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Nothing brings drunk-blogging to the yard like the anniversary of 9/11. Americans are gaudy in their grief. They flaunt it as a badge of honor and expect the rest of the world it share it, or, if that is not possible, to be quietly awed by it. I do not doubt that the reams of somber tributes and elegies and remembrances are sincere, but Americans are by nature a competitive bunch, and many of the entries smack of contestants in a grief pageant, missives that trip over themselves to showcase their profundity and their eloquence and their enlightened sense of social empathy. In their crasser incarnations, they become shrill, embarrassing instances of "My grief, let me show you it, for it is bigger than yours", but most of them are earnest attempts to show what good and proper Netizens, what good and proper Americans they are. They are written because the writer believes he has a moral imperative to demonstrate their fundamental Americanness by wallowing in the slimy residue of national tragedy and engaging in emotional vamparism.
It is, I think, a quintessentially American phenomenon, one not limited to the 9/11 attack. Hurricane Katrina's cataclysmic, wretched aftermath is similarly eulogized. On July 7, 2007, terrorists bombed the London tube system. People died because fanatics were willing to murder the innocent in the name of an extremist, warped ideology, and Britain mourned its violation, as they should have done, as was right and proper for any people endowed with conscience. But three years on, I don't see many Britons blubbing into their cuppa or commemorating the tragedy with ponderous, introspective whiffling. The rest of the world, it seems, quietly goes about the business of getting on with it.
We Americans have a disturbing penchant for picking at the bones of our dead and calling them touchstones.
The victims of 9/11 should be remembered, certainly, but so much of our collective remembrance speaks to appropriation, and it makes me uncomfortable. Yes, 9/11 changed my country, my future, and the world in which I live, but that more immediate grief of loss is not mine. I lost no one in 9/11, and none of me and mine was directly affected. Therefore, I'm not about to sit here and pretend that the events of that morning have been at the forefront of my mind. They weren't. I watched TV and rode out a thunderstorm and prayed that the announcers wouldn't pick at our favorite national scab too intently.
They didn't. Thank God.
I am sorry three thousand innocent people died because they went to work, and I hope the hijackers are roasting in Hell and begging their victims' forgiveness. I'm sorry that two planes and a handful of lunatics knocked my country from its foundations and turned us into a nation of zealots, hatemongers, and fearful, unthinking peons willing to cede our freedoms and restrict the freedoms of others to "protect" a way of life we destroy with each new concession, each new fetter placed on our citizenry to shield it from the sharp edges of liberty and diversity of thought and preserve the comforting illusion of the status quo. I am sorry, and I do mourn that, but I'm not going to indulge in the annual grief pageant that swamps the Internet. 9/11 changed the world, but it did not change my internal world. It did not change me. I am as I was nine years ago, if a little older.
I am still me, and here in the house in the foothills, it's the same as it ever was, the same as it will be tomorrow.
It is, I think, a quintessentially American phenomenon, one not limited to the 9/11 attack. Hurricane Katrina's cataclysmic, wretched aftermath is similarly eulogized. On July 7, 2007, terrorists bombed the London tube system. People died because fanatics were willing to murder the innocent in the name of an extremist, warped ideology, and Britain mourned its violation, as they should have done, as was right and proper for any people endowed with conscience. But three years on, I don't see many Britons blubbing into their cuppa or commemorating the tragedy with ponderous, introspective whiffling. The rest of the world, it seems, quietly goes about the business of getting on with it.
We Americans have a disturbing penchant for picking at the bones of our dead and calling them touchstones.
The victims of 9/11 should be remembered, certainly, but so much of our collective remembrance speaks to appropriation, and it makes me uncomfortable. Yes, 9/11 changed my country, my future, and the world in which I live, but that more immediate grief of loss is not mine. I lost no one in 9/11, and none of me and mine was directly affected. Therefore, I'm not about to sit here and pretend that the events of that morning have been at the forefront of my mind. They weren't. I watched TV and rode out a thunderstorm and prayed that the announcers wouldn't pick at our favorite national scab too intently.
They didn't. Thank God.
I am sorry three thousand innocent people died because they went to work, and I hope the hijackers are roasting in Hell and begging their victims' forgiveness. I'm sorry that two planes and a handful of lunatics knocked my country from its foundations and turned us into a nation of zealots, hatemongers, and fearful, unthinking peons willing to cede our freedoms and restrict the freedoms of others to "protect" a way of life we destroy with each new concession, each new fetter placed on our citizenry to shield it from the sharp edges of liberty and diversity of thought and preserve the comforting illusion of the status quo. I am sorry, and I do mourn that, but I'm not going to indulge in the annual grief pageant that swamps the Internet. 9/11 changed the world, but it did not change my internal world. It did not change me. I am as I was nine years ago, if a little older.
I am still me, and here in the house in the foothills, it's the same as it ever was, the same as it will be tomorrow.
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