I was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, on E. 89th St., just two doors down from the Guggenheim. I was teaching class, so I couldn’t watch television or listen to the radio. I have my story. For me, the events were all the day after the collapse of the towers. For most of America, and the world, the events were the collapse of the towers. For me, and for most people in the inner boroughs, “9/11” refers to a variable amount of time and a variable set of experiences that share only the common features of uncertainty, suffering, and dread.
For me, and for many on the island, “9/11” was the month in which the towers burned. That was when we had the orange glow in the sky every night and the horrible smell that came in through every window either every day (Brooklyn) or intermittently (Harlem and Bronx). That was how long, or even longer, we had a new discovery, every day, of the dead, a new official lie, a new exertion of power — the power of government (Christine Todd Whitman assuring us that the air was safe to breathe, when she knew that it was not), the power of guns (W. Bush sending men with submachine guns to stand in Penn Station to “make us feel safe”), and the power of vox populis to insult the vox humana (cheers for Bush saying that the “people who did this” would “pay”).
I don’t tell my story. My story is of the presence of absence, of the spaces continually filled by losses, dead, ash, and mourning. It was of a time indeterminate, so it only partly ended when the insignia of death were replaced in time.
My story can be re-opened by such abstract things as the presence of National Security Letters, anti-immigrant mania, and the invocation of “emergency” to put away “lofty” ideals of morality “for a time” (Cheney’s “dark side” comments echo), and it can be re-opened by the concrete things like “heroes” of the day and lists definite of “victims” (not because there was not heroism nor victimization; rather, lists limit the heroism and the victims).
I hate hearing the memorials.
Most of all, I find any writer or media talking about “how we came together on 9/12,” “what we have learned since 9/11,” “what we learned from 9/11,” “what we got wrong about 9/11” a fresh wound. It isn’t that there is no “we,” but that there are at least three of them.
Consider the we of “What we went through on 9/11”:
There are three different groups who can be “we” who went through 9/11. The smallest group is mine: people in New York City on the day (or in the Pentagon, but I wouldn’t put us together really), with a smaller group of us being those in Manhattan, and a smaller group still being those who survived the towers. The number? 1,500,000, 600,000, 20,000.
The next “we” in size would be American Muslims, and all Americans of Middle Eastern descent (Sikhs were frequently singled out). Their experience was not the same, although a lot of them overlap with the first “we.” However, it was pretty clear on the day to alert people that the attackers were Islamacist terrorists, and they had to feel a second fear, a second rage — if they were in the City or not-City group. The number? Maybe 4,000,000. Even though they felt patriotic grief and religious sorrow, they also had an instantaneous sense of suffering added to it. No matter what, they knew that they would be scapegoated. They feared being treated like Japanese Americans after December 7, 1940, like German Americans after 1914 (when frankfurters became hot dogs and a great many Schmidts became Smiths).
The last “we” would be the people of various ethnicity and religion who experienced 9/11 as a phenomenon of television. Their experience would be orthogonal to the other two. It was curated, edited (the jumpers were removed), and reiterated. The “most effective” angles were plucked. The experience was recursive, as the singular moment would play over television going to commercial break, and crawls on the bottom of the screen would reinvigorate the death counts. It came with conclusions on top of experience — removing the need for experiencing puzzlement. The number? Hundreds of millions.
Therefore, anyone today, or ten years ago, talking about “our lessons” or “what we did wrong” is either silently choosing a “we” and dismissing the other two or is attempting to create a new experience, a new “we” out of fiction and memory.
. . .and the “we" of imagination: synthetics, fictions, and lies
The most insipid artificial “we” of the City 9/11 is the “we” who were in the Towers (and therefore would have been in the hospital on 9/12) and heard Bush on the pile swearing revenge with pride (and therefore had watched the attack on television and seen the planes hit over and over again, with conclusions added) and had a heart filled with anger (and thus was from a fire company or police company that was unaware of the geopolitics, so was not in the stacks) because “we” knew that the country had come together (and therefore had watched the attacks and responses on television and heard all the calls to unity). This mythical memorial is an American who supports war and regrets dissent.
The next most evil artificial City (and United 93) “we” I have noticed is the competitive survivor. This person was in the towers and has heart rending experiences and then shifts into another speaker with heart rending experiences and then another to become a single memory. The competitive survivor “we” then holds out a measure of self-sacrifice that all later days fail to measure up to. 9/11 is thereby comprised of a “we” who gave the last full measure so that the later ages would be soft. It is the christologic warrior myth.
You get the point.
Otherwise, discussion of 9/11 does as little with the City as possible. A fire crew’s loss, the voice of someone running from the ash cloud, a shot of everyday New Yorkers wrapping their faces with bandanas to work on the pile (and volunteer for cancers), but then shift immediately to “we” seeing the planes hit clearly and “we” understanding who did it and “coming together” to “strike back.”
The monthlong 9/11 is nowhere. The confusion is not permissible. The dread? It doesn’t sell electric Volvos.
Because this new “we” of the 20th anniversary is the “we” of television viewers, there is no place for me. There is no place for apprehensive Muslims. There is no place for those aware of the position of suffering in life (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim).
The people who saw the attacks from the best seat in the house, through the luckiest cameras, and who then saw repeats and slow motion, felt shock and pain, and their brains were wired to respond by reaching out to help or reaching out to defend. Like Alex de Large in Anthony de Burgess’s novel, they could do neither, and so they felt sick. Thus, when Bush stood on the pile and said, “I can hear you” and that “Soon, the people who did this” would pay, he invited the people who felt 9/11 as a slap to let him do the punching back.
That “we” who watched on television did not smell the fires. It did not see the abandoned Kiss-’n-Ride Lot cars. It did not see the bicycle covered in ash chained to a lamp post.
It did not have so much frustration with FEMA and a stunned government’s ability to identify the dead, catalog the dead, and notify the kin that it constructed its own mortuary boards modeled on ride-share bulletin boards. It did not walk past the impromptu chainlink fence of “Missing” pictures every day after crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.
It didn’t weep at every lover’s, parent’s, and child’s toy placed up to lure the ghosts of the dead back the the grieving.
It had not been unable to call family for days because the circuits were jammed and because cell phone repeaters were on top of the World Trade Centers.
It had not been unable to deny the jumpers.
The “we” who were unified on 9/12 were the “we” who experienced 9/11 through television and radio. They set aside their policy differences to be one nation and to fight disunity with unity. The people afraid of reprisals for being Islamic while they fear another attack from Islamists, and the people afraid that their island won’t have food were not setting aside their issues to support Bush.
They were trying to survive. They were suffering. They were trying not to inhale the dust. They may have been trying to forget what they’d seen or trying to work.
Bush invaded Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and New York City residents did not support it.
We of the City did not support inflicting the same thing on other countries that we were experiencing. We had empathy. We knew what it was like to have a missile attack in a way most American cities did not.
I, personally, did support the invasion of Afghanistan, but I agreed that making villagers in the mountains of Afghanistan suffer as we were suffering would not help bring the end of anything except our humanity.
New York City, and those there who experienced the month of 9/11, were never supposed to be included in the “we” of “the American people” Bush invoked.
He sent the active duty troops with battlefield weapons to reassure “the American people” that they can spend again in New York, and he intensified the suffering of the New Yorkers. He gave a national speech about the war coming, how it would be long and difficult and how “we” would follow “them” everywhere. This was all in the name of our pain, but our pain had to remain an exception.
The lessons are the lies
On the tenth anniversary, MSNBC and NBC ran “what we have learned” specials. The object that was supposed to teach was “9/11.” It was understood to be a simple thing, just as the “we” was.
On the twentieth anniversary, with troops withdrawn, we have gotten “The mistakes of 9/11.” Again, 9/11 is a simple, known thing, and “we” are simple, too.
Both are built on insulting lies, as far as the New York City context is concerned. “The Planes Attack” was not a Soduku puzzle to be solved. It was not a question to be “gotten wrong” by a professional intelligence service. Such approaches assume that there is no blood involved, no passion involved, and that all of human history is a calculus problem. Get the right technocrats, the right Sky Guard up, and a powerful nation can “solve” a 9/11.
Then there is the idea that 3,000 people dying is a valuable learning experience for an unstated group. That some We out there will be learning great stuff from it.
Ask the Talmud about suffering, and it is largely silent. The rabbis could never say why good men suffer, why the wicked prosper, but both occur. Christian theologians fare a little better. They sometimes suggest that suffering in this world teaches a sort of Stoic indifference toward happiness. As Job says, “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away: Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Approve of/thank the name of God when He gives and when He takes away; don’t hang on material gain. (There is more to say about Christian views, if we look at theologians talking about the “dark night of the soul,” but I’m being digressive already.)
Our journalists don’t generally endorse Wisdom literature, though.
Now that the day has passed, I can finally say that I mourn our three speech groups and the way that the media has been dominated by a toxic line.