9/11: His Death Was His

If your child is musical

don't study piano

and if he's dying

stay off his turf

So begins a poem Charlotte Mayerson wrote after her son died of AIDS. Her book about losing him, The Death Cycle Machine, clarified the way I felt about a lot of things, but this most of all: Ownership of another's experience, and how violently opposed to it I am. Someone else's suffering is not yours, it's not for you, and while you can be profoundly changed by things that have happened to others, you can't forget who those things happened to.

I had to be slammed to the ground

A thousand times

Before I figured out

Whose tragedy it was

People said this stuff all the time, in the days following 9/11, and they're saying it again now, in the relentless waves of anniversary coverage. "This has reminded me of how short life is." Umm, okay? Great? For you? I'm sure every single dead person is grateful for the chance to give you a little psychic kick in the ass? "This has made me love my family more." "This has made me go back to church." "I'm going to learn more about the world now." Awesome! But wasn't it kind of a lot of pressure to put on New York, on its still-smoking skyline, to teach you a lesson?

Who is today for? I did not lose anyone on 9/11. There was a friend in Washington we didn't hear from, for a few hours, but he was fine. This 10-year anniversary is not prompting me to react with post-traumatic stress (unless the overwhelming snappish anger toward treacly remembrances counts). This isn't mine. It's not for me. There is no hole in my horizon. I've been to New York twice, liked it both times, love many people there. I've visited DC, seen the Pentagon before and since the attacks. But these places aren't my home, and I can't claim it as such. I wasn't breathing dust and ashes. I didn't hear the planes, or feel the ground shake.

Back to Mayerson again:

That, broken heart or no

I'd one day sip

Condolence tea with honey

While he would choke

On snow.

Maybe if I had lost someone, I would be grateful for an entire country of strangers honoring him with their thoughts, today. But part of me says that's not what we're doing, right now. My doctor's office runs The Today Show no matter how much I complain, so Friday while I waited to be seen I was stuck listening to Matt Lauer and his cast of pretty twerps telling us all how to feel, as if feeling is primarily what we're supposed to be doing here.

There was this rage-inducing Bush interview [video], where he was asked about what it was like "to be commander in chief on that day." Because primarily what we're concerned about here is how the costume felt. Not, why did you respond the way you did, not, why did you drag America into two unwinnable wars and fail to kill or capture the man responsible, not in what possible way did any of your justice department's failed prosecutions of suspected terrorists help keep us safe at all, but what was it like to be playing a real-life war games scenario? What was it like, in Presidential Candyland? The barely suppressed excitement, in that question, as if that moment was not the breaking apart of thousands of lives but the beginning of a grand adventure.

And why not, really? It's not as if we drew any profound connectedness from these events, after day three or so. Bush told us to go shopping and carry on like nothing had happened, and in large part we did that, those of us for whom this was something we watched from afar. Even now, it's like, "What wars?" We thought it was awesome that Obama managed to have bin Laden killed but then we went right back to trying to make the mortgage.

If any part of this belongs to the country, if any part of this belongs to "us" as a whole, it's in what came after. In our complicity in the wars, in how we failed to stop so much of the hysteria and fearmongering from taking us over. In our willingness to take anything and everything off at the airport and our steadfast refusal to consider a change in how we deal with the rest of the world. In how we made enemies of allies, fought wars basically to make our pundits feel good about themselves, keep electing people who can't solve problems ... that's what we all own. That's what we all did, and didn't do.

But that's not a spectacle. That's not a show. And that pales, doesn't it, next to the voice mail message someone can't erase, because then he'll never hear her voice again.

Today doesn't belong to "America." It belongs to the dead and to their families. To those who tried to stop it, and those who succeeded, and those who failed. That the rest of us watched it like a movie, that can't be avoided, but we can avoid being absolutely gross about it, pretending that gives us admission to the show. Someone's father is dead ten years today. Someone's mother would have had a birthday, seen a grandchild born. Someone's husband, someone's wife, someone's brother, someone's friend, someone's son, someone's daughter. Ten years of holidays, trips to the beach, missed. Ten years of aching loss.

Not mine. Theirs. Yours, maybe. You have my condolences.

Never forget, people will say today. Not thinking about how lucky they are, to be able to even consider the option. Thousands of families don't have to be told.

A.

Comments

[Escariot]

Jebus, thank you for this. reminds me (as IF I ever need to be reminded how much I love this place) how fortunate I am to know that there are a few, perhaps a very few, whose thoughts go along a similar line.

I went to a concentration camp in Germany (museum not as an inmate) and it was the opposite of this breathless gushing and accelerant for militarist passions. I was speechless....the power of seeing how unbelievably brutal we can be to one another, the machinery of it, the blindness on such a scale is horrifying.

I am working today, and with luck can sidestep the media hype. Not because I think these events were any less meaningful, but that the larger part of the meaning, the really pertinent bits, are absent, as your post and the poem so perfectly capture.

[PurpleGirl]

Good post, A.

I can avoid the TV shows by using my remote control and the on-line TV guide. I'll have to go out to avoid the commemorative ceremony for a probie fire fighter who lived in my complex. The family didn't want the memorial monument built to begin with, but the board of directors really wanted it. At least they didn't put it outside the building where the family lived. (No, they put it outside my building, under my windows, although I'm 17 stories up.) Three local politicians will be among the speakers at the ceremony which starts at 12:30, giving a half-hour to leave.

[pansypoo]

tragedy porn.

[idiosynchronic]

Thank you thank you thank you.

I earlier posted (elsewhere) that I was hard-hearted bastard today. This makes the point far better, and far more articulately.

[Jezebel]

This, so much. A., you and the Shrill One say what I would say today, if I were able to articulate it as precisely and eloquently as you both have.

[Tengrain]

My favorite writing teacher used to admonish us to know whose story it is and then get out of the way. I had a sign taped to the wall above my desk that said, "It's not about you." I wish all the pundits who make me crazy had a similar sign.

Your post is pitch-perfect. Thank you for saying it.

Regards,

Tengrain

[Hecate]

I love you.

[gene214]

I'm a former New Yorker(born and raised) now residing in FloriDUH (not retired by the way, but forced into exile by NY's exorbitant cost of living). I miss it dearly and have family who still live there and experienced 9/11 up close and personal. It was a terrible, frightening day - for them. Not for me - I was 1200 miles away. There is no personal loss for me, and I don't walk around acting like there was. But you listen to people down here in the Sunshine state, talking about how they've been affected by this "tragedy". Remember, these are the very same people, devoted FOX viewers not doubt, who shit on those "New York Liberuls" while making loathesome comments about "Jew York". Most of this 9/11 grief supposedly shared by the entire nation is really nothing more than media driven bullshit. Most Americans (you know, the one's Sarah call the "real" Americans) just use 9/11 as an excuse to rationalize all the horrible things that we, as a nation, knowingly, willingly, and enthusiastically supported in the ten years since That Day.

[Marc]

So perfect. Thank you.

[Diana]

Ooooh, finally, a place where I can post what I remember, because people will understand. I live in the east village of NYC, and after the towers fell (people watched them fall from the roof of my building) everyone ran around saying, "Did you lose someone? Did you know anyone there?" until finally a friend of mine who also lives in my building said to me and a bunch of other people, "I'm a documentary filmmaker in the East Village. I don't know anyone who's even up and dressed at nine am, let alone anyone at work, and I bet none of you do either."

Dead silence followed this statement, because it was true.

Me, what I want to commemorate is the PNAC, whose famous: "A New Defense of the Realm" or whatever it was that called for removing Saddam Hussein that would make everything just hunky-dory in the world for the American and Israeli empires, where are they? I don't seem to have heard much about the PNAC lately. So why isn't the realm hunky-dory?