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The Rising One year later: finding little redemption in 9/11 by Rob Newcomb [Illustration by Dan Hertzberg] Over the past year, a variety of people - from my arch-conservative grandparents to my bleeding-heart liberal collegiate friends - have shared with me how they ultimately found some sort of redemption in the horrific mass murder that was September 11, 2001. Despite its immediately tragic quality, 9/11 seems to have re-committed, tied, redeemed - you pick the verb - many Americans to family, country, justice, morality. |
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There has been a rebirth of what the United States government, and especially the current Republican administration, likes to define as the nation's core values. 9/11-as-redemption can be found in the Ad Council's current television spot showing a street of identical clapboard houses. Each house flies the American flag, while a voiceover ironically notes that those who perpetrated the violence of last September did so, successfully, to "change America forever." The implication is clear: Americans have been brought together under a new patriotism, which will transcend all manner of political scandal and other problems, and last, well, forever.
The street filmed could be part of any American city, but it looks mysteriously like Providence. While some of the flags in this city have been taken down and stored inside, many remain outside, on porches and lawns. This means that regardless of what whiny leftists like myself might want, post-9/11 patriotism is an immediate reality, if not as permanent a fixture of the national landscape as the conservative government would like Americans to believe. Patriotism, and its redemptive offspring, are very real this year, and will be into the future. Let's start at the mall: in terms of consumerism, Americans have displayed their renewed faith in their country and countrymen in the American flag pins and FDNY hats they wear. At its most elegant, redemption can be found in popular music in Bruce Springsteen's song "The Rising," which juxtaposes the image of firemen entering the World Trade Center with the kind of populist and evangelical message that is Springsteen's stock in trade. At its crudest, the post-9/11 ethic's effect on popular music can be heard on classic rock radio, which now peppers songs like "For Those About to Rock" by AC/DC, with patriotic sound-bytes from President Bush. I'm not a fan of the doctored AC/DC, but I find the "The Rising" moving. In this way, even I have experienced the alleged redemptive quality of 9/11, even if I don't like to buy into it. Try not to get beer on the flag Last September, my particular response to the attacks was less than typical. At odds with nearly all of my family and friends, I did not support US military action in Afghanistan; I wanted a multilateral, diplomatic solution involving the UN and the International Court of Justice, and a minimum of military intervention. In the shock of the week following the attacks, I couldn't formulate a specific, viable course of action (neither could anyone, in my opinion - and this includes the government). I just had an intuitive fear of military action, and an aversion to military solutions in general. This desire didn't seem extreme to me, just a little utopian. Beyond policy, I was dealing in those first weeks with a much-exaggerated fear of forced military service, which assumed that Operation Infinite Justice wouldn't go so well. This fell somewhere in between fear of having to kill someone and fear of being killed: the product of both pacifism and cowardice, or at least a lack of a killer instinct. I adopted the Vietnam-esque plan of defection to Canada following graduation from Brown in May. But as US and Northern Alliance troops quickly rolled into Kabul, the need for the government to draft the likes of me quickly subsided, as did my fear of forced enlistment. My plans to settle in the Great White North were put on hold. While I waxed pacifist and paranoid, nearly everyone I knew began flying the flag - at least metaphorically. I couldn't understand how this would help the situation, and on a more basic level, I didn't feel the need to partake in a display of patriotism. Instead, I felt a kind of repulsion. I know this may seem offensive to a lot of you, but bear with me. Instinctively, nationalism seemed to me to be more a cause of 9/11 than an appropriate, redemptive response, but almost no one I talked to agreed with me - and these were people at Brown! My roommate, formerly of the same leftist mold as myself, stuck an American flag sticker on our house beer pong table. I guess it was his way of supporting our troops - as both a patriot and a beer lover - and was done, I believe, without irony. But I couldn't understand it. This lack of comprehension of what those around me were feeling and doing was the hardest part of 9/11 for me to deal with. One year on, some of the more atypical reactions to 9/11 - from my roommate's beer-patriotism fusion to my own plot to defect - seem equally misplaced and equally forgivable, despite their divergent locations on the scale of patriotism. It is logical that many people reacted to September 11 in ways that a year later might seem out of character and even misplaced, given the traumatic, shocking quality of the events of one year ago. It was, after all, a surreal few weeks, if not a surreal year as a whole, even for those beyond the direct impact of the attacks. Power politics A couple of disclaimers before I go on: I have no immediate connection to 9/11. Like the majority of Americans, my experience with the attacks began with mid-morning televised coverage, and has essentially remained indirect. No one I knew died, went to Afghanistan, or lost a job in the economic fallout that followed. Some positive things came out of 9/11, as even I can admit. The Taliban government, for example, deserved to be overthrown - its demise was a direct result of 9/11. Redemption, however, does not fall under this category. I still refuse to believe that anyone was redeemed by September 11, or brought together on a national level under anything other than bogus nationalism. No one-myself included-has the human capacity or authority to react to 9/11 with the kind of alleged moral mandate the US government has claimed in the past year. This mandate, largely deriving from 9/11's status as unique, particular, and even transcendental, is bogus, and carried out by a leader who notably was brought to power with the barest shred of legitimacy. While the Bush administration has conveyed its actions of the past year as guided by some moral mandate, in reality they've been defined by the same fear, anger and power politics that they always have been. Militarism, nationalism - isms in general (including my pacifism) are morally messy, fundamentally human and not close to redemptive. September 11 was a violent, political act with a political target, and which inspired a violent, political response. That its victims were human should not obscure the fact that it can be looked at as one in a series of violent acts that could be blamed on US policy decisions in the Middle East. In looking at these acts, and in listening to (or disregarding) anyone spouting off on September 11, myself included, be skeptical, and when in doubt, don't give them an inch. Rob Newcomb GS likes AC/DC just fine, as long as it's not doctored. |