Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems there’s a new kind of “Great Depression” in the air—so thick you can’t even cut it with a knife. Thick enough to stun an ox.
It’s as if everyone knows. Everyone, regardless of political affiliation, sexual orientation, professional vocation or religious persuasion: “We are going down. We are all going down. Together. There is no pilot.” Yeah, you gotta wonder how the prescient pixie who wrote those lyrics is feeling ‘bout now. No wonder she’s done her best to head for the hills!
But I still think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of? (Ooops! I guess we've got that question answered now, don't we?)
I’ve always been in love with Laurie. She’s a native-born Chicagoan—local patriotism's a hard habit to kick. Already with the 1982 release of Big Science, I could relate: “cause I feel—feel like—I am—in a burning building, and I gotta go.” So I said to myself, “let x = x,” and I left.
I cling like cotton candy to those faded T-shirts from the 1986 Home of the Brave concert in Hamburg, and home-dubbed cassette tapes of the 1988 German-language concerts rebroadcast on Radio Free Berlin--priceless, collector's items even. For everything else there's Mastercard, right?
But I'm still wishing people could just TALK NORMAL.
At a recent show in the intimate setting of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fullerton Hall, I took great comfort and pleasure in that front-row seat close enough to count every eyebrow she forgot to pluck before going on stage with her “The End of the Moon” performance. It was inspiring. The stuff that instills hope and transcends even the deepest measure of despair. Your eyes, it's a day's work just looking into them. Yeah, it was pretty cool to be sittin' there close enough to look Laurie Anderson dead-straight in the eye. You think she mighta noticed?
Trouble is, I doubt even a seat on Laurie Anderson’s lap could do much to lift me out of the fog of fretting and fussing I’m flailing around in ‘bout now.
Call me a sell-out. Tell me to wake the fuck up: I still subscribe to the NYT (there’s something melancholy and nostalgic about exiting the front door, strolling across the courtyard and retrieving the grey lady from her prophylactic blue sack in the morning: one of life’s little luxuries I cling to like Laurie Anderson T-shirts and tapes).
Diving behind the firewall every Saturday night to read Frank Rich has become part of my weekly routine. It’s a dreaded deed because Rich isn’t always easy to read—mostly because he’s got a knack for nailing it in a way that makes you wonder how the hell so many people in this country can still be sitting around like life’s just one big happy Indian summer picnic, even now, after so many days that shouldacouldawoulda “changed everything,” but did not. 9/11/01. 9/29-HelpAmericaVoteBushAct-2002. 3/19/03. 11/2/04. Judith Miller Day. The Fitzmas that Never Came. The FEMA-Fiasco-Fiesta-for-the-Feds days. The clean-up crews that still haven’t come. Tomorrow, tomorrow, we’ll start the day to tomorrow! Yeah, well maybe in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, but for people in my neighborhood, it’s starting to look like tomorrow is never gonna come.
Rich starts tomorrow’s column by reminding us of Richard Drew’s “most famous picture nobody’s ever seen”: his “Falling Man”, with a link to the 2003 Esquire feature on the subject.
Compelling enough reading. And the image? As tragic as it is priceless.
But that’s not where Rich nails it. He does so by drawing our attention to
another taboo 9/11 photo, about life rather than death, that is equally shocking in its way, so much so that Thomas Hoepker of Magnum Photos kept it under wraps for four years. Mr. Hoepker’s picture can now be found in David Friend’s compelling new 9/11 book, “Watching the World Change,”or on the book’s Web site, watchingtheworldchange.com It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn, taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.
And this is where he nails it:
Seen from the perspective of 9/11’s fifth anniversary, Mr. Hoepker’s photo is prescient as well as important — a snapshot of history soon to come. What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today.
What’s gone right? He says
[T] terrorists failed to break America’s back. The “new” normal lasted about 10 minutes, except at airport check-ins. The economy, for all its dips and inequities and runaway debt, was not destroyed. The culture, for better and worse, survived intact. It took only four days for television networks to restore commercials to grim news programming. Some two weeks after that Rudy Giuliani ritualistically welcomed laughter back to American living rooms by giving his on-camera imprimatur to “Saturday Night Live.” Before 9/11, Americans feasted on reality programs, nonstop coverage of child abductions and sex scandals. Five years later, they still do. The day that changed everything didn’t make Americans change the channel, unless it was from “Fear Factor” to “American Idol” or from Pamela Anderson to Paris Hilton.
And what’s gone wrong? The same thing that’s always been wrong with us, us “just us” Americans:
The companion American trait to resilience is forgetfulness. What we’ve forgotten too quickly is the outpouring of affection and unity that swelled against all odds in the wake of Al Qaeda’s act of mass murder. If you were in New York then, you saw it in the streets, and not just at ground zero, where countless thousands of good Samaritans joined the official responders and caregivers to help, at the cost of their own health. You saw it as New Yorkers of every kind gathered around the spontaneous shrines to the fallen and the missing at police and fire stations, at churches and in parks, to lend solace or a hand. This good feeling quickly spread to Capitol Hill, to red states where New York had once been Sodom incarnate and to the world, the third world included, where America was a nearly uniform object of sympathy and grief.
No doubt about it, this
is what's wrong with America.
It's what's wrong with us. We are a nation of Neros.
X,X,X, Zero, Zero, Zero.
Rich continues:
At the National Cathedral prayer service on Sept. 14, 2001, President Bush found just the apt phrase to describe this phenomenon: “Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘the warm courage of national unity.’ This is the unity of every faith and every background. It has joined together political parties in both houses of Congress.” What’s more, he added, “this unity against terror is now extending across the world.”The destruction of that unity, both in this nation and in the world, is as much a cause for mourning on the fifth anniversary as the attack itself. As we can’t forget the dead of 9/11, we can’t forget how the only good thing that came out of that horror, that unity, was smothered in its cradle.
When F.D.R. used the phrase “the warm courage of national unity,” it was at his first inaugural, in 1933, as the country reeled from the Great Depression. It is deeply moving to read that speech today. In its most famous line, Roosevelt asserted his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Another passage is worth recalling, too: “We now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”
How quickly we forget, how blithely: MoveOn.dot.org. Let’s just forget about this little matter of election fraud and go Biblical instead: what’s done is done. No sense in cryin’ over spilled milk. Or blood. Oil.
Unity. White folk threatening black folk at gunpoint? "Looters" and losers, one to a man. Get over it, will ya?
What followed Mr. Bush’s speech at the National Cathedral, we know all too well, is another story.
On the very next day after that convocation, Mr. Bush was asked at a press conference “how much of a sacrifice” ordinary Americans would “be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily routines.” His answer: “Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever.” He, too, wanted to move on — to “see life return to normal in America,” as he put it — but toward partisan goals stealthily tailored to his political allies rather than the nearly 90 percent of the country that, according to polls, was rallying around him.This selfish agenda was there from the very start. As we now know from many firsthand accounts, a cadre from Mr. Bush’s war cabinet was already busily hyping nonexistent links between Iraq and the Qaeda attacks. The presidential press secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned Bill Maher’s irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding “all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Fear itself — the fear that “paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” as F.D.R. had it — was already being wielded as a weapon against Americans by their own government.
Watch what you say, people, watch what you do. Better yet: watch what you don’t do. What you aren’t doing. What you haven’t done.
And remember, as Kristof assures us in tomorrow’s NYT: “Genocide matters.”
Sure, just as long as it’s someone else’s genocide, not our own, right?
It really is a shame that genocide is such a long-standing tradition, because now we have to hear people like Stark [aka Lilian M. Friedberg] whining about it all the time.-_Quilty, DailyKos, Thanksgiving Day, 2005
The path to 9/11 sure as hell has long indeed, hasn't it? And the more you remember about the history of this country, the longer it gets.
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