9/11 10th Anniversary

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/09/911-anniversary-marked-by-a-tribute-on-mars.html

In an attempt to avoid posting an article a billion other kids had already posted, I stumbled upon this short blog from the LA times. Although not a lot to go on for rhetorical analysis, I found the simple tribute to 9/11 nicely fitting.

Shortly after the attacks themselves, Le Monde, essentially the french NY Times, famously printed;

In this tragic moment, when words seem so inadequate to express the shock people feel, the first thing that comes to mind is this: We are all Americans! We are all New Yorkers, just as surely as John F. Kennedy declared himself to be a Berliner in 1962 when he visited Berlin.

My dad quotes this all the time (just the we are all Americans part, he doesn't have like a photographic memory or anything), and tears up in that sort of manly way that boys can do, because it shows how deep a wake the terror of 9/11 left. Reading about a tribute to the disaster in space immediately called that quote to mind. Pretty much since the Monroe Doctrine, we've pushed all sorts of conflicts away from the homeland, and have come to expect a certain degree of security. When that security was breached it really shook the entire planet, because I think many had come to think of America as impervious to that kind of violence. The extension of our tribute to the thousands of dead into space is kind of poetic. In the obvious sense it shows how great the reverberations were, they reached even to space. But also, being the 10th anniversary, and the fact that the Opportunity (the aptly named space probe) used debris from the event itself send a nice heartwarming message of trying to move forward.

To tie the rhetorical triangle into the tangent I sort of just went on, I would say their audience are people who read the LA Times, a pretty small pool. As a part of the blog genre, it's pretty straightforward and short, often people don't like to make big commitments to blog reading. The author uses grammatical devices like dashes and a colon after "Here's the backstory" to cut straight to the point.