The Basic Laws of Reflex Contrarianism have an in-built weakness in that the people they are supposed to govern aren't really the rules types. I was going to say finish that sentence with "as a rule," but there's a definite danger of infinite regression paradox and one mustn't blunder about with the fabric of spacetime. Have you seen an episode of Doctor Who? That stuff is like wet tissue.*
So in the face of all the 9/11 remembrance and solemnitude and general moment-of-silence-ism, the contrarian reflex makes me want to write about women's tennis, but aha! If all the contrarians are writing about women's tennis, the truly contrarian thing to do is to actually write about 9/11. On the surface of it, sure, I'll just be doing what the non-contrarian everyone else is doing, but motivations are important. I'm embracing it by having already rejected it. So, you know, in your face, Mainstream America!
I've been avoiding all of the anniversary coverage, not out of my normal motivations of petty politicism and bloody-mindedness, but really out of a feeling of tiredness. As the anniversary has approached, I have been seized with the dawning realization that I still haven't been able to sleep off the bone-aching weariness that event infected me with. The cycle of tension and tension and tension and release and tension and tension and tension and release, etc. over those many days after, weeks after, months after pulled from me at first emotional and eventually physical resources the great, peacetime softness of my life before never taught me to reserve.
Tom Brokaw has made something of a fetish of his Greatest Generation meme, but there's something to be said for growing up having been kicked in the collective bollocks over and over and over again when the call comes in to actually stand and fight. If you practically starved to death at home during the Depression, you can kind of conceive of what it will take to survive practically starving to death in Belgium or the Philippines fighting the Hun or the Yellow Peril.
Vietnam ended before I turned a year old. Even my first independent impressions of the Cold War are colored by the softening positions of glasnost and perestroika and the (I'm sure hindsighted) feeling of downward-slopeyness. Economics over decades bump around as they are wont to do, but generally speaking, throughout my entire upbringing, the trendlines have all been upward. Honestly, Generation X has got to be the least prepared group of people in the history of people for harshness and want and sacrifice and heroics. Don't get me wrong, I know we have our individual paragons and models, but if you look at the art that supposedly defines us, speaks for us, sharpens the fuzzy borders between Baby Boomers and the kids with the Twitter, all we seem to really be able to do is lament our own waywardness and bitch about corporatism over a meal of Domino's Pizza and Bud Lights. We're every pretentious asshole Ethan Hawke has ever played in any role ever. And we look just as ridiculous being in charge of stuff. It's hard to lead from a position of ironic detachment.
I guess what I'm saying is 10 years is just too soon. For me, at any rate. I'm still processing. In the middle, we've had Katrina and tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan and the Afghan War and the Iraq War and on and on, all the time goaded forward by this army of flag-wavers demanding you do the same, subtly hinting maybe they'll run you through with a flag pole should you opt out.
Past the generational thing, how is anyone past it, really? Where have we had the space and peace to properly mourn and heal? In an atmosphere of closely-held, furiously-defended, wrent-soul psychic trauma, I'm afraid the anniversary minute-by-minute reliving of every thought and impulse of The Event(s) feels threatening almost; it's asking me to be potentially more deeply introspective than I'm ready to be, bordering on self-flagellating tragedy porn.
I accept that other people have assimilated all this information in different ways. In that case, remember away. My position isn't that nobody else should be allowed. It's just that I don't feel like I've got a solid enough stance on non-pourous ground to keep my feet in the slow-rising flood that crests today. I've spent too many of the intervening years overdeveloping otherwise practically useless muscle groups, leaving me strangely misshapen and ill-suited to function within the normative bounds of a healthy society.
So yeah, I guess I ended up talking about women's tennis after all.
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*this of course begs the question of what exactly the tissue of spacetime is moistened with, but I find that the dampness of tissues is a question almost never worth investigating.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
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8 comments:
Hear, hear!
My girlfriend asked me last night if I wanted to watch whatever football game was on and I surprised both of us by going off on a rant about how no, I didn't want to watch a football game because I didn't feel the need to sit through a corporatized fetishistic tribute to 9/11 and I don't get the need for all these remembrances anyway. I mean, who needs this? Who doesn't remember how and where they heard about it and how they felt, then and in the weeks and months that followed? What was all this stroking over the weekend supposed to accomplish? Were we supposed to pretend that we're all a united nation? Hah!
When I'm ready to remember 9/11 and the emotions it and the following events engendered, I'll listen to "Not Ready to Make Nice."
Pretty fountains, though.
"all the time goaded forward by this army of flag-wavers demanding you do the same, subtly hinting maybe they'll run you through with a flag pole should you opt out."
YES.
As a person who was actually living in DC at the time, who was working in a high-rise (for DC) office building less than a mile from the Pentagon, who lived literally across the street from Fort Myer, the base responsible for Arlington Cemetery and - hey - the Pentagon - I'm NOT interested in hearing about the trauma sustained by some asshat in Arkansas who was certain that the terrorists were coming to Little Rock next [note to Little Rock: they've already been there, see also integration of schools].
I keep thinking of that part in Delillo's White Noise, when there's an almost-plane crash, and everyone, even the passengers, gather around to listen to someone's story about it - as if, until they heard it, it hadn't happened to them at all.
someone stole (borrowed & kept) my copy of White Noise, so I can't be more precise. But it's a pretty smart observation, especially since it comes from the late 90s.
What is our Day of Remembrance supposed to DO? What does it DO for me to think about my own feelings endlessly (I already do that and I can tell you the result is: not impressive)? Or even to actually think about the people who were killed that day? There's nothing we can do with our grief/sorrow/horror/fear/rage except funnel it into misguided, sometimes actively ill-intentioned, war activities and hacking away at civil liberties.
Gumbo: So your girlfriend asked you which football game you wanted to watch... OK, just a storytelling tip: maybe don't lead with your least plausible element. And as to your question "who needs this?" the answer is Not Me (yet). It's one thing if something catches me off guard and makes me weep like, say, a documentary about polar bears or claw hammer to the solar plexus. I don't really feel like I need to go actively seeking things like that out.
KnK: What is going to bug me is that it's almost midnight and I have to work tomorrow, so I don't have time to Google what "Delillo's White Noise" is. I know it's not a type of pastry probably, but I'm going to pretend it is because I want it so badly to be so. Tomorrow knowledge will disabuse me of my misconception, but until then, what fun!
Also: civil liberties are the things the homos keep screaming about. Therefore civil liberties = gay. Election-wise, it's a non-starter. Best stick with something people can rally behind. Like NASCAR.
the homos are shrieking about civil RIGHTS, aren't they, not liberties? And white noise is a novel. About, partially, a professor who is head of/essentially invented Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college. It's quite a bit funnier & darker than that makes it sound, though.
Now I want pastry. thanks.
Also, where exactly is the solar plexus?
"Not ready to make nice" is a great call, MrGumby. My mind tends to do a fast moving focus that starts large and then grows smaller as it zooms in, pinpoint to the Dixie Chicks and their vilification, too. And then it settles into a medium, hazy unsettled view of where we remain today. (not kidding. And yeah, just like a film, single shot. My dreams all have amazing camera angles and tricks, too.)
Like the events knocked down some buildings, killed some people, and created a chasm that will never be filled between "sides." And then I realize, that, no, the *events* didn't do that. The people in charge of the nation at the time--and since--created that after the events.
KnK: Hey, pastry was your idea. You know, sort of. And nothing sounds funnier than "Hitler Studies." Finally, the History Channel would have some serious academic merit.
SJ: The good news about living in California is that, by and large, I have the luxury of opting out of the craziest parts of The Troubles. I can't imagine you have the same opportunity for distance in Alabama. I at least feel like sitting a few plays out is a choice I have. It occurs to me that not every environment affords the same.
We have so marginalized the people who actually fight our wars for us that most of us don't know that they're going crazy and killing themselves at record levels, and it's not because the Greatest Generation was just more stoic than this one is or ate more red meat and potatoes.
Soldiers now face combat several times a week on average, whereas in WW2, it was once a month or even less frequently. So we're simultaneously suffering more, and are more disengaged from those suffering. Seems like an awesome combination.
Why are you talking like you never saw "Band of Brothers"? World War II veterans are flawless paragons of stuck-in American determination and stainless virtue. Say it. SAY IT.
Actually, in slightly more seriousness, I don't know how many route clearance missions WWII, Korea or Vietnam veterans had to undertake. It doesn't actually count as "combat" I don't think, but ask any Iraq/Afghanistan veterans how they feel about bags of trash next to a road.
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