Mu-Meson
08-20-2007, 02:45 PM
On the afternoon of 11 September 2001 I was sitting in a Soho screening room watching a preview of a film called Greenfingers. At the end of the film, the credits were interrupted by a flickering image of a burning skyscraper. Yet another Hollywood cliché, I thought. The picture was presented as if it was newsreel but, due to an apparent problem in the projection room, there was no sound. It was a little odd to see another feature played immediately after the previous one had finished. Was this one of those guerrilla advertising campaigns? A preview of a forthcoming attraction?
Then in an instant I recognised the building, and its untouched twin, and in that same instant I saw a fast-moving shadow enter the frame and fly straight into the structure that wasn't burning. It was a shocking sight, but my mind absorbed the shock because it was still operating on the assumption, not unreasonable in a cinema, that the footage was a shocking cinematic sight. Still, credit where it was due, the film achieved a compelling authenticity. They had got that flat video texture just right. And on some nagging level of consciousness, for those strange few seconds in that darkened room, it was a struggle to suspend the suspicion that it was real. I lost that struggle a moment later when the image stabilised and it suddenly gained the accompaniment of sound. I saw the 'Sky News' logo in the corner of the screen. The reporter was saying that aircraft had flown into both towers of the World Trade Centre. The audience audibly inhaled and exhaled, first a gasp then a hush, and I slumped back down. The details were limited and confusing but I thought I picked up either that one of the planes had been heading for Washington or that there was another plane, still in the air, that was DC-bound. I took a couple of seconds to process the information and then I was off, up out of my seat, out of the room and up the stairs, trying to locate my phone as I rushed out into the street.
My wife was in New York and she was flying to Washington DC that day. I couldn't get through to her number. I tried again and again without success. Panic started to rise up from my stomach into my shallow-breathing chest. Was this how it happened? Was this how a nightmare invades your life, masquerading as a movie, as a cheap action flick? After what I imagine was just a few minutes, but felt infinitely longer at the time, I got through to my wife's London office. They had heard from her. She was OK. The panic was over. I could rejoin most of the rest of the world as an appalled voyeur, but a voyeur none the less. I could stand in murmuring awe in a bar with the other critics, silently reviewing the incredible atrocity happening live on television. I could note the innocent clarity of that blue sky and the shimmering glory of those twin totems of capitalism, which stood proud even as the thick smoke gushed, like arterial blood, from their obscene entry wounds. I could try to imagine, and then try not to imagine, the last hellish moments of the passengers on those planes, and the hopeless plight of the workers trapped on the floors above the fire. I could address the unforeseen and earthshaking collapse of the buildings by studied recourse to metaphor and history, all the while stifling the childish, vicarious and despicable thrill of witnessing the creation of devastation. I could do and think all this and more from the civilised safety of Bar Italia on Frith Street, but it was OK, my wife was alive. This was a global event. But this was not our story.
I was just a few months into my fortieth year in September 2001. The previous year I had become a father for the first time and published my first book. I had a good job as a feature writer and a life that was not without comfort; a middle-class, middle-aged urban professional with plans and expectations, but, more than that, a growing sense of rootedness, social investment, dare I say a kind of ominous contentment. It is in such conditions, of course, and at such times that a man, particularly a man, can start to question himself and his purpose in life. If the midlife crisis is a figment of the psychiatric and literary imagination, it's a figment that has migrated to the male imagination at large. The option of fleeing one's responsibilities seems, paradoxically, to grow more appealing as the responsibilities themselves become more rewarding. And in the same counter-intuitive fashion, there is nothing like the arrival of new life to focus the mind on the proximity of death. You become more grounded and simultaneously the ground becomes less steady. My daughter was just starting to walk and suddenly the world was full of dangers. How would such heightened sensitivities contend with the incineration of 3,000 people and the destruction of two of the most recognisable structures on earth, buildings in whose dizzying elevators I had ridden to what was once the highest man-made point in the world? How steady would the ground seem after that?
A midlife crisis did indeed ensue after 9/11. In truth it had been brewing for some time. It wasn't my midlife crisis, however, but that of Western culture at large. No matter what other aims may have motivated this singular act of terrorism, it was beyond question that it was planned as a symbolic, as well as a lethal, attack on 'the West', whether the target was militarism (the Pentagon), capitalism (the WTC), or cosmopolitanism (the heterogeneity of the victims). The problem was many in the West were not sure that it was worthy of defence. For some time in the post-Soviet era, as America established its position as the sole superpower, a West-based movement had been growing that rejected the spread of free-market capitalism and the Western values that underpinned the global market. Known as anti-globalisation, it drew attention to the poverty and deprivation that was such a common feature of life in the Third World. But it also posed some stark existential questions about the Western way of life. 'What was the point?' the anti-globalisers seemed to be asking, all we do is buy stuff, turn everywhere into a market, and force McDonald's and Starbucks down other people's throats. Our culture is nothing but consumption. As the anti-globalist writer Naomi Klein argued a few weeks after 11 September: 'Part of the disorientation many Americans now face has to do with the inflated and oversimplified place consumerism plays in the American narrative. To buy is to be. To buy is to love. To buy is to vote.'
Drinking in the devastation, numbed and intoxicated by the scale of what had taken place, I struggled, like everyone else, to make sense of it all. And in my case, as with many people from the liberal-left side of the political spectrum, that job was made more difficult by the fact that the United States was the victim. From where I came from, the United States was always the culprit. There was Vietnam, Chile and the dreadful support for repressive and often debauched regimes right across Latin America, Africa and Asia. I was a veteran of CND anti-cruise missile marches in the 1980s. I had gone to Nicaragua to defend the Sandinista cause against American imperialism. America was the bad guy, right? America was always the bad guy.
Clearly some basic moral calculations needed to be performed. Which vision of the world represented more closely my own liberal outlook? The cosmopolitan city of New York, a multi-racial city of opportunity, a town where anyone on earth could arrive and thrive, exuberant, cultured, diverse, a place I had visited and loved for its liberty and energy and excitement? Or the people who attacked it, those arid minds who wanted to remove women from sight, kill homo******s, banish music, destroy art, the demolishers of the Bamiyan Buddhas who aimed to terrorise everyone they could into submission to the will of their vengeful God? It was, as they say, a no-brainer, or should have been.
But was there not also an obligation to ask if this heinous crime was more complex than it first appeared? That was the progressive instinct: don't be fooled by the mass media, which we all knew was a propaganda industry, look behind the scenes, examine the bigger picture, think about the context, study history. And so if you wanted to consider yourself a member of the thinking classes, it was not enough to recoil in horror, you also had to take into account America's own score sheet in matters of cold blood. 'It's terrible,' was the often heard formulation, 'but....' Did I think there was a but? And if there was a but, could it be any kind of justification for what had taken place? And if it wasn't a justification, what was the point of the but? Was it there to show one's even-handedness and sense of fair play? Or purely for decoration? I knew right from the first second where my emotional sympathies were located but what was my intellectual position?
What helped guide me to the answer was the alternative analysis, the 'It's terrible, but' in which the 'It's terrible' was the decorative part of the equation. A number of commentaries that articulated this response quickly began to appear in different newspapers. Perhaps the most indignant came, with impressive alacrity, on 13 September in my daily newspaper, the voice of liberal Britain, the Guardian. 'Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington,' wrote Seumas Milne, 'it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it... Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.'
One doesn't need to work for a newspaper - though it probably helps - to realise that Milne was underselling his own speed of analytical thought. To get his piece published on the 13th meant that he would have needed to have completed it by around 6pm or 7pm on the 12th. Allowing for its considered tone, which must have been the product of several hours of sober reflection, it would be fair to assume that he would have begun writing it, at the latest, at around 2pm. In other words, at about 9am New York time. That left the Americans a whole 24 hours to absorb the shock, deal with the grief and then move on to some cold, hard self-criticism. And they flunked it.
Milne's savaging of American self-absorption was the most conspicuous example of an attitude that could be heard in plenty of sophisticated conversations, or should I say conversations between sophisticated people, and read in a number of left or liberal publications.
What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?
In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself. In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2151530,00.html
I know its pretty long, but you'll be glad that you read it.
Any Brits reading this should definitely read pages 2 and 3. If they aren't already, this will really open your eyes.
Then in an instant I recognised the building, and its untouched twin, and in that same instant I saw a fast-moving shadow enter the frame and fly straight into the structure that wasn't burning. It was a shocking sight, but my mind absorbed the shock because it was still operating on the assumption, not unreasonable in a cinema, that the footage was a shocking cinematic sight. Still, credit where it was due, the film achieved a compelling authenticity. They had got that flat video texture just right. And on some nagging level of consciousness, for those strange few seconds in that darkened room, it was a struggle to suspend the suspicion that it was real. I lost that struggle a moment later when the image stabilised and it suddenly gained the accompaniment of sound. I saw the 'Sky News' logo in the corner of the screen. The reporter was saying that aircraft had flown into both towers of the World Trade Centre. The audience audibly inhaled and exhaled, first a gasp then a hush, and I slumped back down. The details were limited and confusing but I thought I picked up either that one of the planes had been heading for Washington or that there was another plane, still in the air, that was DC-bound. I took a couple of seconds to process the information and then I was off, up out of my seat, out of the room and up the stairs, trying to locate my phone as I rushed out into the street.
My wife was in New York and she was flying to Washington DC that day. I couldn't get through to her number. I tried again and again without success. Panic started to rise up from my stomach into my shallow-breathing chest. Was this how it happened? Was this how a nightmare invades your life, masquerading as a movie, as a cheap action flick? After what I imagine was just a few minutes, but felt infinitely longer at the time, I got through to my wife's London office. They had heard from her. She was OK. The panic was over. I could rejoin most of the rest of the world as an appalled voyeur, but a voyeur none the less. I could stand in murmuring awe in a bar with the other critics, silently reviewing the incredible atrocity happening live on television. I could note the innocent clarity of that blue sky and the shimmering glory of those twin totems of capitalism, which stood proud even as the thick smoke gushed, like arterial blood, from their obscene entry wounds. I could try to imagine, and then try not to imagine, the last hellish moments of the passengers on those planes, and the hopeless plight of the workers trapped on the floors above the fire. I could address the unforeseen and earthshaking collapse of the buildings by studied recourse to metaphor and history, all the while stifling the childish, vicarious and despicable thrill of witnessing the creation of devastation. I could do and think all this and more from the civilised safety of Bar Italia on Frith Street, but it was OK, my wife was alive. This was a global event. But this was not our story.
I was just a few months into my fortieth year in September 2001. The previous year I had become a father for the first time and published my first book. I had a good job as a feature writer and a life that was not without comfort; a middle-class, middle-aged urban professional with plans and expectations, but, more than that, a growing sense of rootedness, social investment, dare I say a kind of ominous contentment. It is in such conditions, of course, and at such times that a man, particularly a man, can start to question himself and his purpose in life. If the midlife crisis is a figment of the psychiatric and literary imagination, it's a figment that has migrated to the male imagination at large. The option of fleeing one's responsibilities seems, paradoxically, to grow more appealing as the responsibilities themselves become more rewarding. And in the same counter-intuitive fashion, there is nothing like the arrival of new life to focus the mind on the proximity of death. You become more grounded and simultaneously the ground becomes less steady. My daughter was just starting to walk and suddenly the world was full of dangers. How would such heightened sensitivities contend with the incineration of 3,000 people and the destruction of two of the most recognisable structures on earth, buildings in whose dizzying elevators I had ridden to what was once the highest man-made point in the world? How steady would the ground seem after that?
A midlife crisis did indeed ensue after 9/11. In truth it had been brewing for some time. It wasn't my midlife crisis, however, but that of Western culture at large. No matter what other aims may have motivated this singular act of terrorism, it was beyond question that it was planned as a symbolic, as well as a lethal, attack on 'the West', whether the target was militarism (the Pentagon), capitalism (the WTC), or cosmopolitanism (the heterogeneity of the victims). The problem was many in the West were not sure that it was worthy of defence. For some time in the post-Soviet era, as America established its position as the sole superpower, a West-based movement had been growing that rejected the spread of free-market capitalism and the Western values that underpinned the global market. Known as anti-globalisation, it drew attention to the poverty and deprivation that was such a common feature of life in the Third World. But it also posed some stark existential questions about the Western way of life. 'What was the point?' the anti-globalisers seemed to be asking, all we do is buy stuff, turn everywhere into a market, and force McDonald's and Starbucks down other people's throats. Our culture is nothing but consumption. As the anti-globalist writer Naomi Klein argued a few weeks after 11 September: 'Part of the disorientation many Americans now face has to do with the inflated and oversimplified place consumerism plays in the American narrative. To buy is to be. To buy is to love. To buy is to vote.'
Drinking in the devastation, numbed and intoxicated by the scale of what had taken place, I struggled, like everyone else, to make sense of it all. And in my case, as with many people from the liberal-left side of the political spectrum, that job was made more difficult by the fact that the United States was the victim. From where I came from, the United States was always the culprit. There was Vietnam, Chile and the dreadful support for repressive and often debauched regimes right across Latin America, Africa and Asia. I was a veteran of CND anti-cruise missile marches in the 1980s. I had gone to Nicaragua to defend the Sandinista cause against American imperialism. America was the bad guy, right? America was always the bad guy.
Clearly some basic moral calculations needed to be performed. Which vision of the world represented more closely my own liberal outlook? The cosmopolitan city of New York, a multi-racial city of opportunity, a town where anyone on earth could arrive and thrive, exuberant, cultured, diverse, a place I had visited and loved for its liberty and energy and excitement? Or the people who attacked it, those arid minds who wanted to remove women from sight, kill homo******s, banish music, destroy art, the demolishers of the Bamiyan Buddhas who aimed to terrorise everyone they could into submission to the will of their vengeful God? It was, as they say, a no-brainer, or should have been.
But was there not also an obligation to ask if this heinous crime was more complex than it first appeared? That was the progressive instinct: don't be fooled by the mass media, which we all knew was a propaganda industry, look behind the scenes, examine the bigger picture, think about the context, study history. And so if you wanted to consider yourself a member of the thinking classes, it was not enough to recoil in horror, you also had to take into account America's own score sheet in matters of cold blood. 'It's terrible,' was the often heard formulation, 'but....' Did I think there was a but? And if there was a but, could it be any kind of justification for what had taken place? And if it wasn't a justification, what was the point of the but? Was it there to show one's even-handedness and sense of fair play? Or purely for decoration? I knew right from the first second where my emotional sympathies were located but what was my intellectual position?
What helped guide me to the answer was the alternative analysis, the 'It's terrible, but' in which the 'It's terrible' was the decorative part of the equation. A number of commentaries that articulated this response quickly began to appear in different newspapers. Perhaps the most indignant came, with impressive alacrity, on 13 September in my daily newspaper, the voice of liberal Britain, the Guardian. 'Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington,' wrote Seumas Milne, 'it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it... Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent.'
One doesn't need to work for a newspaper - though it probably helps - to realise that Milne was underselling his own speed of analytical thought. To get his piece published on the 13th meant that he would have needed to have completed it by around 6pm or 7pm on the 12th. Allowing for its considered tone, which must have been the product of several hours of sober reflection, it would be fair to assume that he would have begun writing it, at the latest, at around 2pm. In other words, at about 9am New York time. That left the Americans a whole 24 hours to absorb the shock, deal with the grief and then move on to some cold, hard self-criticism. And they flunked it.
Milne's savaging of American self-absorption was the most conspicuous example of an attitude that could be heard in plenty of sophisticated conversations, or should I say conversations between sophisticated people, and read in a number of left or liberal publications.
What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?
In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself. In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2151530,00.html
I know its pretty long, but you'll be glad that you read it.
Any Brits reading this should definitely read pages 2 and 3. If they aren't already, this will really open your eyes.