Maybe you saw and heard it, too. There’s a good chance you did; every other TV channel had some sort of 9-11 progamming (except the shopping channels of course—Bush told us to go shopping and show those terrorists that they couldn’t shut down our American raison d’ebt. At the end of a “commercial” about 9-11 events scheduled at “ground zero” this weekend workers at the new buildings being erected there, firemen and others express their feelings, but the last voice says something like “when we’re finished here the angels will come down to receive the souls of the victims.” Huh? What? Can I be there for a photo op?
Angels? OK, Americans have a genius for mythification and hero-making but, if we are going to remember 9-11 and get some understanding, perhaps even some wisdom, from this horrendous event, we will need, a decade on, a little more clear-eyed vision of the before and after than what seems to have become a media “event.” Huge flags are unfurled at NFL games, public radio stations like mine are doing call-ins of “what were you doing when the planes hit?” and a host of other media remembrances. It’s a potential ratings booster; find some new angle (or angel) for us to reduce this horrible event to some perverse festival of grief. Further, the anniversary provides an opportunity for conflating with the ground zero ceremonies and sports in a stew of patriotic fervor such that 9-11 becomes a convenient theme and re-justification for militaristic response and persistent fear mongering
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9-11 was mass murder right in front of our television cameras (some stations have pulled out their videotape with the effect that there is an bizarre sense of immediacy, e.g. MSNBC), with enough symbolism to feed the media and political posturing and media drama for more than a decade. So this was to be the beginning of our new millennium: a new Dark Age of imminent terror in which religious zealots imperil world peace, in which the high-tech Preditor drone faces off with the suicide-bomber vest. In 2021 there will be a whole new generation who get to see the buildings implode, who will need to learn to say “never again” to an event they will experience only in lingering fear of terror al Qaeda installed in our national consciousness.
Today the dead are being mourned, but they have already become part of our myth, our causus belli, part of our rampant nationalism, our need to avenge this insult to “the greatest nation on earth”, our justification for the piles of corpses of tens of thousand innocents inn Iraq, of entire families in Afghanistan. Like so much else in America 9-11 has also become a commodity, a source of charitable funds, of events and organizations and web sites, of “selling.” When JFK was assassinated we had only the Zapruder film and that still of Oswald being shot. In the digital age of 9-11 we have a fund of images that has yet to be fully explored. Indeed, the “footage” of the alleged more that one-hundred victims who leapt from windows has been largely censored by the media for its gruesomeness.
So there is a paradox in this ceremonial trotting out of the families of victims to re-testify their grief, to re-read the name of their loved ones into microphones yet again. Maybe the wounds are still too fresh for them, but we have massaged their private grief our public grief. Media have made seemingly everyone a “hero,” first responders, families, even the victims. Make no mistake, there were indeed heroic deeds, from first responders to “average” citizens on Flight 93. We should still mourn those lost, and reaffirm our resolve not to be victims again. But a decade has passed, and in that time we have become a people with a deep post traumatic political disorder, a cognitive malady that can obscure the consequences of the inappropriate use of our military might. If we are to apply the Bush doctrine that you are either “with us or against us” as the only choices we might be subject to horrors of greater magnitude than 9-11.
Much was made that 9-11 was a tragedy that “pulled the nation together,” that got us to set aside our partisan quarrels and find curious common ground in our collective victimhood, as though this were some amalgam of a feel-good and a tear-jerker” movie of the week. Uncomfortable realities will be expunged. Lost in all the revisiting of the tragedy is that, as subsequent analysis has shown, it was probably preventable were it not for the egregious incompetence of the Bush administration and several the members of his cabinet. Many still believe—and the administration encouraged it—that there were Iraqis flying those airplanes. Many fewer know that members of the Saudi royal family were allowed to fly out of this country despite the shut down of air traffic. There is no mourning our bad decisions, our perverse alliances. Too many of the wounds of 9-11 are self-inflicted.
This was also the year “we got bin Laden.” He supposedly reposes, bullet-riddled, in some unmarked watery grave. There were raucous celebrations near ground zero. But there was something hollow (as well as tasteless) about the cheering and jeering. Deep in our denial we know that the terrorist lives on in the fear that he got our leaders to buy into. A new term came into popular usage since 9-11, perhaps inspired by the atmosphere even bin Laden did not dream would eventuate from 9-11—“the new normal.” Bin Laden got us to ignore our Constitution, shred our civil rights, adopt torture and illegal detention, and ruin our economy. There was a moment when we might have rectified some of that, but there on television today were Bush and Obama, together, with their wives, strolling for photo ops around the pool at ground zero, comfortable in the legacy they now share— the new American normal.
Maybe this decennial marking of our American holocaust is a necessary and salutary process; maybe it is denial and self-deception. The families of victims know better than the rest of us. I’ll have a better idea when the angels show up.
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© 2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 9.12.2011)