the anniversary
Music: Marconi Union: 13 (2009)
It's difficult to let this day pass without acknowledging the life-changing events of this day nine years ago. After a fitful night (I had trouble sleeping) I awoke today to a long-list of to-dos, most of which involved sitting in front of a computer writing, or reading. I hit "send" on the last bit of work about ten minutes ago. Yes, I realize it is Saturday night and I have been working, but when you are naughty on one night you have to "make up for it." As I was working today, however, the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 did come to mind frequently. Since that time I've come to refer to the totality as, simply, "Nine-eleven." That day changed my life---frankly, all of our lives.
I don’t have anything particularly poignant to say, just the nagging guilt I should say something. I went over my vita briefly just now to see how much of my scholarship concerns the events of that fateful day. Five articles. I've written five things since Nine-eleven that reference the events of that day explicitly. And while I want to hold fast to the notion that my life is not reducible to my scholarship, I also know that my thinking-aloud-in-print is one of the many ways in which I process the world around me. All of us have "moved on" and mourned whatever it is that Nine-Eleven represents, but still: for my generation, Nine-eleven is a defining moment.
Much of my formative adult life has been spent in the wake of Nine-eleven. It's a strange dividing point. I remember what traveling was like before it. I was on the job market right after it happened; 22 airplane flights right after that fateful day. Turbulence in flight before the WTC fell was something of an amusement, like a roller coaster ride. After they fell, turbulence was a terror and reason for nightmares. I used to love flying; today I loathe it.
Like life defining moments of older generations---wars, JFK's assassination---I remember exactly where I was when the news broke. Prior to Nine-eleven, the life defining public event was OJ's car chase with the police. I was home for the summer during college, and my friend Jennifer called me and we watched a split screen television broadcast: on the right was president Clinton delivering an address to the country; on the left was an aerial shot of Simpson's black Bronco.
But Nine-eleven sticks even more vividly. I was writing my dissertation. My routine was to proofread what I had written the day before while swilling coffee and watching NBC's The Today Show. I remember Matt Lauer and Katie Couric reporting the confusion above them; initially the reports were that a small hobby aircraft had crashed into one of the towers. Then things become more ominous. When the second plane hit, my friend (and frequent commentator on this blog) David Beard phoned me. We had an essay in review about "real time" news coverage, and we were talking about how everything we had said in that essay was happening on television. We watched the television, on the phone together, and . . . just watched. At times silent. Slack-jawed, to be sure.
Nine-eleven has changed so much of what is "important" and affected our lives in so many ways, and much of that is ugly. In some sense, there's no way to disarticulate Obama's election to a collective need to mourn and move on. It seems like so much of the Bush regime was tied to milking that crisis and sense of anomie for this-or-that political end. While I'm critical of the Obama presidency, at the same time, I'm very thankful for the page-turning his election represented. The recession surely sucks, the cultural political stuff could certainly be better. Upon reflection, however, today (now September 12, 2010) I'm grateful that our collective obsession has shifted from warmongering to jobs. I'm grateful that it's possible to be reflective.
I'm grateful it is permissible to be critical again.