When I was about seven or eight years old, in what would have been the late 1980s or early 1990s, I saw a photograph of a volcanic explosion doctored to look as if it bore the face of the devil. I saw it at a supermarket check-out line, on the cover of one of those tabloids that printed blatantly false and fantastical "news". Although I feel like I should have known better, I was a very sensitive and deeply impressionable child, and I was deeply disturbed to see a report, accompanied by apparent photographic evidence, that evil itself had burst forth from the very depths of the Earth in a sulfurous cloud of smoke and ash. The grocery had always seemed like pleasant, familiar, and safe place, but for weeks afterward its bright cleanliness and its promises of plenty were somehow darkened by vividly illustrated news of a demonic emergence from the depths of a shockingly literal Hell.
In my memory of today, that old supermarket tabloid is a document of unconcealed silliness, and the face of that fabricated devil is laughably cartoonish. A cosmology in which Satan lives inside of a volcano in Alaska seems almost quaint, as if he was little more than the eccentric and decadent villain of a James Bond movie. I remember my mother trying to explain to me that the photograph was fake, and why it was that a newspaper would publish reports with no factual content. I remember trying to comfort myself that it was all a harmless spoof belonging to the strangely frivolous and disconnected world of adults. I also remember how little comfort any of those arguments brought.
Surprising though it was, I was willing to believe in the falsity of certain news reports and the possibility of faking photographs. Possibility, though, is immeasurably bigger than any particular collection of events. I knew that there were other newspapers that were not fake, and whose photos depicted real events. I knew that each day brought new stories and new pictures, and there seemed to be no guessing what they might contain. I convinced myself that the picture was a fake, and that the devil was not erupting from a volcano somewhere in North America. Still, that seemed to provide no guarantee against what unforeseen but unquestionably real nightmares might emerge from the passage of days. I couldn't imagine what faces might yet appear, or where.
That cartoonish devil still floats in my memory, as a chimera of childish gullibility and mute awareness of the limits of the predictable.
In September of 2001, I had very little going on. My health was bad. School was not going well, and I didn't really care. Kung fu was the sole point of interest, and it was the only thing that I really worked at, but it seemed to cause me more frustration than anything else. Mostly I just wanted to play video games, and not think about the future.
On Tuesday the 11th, I didn't have class and so woke up extremely late. I put on some dirty workout clothes, went to the living room, and fumbled around trying to arrange the weights on a barbell for a strength workout. After one set, I turned on the television and saw that there seemed to be a news broadcast going on at an odd our the day. Someone was speaking dryly but haggardly about the stability of the stock market. I thought, oh, the market must have crashed, and took no further interest. I left the television on as I did several more sets. The press conference gave way to several others, then one or two monologues by television anchors. This was followed by a video of a very large building collapsing on itself in a plume of dust. I thought, huh, did someone botch a demolition job? The newspeople seemed all to be working under the assumption that I had been watching their broadcast for some time and so knew what was going on. I was not especially interested in what they were saying, though, and had written all them off some time ago as shameless seekers of attention. At some point, from bits and pieces fished out from the stream of information oozing in through the television, I gathered that someone had crashed commercial airliners into both towers of the World Trade Center, precipitating the collapse and utter destruction of the entire building. Realizing this, I recall saying to myself, "Ah, now that's something you don't see every day."
Later, my brother and I went to our favorite gas station off of the I-70 exit and got a soda. We ignored the minor panic of nervous motorists and windingly queued-up automobiles swirling around the gas pumps. Later, I went out and did what I always did at night, which consisted of drinking many cups of coffee at Osama's Coffee Zone (no, I am not making up that detail) and stubbornly studying abstract algebra that I could only barely understand. My days had long ceased to have any interest for me, and knowing no other way to orient myself, I tried to take pride in this, though I could scarcely understand how it was anything to be proud of. People always seemed to think that constancy was a virtue, and so I patted myself on the back for making all my days look exactly the same. I had become skilled at bending other people's views to suit mine.
At 10:00 PM that night, I honestly wondered if anyone I knew had not yet heard what had happened, and if I would be the first to break the news of the total destruction of a major U.S. landmark. As it turned out, everyone had, and I found myself vaguely annoyed with how hard people were taking an event that did not seem to impact any of them directly. There are, I thought to myself then, many thousands of people dying every day all over the world in events just as surprising and horrible. Why should this one event be any different? It seemed to me cowardly and self-indulgent to give these other tragedies, happening continuously around the world, such scant thought or mention, but then to raise a loud, public lament when our own false senses of security are shattered.
The world is full of pain and death as a principle, I would say to people then, so why raise a hue and cry now?
On the 12th, the Chancellor of the University declared a campus-wide moment of silence at noon. I was unaware of it until after it had happened. At noon, I simply found myself walking through ghostly still and silent crowds of people as a bell tolled from somewhere above. I hunched under a backpack that was too heavy for me, and scowled.
I look back at my profound sickness of the soul with sober disapproval, and I am never proud of it. To this day I do not fully comprehend how it came to be. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps I saw too many stories of important events confabulated, and then debunked.
Just over three years later, my brother would die in an accident. Four years later, I would fall in love on the day that the city of New Orleans was almost totally destroyed by a powerful hurricane. Six years later I would lose that too. That was the same day that they unceremoniously tore down the old plantation house at the north edge of town, the one that had stood there since before I had moved here over twenty years ago.
The other night I returned home late. I turned on the television to see what was on, and discovered that the channel it had been left on was airing old news broadcasts from eight years ago. All the sudden I was seized with the feeling that I had lived through some history whose importance I had never really grasped at all. Many things have changed in the time that has passed, and all of it makes me see those events in a new perspective.
There is a profound tragedy in the perpetration of such a tremendous act of violence, and in the many lives lost as a consequence. There is no diminishing, or ignoring this, but I am of the firm conviction that death is a thing that speaks best and most truthfully for itself. For us as Americans, however, there is also a deep cultural significance attached to this event, one that goes beyond the number of lives lost, or the shocking manner in which they were lost.
I encourage the reader to locate and watch an old news broadcast of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I don't mean a news broadcast detailing the events after the fact, I mean a recording of the journalists and broadcasters struggling to cover the events as they unfold. Watch from the first announcement at least up until the collapse of the second tower of the World Trade Center. Events unfold with the surreal abruptness of a nightmare and indeed, I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that those events have become a nightmare of the collective mind of America. As is the case with nightmares, a patient examination reveals the unexpected contents of the unconscious.
The most conspicuous feature of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is the utter helplessness of everyone involved. The journalists, whose modern profession is to appear confident and knowledgeable about the world, are shaken, confused, and visibly frightened. Their voices tremble. They speculate wildly and talk over one another. They ask questions that no one answers. A train of experts comment by phone, with none offering anything but bewilderment. The President delivers a short statement saying nothing new. The terrorists would seem to be the only ones with any power at all, and even they obtain it only at the cost of immolating themselves, so that even the perpetrators of this awful act have no real control over the course of events. All the while, the World Trade Center burns, the Pentagon burns, and the cameras are able to do nothing but sit and watch.
On that day, American wealth and American military power, the two things we have all learned to take for granted, are suddenly revealed as fallible. They suffer the destruction of two of their most conspicuous symbols and appear wholly unable to defend themselves. This is a profound revelation for our nation, for us as a people. Its significance should not be underestimated. For generations now, we have been able to justify all of our best and highest expectations for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, and for the country as a whole simply by noting that "this is America." We learned to take American victory and American prosperity for granted. We assumed ourselves invincible and eternal. Then, for a fleeting instant we all saw a face in the dust and the smoke, threatening us with the possibility that it could all be suddenly snatched away.
We should have learned, all of us, to live in a world where successes cannot be assumed. We should have learned that the ideals and principles of America as we know it, as we believe in it, as it can be, stand beyond the reach of money, influence, or forceful violence. America is not unbounded abundance and military victory, but liberty, equality, and justice for any and all who would peaceably dwell here. We should have learned that wealth and power are not bestowed on us from on high, but earned through perseverance and hard toil. I think that to some degree we did all learn that lesson. But I also think that would could have learned it better, and taken it more to heart.
Why do I say we could have done better? Because in the years that followed, we proceeded to try simply to debunk the frightening fallibility of American power through a series of far-reaching and ill-planned military adventures. We tried to debunk the threat of scarcity or poverty, in the days immediately after by urging the people their money freely "for the good of the economy", and in the long days after by turning a blind eye to destructive and short-sighted machinations of powerful financiers and captains of industry whose schemes ultimately spelled ruin for our economy today. We could have done more to reflect upon and nurture the sources of our power and our wealth, instead of recklessly flaunting them in an attempt to trivialize the significance of that terrible day. Our power and our wealth begin with our people and our land. We pursue heedless war and easy gain at their expense.
This is the error of those would abstract away from this event, and attempt to turn it into a simple schematic of wealth and power flowing here and there across the world. This sin was committed in many ways, by all kinds of people with all kinds of politics: the war profiteers with their lucrative government contracts, the idealogues who condoned the violence and indulged their own self-loathing, the politicians who used tragedy as a device for personal ambitions, and the demagogues who used the deaths of thousands of Americans to sow fear and division among honest citizens. These are all the people who would tell us that such things are "just the way world", disguising half-hearted and selfish fatalism as wisdom or maturity, in a self-serving justification for the callous pursuit their own small agendas.
We can do better than that. Loving your country means accepting responsibility for its past, present, and future. It means taking its triumphs and its tragedies to heart as your own. It means accepting its virtues and its faults as if they were your own. Being a genuine citizen means much more than just being on the winning team.
They say that tragedy tests a person. Surely the same is true of nations. Even all these years later, we should look back at that tragedy and ask what that test has showed us about ourselves. There is much more to America than wealth and power. There is much more to those terrible events of eight years ago than cartoonish caricature of evil, or a series of disembodied images beamed in from far away. The tragedy is one of real people and real events, all of which, in some way or another, belong to all of us.
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1 comment:
It's good to see you writing again.
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