let’s look at some alternatives to tease it out.

Communities across U.S. to honor 9/11 anniversary. Now that makes perfect sense — if only it was what the story was about. Even this passage misses the point:

Communities across the country will also be honoring those who were lost in the tragedy. Below is a list of how some areas plan to remember the fallen.

Listed below? New York, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. And nothing else. Those aren’t mere “communities across the country” — those are where the jets crashed. We have a hunch the observances will be a tad different there.

Yahoo! joins communities across U.S. to honor 9/11 anniversary. This doesn’t seem as wrong as the original, but while it’s not quite right, either — what communities? — it probably wouldn’t have caught our attention. For as written, the headline reads like Yahoo is sponsoring the commemoration, or at least has some pride of place in honoring it. And really, if anyone’s gonna outrageously own 9/11/11, it’s Fox.

Yahoo! to hold Digital Moment of Silence commemorating 10-year anniversary of 9/11. That’s really what the story’s about. It also happens to be the headline of a Yahoo news post on June 28.

But if neither Republicans nor Democrats can see that we need a hybrid politics today — one that requires cutting, taxing and investing as part of a single nation-building strategy (phased in over time) — then I’ll hope for a third party that does get it and can take us where we need to go.

Oops. Sorry. Damn that Friedman. There’s just no escaping him.