Everybody who has ever considered themself to be an American (proudly, grudgingly, etc) has their own personal 9/11 story. We think of where we were, how we were told. When we realized what it meant. Who we lost. If we lived near any American landmarks, or in any large city, we wondered if we were next. (From a New Jerseyan perspective, we definitely had a healthy dose of suspicion that Philadelphia could explode at any second, and we were goners.)
For many college age kids in this country, especially those who hail from the Northeast, 9/11 remains one of our closest brushes with anything apocalyptic. The city that hummed in our blood, that buzzed through our dreams with sleepless promises of future greatness, was suddenly off limits, a mess of debris, 'missing' posters, and panic.
After the initial shock wore off, after we dealt with the fact that landmarks we had known, loved, visited on field trips, were eradicated, we began to face the moral apocalypse--just a level deeper than the physical. More horrible than we could conceive--human beings had done this. This fire, this smog, was not a natural distaster. We could not gather the whole world together in our sorrow; at least one corner of our universe rejoiced.
We tried for moral repair. Every car carried a red-white-blue badge of solidarity. Country and city porches and balconies alike unfurled dusty, discolored flags to billow sadly, but proudly, among the fire-colored autumn leaves. We played patriotic songs on the radio, cried when the national anthem blessed Little League ball games.
We rebuilt, post-apocalyptic. We collected our pride, our anger. We defended ourselves, we shot blame through all the farthest nooks in the world, hitting any target we could imagine. We painted our fear red, white, blue, and we fought back. Confronted with a taste of the apocalypse, we garnered it as a weapon. We kept it close. We urged it on.
**Title of this entry is a tribute to Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11 novel. I highly recommend.
This is a thoughtful reflection, and I particularly like the critical turn toward the end. I wonder, though about one claim: "This fire, this smog, was not a natural disaster." Yet what if we considered 9/11 *as* a 'natural' disaster? All of it: not just the hijackings and the towers falling and the colossal dent in the pentagon—all of it, including the cultural fixation that remains. What concepts would we have to abandon—or rethink—if we understood the events of 9/11 through a naturalistic lens; that is, what happens if we zoom out and see humans as clever animals very good at creating disasters—and 'disaster' itself as a sort of natural limit case? This may sound bleak but I mean it in a more analytic sense: by reapplying and reconditioning the word 'natural' we might be able to the trends and tensions of apocalypse on a different scale—much as you refocus the use of 9/11 "garnered...as a weapon") in your post. On another note, the image at the top of your post reminds me of Don DeLillo's compelling post-9/11 novel "Falling Man," which perhaps we should read in this class. It is right in line with your post.
ReplyDeleteDr. Schaberg I am not exactly following the sense in which you are seeking to re-think 9/11 as 'natural'. Some of the interpretative reflections concerning the event of 9/11 focused on the degree to which the US deserved it, the counter-attack as it were (and not let's say, the "loss of innocent life"), given the myriad number of foreign policy commands and decisions by the US to the rest of the world, but of course particularly the Arabic and Islamic worlds. In this, the effect followed the many causes (for hatred of the US, etc.) as in the classical view of nature as causal mechanism. Of course in this sense humans lie ultimately outside of causal determination because they are 'free'. But is this what you are asking us to think? Certainly an exercise of auto-critique, but I am not exactly gleaning that from what wrote. Perhaps instead the sense in which the 'natural' is often 'cultural', or at the very least culturalized?
ReplyDeleteBryan, great response. Yes, I want us to rethink the ways that we use the concept 'natural' and to be sensitized to when it blurs into 'cultural'. Could we ever find the exact point at which a disaster, for instance, shifts from being 'natural' to 'cultural'—or the other way around? I don't think so, and I wonder what use these qualifiers are to us. My point might have been better posed as such: What kinds of inquiry do we preclude when we determine that something is (or is *not*) 'natural'? Particularly in terms of a 'disaster', it seems that there are very specific material things at stake that we highlight or elide by determining its 'naturalness'. (Katrina comes to mind as an all too ready example—and think about the legal language around this matter in terms of insurance!) When we say that something is "not natural," what else do we call it? Do we ever simply call a disaster 'cultural'? Well, if 'cultural' just means that humans did it because of social patterning and historical accumulation over time, I don't see how this is any more precise than applying the term 'natural'.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of 9/11, we might say in a common sense way, of course, it wasn't a 'natural disaster': these were humans doing things in a very planned (if not entirely strategic) manner. But might we have to consider these human acts differently under the rubric of 'nature'? How would we have to reevaluate the intentions and aims of such a group if we saw humans in broader terms of species, habitats, migrations, and animality rather than as (simply) some nefarious and cunning humans with elaborately concocted schemes? What happens when we widen the lens of the 'natural' to include human activities? It does not mean that there is no longer any bearing for how to evaluate human acts; rather, it might mean that humans have to be more attentive to and responsible for precisely what they (can) cause. I should say, too, that my reapplication of 'natural' here is intended to be provocative. I am actually very wary of the term 'natural'—which is why I often put pressure on what people insist "isn't natural" in order to suggest that, sure it is 'natural' in a sense that it happened in the world. Let go of that concept, and the question becomes how do we talk about it? How do we react or respond? These things become more complicated when we cannot make simple recourse *either* to 'nature' or to 'culture'. (Consider how people talk about "other cultures"—that sort of language is often just as disavowing and simplistic as speaking about "nature" as if it is a knowable thing Out There, other-than.)
I cant help but think about other nations that have been attacked a lot more than the US when looking at this post. We as a country have been fortunate enough to never fight a home front war. In fact, Since the gaining of our Independence we have been attacked by a foreign nation of on home soil twice(Pearl Harbor, 9/11). But, taking into account throughout history even how other nations have built whole lives around living in bombed out cities, streets paved with military presence and the fact that it becomes a regular occurrence to see a dead body lying in the road. We don't experience situations such as these at the same level as say Iraq or Iran.
ReplyDeleteHowever, if the fact that The World Trade Towers being destroyed is what made New York apocalyptic than I think that just has to relate to change. People got used to seeing the tower and now its gone. People died. Several even but that happens on a daily basis in functioning cities who have made a life dealing with daily situations that we in America find Apocalyptic.
Note: I am not trying to belittle the attacks of September 11th in anyway. I was on the West Coast when it happen so I'm sure it had a much deeper impact on those in the Northeast.
While I think your points are definitely valid, I'd like to point out only that one of the apocalyptic factors of the 9/11 attacks is that, since it happened in New York, the event killed an extraordinarily high percentage of non-Americans. Sure, it happened in America, but nationals of over 90 different countries lost their lives in that event. New York City is one of the more, if not, the most culturally diverse places in America--the whole basic idea of New York is that of getting there from somewhere else, somewhere far different. It's kind of a patchwork city. Thus, while, yes, other countries have to deal with murder or war or genocide, all of which are far more long-lived and continual than the crashes of Sept. 11, the effects of the Towers' fall were much more far reaching than if they hadn't been, specifically, the World Trade Centers--suggesting even just in name that the people who crashed those planes had an aim to affect not just New York, not just America, but the entire world.
ReplyDelete