Category: Media & Culture

I’m going to try and at least appear to be doing some work today, rather than the torrent of blogging I indulged in yesterday. Therapeutic as it was, I run the risk of Letting the Bastards Win if I let them keep me from performing my duties much longer.

There seems to be — and not just in the not-nearly-as-overblown-as-it-might-have-been(-just-wait) media coverage — a real sense that Things Changed yesterday. The Universe turned the page, and there’s a new chapter heading up there, giving portents of what lies ahead, could we but read type that large.

Being of an historical bent, I’d rather wait for a few weeks, months, years, before leaping to that conclusion. I think there’s something to it, but trying to assume an historical perspective while in mid-crisis is always a good way to write comedy.

Sitting around the dinner table last night, we engaged in the “Where were you?” game. That, above all, may be the deciding factor as to how this affects us.

That and, what happens today? I mean, want a really panicky populace? Pull some crap today. Let folks think it’s a real trend, vs. a (hopefully) one-off tragedy. That would damage confidence, among other things.

I hope I am not being a Cassandra here.

The other thing we “need” is a pithy name. Most events of this sort get named after the location. Unfortunately (speaking with irony here), we have too many locations. “Remember the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and some field in Pennsylvania” doesn’t do much as a rallying cry, any more than it does would if you used the same phrase in a “Where were you?” activity. And the media’s “Attack on America” theme is kind of lame, too.

“Bloody Tuesday”? “The 11th of September”? (“Remember, remember // 11 September, // of aeroplane terror and plot …”)

I leave it to the media hacks.

I was reminded, as I considered my call yesterday to rebuild the WTC, of Babylon 5 and some dialog from the pilot episode, “The Gathering.”

DELENN: “Why Babylon 5? If the prior four stations were lost or destroyed, why build another?”

SINCLAIR: “Plain old human stubbornness I guess. When something we value is destroyed, we rebuild it. If it’s destroyed again, we rebuild it again … and again and again and … again. Until it stays. That as our poet Tennison once said is the goal: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.“

I don’t know as the WTC is as noble a symbol as B5. But it is, in some ways, a symbol which has been thrust upon us. To leave it as rubble, or to let something else take its place, would be, in some small way, an admission of defeat.

110 stories. Twice over.

Now think of the Murrah Building in OKC. Nine stories.

The mind reels.

Finally, there is this. We are what we let this make of us.

We may become fearful and isolationist. “Don’t let the bad people hurt us — withdraw from the world!” That’s been a typical, if unstated, theme in American history. Indeed, in some ways, that’s just what we’ve been doing in the early days of the Bush administration — pulling out of treaties, acting on our own, being unconcerned about what the rest of the world does. It may well be, though, that by having been attacked so publicly and bloodily, that we will break out of that typical funk — that we will realize, “The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.” (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings).

Or we may rage back in the other direction. Hunt ’em all down. They were Arabs? Attack the Arabs. They were Muslim? Attack the Muslims. Their leader was holed up in Kabul? Carpet-bomb Kabul. In which case, they have, ultimately, won, by transforming the US into just what they claim it is — a killer and bully and infidel. “It is hard to fight with anger; for what it wants it buys at the price of soul.” (Heraclitus)

And we may decide that the only way to proceed is to insist on safety — no matter how it encroaches on liberty. E-mail monitoring? Censorship? Political oppression? Restrictions on freedom? Those will give at least the illusion of safety, at the cost of privacy, freedom, and the value of open debate.

If I have prayers for the future, it is not for safety, for life itself is not safe, and while I may never be blown up by a terrorist bomb, I can as easily (and more likely) be hit by a car in a parking lot. And it’s not for vengeance, though I think that, right at this moment, I’d grimly and willingly flip the switch/drop the pill/open the scaffold/give the order to fire.

No — it’s that we (and by “we” I mean the US, and those who will stand with us) act in our response to this in a fashion that we can be proud of, that can be a model for others in the future. Justice, mercy, freedom, respect, tolerance, commitment. We find the guilty and punish them, but we do so in a fashion beyond reproach, even if it’s harder, even if it’s less satisfying in some atavistic sense. And we take steps to protect ourselves, but not in a way that unduly compromises the basic freedoms that we claim we stand for.

This can be our finest hour. I pray we don’t blow it, and that we use it to show the world that we are in fact that “shining beacon of freedom” that the President spoke of last night.

Risk more than others think is safe.
Care more than others think is wise.
Dream more than others think is practical.
Expect more than others think is possible.
— Cadet Maxim, West Point