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YEAR-MARK
by Christine Hemp
If the year-mark of the
terrorist attacks might have slipped anyone's mind, the media has taken care
of that for us. Every day the New York Times reviews new books published
just in time for the anniversary of the disaster. We can also anticipate the
made-for-TV movies, docu-dramas, and History channel features that will
recount again and again the familiar images, the personal stories, the
firemen's helmets. Yesterday's paper had a photo from an exhibition soon to
be unveiled at the New York Historical Society that captures images such as
a window shade blown out of the World Trade Center caught dangling from a
tree.
Usually the poets are the
ones to pull these disparate artifacts from the rubble and weave them into
language that shapes an event for us all, offering common things as
handholds. Unlike many current remembrances that seem to populate the
airwaves and print-journals, art can provide the distance and perspective to
transform the event while still commemorating its horrors. Pablo
Neruda's poem "Keeping Quiet," for example, seems far more
fitting a response to this anniversary than all the media chatter.
Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much....
Something feels deeply wrong
in our country, and I think it has to do with "moving our arms too
much." The way the media is approaching the anniversary of this
terrible event reflects the very thing that caused the terrorist attack in
the first place - a self-referential indulgence that has come to define
America in the eyes of the rest of the world, including those madmen who
wreaked havoc a year ago. Why have we not connected our losses to the losses
of other countries who have suffered terrorism for years? Why have we not
linked these acts to a growing discontent with our foreign policy? Why have
we not asked ourselves how this event can change us?
The media-drugged frenzy
continues to lack the transformative and metaphoric power which gives
dignity to those who perished. We need to see this event in a picture much
larger than New York City or Washington D.C. or America herself. Maybe this
is why, with the fast-approaching anniversary, I feel an emptiness, a
grating discomfort. Our packaged solemnity smells suspiciously like the
thing we continue to worship: ourselves. The culture we live in is nourished
by selling air time, selling books, selling movies, selling our image. And
if you can package it with the stamp of 9/11 across its cover, well done.
Let's face it: The magnitude
and complexity of the events of last September have not been fully addressed
by our president, our government, or ourselves. Like the rush to publish
books and get the films on television, we haven't contemplated what
"history" really means, supremely so because we haven't
acknowledged our own role in the terrorist destruction.
I wish that we had
elected a president who could have provided the integrity and leadership to
help us make sense of what happened last September, someone who was a big
enough thinker to know how many nations on this globe experience such
violence daily, a person to pull us together by symbolic acts unity: to
drive 10 fewer miles a day in our gas-thirsty SUV's, to plant a small garden
to commemorate the lives lost, affirming self-reliance and fruitfulness,
American virtues extolled by our founding fathers and mothers.
Instead this president asks
us to "shop" and "fly," to "go back to our
lives" of consuming the gasoline, the source of much of this violence.
Our president and his administration had one of the biggest chances in
American history to help us show our true strength, our can-do tenacity, and
moral leadership in the world. But he blew it. And now he has cast us in the
role of victim, diverting our attention away from his and his
vice-president's corporate transgressions, and touting a war that
contradicts the campaign against terrorism he so solemnly vowed to see
through. No one argues that Saddam is a dangerous man, and one we wish
deposed from power, but again, we are closing our ears to the warnings of
our allies who know all too well the ravages of terror on home ground.
So now as September 11 presses
close, I feel uneasy, as if the frenzy of the media and the president are
hollow cries to a people aching for meaning, but are being fed a message to
consume, ignore our long-time friends, and bomb a country yet to strike at
us. One of the best parts of being an American is our right to choose. I am
still proud to be an American because I can write this essay and be certain
that I will not have my hands cut off in public. I am going to
continue to choose and do so in the name of liberty. This September 11th I
will choose not to turn on my television and not be seduced into listening
or reading one more account of this tragedy as an end in itself. Like Neruda,
for a moment I am going to choose to keep still and to be very, very quiet.
Christine Hemp's commentaries
can be heard on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
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