One of my most vivid memories from the 9/11 era actually came a few weeks later, when my grad school hosted a faculty panel discussing music in relation to the events of 9/11. I was then a grad student in musicology, looking to pursue a career in academia, and the 9/11 tragedy had by this point in the fall already been taken up in every other context; it was only a matter of time before the musical connection would come up. And indeed, there was a real desire in the institution’s community to hear about the relationship between the two: the room where the panel was hosted, an auditorium capable of seating 500+ people, was pretty packed.
The panel basically covered two main themes: on the one hand, music was seen as a balm for Americans healing in the wake of the September 11th atrocities; on the other, the panel documented the suppression of music and the arts under the Taliban in Afghanistan, where the American government was already directing its attention.
As the panel went on, I kept thinking about the sudden ubiquity of the song “God Bless America” in the weeks after 9/11, with its martial beat and its stirring call to unity. I thought about whether it was only “healing” that was the effect of constantly playing a song like that, when the US was then in preparations for the invasion of Afghanistan, and was already making noises about Iraq. I would have cause to think back on this panel’s Polyannish view of American music two years later, when ostensibly “neutral” news networks were using backing tracks of stirring martial music to back their coverage of the American preparations for war in Iraq; already by fall of 2001, we were getting inundated with stuff like Lee Greenwood’s performance of “God Bless the USA” in game four of the World Series:
(Incidentally, for a really good shellacking of Lee Greenwood’s jingoism, check out
David Cross’s standup bit from that period.)
Anyhow, to return to the panel: after the faculty discussion, when I got up in the question period and tried to gently point out that music in American history (in the history of all nation-states, really) has had the potential to be a site of jingoistic and nationalist tendencies, with potentially dangerous effect, an audience member abruptly jumped up and interrupted me in mid-sentence, loudly declaiming that no, we couldn’t think like that, it was dangerous to be critical of America at a time like this, we all needed to stick together to preserve the American way of life, and so forth. Their fear was almost palpable. I was so stunned that I didn’t even know how to respond; I just slowly sank back into my seat.
I don’t think it had occurred to me until right then of precisely how scared people were, such that even a whiff of dissent, on an issue of arguably peripheral importance (American music is good, but sometimes American music can be bad!) had so shaken an audience member that they felt moved to jump in and shut me down before a panelist was even able to respond. It’s also noteworthy that none of the panelists *did* respond to their comments; none of the faculty in the session did anything to stand up for a dissenting view, or for the usually unexceptional idea that our institutions can be subject to criticism.
For me, it was a vivid demonstration of how quickly people can abandon their commitment to democratic deliberation when they are afraid, how immediately and viscerally they are willing to subsume themselves to an unthinking unity that in this case would go on to do immense harm, endorsing the American imperialist misadventure in Iraq and the 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.