Recently I have felt – more often than I'd like -- that September 11th was something I witnessed in a very bad dream or a documentary or some distant, irrelevant epoch of my life. It hasn't felt like something that happened fifteen blocks away from me, affecting people I know and a place I inhabit. After I "woke up" from my CNN-induced trance, I attributed this feeling to some sort of subconscious suppression. Then I began to think about the city's concerted attempts, say, to remove "missing" posters, which were especially prevalent in my neighborhood near the medical examiner's office and the East Side hospitals. Was my reaction the result of social engineering, delusion or something else?
A recent article in Salon by Daniel Harris, "The Kitschification of Sept. 11," suggests an interesting answer to this question. I'll just have to quote from it, rather than link, since it's from the "premium" content that only I have been sucker enough to purchase. In short, his essay posits that our collective memory of September 11th has been obscured by the accretion of kitsch. I'm not sure whether he ever does answer his own question: "does an event as catastrophic as this one require the rhetoric of kitsch to make it less horrendous?" But in showing how elements of the event that aren't kitsch-friendly have been papered over, he makes me think that the reason I sometimes feel like 9/11 didn't really happen, is that the 9/11 that we discuss now isn't the one that happened.
"Through kitsch," Harris begins, "we avert our eyes from tragedy, transforming the unspeakable ugliness of diseases, accidents and wars into something poetic and noble, into pat stories whose happy endings offer enduring lessons in courage and resilience. [...] Rather than making sincere efforts to understand the historical origins of the event in a protracted international conflict, we erect a schematic narrative that pitted absolute evil against absolute good, our own unwavering rationality against the delirium of crazed fanatics." Central to the development of our legend is the concept that we are completely innocent and were taken entirely by surprise.
Harris hits upon something very key here: to emphasize our side’s heroism and sacrifice, we must allocate our sympathy disproportionately. Firefighters are more palatable as heroes than office workers, he says, because they volunteered and because they were trying to save others – but they only represented 1/12 of the casualties. This last point squares with my own memories of the day -- at first all my coworkers and I were concerned for the civilians trapped within, who jumped from windows to avoid the fires. Only later, as the towers collapsed, did we think of the rescue workers. This reaction is more typical historically (aren’t we more horrified by the deaths of civilians?) but it’s not the one that has stuck.
Further, Harris exposes some of the more deceptive tactics of fundraisers. "[Children], and not adults, are easiest on the eyes, the most photogenic of panhandlers... Many did, of course, lose a parent, but many parents lost something equally important: their lives. Once again the primary victims of the tragedy were shuffled off to the sidelines to make room for a cast of more narratively appealing objects of compassion, much as the rescue workers were elevated into the starring roles of this 'Towering Inferno,' since their deaths were more dramatic than the banal denouements of file clerks collapsing at the water cooler and stock brokers suffocating in bathroom stalls." Yet it was while reading exactly these banal descriptions of Harris's that, for the first time in months, I once again felt what had actually happened.
What about advertisers that referred to 9/11 and our beleaguered economy to spur us to economic normalcy? According to Harris, they, too, are perpetrators of kitsch. "We discovered that we could have our cake and eat it too, enjoy that laptop or that surround-sound stereo system and simultaneously bask in the warm glow. If corporations engaged in charity impersonation, consumers engaged in a similar fraud: benefactor impersonation, with both parties participating in a mutually beneficial game of self-flattery." And who can deny that the endless commercials for, say, tanning salons offering 5% of their profits for the day to charity, have dulled our sense of what happened?
In the end, Harris has simply shown that in the war of What Happened Vs. What Appeals to Us, the latter is winning for now. With the Internet at our disposal, individuals have made an unusually large contribution to that construction. Which version will take the upper hand in the historical record is a question for which I think there is no adequate precedent to guide us.
[As for Harris, his essay veers off in an interesting direction at the end, and I'd be remiss in my summary to ignore the ending, odd though it is. Wondering at the perverse pleasure that people seemed to take in their communal mourning, he writes: "A society that seems to run by itself, that does not require us to perform any civic duties, is plagued by feelings of isolation and is particularly prone to bouts of pathological collectivity in which we hold old-fashioned neighborhood socials around a centerpiece of mangled corpses, a hideous incongruity that we hide behind a tearful mask of kitsch. In an atomized society, any crisis becomes a catalyst for instant togetherness in which the pleasure of companionship far exceeds the depths of sorrow, and our fierce tribal instincts reemerge with a vengeance, having been thwarted by the curse of autonomy that afflicts advanced Western cultures." Whether this post is "pathological," I would not venture to say.]
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