People — and particularly Americans — like stuff. Having lots of stuff seems to make us feel safe and secure. Or at least better than the Jones' next door.

Some people like to bring home a little piece of every place they visit, for example. My husband's aunt buys a local cuisine cook book on every trip she takes. Other people can't take a summer vacation without schlepping back a suitcase full of swag -- refrigerator magnets, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and even bottle openers for your key chain.

Still others are history buffs who collect items from one or more historical periods. Take all those deluded Southerners who collect Confederate artifacts, all the while raging about Southern nobility, so-called states rights, and the "war of Northern aggression." You'd think the South actually fought for something good with all the fuss still made about General Lee and the burning of Atlanta. You want to remember the Confederate South? Try collecting a few shackles and slave ship manifests, mmmmkay?

I'm not a "stuff" person. Less is more in my book, so I make it a point not to collect much of anything, unless you count dust mites, dirty laundry, every high school, college, and graduate school essay I ever wrote, and IOUs for sex with the husband in exchange for a night out with the girls. [I get the night with the girls, he gets the IOU. Just to be clear.]

Maybe that's why I can't understand people who would take home a little piece of the 9/11 WTC and Pentagon wreckage. Or maybe I can't understand it because it's just so ghoulishly wrong.

Pop Quiz

Answer: A piece of the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

I know, it's not fair. What if everyone wanted a piece of a mass murder weapon? Don't you worry, my fellow Americans. It's not really Rumsfeld's, says a Pentagon spokesman:

"He doesn't consider it his own," Di Rita said, adding the piece is on display for the Pentagon. "We are mindful of the fact that if somebody has an evidentiary requirement to have this shard of metal, we will provide it to them."

Well, that's a relief. Rumsfeld doesn't consider the piece of the airplane that murdered over 180 people his own. How righteous. And even though he has put his and all his office visitors' grubby paw prints all over it, Rummy will be happy to return it any time if it's needed for evidence, now that its evidentiary value has been reduced to ZERO.

Funny, I didn't know it was okay to remove potential evidence from a crime scene as a souvenir. You think the LA police screwed up the evidence in the OJ Simpson case? Those bozos have nothing on our federal investigators. Nosireebob.