If you watched the Ric Burns documentary "The Center of the World" this week, you saw an effort to rewrite the story of 9/11, so it is no longer about murderous fanatics and selfless heroes, not even about life and death.

It is about globalization.

As we watch the jets tear into those buildings, as we watch them collapse, as we watch almost 3,000 neighbors die yet again, the show's narrator says without a trace of emotion:

"In a little less than two hours - with an almost poetically horrifying symmetry - the symbols and instruments of the city's uniquely air-minded culture, and of globalization itself - skyscrapers, jets and the mass media - would be turned back against themselves with a devastatingly lethal impact and effect."

Don't you see: globalization - that's what made this happen. Globalization - the political bogeyman of the age, the American disease.

But the truth is that "globalization" is really just code for "why they don't like us." It's just another way to say that this was our fault. Nothing could be more offensive.

In the two years since 9/11, we have heard small anti-American voices here and there try to turn this crime on us. They say we should ask why they hate us, as if there could be any justification for this act, as if the blame should fall to the victims, not the criminals. That is abhorrent. It is no different from saying that the Jews should ask why Hitler hated them. But, of course, it does not matter.

Yet this is the anti-globalization agenda: to blame us for our success and others' failures.

And when did globalization become a presumed sin, a bad word? Isn't bringing the world together - economically, culturally, politically - a good thing (except to tyrants who fear the marketplace of economics and ideas)? Isn't it still a good thing that democracy and free markets brought down the Berlin Wall? Isn't it good that we are successful? Not to this crowd and this show.

The narrator says: "the Twin Towers had become . . . the ultimate emblem of the forces of globalization, still making their restless way across the globe." What is equally offensive about the show is that it leaches the event of its humanity, when that day is all about humanity.

I was there on 9/11. I saw lives lost and lives saved. And since then, like every New Yorker, I have seen the terrible aftermath of this mass murder: lives ruined.

Yet when I watch Burns' film, I see none of that. By its very look and sound, the show pushes aside heroism and anger. The production value reminds me of those Bell Telephone films we saw in fifth grade: We're here to educate you, to tell you what and how to think, and certainly not to make you feel.

Even the most horrifying images of the day, of people falling from the towers, are used coldly. Burns shows them, one after another. And I say that is wrong. I won't argue that we should sanitize the visual record of the day; quite to the contrary, we should remind ourselves of this horror so we dare not forget it. But this is different. These are real people dying. By contrast, TV news had the decency not to show us the recent death of the pizzaman/bank robber when a bomb around his neck exploded. So how is it acceptable to show these innocents and heroes in their last moments of life and in such a sterile context as this show?

The rest of the documentary is filled with steel and stone: images of the towers from above, viewed only as objects, symbols of hubris more than pride. And the narrator keeps coming back to hammer that globalization note, again and again, the word repeated a dozen times: " . . . the two tallest towers in New York were really bound to symbolize economic globalization . . . the cultural and commercial energies unleashed by the forces of globalization had breached political and ideological barriers around the world."

Enough, already. We did not invent globalization (didn't Marco Polo?). Globalization did not cause this horrid crime - Osama bin Laden did. We did not bring this upon ourselves - in fact, here's the worst of it, the show does not say who did perpetrate this crime.

No, on that day, 19 fanatics killed 3,000 innocents. That is the story of 9/11, not this PBS version.

Jeff Jarvis, editor of Buzzmachine.com, is the former TV critic of TV Guide. E-mail:

jeff@buzzmachine.com