"I have learned one thing: not to look down
So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize strangely with the divine
Love." -- Geoffrey Hill, ''The Kentish Canticle.''
I should qualify, because qualifications are necessary. I was on E. 89th St. between 5th and Lexington on September 11, 2001. Therefore, I can say, with neither pride nor particular uniqueness, "I was there." I was in Manhattan. Furthermore, I saw the tower, due to the curiosity of the day, that was burning first. I had gone for a bowtie donut and a cup of coffee at the bodega on Park, and I looked down the infinite expanse of rolling streetway, noting that uptown's up, and downtown's down. (I never understood that those are topographical references: uptown is up hill.) I saw something that looked like a messy candle snuff.
Now, we prepare, all of us, because television has a calendar event. What network isn't going to do a 9/11 ten year show? BBC isn't spared. I haven't checked al Jazeera, but I should imagine that, although they might have objectivity, they will have the shows. As for the networks and the news channels, each has already announced that a giant glob of 9/11 is coming our way. It's like watching a bolus in a snake: you can see the lump, and you know it's going to vomit, and you're just in mild suspense as to what sort of animal will jump out.
You see, the television is not profane, but obscene, in this regard.
The profane is that which corrupts the sacred, destroys the moral. The obscene is that which offends aesthetics and outrages or mocks the sense of decorum, privacy, and sanitary integrity. People speak of this view or that desecrating the valiant and innocent dead of 9/11 fairly frequently, I'm afraid, but what bothers me is the glutinous mass that is television morality and the obscenity of its creation of 9/11 and perpetual ownership of it.
We know how the right wing, the pro-"war on terror" and the racists/bigots who oppose "Islam" like to claim "desecration," which requires that the dead be sanctified in the first place, that they be heroic and ennobled in some special way by death that, as workers at Goldman Sachs (which lost more people than any other company), they weren't. Part of the reason they can do this is television's creation of the 9/11 that non-Manhattanites and non-Pentagon employees received.
I moved to New York City in August of 2001. I took an apartment in the Bronx and rode the #6 train in. I remember September 11th most because of the beauty of it. You see, it was a gorgeous day. When I say that it was beautiful, I understate it. It was a perfect day. My heart was hammering against my ribs to go to Central Park and play. The temperature was ideally life-giving, joy-giving. It was, and in this I do not exaggerate, the finest morning I have ever experienced. Television 9/11 simply cannot communicate this, but the truth is that bin Laden's attack was mostly a failure. You see, the death toll on an ordinary day would not have been 3,000. It would have been 30,000-45,000. (Yes, I know that fools and hateful cretins want to make something of the "low" numbers. Were they there?) In effect, God saved tens of thousands of lives (or random metereology, if that's your belief), because vast, vast numbers of executives decided to come to work late that day.
For the viewer, a clear view of fire and a sudden set of deaths appeared, but for us, we heard and saw nothing much. The people at the very scene itself heard and saw the most horrible things imaginable (and not what was on television), but the rest of us got the opposite. We KNEW NOTHING. When I got my doughnut and coffee, I couldn't figure out what I was seeing.
Inside my work, some people were turning to televisions and radios. I was teaching, so we could not allow the students to know what we were doing, even though it was likely that some of our students were now orphans. We had to be silent and calm, even though some of us had children in the trade towers.
Our minds, unlike the television viewer's, flew. We were trying to establish checklists, think of what to do next, how to get home, how to make contact. Telephones were out. Cell phones were out, as all the repeaters were on top of the World Trade Centers. (I had Virgin, which was Sprint PCS, so I could call, but my parents showed their usual lack of concern.) We had to prioritize. In short, we were filled with imperatives, and we could do something, while 9/11 on the television strapped the viewer into the worst seat in the house and yet denied her or him any ability to do anything except tremble in fear and rage.
As soon as the day was done, we held our children for pick up. Only that way would we find out who did not have a parent.
Then we tried to find ways home.
Manhattan was... quiet.
You cannot imagine what it is like to be in a quiet New York City. With no vehicles allowed in, no flights allowed over, no trains or buses running, there was no sound but the human sound of people not getting through on cell phones. I knew that it was Osama bin Laden that day, because I had heard the report of al Qaeda blowing up Massoud, a Taliban enemy, the day before, and I figured that was a down payment.
On television, the scene was replayed, and then there was speculation, and speculation, and more speculation. On the ground, we tried to raid the Duane Reid for water and candy bars and wait for mass transit. On the train, I saw a lovely, tiny woman in an oversized t-shirt that was filthy. For once, people were talking to strangers. I mentioned the rumors I had heard about the jumpers. The other man in our triad said he didn't believe it. She said it was real, because she was standing where they landed. I thought about what she saw -- no slow motion air planes, but people alive and then in a flash dead.
Television proceeded to the next phase of the narrative. Stories require action and reaction, and they demanded the reaction and got it.
The next morning, though, we all got the smell. Television couldn't tell you about it. The twin towers burned for over a month. It was not a one day event. Volunteers -- every day people -- who will never get their health claims recognized because they "chose" to be exposed by "choosing" to try to uncover people -- and firefighters got the worst of it, while Christine Todd Whitman told us all that the air was safe to breathe, even though she knew it was a lie. It wouldn't have mattered. Could we have held our breaths for a month? The smell was salty, strong, and not the smell of death or plastic but a peculiar thing of its own.
Finally, though, Bush came to stand on some bricks and tell us that it would all mean something when he would get the guys who did it, even though the guys who literally did it were mixed in with the rubble already. For television, the narrative had moved on to the next phase: consequences, or "The Empire Strikes Back." Never mind the fact that New York City residents were actually not in favor of invading Afghanistan, we were in the "lessons to teach" phase.
One reason that "America" wanted "revenge" and New Yorkers didn't was that New Yorkers lived it. If you were not there, you were forced to watch, again and again, something that you were powerless to stop and powerless to react to. You were given no context for it, and it remained a discrete, violent assault against you. You did not have a month-long misery and dread of knowing fully well that every breath was probably dangerous. You did not see the abandoned cars and realize why they were there. You did not have the thousands of daily, minor objects that turned the matter from a simple violent act into a complex process of violence and suffering, and that coerced you toward anger. (If you resisted, then that is good for you.)
There were no "lessons of 9/11" for New Yorkers. Each individual got an experience, a living thing, a part of life or death, a mar or a mark. Because the anniversary of television-9-11 will be "America's lessons" and "ten years and what have we learned" and other collective nouns, collective conclusions, collective verbs, television again profanes the suffering of 9/11/01 and gives us obscenity.