9/11 twelve months on
A year later, nothing really has changed, or has it?
I remember where I was when I first heard….
"Someone’s just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center." I remember hearing these words – where I was, what I was doing, who I was with. It was 7:45 on the morning of September 11 and I was on my way to teach the first class of a new term. I remember my initial response: some guy in a twin-engine, no doubt, another nutter like the guy who parachuted into that boxing ring a few years back.
And then I remember coming out of the class an hour later to see how the world had changed. A crowd standing silently around a TV set up in the hallway, watching the spectacle of horror before them. Not a lone nutter, then, but something very different. Something much, much worse. Already, even that same day, there was an awareness that things would never be the same again.
A week later, we were at the zoo with our then two-year-old daughter. Passing the yet-to-be-built Africa exhibit, I flinched as a plane passed overhead on its way to Calgary airport. I remember flinching. This is it, then, a world in which every airliner represents a potential threat, in which all the old assumptions about daily dangers (random assaults, deranged postal workers, drunk drivers, vengeful students, etc.) are laughingly obsolete, in which even a day at the zoo is lined with fear.
Yet in the first weeks after 9/11 (as it is now impossible not to call the events of that day, it seems), there were signs of hope. President Bush’s not unreasonable claim that this was an attack on all the civilized world, not just America; Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente’s reciprocal claim that we were "all Americans" now; a response to the disaster itself not yet shrouded in the Stars and Stripes but marked by a common courage, resolution and determination. In those moments, our national differences – cultural, social, political, historical – were exposed as shamefully trivial, no more than the differences that separate two species of lemur.
And then… and then. Within weeks, the much-vaunted "War On Civilization" had become "America’s New War." I know this, as CNN nightly (and seemingly eternally) declared this new designation for the attack. Even as protests about Bush’s failure to list Canada among America’s friends were being voiced here, the U.S. government made it clear that it and it alone would determine the timing, scale and objectives of any military response. The UN, NATO, NORAD and any other collective acronym would not be consulted – at least not before the fact, it appeared.
And then there was the promise of political and cultural self-examination. Americans – individually and collectively – rejected any "blame-the-victim" analysis of 9/11, but certainly many commentators suggested that maybe America’s track record of supporting known terrorists, its arrogance on the international stage and its ever-expanding cultural empire (where Roman troops failed, Friends and Britney succeeded) all played a part in focusing resentment and anger against the U.S.
Things would be different, we were assured. TV stations and Hollywood began to re-examine and even self-censor some of their products, on the grounds of "taste" and "appropriateness." Comedic "irony" was pronounced dead, as was "postmodernism." After 9/11, you were expected to call a spade a spade, a bomb a bomb, and an attack on civilization an attack on civilization.
Yet by Christmas last year, there were signs that "normal business" was already being resumed. Having shelved some of its planned "disaster" movies for a few months, Hollywood dusted them off, edited out a few of the more unfortunate echoes of 9/11, and re-embraced the money-making capacity of screened mayhem and murder. And TV comedy soon simply tired of trying to be "serious" or "adult," and instead responded to the "death of irony" by launching the largest army of pointless, gutless and weightless sitcoms ever yet assembled.
Things would never be the same, we were assured a year ago. Bullshit. Today, a year later, airport security is as lax as ever. American capitalism is as corrupt as ever, as the summer of scandals has underlined. And all that dignity and sacrifice exhibited just 12 months ago has been drowned by a lengthy, bloated and self-centred squabble in America’s national sport. Nothing has changed.
Oh, but it has. All those "conspiracy" movies – The Net, Enemy of the State, The Truman Show, etc. – depicting a nightmare world of omnipotent surveillance and control got it wrong. Even with all its spies, satellites, monitoring systems and so on, the U.S. has yet to complete its original task of locating the "world’s most dangerous man."
Ironically, I sleep a little better for knowing that. |
