Excavating Tragedy

Well, it looks like my post for the week made everyone's lack of interest in the subject quite manifest. The odd thing is that I didn't even want to post it myself. But since I am rebellious by nature (which becomes really odd when I rebel against my own rebellion and post something that really annoys me), I did it anyways. I don't even like talking about 9/11. The political debates surrounding it disgust me. The sentimentalism that pervades it makes me want to vomit. The uninformed, uncritical, cowboy-driven patriotism that has resulted from it (ironically) makes me ashamed to be an American. Layer after layer of emotions and reactions distance me (and, I'm presuming, others) from being able to "access" the event itself. The fact that its only reality to most of us is mediated through television, radio, internet, etc., distances us even further. And yet, when we speak of the Holocaust or Pearl Harbor or the World Wars, we're not confronted with such layers of repulsion. Is this a problem? Sure, all of those events are mediated to us as well - literature, anecdotes, etc. - but the type and level of mediation are not the same as what we have now. Now, we have witnessed an event of large proportions happen (whether in real time or not) and we're so distanced from it that we are unable to speak of it without resorting to partisan dialogue or narcissistic, sentimentalized reflections on our personal lives (religion, romance, etc.). The internet and other forms of media provide what seems to be an unprecedented forum for this layering effect to occur.

How do we engage this event? There's of course a large degree to which such tragedy goes beyond words. But is such silence becoming epidemic? The things of which we speak when we do speak of 9/11 have very little to do with the event itself. For example, we get lost in conversations about "terror" and "national security" at the cost of asking the much simpler question of "why did this happen?" The truth is that America fears the answer. We don't want to be exposed as being complicit in the tragedy that happened on September 11. We've masked the real issues with rhetoric of "terror" which is a concept that is inherently inconceivable. I would think that honoring the dead means precisely that we should ask such questions, not avoid them. Trying to combat "terror" from a top-down approach (organization first, ideology second) simply isn't going to work. I don't claim to have the answers for what will work effectively but I think asking the right questions is a good place to start.

Round 2 is served so drink up.