I find I do need to talk about 9/11 after all
Today, I managed to avoid seeing much media coverage. Put in job applications, did my food shopping, went for a walk, cooked, had my parents and housemate over for supper and a game of cards. It was a happy day. I'm glad I wasn't near a television.
Ten years ago, I failed to recognize the magnitude of the World Trade Center attacks and went about my business of the morning, annoyed that people were leaving their workplaces here in Massachusetts over something that was happening in New York. You know the apathy we feel in America towards some megadeath war or natural disaster off in Pakistan or Micronesia or the Asian steppes? I was like that about New York. I was living with my parents, and we didn't have a TV at the time. A friend had to phone me and tell me the news. Only in the evening did I meet people who had actually seen the burning buildings collapse on live TV. They were devastated and crying and I hugged various people I didn't know very well and tried to give comfort while thinking, "What are they so upset about? They didn't know anybody who died." Then I saw the footage myself, which was playing on every screen everywhere in the Smith College student center. God, that was bad. I saw it on the bar TV during my last day at work, and it doesn't get any easier with time.
Powerless sorrow for the victims, impotent rage at those who did this to them. That's what I feel. I've got no personal connection to any victims, as far as I know. I'm sorry they're dead, that's all, and they died in such a lurid, ugly, public way that I wish I could make some act of mourning for them. I can't'; there's nothing vast enough. I wish I had made some token of respect at the time. I didn't, and I feel a little badly about it even all these years later, the way I calmly went on with my life. Under the circumstances, I feel like I'm the one jerk who wouldn't weep for Balder. Oh, well. It's not about me. And tears or no tears, it's not sticking any lives back in any bodies, no matter what I do. I'm sorry that they died and died in such a way.
Things I have only gradually come to see and hate: the phrase "Sept. 11 disaster" as though it had happened by accident, like a flood or an earthquake. The use of the Sept. 11 bombing in pretty much any fiction. (Francesca Lia Block, what the fuck were you thinking?) The use of the towers' destruction as a symbol for... anything at all, really. Wow.
Mind you, I hate the ideology that says we had it coming, we're the evil West, we're the Empire and we deserve to burn, which I've heard and seen in various forms because I live in far-left self-loathing-liberal bubble-world. I dislike that ideology almost as much as I've come to dislike the warmongering narrative (though it's done a hell of a lot less active harm). Nobody killed that day had it coming. Nobody. The city and the country didn't have it coming, either.
But even more I hate the way the 9/11 attacks flipped straight over into being an excuse for war. Back ten years ago, I comforted people by saying that of course there wouldn't be a war, they'd get the people responsible within a few weeks and then it would all be over. Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong. I was innocent, I was ignorant, and I had no idea of the magnitude of what was coming, and if you'd told me our troops would still be involved overseas, being poured out like sand down rabbit-holes to no apparent effect, I wouldn't have believed a word. And that's all I'm going to say about what a fool I was back then.
Your sword within the scabbard keep,
And let mankind agree;
Better the world were fast asleep
Than kept awake by thee.
The fools are only thinner
With all your toil and care;
And neither side a winner,
For things are as they were.
I wish the 9/11 attacks weren't a defining moment of my generation. We judge people by the wars they had on. It's a handy point from which to measure. And here I am, in the fascinating, rich, beautiful, complex world of my personal experience... knowing all the time at the back of my mind that future generations will read in their history books about the Undeclared War or the War for Oil or the Forty Years' Desert Storm or World War III or whatever they wind up calling it. And the first thing they think of when they say "New York at the turn of the century" will be horrible fiery death in the city. That will be all 2001 is to most people, the same way certain other years are London burning to the ground or shaky newsreels of the Nazis invading Poland. It's my generation! It's my time, it's my life! I wouldn't call myself a leader, but I wanted to make this a better world in some way that would last. And even if I do, I know that the damn fool of a future student who talks about me in her term paper will go, "Buffalo's sensibilities were shaped by the pressure cooker that was World War III on the home front..." The war's not me. The WTC attacks are not me, either. We are not them, though we know them.
I was thinking about the bombing a couple of months ago for unconnected reasons. Remember how I liked "A Plague On Both Your Houses"? Most of the action takes place in a cemetery that I'm guessing to be St. Paul's Churchyard, a handsome historic church and burying ground. (There's a household of dysfunctional zombies living in the crypt. In the play, I mean.) At that, I became curious what historic Manhattan graveyards look like, never having seen one. Google turned up a bunch of images of the graveyard, a fine old place with headstones leaning this way and that, carved in an assortment of eras. Turns out that St. Paul's is within a few blocks of Ground Zero. Half the images were beautiful photos of the graveyard covered in snow or illuminated in the evenings. The other half were of the graveyard covered in debris after the bombings. I stared at them and gaped for a while. That would be real life, poorly written and full of pointless destruction and horror, intruding on my pleasantly Gothic thoughts.
Ever since then, I've been thinking of this Thomas Hardy poem.
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins, as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day...
Ten years ago, I failed to recognize the magnitude of the World Trade Center attacks and went about my business of the morning, annoyed that people were leaving their workplaces here in Massachusetts over something that was happening in New York. You know the apathy we feel in America towards some megadeath war or natural disaster off in Pakistan or Micronesia or the Asian steppes? I was like that about New York. I was living with my parents, and we didn't have a TV at the time. A friend had to phone me and tell me the news. Only in the evening did I meet people who had actually seen the burning buildings collapse on live TV. They were devastated and crying and I hugged various people I didn't know very well and tried to give comfort while thinking, "What are they so upset about? They didn't know anybody who died." Then I saw the footage myself, which was playing on every screen everywhere in the Smith College student center. God, that was bad. I saw it on the bar TV during my last day at work, and it doesn't get any easier with time.
Powerless sorrow for the victims, impotent rage at those who did this to them. That's what I feel. I've got no personal connection to any victims, as far as I know. I'm sorry they're dead, that's all, and they died in such a lurid, ugly, public way that I wish I could make some act of mourning for them. I can't'; there's nothing vast enough. I wish I had made some token of respect at the time. I didn't, and I feel a little badly about it even all these years later, the way I calmly went on with my life. Under the circumstances, I feel like I'm the one jerk who wouldn't weep for Balder. Oh, well. It's not about me. And tears or no tears, it's not sticking any lives back in any bodies, no matter what I do. I'm sorry that they died and died in such a way.
Things I have only gradually come to see and hate: the phrase "Sept. 11 disaster" as though it had happened by accident, like a flood or an earthquake. The use of the Sept. 11 bombing in pretty much any fiction. (Francesca Lia Block, what the fuck were you thinking?) The use of the towers' destruction as a symbol for... anything at all, really. Wow.
Mind you, I hate the ideology that says we had it coming, we're the evil West, we're the Empire and we deserve to burn, which I've heard and seen in various forms because I live in far-left self-loathing-liberal bubble-world. I dislike that ideology almost as much as I've come to dislike the warmongering narrative (though it's done a hell of a lot less active harm). Nobody killed that day had it coming. Nobody. The city and the country didn't have it coming, either.
But even more I hate the way the 9/11 attacks flipped straight over into being an excuse for war. Back ten years ago, I comforted people by saying that of course there wouldn't be a war, they'd get the people responsible within a few weeks and then it would all be over. Boy, oh, boy, was I wrong. I was innocent, I was ignorant, and I had no idea of the magnitude of what was coming, and if you'd told me our troops would still be involved overseas, being poured out like sand down rabbit-holes to no apparent effect, I wouldn't have believed a word. And that's all I'm going to say about what a fool I was back then.
Your sword within the scabbard keep,
And let mankind agree;
Better the world were fast asleep
Than kept awake by thee.
The fools are only thinner
With all your toil and care;
And neither side a winner,
For things are as they were.
I wish the 9/11 attacks weren't a defining moment of my generation. We judge people by the wars they had on. It's a handy point from which to measure. And here I am, in the fascinating, rich, beautiful, complex world of my personal experience... knowing all the time at the back of my mind that future generations will read in their history books about the Undeclared War or the War for Oil or the Forty Years' Desert Storm or World War III or whatever they wind up calling it. And the first thing they think of when they say "New York at the turn of the century" will be horrible fiery death in the city. That will be all 2001 is to most people, the same way certain other years are London burning to the ground or shaky newsreels of the Nazis invading Poland. It's my generation! It's my time, it's my life! I wouldn't call myself a leader, but I wanted to make this a better world in some way that would last. And even if I do, I know that the damn fool of a future student who talks about me in her term paper will go, "Buffalo's sensibilities were shaped by the pressure cooker that was World War III on the home front..." The war's not me. The WTC attacks are not me, either. We are not them, though we know them.
I was thinking about the bombing a couple of months ago for unconnected reasons. Remember how I liked "A Plague On Both Your Houses"? Most of the action takes place in a cemetery that I'm guessing to be St. Paul's Churchyard, a handsome historic church and burying ground. (There's a household of dysfunctional zombies living in the crypt. In the play, I mean.) At that, I became curious what historic Manhattan graveyards look like, never having seen one. Google turned up a bunch of images of the graveyard, a fine old place with headstones leaning this way and that, carved in an assortment of eras. Turns out that St. Paul's is within a few blocks of Ground Zero. Half the images were beautiful photos of the graveyard covered in snow or illuminated in the evenings. The other half were of the graveyard covered in debris after the bombings. I stared at them and gaped for a while. That would be real life, poorly written and full of pointless destruction and horror, intruding on my pleasantly Gothic thoughts.
Ever since then, I've been thinking of this Thomas Hardy poem.
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins, as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day...