From the issue dated September 28, 2001
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Toward the 'New Normal'By EDWARD T. LINENTHAL
One of the things I've been thinking about today is: Somewhere down the line, when we are engaging and struggling with this event without the visceral immediacy of now, I think it is going to be very difficult for those people who deal with cultural representations -- aesthetic, historical, or whatever. We already have films that have imagined these sorts of scenarios, but those always have happy endings, and this didn't. What has happened is imaginatively unmapped terrain, and we are likely to fall back on familiar narratives, story lines, slogans, rhetoric -- none of which will be able to approach the magnitude of this catastrophe. I'm reminded of a phrase that people use in Oklahoma City, and there the phrase works (it's not going to work in New York or Washington for a long time yet); they talk about the "new normal." There's a sense in my mind that we live now in a kind of alien, foreboding, frightening landscape, and we're searching for the resources with which to deal with it. And I find myself uncomfortable with the understandable but, I think, problematic narrative of civil or national renewal that's already begun to be formed. "Yes, it was horrible, but ... it will bring us together." "Yes, it was horrible, but if it results in a, b, and c ..." That is so false to the horror and evil of the event. It's obscene rhetoric to me. This is a time to be silent and filled with awe in the face of the power of evil and the enormity of mass death, and not to begin to extract redemption from it. To wriggle out of this horror in redemptive ways is false to the power of the event and dishonors the dead. Obviously, there are tremendous differences from Oklahoma City -- particularly the scale of death. September 11 was a day of mass death that far surpassed Oklahoma City, Pearl Harbor, or other attacks on the United States. It was a qualitatively different event from anything that has ever happened. And I think it's going to be a while before we get a sense of the new landscape. This has created a psychic, social, cultural earthquake of such massive proportions that we aren't going to know for a very, very long time -- maybe, it would be better said that we will know only little by little, in different nooks and crannies of the culture -- what the "new normal" is going to look like. I never, ever will use the word "closure" again, except to talk about it in angry ways, because there is no such thing. I think it's a horrific pop-psychology term. There are events to be endured, not resolved, and I think that is something Americans have a very difficult time with. People sometimes -- not all the time -- integrate violent loss into their lives. One thing we know is that the lives created after such events are new lives; they are not the old lives. That is what we are now facing, as individuals, as cities, as states, and as a culture. The "new normal" in America, what America is, is going to be redefined by this event. When the rubble is gone, months down the road, and there's this toxic, haunted place, transformed by the deaths of thousands of people, is that, in fact, going to be a site where you can go back to business as usual? That will be a tremendously interesting, contentious, vexing question, I suspect. Even after Oklahoma City, the impact of that bombing on the wider culture, and even across the world, was absolutely stunning. I think largely because of the media, people felt enfranchised, sending in thousands of memorial ideas, writing family members of the casualties, acting as if survivors and family members were friends, sending money, sending statues, in some cases, in a darker way, even stalking mothers of the murdered children, whom they had seen on television, and becoming infatuated with them. So this kind of pseudo-intimacy -- media-intimacy is a perhaps more nonjudgmental term -- is going to be re-created here on an even larger scale. It's a very complex business, because people who have lost loved ones not only are used by the media, but also use the media. I don't mean that negatively; it's a form of public eulogy for loved ones. The deaths in Oklahoma City and the deaths here -- these are now very public deaths. They are not the anonymous deaths of the violence that we've all learned to live with. They are not the anonymous deaths of business as usual on the nation's highways, or the deaths of those distanced by caricature and stereotype, like the people who died at Waco -- cult members, fanatics, zombies, people who are not like us and whose deaths do not count in the same way. The fact that these deaths are public, and their scale, will make dealing with them incredibly challenging. I think the next few months are going to be some of the most turbulent months we have ever, ever lived through, in terms of setting foreign policy and trying to get some semblance of the fabric of everyday life restored. Because we're going to be living with the images of rescue and recovery for a very long time. Edward T. Linenthal is a professor of religion and American culture at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B4
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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Reflections on the Fractured Landscape |
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