First of all, I'd like to thank toddalcott  for the opportunity to discuss the comedy hit of the year, Alvin and the Chipmunks, a feel-good movie that certainly made me feel better than I felt on September 11, 2001. I was the mayor of New York City on that fateful day, September 11, when a group of dark-skinned, foreign jihadists rammed two commercial jets into the World Trade Center, destroying them and killing three thousand people. No one gets killed in the riotous Alvin and the Chipmunks, but the fact that we, as Americans, can produce this kind of strong-willed family entertainment, even after the devastating losses suffered on September 11, produces in me a sense of wonderment, the same kind of wonderment I felt as the nation, indeed the world, rallied around my fair city on September 11.

Alvin is a classic American archetype, a sassy, can-do optimist, a lot like the ordinary, everyday New Yorkers I met in the aftermath of September 11. At the beginning of the movie, we meet Alvin and his pals leading an innocent, carefree life in nature, just as many Americans led an innocent, carefree life prior to September 11. They sing songs in their sweet, sped-up voices, bringing to my face a smile I haven't felt since I saw the hope and spirit that rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center in the months following September 11.

They meet Dave (My Name Is Earl's Jason Lee), a down-on-his-luck songwriter, and proceed to turn his life upside-down, just as a team of murderous Islamic fascists turned America's fortunes upside-down on September 11. Dave, charmed by their singing talents, writes them a Christmas song, a song everyone falls in love with, although I doubt any of the plotters of the attacks on September 11 would enjoy it. Their success is then hijacked by a mean music-industry record-producer (Arrested Development's David Cross), much like the two commercial jets that slammed into the World Trade Center, generating orange fireballs and enormous black clouds of religious hatred, were also hijacked on September 11.

I laughed until tears rolled down my cheeks, a sharp contrast to the tears I shed in mourning on September 11, as Alvin and the gang upend the mean record-producer's plans. In the end, Alvin shows that he cannot be intimidated by a callous music industry, just as America showed that they could not be intimated by the evil forces of Islamic Jihadism in the bloody conflicts that followed the attacks on September 11.

I greatly enjoyed Alvin and the Chipmunks, and hope that they don't wait until there is another catastrophe on the scale of the unwarranted attacks we as a nation experienced on September 11 before they release a sequel. It's toe-tapping fun for the whole family, and I recommend it to anyone who was not brutally murdered on September 11.

America's Mayor,
Rudy Giuliani