9/11 in NYC and Beyond: A Collective Memory Culturally Forming...

Where were you on 9/11? The  September 11 fifth year anniversary retrospects will continue to define that day for years to come.  What will be the before and after for us - the changed ways we will see ourselves in retrospect? 

Before JFK was killed, women and men wore hats.  We lost our innocence, then.  Bare became the heads, bare became the hands. The women lost the gloves and the girdle soon thereafter.  Life and the living of it became less contained.  But death was still skirted around and euphemisms reigned. JFK was killed; he did more than pass on.  It was on tv; it was beyond radio then.  It was a culturally unifying moment, (in the U.S.).  Coverage of murders has always been gripping fodder for media.  There are more media tools, technologically, now, though.  National media can now go broader and deeper with online content in recording the stories for today's anniversary (WaPo and NYTimes coverage have lots of links, for example).

Media is changing our present and how our present is captured for the past for the future's narrative.  Media is changing us, our world and how we interpret it.

We're starting to build the myth of it all, to establish our narrative. Politically, it was an unprecedented attack on our homeland and the pivotal start of the War on Terrorism (which is morphing into The Long War) and made the President a Commander-in-Chief with expanded powers.  The event established an "other" -- terrorists as the enemy -- and a presidential image to protect the citizens (an image that has become an important political narrative). The "truth" in the narrative is a political issue according to the NYTimes in an editorial today, 9/11/06.   The Emperor's Children is one of the first books to address the event in a literary way and is #12 on Amazon's list.  NYC store displays are honoring firefighters this week, as in the photo, above, of a window display for a sporting attire shop on Third Avenue. The mannequin is appareled in a NY Firefighter t-shirt with the word "Heroes" in big black letters across the window.  Heroes became the first narrative focus of 9/11, followed by tributes to the victims in the New York Times.  The event was collectively embraced and collectively written as the best-selling ever government document that wrote the "official narrative"- The 9/11 Commission Report, ranked #101 today on Amazon.

The dead are being acknowledged ever since cable tv allowed us to share collectively the events-as-they-happened (think Challenger, think the Murrah building  bombing in Oklahoma City) because we lived it, too.  TV made it "live" and let us "be there" as witnesses.  But the narrative is no longer authoritative and top-down. New media with cheap publishing allows new content to be produced; new and alternative narratives out there (such as David Ray Griffin's the 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions) and online sites and free media present challenges to official top-down controlled information.  The narrative is all topsy-turvy.  The 2004 elections gave new media peeps via Howard Dean's campaign for president.  New media roared a year ago after Katrina hit.  And now the liberal/progressive media can reach sometimes more than national newspapers with their alternative stories such as today's new version of Bush's secret deal with Osama and other Osama and 9/11 stories on Daily Kos.  Who do you trust and how do you determine the truth?  Do you have time to wade through it all yourself?

The photos, the movies, the truth... the hash-out is happening.  The babies and children who lost a parent that day are further victims and an ABC article (hat tip to Mustache Pete   at the Godfathers blog) on these kids noted that they want to know what happened to daddy and one family still keeps dad's toothbrush in the sink holder.  As a mom, your heart goes out to the widows and fatherless children who are victims just as much as the firefighters and workers who died that day.  Minutes for Mom has a tribute to Paul Stewart Gilby with his daughter Hannah's letter to him: "Daddy, I miss you so much every day. I wish you could come back to me. I love you so much and think about you all the time." It might take years, (as it did WWII veterans, victims and families) for these children to be identified in the publc records and to share their own stories. 

The movies? The controversial truth of the narrative? ABC's Path to 9/11 showed an edited version last night and the President will cut in for a 20 minute speech tonight during the second prime time airing, interrupting the show for viewers on the East Coast, Reuters reports.  Who said the truth and the writing of history belong to the victors (is it a war to claim the narrative)?

Blogs are helping with this effort to document and add to the historical record in ways that were not available when dead were killed by crazy terrorists in the past like at the University of Texas in the 1960s or the Edmond, Oklahoma post office massacre (which was one of the biggest mass murders in the U.S. at that time when crazy killers weren't called terrorists).  Think of what might have happened had new media outlets been around to document the dead during the Vietnam War.  How many years did it take for the names to be documented for the record and then -- in stone, like the Rosetta, at the famous WDC memorial?  Almost 130 years after Cheyenne Indian tribe under Chief Black Kettle was slaughtered by Custer and his men on the banks of the Washita River in Oklahoma, nothing was to be seen at all to document victims at the site.

Where were you when you knew?  Time warped into slo-mo, didn't it, then.  Were you, were we changed, then and now? Do we even know yet how exactly, or will we have to wait to see the unfurling of it all? 

Media and technology are shaping and changing us culturally. Think about it.

Photo, above left: Vincent Laforet for the NYTimes

Comments

[Rhea]

I was at home instead of at work, which was unusual. I was waiting for the Salvation Army to come pick up some old furniture. I was wanting a 'new start'. My co-worker called me and asked why I hadn't come to work yet. (He had already heard about the World Trade towers and thought something had gone wrong with me.) He told me to turn on the TV and there it was. I was in Boston, where the planes had taken off from.

[Jennifer]

What a terrific post.

I'll never forget where I was, or what I was doing, which was - in short - being less than patient with a vendor on the phone who was riling me up over something so insignificant, it embarrasses me to remember my most immediate concern that morning, right up until the plane hit the Pentagon.

I caught a bit of a special last night about the 10,000 children directly affected by the loss of a parent/grandparent on September 11. I thought it would be incredibly sad. And it was. But it was the most moving, uplifting and hopeful piece I’ve seen about the whole experience since this time five years ago.

[Janice]

Time stopped didn't it. We were all frozen where we were, staring stunned at our televisions.

I was at home, pregnant with my son, totally traumatized with grief and fear.

[ra]

I am presently staring at the hole in the ground where the buildings were. I remember watching the cranes picking up pieces that were still smoking weeks later. We stopped for a moment of silence at 8:46 and at 9:03 today (the times the planes hit). There are some people who did not come in today, people who lost their spouses and one who lost their child. The comment that hit everyone around the conference table was, "its a clear day with a blue sky, not a cloud to be seen, just like that day". The silence was complete. Take a look outside now (at 1:30) and the clouds are back, but clear blue at 9am. Everyone should forget the politics and what happened afterwards for one day, we can pick up the debate tomorrow. Five years ago today, people sat in what used to be my office and watched people jumping from two buildings that were not there a short time later. That by itself was enough of an event to last a lifetime for all of those who saw it live, as well as those who watched on tv.

[CrankMama]

I was 8 months pregnant with my twin daughters... typing on my laptop and watching the news. I was horrified and the world seemed such a scary place to be bringing children into...