9-11-2011

I don’t think it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to admit, but I avoided the 9/11 coverage as much as possible this past weekend.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to remember, though.  I didn’t want to remember it the way that everyone seemed to think I was supposed to remember that day.

I mourn what we lost on that day ten years ago.  But it’s not the four thousand lives that cause my tears.  It’s not that great scar on the New York skyline I think about.  The lives lost did not belong to people I knew, so my life is not diminished by their absence.  New York, to me, is just another city, so the loss of its great iconic buildings means little to me.

I want to make a great, sweeping statement about how we lost our way in the days following 9/11.  I want to say that America was still on the path to greatness on 9/10, but then fear and ruinous, senseless, blind retaliation emptied our coffers and drained our future potential.  But I cannot.  The world does not allow us to wrap it up in a neat little metaphor.  I know too much about who we were before to pretend that we were something different after.

On Friday I received an unexpected package from Amazon.  It contained the copy of Lawrence Weschler’s newest book, Uncanny Valley.  The subtitle of the book is Adventures in the Narrative, but I think there’s a better way to express the contents of the book.  If you know anything about the term “uncanny valley” you know it is a term that expresses the space between the obviously not-human and the authentically human.  It’s the spot where the brain stops saying, “Wow, that’s a really good likeness of a person,” and starts saying, “What the hell is wrong with that person?”

That’s what Uncanny Valley is: a collection of essays on the nature of what it means to be human.  Weschler’s essays work in toward that question in his typical fashion, through the study of art and justice.  This is how I spent a good chunk of September 10th reading stories of people who stood up to oppressive regimes in the name of human rights.  It’s how I spent time on September 10th reading Weschler’s report from the negotiations that created the International Criminal Court in Rome.

It’s how I spent September 10th angry with America.  The American delegation did everything in its power to strip the ICC of any sort of reach or jurisdiction.  They claimed they wanted to protect American soldiers on peace missions from being prosecuted for war crimes.  In reality, America wanted to avoid having to risk having its leaders called on charges of war crimes.

I’m sure that there are people out there who would read this and nod sadly, thinking of Iraq and Afghanistan and saying, “Damn that George W. Bush,” or considering Cambodia and saying, “That fucking Nixon.”  But the President who presided over America’s obstructionism at the conference to create the ICC was William Jefferson Clinton.

This, of course, followed the United States’ refusal to sign the UN’s Genocide Convention for 40 years.  And it came on the heels of the United States not ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child, joining only Somalia in that august role.  Of course, Somalia doesn’t have a government, so they have an excuse.  This also followed on the heels of the United States’ refusal to sign to the Ottawa Treaty, which would have gotten rid of anti-personnel landmines.  The United States’ stance on this puts them on the same side as such human rights luminaries as China, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Libya, Israel, and Vietnam.  Finland also isn’t a party, along with South Korea, India, and Pakistan.  But I suspect the latter three aren’t involved because they’re planning to have to go to war with non-signatories in the future.  I don’t know what Finland’s reasoning is, though.

Of course we can’t consider the United States’ attempts to thwart the ICC, or lack of ratification of the Ottawa Treaty and Convention on the Rights of the Child without also considering the US’s past failings on the international stage.  There was the League of Nations debacle, for one.  Then there was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which the US used as an excuse to send the Marines in to Latin American nations at the turn of the 20th Century to act as debt collectors for European imperial interests.

I think the most fitting note that I read about the tenth anniversary came from the pages of Weschler’s Uncanny Valley.  It wasn’t his essay about Ground Zero, however.  It was from an essay on people dealing with those disappeared by their own governments in Latin America.  But the words weren’t even about that.  They were from an essay about World War II by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

We have learned history, and we claim that it must not be forgotten.  But are we here not the dupes of our emotions?  If ten years hence, we reread these pages and so many others, what will we think of them?  We do not want this year of 1945 to become just another year among many.  A man who has lost his son or a woman he loved does not want to live beyond that loss.  He leaves the house in the state it was in.  The familiar objects upon the table, the clothes in the closet mark an empty place in the world…The day will come, however, when the meaning of these clothes will change: once…they were wearable, and now they are out of style and shabby.  To keep them any longer would not be to make the dead person live on; quite the opposite, they date his death all the more cruelly.[1]

I’m not saying we need to forget 9/11.  I think we just need to stop being told to think about it every time we turn around.  To live in that moment is to live in a moment of irrational fear.  We cannot survive as a nation if we live only in irrational fear.

We must, to borrow from Merleau-Ponty, make room again in the national closet.

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Of course it would be nice to be able to look back ten years from now and say, “I am proud of what we have done and who we have become since September 11, 2011.  That is a much harder thing to achieve, however.  It requires ignoring the raised voices that conflate “patriotism” and “unflagging obeisance to some imaginary America.”

America is a place and a nation, but it’s also a people and a set of ideals.  People can change.  Ideals can be discussed, dissected, and realized.  Nothing is set in stone.

That is why the true patriot starts with questions and only reaches answers after long and thoughtful deliberation.

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[1]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The War Has Taken Place.”  In “Gazing Back: The Disappeared,” in Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, Lawrence Weschler (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011), 112-113.  Originally published in Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 150-151.

Also, good gravy, I probably got that footnote wrong.

Comments

[The Everlasting Dave]

Whereas Glenn Beck's 9/12 Project is roughly the opposite of everything you just said. Because jingoism, xenophobia, and ignorance FUCKING RULE.

[Inquisitive Raven]

I didn't so much avoid the coverage as I ignored it and got on with my life. By contrast, my housemate who is an NPR junkie declared a moratorium on radio from 9/10-9/12 because she couldn't deal with NPR's coverage. So, you're not alone.

[Janet]

Before 9/11 was "Patriot Day", it was my sister's wedding anniversary. Since she had first dibs on the eleventh, I refuse to acknowledge the newly minted holiday. While the rest of this country donned its crown of thorns, I turned the other cheek and sent my sister a card.