In an article about “9/11 fiction” in Prospect, Adam Kirsch points out one difficulty in writing about that day: It was a television event, and that is the medium through which the vast majority of us learned about it. Of one writer’s experience escaping one of the towers, Kirsch writes, “Like everyone else, he had to watch TV afterwards to piece together what had happened.” (I previously wrote about Kirsch’s article here.)

I hadn’t realized just how true this was—just how attached the attacks were to television—until I heard Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger on Democracy Now!this morning. Kahle, a 2009 Utne Reader Visionary, and Prelinger are Internet archivists who have put together a project called “Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive.” “[9/11] was a major event, that was really a television event,” says Kahle. “People understood this through television.”

The archive is a collection of 3,000 hours of television news from around the world from September 11 to September 17. The project is exhaustive and impressive, at times even overwhelming—seeing all the news organizations’ coverage in one spot. Watching Charles Gibson reference New York fashion week going into a break, on the other side of which would be footage of one burning tower, has an effect like nothing I’ve felt on the page. It brings you back to that exact moment.

Kahle and Prelinger are looking to television as “a medium of record,” which is somewhat antithetical to the way it is usually used. News on television is here and then it is gone, never to be referenced again, at least not with any depth and analysis. “When we can watch the real-time coverage [of 9/11],” says Prelinger,

not just the famous images that get broken out and repeated all over again, but capture the full stream of that day and see how consciousness developed and how events were covered, it gives us a lot of grounding and enables us to begin to really think kind of analytically, critically about these events and about the way that television works.

Source: Democracy Now!, Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive 

Many American novelists have tried their hand at what is now widely referred to as “9/11 fiction,” more often than not, to mixed reviews. Often novels by writers from other countries are cited as the most successful books on the matter. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, who was born in Ireland and schooled in The Netherlands, is often said to be the best novel about September 11, 2001.

This, too, is the conclusion reached by Adam Kirsch in “In the shadow of the twin towers” (Prospect, June 2011). Naming the (in Krisch’s view) failed attempts by some of America’s heavy weights, like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (“But style defeats itself in these cool, hypnotic sentences, precisely because DeLillo knows that he is wagering everything on style.”) and John Updike’s Terrorist (“Sex, not God, is Updike’s God, which is why he overdetermines Ahmad’s rage by giving him a clear Freudian grievance…”), Krisch is left to conclude that American writers may just be “ill-suited to a subject that, like the sun, does not bear looking at directly.” This conclusion seems a bit simplistic to me, as do others in this article, like when Krisch uses a description from a nonfiction book about one man’s descent from the south tower on September 11 to criticize a novelist’s decision to devote “the last ten pages of his novel to the thoughts of his protagonist, Kevin, while he plunges to his death from the 52nd story of a burning building.” In fact, as we learn from the nonfiction writer, nothing enters the mind, much less ten pages worth of thoughts: “My mind switched off. I didn’t start praying. I didn’t have visions of childhood. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. It was a puzzling feeling.” Putting aside the discussion of how the thoughts of someone falling to his death from a skyscraper might differ from those of someone trying to run for his life from one, no matter what appears on those last ten pages of a novel, it is unfair to compare them to a work of nonfiction. I am not one to claim that there is no imagination in nonfiction—that it’s a simple task of retelling—but surely there is a distinction between someone trying to relay their experience in a book and someone trying to possess “the imagination of disaster” (a term coined by Henry James and used by Kirsch) and fictively tell the story of a character falling through the sky. Now, if the thoughts of the falling character are unbelievable, that’s another story, but comparing them to a work of nonfiction seems arbitrary to me.

Kirsch’s argument also falls short for me when he addresses attempts by writers to focus on the perpetrators of the attacks:

There is something admirable about the dogged attempts of American writers to inhabit the minds of the hijackers. After all, the terrorist act involves a radical refusal to imagine the experience of the victim. By contrast, the novelist’s insistence on his obligation to inhabit the mind of the terrorist can be seen as an exemplary liberal response.

In practice, however, this kind of liberal imagination depends on a psychological and materialist understanding of character, which leaves the novelist ill-equipped to understand religious fanatics whose deepest motives are theological and absolute.

Couldn’t the same be said about any individual throughout time whose “deepest motives” were “absolute”? Isn’t this and the “radical refusal to imagine the experience of the victim” what make up any number of novels about murder?

While I disagree with much of Kirsch’s reasoning, I appreciate his attempt to address these books, writers , and topic with a level of  respect.  Kirsch reminds us that after a brief moment of  a new national “sobriety and sternness of purpose,” most of the country went back to business as usual. The fact that so many American writers to this day are wrestling seriously with this subject matter shows Kirsch that at least that demographic has remained steadfast toward that sobriety and sternness.  “American writers, to their credit,” Kirsch writes, “have taken the exhortation to seriousness quite seriously.”  And who am I to say that his ultimate conclusion is not correct? Maybe “there is no need for the novelist to re-imagine 9/11 when, on some level, Americans have never stopped thinking about it.”

(Note: The online version of this article includes interesting responses from three American novelists, Siri Hustvedt, Stefan Merrill Block and Teddy Wayne.)

Source: Prospect 

Image is in the public domain.  

 

The news of Osama bin Laden’s death came as a surprise to most people around the world. And while there are still many questions to be answered, we have found interesting takes from those we turn to at times like these. Here are just a few.

UPDATED: 5/6/11: Al Qaeda has confirmed the death of bin Laden, according to National Post, and “vowed revenge on the United States and its allies, including Pakistan.” Not too surprising . . . Here is just a little bit more taken from an Islamist Internet forum: “It will remain, with permission from God Almighty, a curse that hunts the Americans and their collaborators and chase them outside and inside their country.”

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 UPDATED: 5/5/11: Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatchlooks at bin Laden’s legacy: a changed America, not a changed Middle East.

It was our misfortune and Osama bin Laden’s good luck that Washington’s dreams were not those of a global policeman intent on bringing a criminal operation to justice, but of an imperial power whose leaders wanted to lock the oil heartlands of the planet into a Pax Americana for decades to come.  So if you’re writing bin Laden's obituary right now, describe him as a wizard who used the 9/11 attacks to magnify his meager powers many times over.

After all, while he only had the ability to launch major operations every couple of years, Washington -- with almost unlimited amounts of money, weapons, and troops at its command -- was capable of launching operations every day.  In a sense, after 9/11, Bin Laden commanded Washington by taking possession of its deepest fears and desires, the way a bot takes over a computer, and turning them to his own ends.

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UPDATED: 5/5/11: Steve Chapman, writing for Reason, has this to say:

Responding to attacks or perceived threats with irresistible force is America's strength—as the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden learned. Our weakness is what comes after: reconstructing defeated countries as stable, democratic states.

It's a much tougher undertaking, requiring far more money, knowledge, and patience than Americans can muster. We rouse ourselves to ambitious tasks when adversaries challenge us. But as soon as we've taken one down, we lose interest.

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UPDATED: 5/4/11: Christopher Hayes at The Nation looks at how the term “bad guys” worked itself into our national conversation following 9/11. Using the term, Hayes argues, is a rejection of mature thought and an acceptance of a childlike view of the world. He hopes the death of bin Laden will allow us to “return to the world as our adult eyes see it, shot through with suffering and complexity.”

We can feel compassion for the thousands of innocents who died by bin Laden’s hand as well as our own, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in places like Bagram and Baghdad. We can remember that just because there is evil in the world that we are fighting—and bin Laden was a mass murderer and war criminal—that does not mean we are purely righteous.

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UPDATED: 5/3/11: Chris Good at The Atlantic examines the politics of the language used to talk about Bin Laden and the post-9/11 “war on terror.” He notes: 

During his time in office, Obama has sought to do away with Bush-era terminology. His Department of Homeland Security stopped using the phrase “Global War on Terror,” which President Bush coined after 9/11, and replaced them with the term “Countering Violent Extremism.” For this, Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano took some criticism. 

Good continues:

When he announced bin Laden’s death Sunday night, Obama made no mention of “radical,” “extremism,” “war,” or “Islam,” except to note that: “…we must also reaffirm that the United States is not—and never will be—at war with Islam….” House Republicans, by contrast, used all those words Monday afternoon as they reacted to the news in a press conference at the Capitol.

 

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UPDATED: 5/3/11: Jessa Crispin of Bookslut fame looks to an old comic strip to give her comfort from her annoyance toward the responses to bin Laden’s death.

 

Yesterday, after waking up to the news of bin Laden’s death, I started reading Get Your War On again from the beginning. The comic now exists as an online archive and a two-volume collection. I still marvel at it, a little. When I’m worked up and angry about politics, I turn into a sputtering child. In arguments with my Fox News-watching family members, my side of things degrade into, “Yeah, well, what do you know?” Rees managed to articulate righteous anger and despair, and reading his work is still weirdly comforting.

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UPDATED, 5/3/11: Associate Editor Peter Gabel and Founding Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner give Tikkun’s spiritual response to the assassination. First Gabel writes:

Never should the killing of a human being be an occasion for such celebration — even in circumstances that involve actual self-defense against mortal danger. Not only does such a raucous display of pleasure in response to the killing of another disrespect the sacredness of every human life; it also inherently undermines the moral character and worthiness of those responsible for the death itself.

Lerner follows with a short statement addressing what the Jewish tradition says about killing murderous foes.

[W]hen we do the Seder on Passover and recite the plagues that were used against the Egyptians to get them to free the Jews, we put our finger in the cup of wine, symbolic of our joy, and dip out a drop of wine for each plague — this symbolizes that our cup of joy cannot be full if our own liberation requires the death of those who were part of the oppressor society….

The task of spiritual progressives at this moment is to reaffirm a different consciousness — to remind ourselves that we are inextricably bound to each other and to everyone on the planet.

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Adam Weinstein at Mother Jones notices similarities in the responses coming from bin Laden’s supporters and President Obama’s detractors:

“I will wait for the Mujahideen to confirm this, and will not believe until I see a picture of his dead body,” wrote one jihadi sympathizer on Islamic Awakening (IA)—one of several such forums provided to Mother Jones by Aaron Y. Zelin, a researcher at Brandeis University who tracks online militant activities on the website Jihadology.net.

This sentiment, and many others by Islamists, were echoed by conservative detractors of the president. “Obama can claim what ever he wants but his word is no good,” wrote one commenter on the right-wing site Free Republic. “Without proof that Osama is dead and staying dead, I don’t have to believe anything he says.”

Paul Waldman at The American Prospect wonders “Can Bin Laden’s Death Make Us Dial Back the Crazy?”

We may not know for a time what effect Bin Laden’s killing has on Al Qaeda as an organization (or a movement, or however it could be described these days). But we can at least hope that this event can help us be a little more sane about terrorism.

David Sirota (who has a piece in the most recent issue of Utne Reader) writing for Salon thinks that all the celebrations and chants of “USA! USA!” following the news of bin Laden’s death actually give him his most “enduring victory”:

This is bin Laden’s lamentable victory: He has changed America’s psyche from one that saw violence as a regrettable-if-sometimes-necessary act into one that finds orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed. In other words, he’s helped drag us down into his sick nihilism by making us like too many other bellicose societies in history—the ones that aggressively cheer on killing, as long as it is the Bad Guy that is being killed.

How many ways can you say Osama Bin Laden is dead? Not many, to judge from the selection of newspaper front pages posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog at Poynter.org—although the East Coast tabloids eagerly worked the dancing-on-his-grave angle.

The Twitterverse was there first, reports Poynter’s Al Tompkins.

If Republicans are strangely dispassionate and Democrats openly gleeful about the news, what do the Libertarians think? In a press release, Libertarian Party Chairman Mark Hinkle says they’re glad to hear about bin Laden’s death—but eager to also see the “termination” of “the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA, the PATRIOT Act, warrantless wiretaps, the ‘state secrets’ doctrine, and other violations of Americans’ civil and economic rights.”

In “With Bin Laden Gone, Is the Jihadi Revolution Dead?” Mark Juergensmeyer, writing for Religion Dispatches, extends credit for undermining the jihadi insurrection beyond the U.S. forces that killed bin Laden.

The imagined war of the Bush era may indeed be over. And the jihadi insurrection associated with bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization may also be dead. But I suspect that the real perpetrators of their deaths may not have been the elite American military cadre some hours ago in Pakistan, but the legion of cell-phone toting protestors earlier this year in Tahrir Square. They have helped to complete the erosion of legitimacy that has undermined the jihadi activists in recent years within the Muslim world….

[T]he jihadi warriors may again have their day. For the moment, however, bin Laden is dead, and Tahrir Square has challenged both the strategic value and the moral legitimacy of the jihadi stance. The legion of young Muslim activists around the world have received a new standard for challenging the old order, and a new form of protest, one that discredits terrorism as the easy and ineffective path and chooses the tough and profitable road of nonviolence. 

Fast Company offers an early analysis of the Obama administration’s global PR war:

[A]ll we’re left with is old images of Bin Laden, and the image of a stern, dignified President Obama. The latter presents a far more dignified, far less political image than any of the high-profile captures that have attended the War on Terror, inaugurated under George W. Bush. There is nothing there for Bin Laden’s cohort to twist and remix for their purposes. There is no whiff of American savagery, and no whiff of personal vendetta. Simply justice.

Source: Mother Jones, The American Prospect, Poynter, Religion Dispatches, Fast Company 

Image by hodgers, licensed under Creative Commons.