Paul Greengrass and Universal set out to tell the story of United Flight 93 on that terrible day in our nation's history. They set about the task of telling this story with a genuine intent to get it right--the actions of those on board and honor their memory. Their extensive research included reaching out to all the families who had lost loved ones on United Flight 93 as the first casualties of this war. And Paul and his team got it right.

ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2001, ABC News president David Westin decided that his network would no longer air footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center only a week before. The constant repetition of the images of the planes crashing into the buildings had become "gratuitous," a spokesman said. Almost immediately, all other networks and news channels adopted the same policy, and ever since, it is only on rare occasions that Americans have been exposed to those indelible images. This extraordinary act of journalistic collusion followed another mysteriously unanimous decision to censor the photographs and moving images of those victims who had chosen to jump to their deaths rather than be burned alive. … One gets the impression that the video footage is kept largely under wraps because of the emotions it might provoke. Someone is trying to protect us from the neurochemical cocktail of grief and rage, sorrow and anger, trauma and vengefulness that even a few minutes' conversation about 9/11 can cause. Or, perhaps, some in the media might feel as though the imagery is almost too politicized. Perhaps because George W. Bush invokes the attacks and their meaning so frequently, leading figures in the media believe the imagery will tend to buttress Bush's arguments, and serve as unpaid advertising for the president's policies. … There's a lot of talk about whether Americans are "ready" to see a movie about 9/11. Some of that talk is doubtless due to the same attitude that says Americans can't possibly stomach seeing footage of the crashes, or the buildings falling. Such infantilization is an insult both to Americans, who are perfectly capable of handling such things, and to the memories of those who perished in the attacks, whose public murders are being treated as though they had been quiet and private deaths.

If United 93 fails at the box office, the war on terror will be re-written in our popular culture the way that returning Vietnam vets were re-written from normal people into murdering psychopaths let loose on the general population. Like it or not, what passes for popular culture very often serves as the basis of history. Popular culture is often the lens by which historical events are later interpreted. If we are not careful to support this movie because of our collective sense of “survivors guilt”, then the failure of United 93 will serve as a springboard for furthering the cause defeatism that permeates most of modern era popular culture. No matter our victories in this war of which United 93 represents just the first, popular culture is already working to marginalize them as inconsequential. A ‘defeat at the marketplace” of United 93, will further make the case for those who think we must “lose to win” in their perverted logic in the worship of failure.