Insult to Injury

I was working two jobs at the time, one in Greenwich Village and one two blocks east of the WTC. PhysioWife and I watched the planes hit the towers on teevee and then both left for work–she to Midtown and I to Greenwich Vilage–clearly in severe denial about the gravity of the situation. I was on the downtown subway in the thirties, when someone on the train said, “A plane has hit the Pentagon”. My immediate reaction was, “No, way. That can’t be true.” The train stopped at Union Square, and the conductor announced that the train was stopping and everyone should get out.

I exited to the street, and walked down to Greenwich Village to my job there. When I tried to contact PhysioWife by cell phone and by land line, there were only busy signals. Fortunately, we both had Blackberries, and were able to communicate via e-mail. We immediately agreed to walk home and meet there. I was fortunately also able to communicate with my friends and colleagues working two blocks east of the WTC and ascertain that they were ok, and most of them were staying put, on very high floors of a nearby office building.

On my way walking back home, I passed a van parked on the side of the road that had a generator and a teevee playing (why, I have no idea). As I walked by, I heard people gasping that the first tower had fell. I quickened my pace and wanted nothing more than to get home to PhysioWife. We finally arrived home and fell into each other’s arms.

That afternoon, we decided to walk around our neighborhood, as apparently did many other people. Everyone looked pretty dazed, but you could tell people were thirsting for human contact. That evening, we felt like we couldn’t stay inside our apartment, and so we went to a local Italian restaurant that we were very frequent patrons at. The place was fucken *packed* with people, and everyone was drinking more than usual and sort of frantically socializing.

at a new-ish job in northern NJ just outside of NYC, even at that close range I still only just barely “experienced” anything first hand (the smoke was visible from the top of my building) and after attempting to teach that afternoon, I curled up in bed alone for the first time feeling like moving across the country all by myself for a job might have not been the best idea.  It felt very very lonely.  

I choose to blog about it today in connection with ideas of public memory and how commemorations do (or do not) ultimately alter how events are remembered.  In addition to the excellent resources you listed, above (particularly love the Oral history projects) Salon had a pretty interesting three part slideshow/commentary that (unevenly) examined the cultural manifestations of 9/11, but the thing that moved me most was the “material culture” slide show of things people kept from 9/11 on the NYTs

Thanks for this post.  As someone who watched the events of 2001 from afar, I agree that both the event and the annual commemorations are a very different experience for those of us who don’t live in the East and don’t have an immediate connection to the people killed or families maimed by the terrorist attacks 10 years ago.  And yet, I find myself emotional and deeply disturbed by what I see as a mainstream media effort to re-traumatize us all with those spectacularly horrifying photographs and replays of the voicemail messages from the doomed and desperate.  I don’t know how they must sound to the survivors and the families of those who didn’t survive, but to me it seems prurient or even almost pornographic.

I certainly mean no disrespect either to the survivors, the dead, or the families of the dead.  We must remember, but I’m disturbed by the tone and intensity of the commemoration this year.  (Perhaps this will sound like the complaint of someone who was safely isolated from the horror and only watched it on the teevee.  If so, I apologize.)

And yet, I find myself emotional and deeply disturbed by what I see as a
mainstream media effort to re-traumatize us all with those
spectacularly horrifying photographs and replays of the voicemail
messages from the doomed and desperate.

Yes, this is calculated and intentional. The idea is to divert attention away from the gross culpability of that same mainstream media in the rending of the fabric of American society that has occurred in the ten years since that day, and their abject repudiation of the moral and political obligations of the fourth estate.

Thanks, TR and CPP.  I think it’s worthwhile to ask what the purpose or the intended effect is of returning us to the moment rather than (as you both suggest) reflecting on the last 10 years of politics and foreign policy in the wake of 9/11/2001.  It’s easy to cry and hug our loved ones and remember a day on which good v. evil seemed perfectly clear, but more difficult to analyze and consider the causes and effects of bin Laden’s attack.

At about 11 a.m. Eastern time, I pulled into my parking lot at UMass Amherst and wondered why someone was sitting in his truck with the door opening and the radio blasting some kind of news report about what I quickly realized was a disater somewhere. I had left my home in Middlebury, Vermont, about three hours earlier, so that I could make it to work in time to have lunch and photocopy some handouts before my 1 p.m. class–Introduction to World Religions. (At the time, my wife taught at Middlebury College, and I did most of the commuting.) Sometimes I listened to NPR on the drive, but three hours is long enough for an opera, and that day I had decided to listen to “Don Giovanni.” I’ll always associate that opera with that day. It wasn’t until I got to my office, a 5-minute walk away, that I found someone who could tell me what happened.

Of course, classes were cancelled once the enormity of what had happened became clear, but I went to my classroom to inform any students who hadn’t gotten the message. I don’t remember whether anyone was there; what I do recall, two days later, was having an urgent need to tell students that they shouldn’t judge all Muslims based on this act, any more than that they should judge all Christians based on what Timothy McVeigh had done. That sense was honed after reading about the Sikh gas station owner in the southwest (Arizona? New Mexico?) who was killed by someone who thought he was a Muslim.

My other strong memories, a decade later:

–Trying to figure out exactly what had happened from my office, back when streaming video on the Internet was fairly new. I also recall various rumors, which turned out to be false, about car bombs in DC.

–Speculating over lunch with friends and colleagues about how many people might have been in the towers. In a certain sense it was a relief that the first plane hit relatively early in the day; the toll might have been ten times as high.

–The paranoia that briefly seized me on my commute for the next few weeks, when any truck that didn’t seem right (dirty license plate, etc.) would set alarm bells ringing in my head.

And while I didn’t know anyone who was killed in the attacks, I had a meeting scheduled the following week with one of them, Chris Carstanjen, who worked in IT for UMass and was on American Airlines flight 11 that day.

Right now I’m in Paris, where I feel somewhat insulated from the commemoration circus despite an idiotic report on France 3 last night about how “all Americans” were still “traumatized” by the event.

I debated whether to post this, as how I heard isn’t so much interesting as generationally illuminating.  I was two weeks into my high school senior year on September 11, 2001, and living in the same in which town I grew up, a small city in western Canada.  My father woke me up early on Sept. 11, running into my room, shouting that planes had struck the WTC in New York and up to 30,000 had died.  I scrambled to the TV, watched horrified with the rest of my family as the second tower fell, and then had to go to school, where every classroom had CNN blasting (except, oddly, mine–after 20 minutes, my chemistry teacher insisted that nothing more could be known or done, and then he proceeded to teach chemistry for 3 hours, though I doubt anyone learned much).  

The reason I’m posting, though, is not so much because of how I heard but what it represented for the odd generation I’m a part of, the “Millenials.” We heard a lot about a loss of innocence on 9/11, but I think it was more of a loss of a certain kind of innocent worldview; growing up in the 1990s, I was too young to remember the Soviet threat, but nearly an adult, on Sept. 11, 2001.  The 1990s was a brutal decade on much of the planet, but in suburban North America, we lived in what my teachers called “the End of History”–basically, an unthreatened and unthreatening world.  We were assured that never again would we be called into war as our grandparents were, or live under a dark shadow as our parents did: in fact, my clearest memory of September 11, 2001, was the assumption among my 17-and-18 year-old classmates that this was it–World War III–that we would shortly be called in to fight the kind of threat that was supposed to have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union when we were 4 or 5 years old (and indeed, in some ways, we called in just that way–I couldn’t have imagined on September 10, 2001, that the kids I’d babysat all summer, would 10 years later be coming back from their second tour in Afghanistan; by 11 am on September 11, it wouldn’t have surprised me).  Even now, I don’t see this kind of shattered worldview in anyone but those individuals who are within 5 years of my age: to my (Cold War era) parents, post-Sept. 11 was simply a return to the world of external threats they were familiar with; to my freshman students, who this year were mostly born in 1993, that threat–in the form of Sept. 11th–is simply a constant fact that has existed most of their lives.  So I suppose that the Sept. 11th didn’t really change my life, but it certainly changed my understanding of my life–it was the End of the End of History.  

Kevin: shameless plugs with great material are more than welcome — thank you.

Not gonna bother with “where was I?” since it starts like many others, with a phone call and insistent instructions to turn on the TV.  How have things changed?
My commute takes me past the Pentagon.  For a couple of years after the attack, soldiers were posted in armored personnel carriers with 50-caliber machine guns by the highway.  Eerie…especially at night, when you could see the soldier’s silhouette and car lights glinted off the gun barrel.  Then they moved the road.  Soldiers may still be posted, but we don’t drive by them anymore.
My commute also takes me through Anthrax Alley, in front of the Capitol Police headquarters.  That block was closed for about a year.  Other roads are closed, converted to one-way, watched by uniformed patrols 24/7.  This is the campus of the U.S. Capitol, no longer a place to roam free.  One of the best views in the city—the west side porch of the Capitol looking towards the Washington Monument—is completely blocked off from pedestrian traffic…originally for a reconstruction project, but they keep finding excuses to keep it closed.  Big events on the Mall, like July 4 fireworks?  Gotta go through metal detectors and bag inspections.  I don’t avoid events because of terrorists, but I do avoid events with lots of “security” attached.
The Capitol Police force has at least tripled in personnel.  The landscaping budgets are all spent on bollards and walls that might stop a truck or car (though not a plane…).  Enormous planters are positioned in the middle of roads, filled with flowers…which only calls attention to the weirdness of them being in the middle of the road.
It hasn’t helped that there have been other incidents—domestic terrorism—at the U.S. Capitol, the Holocaust Museum, the Metro stop at the Pentagon, the Discovery Channel building.  We were reminded the other day, after the earthquake, that there still isn’t a coordinated evacuation plan for D.C.  Stuff is going to happen.  If you are going to live here, you can’t dwell on those possibilities.
Do I feel safer for all this “security”?  No.  Do I feel like I live in a police state?  Yeah, sometimes.  Does this sound like the kind of environment you want in your town?  Can this be localized to things that really should be protected, like power plants and water systems?  Or can we expect that future investment in infrastructure means building a fence around the plant instead of replacing old pipes and roads?  Is there any chance of walking this back, not acting out of fear and reinforcing fear factors at every turn?

TR, thank you for including linking me live to your wonderful post. You write “We also believe that life can sometimes become so saturated with commemoration that as citizens we become besieged by memory and unable to recall what it is, exactly, we experienced.” This wonderful sentence is so provocative to me. The idea that we remember ourselves out of real memory is powerful, and I think a great possibility when emotionalism is the main content of the so-called commemorations. Where is the truth telling? 

Great post.