WTC -- 9/11

Update/Re-cap (1:13 p.m.): Honestly, I didn't like having the unadorned 9/11 image on the blog. Too unsettling. In fact, I was going to bring in some YouTube footage from the day, but just didn't have the stomach for it. It almost fully recreates the experience; in fact, from my perspective (and the vast majority of the world's perspective) it does fully recreate the experience I had.

That's the idea we're going to start with tomorrow, keeping in mind the shared experiences of 9/11 that we talked about today in class. Namely dropping what you were doing, watching the non-stop coverage, not knowing what the heck was happening, connecting with loved ones, etc.

And then we're going to try to get at least a basic handle on "what the heck was [and wasn't] happening" and what 21CC those happenings raise.

One last thing. We only sort of obliquely mentioned this in class, but I see a connection between the 9/11 experience and the passage we read in White Noise today. Jack says:

I watched the audience. Folded arms, heads slightly tilted. The predictions did not seem reckless to them. They were content to exchange brief and unrelated remarks, as during a break for a commercial on TV. The tabloid future, with its mechanism of a hopeful twist to apocalyptic events, was perhaps not so very remote from our own immediate experience. Look at us, I thought. Forced out of our homes, sent streaming into the bitter night, pursued by a toxic cloud, crammed together in makeshift quarters, ambiguously death-sentenced. We'd become part of the public stuff of media disaster. The small audience of the old and blind recognized the predictions of the psychics as events so near to happening they had to be shaped in advance to our needs and wishes. Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept inventing hope.

First of all, what was/is 9/11 [i.e., Terrorism] but an ambiguous sort of "death sentence," not too unlike Jack's Nyolene-D "contamination?" It may get us, it may not -- but it's out there. And we're supposed to go and live our lives normally anyway because we don't have any other option.

And then there's the idea of a "hopeful twist to apocalyptic events," that "out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we kept reinventing hope."

I don't know if you were too young to remember this feeling, but the groundswell of unity and, yes, even hope in the days and months immediately after 9/11 was absolutely palpable. It was particularly intense in the U.S., but even abroad there was a circling of the wagons that brought people together. I would say that it produced a significantly larger sense of unity (and, yes, hope) than President Obama's election did. It crossed every kind of factional line -- politics, race, gender, class, age, etc.

Here's a pertinent NY Times book review of Middletown, America: One Town's Passage from Trauma to Hope. Also here's the NYT's 9/11 page -- which, as you can imagine, is enormous.

I'm not 100% sure what to make of these observations. At this point, I'm just making them. Let's keep these ideas on our radar as we move on throughout the week.