It's been about a year since Frank Cerabino, The Palm Beach Post's longtime columnist, decided to retire from the paper and pick up his pickleball paddle full time.
Frank entertained, educated, poked and prodded Palm Beach County readers for 34 years. And he made them laugh. But he didn't need one-liners because with an abundance of true, absurd material at his feet, he didn't need to. Frank was more than up for the challenge to hold the mirror to the wackiness that often permeates Florida politics, local government and, yes, Florida Man.
But just before Frank literally left The Post building for good, I asked him what his favorite column was.
The one he chose, maybe surprisingly, wasn't humorous. But it did what every column aims to do: Grab the
reader and make them think, make them feel.
On this 25th anniversary of the most tragic day in our lifetime, here is that column.
This column initially appeared in the Sept. 12, 2001 edition of The Palm Beach Post.
By Frank Cerabino, The Palm Beach Post
As I watched the compounding tragedy of events Tuesday, and the smoke that seemed to cover so much more than two American cities, I thought of Robert Hanssen.
Hanssen is the career FBI agent, a father of six, and a devoutly religious man, who ended up being a double agent for Russia's KGB. What made me think about Hanssen was something he had written in a letter to his Russian handlers.
"The U.S. can be errantly likened to a powerfully built but retarded child — potentially dangerous, but young, immature and easily manipulated," he wrote. "But don't be fooled by that appearance. It is also one which can turn into genius quickly, like an idiot savant, once convinced of a goal."
It's too bad that Hanssen's admonitions hadn't deterred the instigators of Tuesday's acts of terrorism on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon near Washington.
Hanssen had been trying to give warning about America's collective spirit to those who don't live here. The United States, as viewed from abroad, can easily be mistaken for a spineless cacophony of petty interests.
We argue in public about the things many countries repress by law. We debate racism. Excessive force by police. Spending too much on the military. We're a nation of 281 million people led by two political parties whose main goal, it sometimes seems, is to make the other one look bad.
Our chaotic democracy can be confused for weakness. Our fascination for gas-guzzling cars, mindless entertainment and celebrity worship can be taken as a national allergy to sacrifice and suffering, and a predilection for always choosing the easy way out.
Hanssen was trying to warn his Russian handlers not to fall into that mind-set. Even though this FBI agent had despised his own country, he had come to acknowledge its principal virtue.
America "once convinced of a goal" can go from bumbling to brilliant. And its many voices can resound as one.
Tuesday's suicide flights, much like the attack on Pearl Harbor nearly 60 years ago, is that kind of transformational event for America.
In one day, distant and theoretical debates vanished. Our regressive tendencies toward isolationism had been dealt another blow. The sand around our buried heads had disappeared.
We had become Jerusalem.
And watching those columns of smoke, we had become much less young and immature.
Midwesterners grieved over New Yorkers. Ted Kennedy stood next to Laura Bush. Nobody cared what Gary Condit had to say.
The pews filled in local churches, and lines formed outside blood banks. Other aspects of our daily lives — school, baseball games, condo club meetings — were canceled; sometimes for no other reason than it seemed inappropriate or impossible to think about anything else.
It was Hurricane Andrew on a national scale, and the storm, this time in human form, touched us all with its ill wind.
On Tuesday, America became that other America, the one that the wisest of our foes know to fear.
And it's the one I fear, too: for the anger that has already sought release, and for the civilians in other parts of the world who also won't deserve the fate that befalls them as a result of Tuesday's suicide plane hijackings.
We have a nation well equipped with the physical tools of war. Tuesday, we got more than enough motivation to begin using them.
Only madmen and fools would provide us with the proper motivation to, as Hanssen put it, "turn into genius quickly."
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: 9/11 column from 25 years ago, when we went from bumbling to brilliant
