As it must every year, September eleventh has arrived once more.
Cue the inevitable scab-picking that occurs on each 9/11 anniversary. Even at this remove, it is difficult to believe it actually happened. Watching the live coverage that Tuesday morning I clearly remember the abrupt sickening feeling when I watched the second plane strike the South Tower, turning what at first looked like a bizarre accident into a chilling blow to our presumed safety and security.
I don’t think it does much good, though, to commemorate the day as MSNBC did for several years after when it rebroadcast the news coverage of that morning in real time. The National Geographic Channel, Discovery Channel, and the History Channel have repeatedly run 9/11 documentaries in the last few days in their own annual ritual.
At some juncture, we must take a sober, detached view of the event. After twenty years, we owe ourselves that much. This is particularly true to me when I consider that a significant number of my students nowadays were born after the fact. For them this catastrophe is a terrible, but abstract historical event. Gen Z views 9/11 with the same emotional detachment my generation has toward Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination. These events were terrible, but not in a way they can access emotionally.
True to form, we made heroes of a few. Twenty years later, the victims the public holds in its collective memory are the participants in the Flight 93 passenger rebellion. While we mourn the Pentagon victims and the first responders who perished at the World Trade Center, we mostly mourn them as a faceless mass absent individual personae. (If you doubt this, I challenge anyone who wasn’t a family member, friend, or coworker of any of these people to identify any one of them by name off the top of their head.) The unresolved deaths of Sneha Anne Philip, who may or may not have been at the WTC when the towers fell, and Henryk Siwiak, who was the only murder victim in New York City unconnected to that day’s attacks, hold some public interest but they are outliers.
Tellingly, we almost never acknowledge the deaths of the workers—receptionists, security guards, cleaners, maintenance personnel, food service workers, among others—whose very lives seem almost to have been beside the point for the public. This is because in the warped calculus of American values, the lives of ordinary workers count for less than those of a few businessmen.
Consider the Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died while their boss was out of office to enroll his daughter in kindergarten…and consider how many CF employees would liked to have been with their own children that Tuesday morning. The boss was appropriately contrite to the media, of course, but that does little to mitigate his privilege-borne guilt. And it is the privilege divide which bounds the narrative of that day.
I think in particular of the so-called “Falling Man” caught in the famous photo taken by Richard Drew outside the North Tower as people trapped on the upper floors jumped to their deaths rather than be incinerated. Drew tried for years to identify the man, to no avail. Drew surmised that Falling Man was probably a cook or kitchen helper as he was wearing a white shirt and checked pants. Aside from this detail, there were scant clues to Falling Man’s identity.
Unlike Falling Man, many of the executives who died lived charmed and fulfilling lives, save for their final hour or so. By contrast, the Falling Man was someone they would have ignored: a person of color, very possibly an immigrant, working at a low-wage service job the main purpose of which was to ensure their own convenience. Even if he had been positively identified at the time of his death, it’s unlikely that Falling Man’s wife would have been invited by President Bush as a special guest at the 2002 State of the Union address. The Falling Man was deemed expendable twice over—first by his capitalist masters, and then by the militants who took his life. He is an anonymous cipher in the larger narrative.
Mass disasters point up societal values. Much like the tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi civilians who have died since 2001, the fates of 9/11’s working class victims simply aren’t relevant. They are the losers of the neoliberal world order, fated by their informed personal and cultural inferiority to live in service to the wealthy and their managerial underlings. If they die, well, there’ll be more to take their place. New York, Kirkuk, or Kandahar…it’s all the same story.
We have been told that the attacks brought out the best in us. Perhaps so. It also brought out the worst. The immediate aftermath of the attacks set the stage for an assault on freedoms in the name of freedom. There were the ham-fisted official measures such as the PATRIOT Act to be sure, and the horrors of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and “extraordinary rendition.” But many signs were more subtle, because they were socially imposed. It’s natural to seek solidarity in a time of crisis, but in the autumn of 2001 wore on some of it was clearly forced. Whether it was bank tellers fired for refusing to wear an American lapel pin or the harassment of Muslim schoolchildren, the reactionary response to the attacks produced a chilling effect.
This chilling effect was reinforced by popular culture. Numerous TV shows, particularly if they were set in New York City, referenced the attacks. This was understandable, but white working class culture dialed the sentimentality up to eleven. From Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning),” to the renewed popularity of that godawful Lee Greenwood song, to the bombastic tributes to the troops at sporting events, the years immediately following 9/11 inspired either a sense of inspirational unity or one of disorienting alienation. My own initial shock rapidly gave way to the latter.
As the last Americans left Afghanistan,
I could only wonder at the futility of it all.
Afghanistan, Iraq, the War on Terror, what was it all for? What do we say to the thousands of Gold Star parents? How do we ameliorate the rise in racism and
xenophobia that has persisted into the present? The answers are elusive for us all. Unfortunately, it appears 9/11 may become still another
tragedy whose lessons will go unheeded.
© 2021 The Unassuming Scholar
