We Must Remember 9/11 - Cold Open

   
COLD OPEN


It's the terrible anniversary again.

We are now as far away from 9/11 as we were, on 9/11, from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Think about that, for a moment, about how dissimilar the Americas from these three points of time are from one another. It's a chastening lesson in how much, and how fast, the world can change.

On the subject of being chastened, the teenagers entering high school as freshman this week were toddlers on 9/11, and so have no direct memories of the day. Two more anniversaries from now, we'll have high school freshmen who weren't even born on 9/11. And a couple anniversaries after that we'll have, for the first time, young voters with no first-hand recollection of the event that has defined America's experience in the post-Cold War era.

I don't know that 9/11 has any direct lessons for the problems of today. The lessons 9/11 offers—at least to my mind—are much more general. Events are inherently unpredictable. Actions have consequences. Inaction does, too. War, by its nature, places enormous stress on the political order, making the status quo vulnerable and offering the possibility of reshuffling—again, in unpredictable ways.

It was 9/11, for instance, which unmoored some important minds—such as Christopher Hitchens and Ron Rosenbaum— from their liberalism. But it was also 9/11 that revived the paleo-liberal movement, which then grew to sufficient strength that it powered the failed presidential campaign of Howard Dean and, continuing to surge, the successful candidacy of Barack Obama (whom even the New Republic recognized as being “Dean 2.0”).

The biggest lesson of 9/11, however, is the day's exhortation to be clear-eyed—about the world around us and about the nature of man. And on this score, I turn every year to three essays by Leon Wieseltier.

The first, Wieseltier wrote just days after the attacks. It was a perfectly controlled thunderclap:

Is it a little laughter that we need now? Then behold the contrition of yesterday's frivolous, the new fashion in gravity. The man who edits Vanity Fair has ruled that the age of cynicism is over. He would know. I always wondered what it would take to put a cramp in the trashy mind, and at last I have my answer: a mass grave in lower Manhattan. So now depth has buzz. The papers are filled with hip people seeing through hipness, composing elegiac farewells to the days of Gary Condit and Jennifer Lopez.… It has discovered evil and the problem of its meaning. No doubt about it, seriousness is in.

So it is worth remembering that there are large swathes of American society in which seriousness was never out. Not everybody has lived as if the media is all there is. Not everybody has been consecrated only to cash and cultural signifiers. Not everybody has been a pawn of irony. Everybody was shocked by the attack, but not everybody was philosophically unprepared for it. For a thoughtful life is not premised on an experience of catastrophe, except for the exceedingly thoughtless. There are states of happiness that are not states of stupidity. We should not have to choose between being imbeciles and being mourners.


The second came a year later, from a piece about a literary effort to grapple with September 11:

I have been reading collections of writings about September 11, and they are wearying: so many bruises so feebly expressed, so many people searching for a poem to protect them. Dickinson #341, perhaps? Literariness is a kind of sedative, I suppose, and in this way it differs from literature. There are circumstances, of course, in which unoriginality of feeling or form is not a shortcoming, in which the really advanced statement is the modest expression of a common sentiment, in which banality is a guarantee of decency. In a huge volume called September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, I encounter a letter by Richard Wilbur written a few months after the catastrophe to the book's editor, declining the invitation to art:

Dear Bill,
The only thing I can say right now is this. There is no excuse for the cold inhumanity of 11 September, and there is no excuse for those Americans, whether of the left or the religious right, who say that we had it coming to us.

Dick

The poet's disinclination to make a poem is affecting. It is the truest thing in the book. But elsewhere in this book, and in the other books, there is only banality in the bad sense, and remaindered habits of dissent, and the occasional hilarity, as in the observation by Avital Ronell that when George W. Bush remarked that we were tested on September 11, he "reverted to a citation of pretechnological syntagms that capture the auratic pull of the test." Surely the syntagms were his staff's.


The final Wieseltier essay, also from that first anniversary, was about the challenge September 11 would present to the American memory. It is as apt today as it was then:

A society that is notorious for its inability to remember is about to do nothing else. America eats the past, which is why people eaten by the past run to it; but even the American creed of newness will pause on September 11, and learn its limitations. The yahrzeit is here, and the least lachrymose country on earth is devising its rituals of commemoration. The interesting question is whether the memory will have life outside the media. September 11 will be a test of the American sense of reality, for it marks the anniversary of a day on which reality bested every representation of it.…

It was a measure of the horror that the media were too weak to interfere with our consciousness of it. In American existence, this counts as an epiphany. For the managers of meaning, the anchors and the reporters and the commentators, were themselves too shocked to set to work.

But later they set to work, and "September 11" was born. "September 11" was the deadening of September 11. It was deadened, like all images and ideas that are hallowed, by repetition, and also by sentiment, which is what our popular culture uses to drive away lasting significance.…

I know that Langewiesche knows this; but his articles are in their way complicit in the transformation of September 11 into "September 11," which was in large part a dissociation of the event's political and strategic aspects from the event's social and emotional aspects, so that what remained was a holy day and a homily about heroism.

This concentrated the American spirit, but it dispersed the American will. What we will be commemorating on September 11, after all, is the beginning of a war.

"They forget death, Basil," remarks the wife of the hero in the Howells novel, explaining why she does not wish to move to New York, "they forget death in New York." Her husband retorts with the metropolitan philosophy: "Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering it." These days they forget death less easily in New York; but in truth there can be a certain dignity in forgetting death. Life must not be a long mortification. The frontier between memory and morbidity must be vigilantly policed. But if death may be usefully forgotten, it may not be usefully misremembered. A shallow mourning is a hideous thing.


It is not enough that we remember September 11. We must remember it usefully.