The majority of the media coverage surrounding the tenth anniversary of September 11 is reflective; it follows up with survivors interviewed in 2001 or looks back at a decade of war on terror. The Atlantic is a bit more ambitious, in that it at least makes an attempt at critical thinking. Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Real Meaning of 9/11,” serves as an introduction to the magazine’s 10-years-later section. As one might expect from an essay purporting to reveal the “real meaning” of anything, Goldberg’s piece is ponderous and self-serious. “What we saw on the morning of September 11, 2001 was evil made manifest,” he declares in his opening gambit, as if he plans to address the nature of evil and its connection to Al Qaeda in a mere three pages. Though he acknowledges that “self-criticism is necessary, even indispensable, for democracy to work,” he mostly dismisses such navel-gazing, reminding us that “Westerners are gifted in the art of slashing self-criticism.” Goldberg wants to keep the onus of that bright Tuesday morning on Bin Laden and his suicide attackers; he has little patience for those who would explain 9/11 as a failure of intelligence, a failure of policy, or a failure to understand the Muslim world. No one would argue with the contention that the responsibility for the deaths of 3,000 Americans rests solely on the shoulders of the attackers — but then, no one is really suggesting otherwise. Even the self-flagellation that was supposedly popular in liberal circles, as some wondered aloud whether American actions could have somehow contributed to the attack, was not an attempt to absolve Osama Bin Laden of his crime. Professor Ward Churchill’s reference to the thousands of “little Eichmanns” who died in the Twin Towers was notable for its abhorrence, not its sound reasoning or widespread appeal.
Some of what Goldberg has to say is indeed valuable; he is one of the few authors to question the axiomatic belief that “terror is a weapon of the weak, when it is in fact a weapon deployed against the weak.” Here he means “weak” in the sense of “innocent” — the innocent children, mothers and fathers who were killed on 9/11 — but the fallacy he points out parallels the strange perception that terrorists are cowards. Preying on the weak is despicable, and if one assumes it is cowardly to hunt easy game rather than equally-matched targets — civilians instead of soldiers, say — then terrorists are indeed cowards. But the phrasing has always seemed chosen more to belittle and scoff at the perpetrators, to in some way posthumously humiliate them, than to actually explain their crimes. I do not pretend to understand the mind of a suicide bomber, but it seems that to face one’s own death requires some sort of bravery, or perhaps insanity, however twisted it may be. Maybe I feel this way because I fear death so much myself, because I do not believe in heaven or hell and so regard death as the ultimate, terrifying end. But I know I would never be brave enough to walk willingly into my own death.
While Goldberg rejects the idea that terrorists are weak, he asserts throughout his essay that they are evil. Their souls “are devoid of anything but hate, and murder is what erupted from these voids.” With this claim, Goldberg commits the very error for which he chastises the “terrorists are weak” crowd. To say that a terrorist’s emotions are limited to hate is to suggest, as those who label terrorism a coward’s tactic suggest, that a terrorist is less than human. Such denigration makes it easier to see violence as something foreign and 9/11 as an event fundamentally removed from the otherwise logical and compassionate flow of history. But what makes 9/11 so repulsive is that it was carried out by humans, by people with the same capacity to reason and feel as ourselves. Terrorism would be less frightening if it were perpetrated by an inherently cruel alien attacker; then we would not have to ask “why?” We would not have to wonder at man’s inhumanity to man. I can accept that Bin Laden’s suicide bombers were evil, because evil implies a present characteristic, a deliberate cruelty. What I have a hard time accepting is that these men were necessarily “soulless,” people, “devoid of love,” whose actions expressed “their hatred for humanity.” To believe someone is soulless is to believe in absence — the absence of a soul, the very thing that makes humans human. I suspect that even an evil person has experienced moments of love or friendship, if only perhaps as a child. This in no way lessens the magnitude of the evil that person commits; it only confirms our worst fear: that he, too, is human. Love and hate are not zero-sum quantities — a modicum of love does not soften or take away from a surplus of hate.
In the title of his essay, Goldberg assures us that, if we just stick with him for a few pages, we will learn the meaning of 9/11. Unfortunately, the answer to his implicit question is unsatisfying and vague. “[M]urder is the meaning of 9/11,” he writes. The statement feels cheap, because where does that leave us? Yes, murder is what happened on 9/11, but the idea of meaning suggests something broader and more resonant. Murder is perhaps what 9/11 meant for the terrorists, who never had to wake up on 9/12 and wrangle with the event’s far-reaching, tangled consequences for the future. For Bin Laden, the attack on America was very much about hatred; but for millions of Americans, “hatred” and “murder” do not begin to encompass the effects of that day. Murder happens once, but grief and vulnerability and politics happen each day, every day, for the rest of our lives. The meaning of 9/11 cannot possibly be restricted to three acts — three planes — of murderous impulse.
If Goldberg’s reduction of 9/11 to a series of facts impedes his quest to define the date’s greater significance, it may in part be due to his phrasing of the question. Writing in The American Prospect, John Powers makes this observation:
Before you knew it, the date September 11, 2001, gave way to the mystified shorthand of “9/11,” a name all too soon employed as a talisman, a bludgeon, a Get Out of Jail Free Card.
Powers is referring to the way in which 9/11 became the answer (or perhaps the excuse) for everything: the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the PATRIOT Act, the subtle erosion of civil liberties and the ability of politicians on the right to shut down any line of inquiry by questioning their opponents’ patriotism. President Bush declared that “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” In a 2007 debate, then-Senator Joe Biden chastised Rudy Giuliani for constructing every sentence from “a noun, and a verb and 9/11.”
Such discourse cheapens the memory and impact of September 11, and makes it more difficult to tease out the meaning that Jeffrey Goldberg is so certain he has identified. Can an event experienced — for the most part vicariously, but haven’t we all laid a claim to a piece of the tragedy; hasn’t it changed everyone’s lives just a bit? — by millions of people have one unified meaning? In a more general sense, do events even have meaning deeper than the simple facts of their occurrence? Events have consequences and implications, but meaning is not a quality that exists independent of the human mind. It is something we ascribe to a tragedy in its aftermath, a narrative not of what happened that day but a story of how it affected us in the days followed.
I don’t know what the so-called meaning of 9/11 is, but I know that, whatever it is, it will have to account for the years, mostly still to come, in which the victims will not be there for their wives, husbands and children. It will have to account for two wars, for a society trying to walk the line between security and civil liberties, for a body politic upended and left angrily vulnerable by the attacks, for a shift in America’s sense of the world. “Murder” is far too simple to rise to the level of meaning. It is what 9/11 meant on 9/11/o1, not on 9/11/11. Too much has happened. Goldberg writes that “There are many people who still seem befogged by fallacies and delusions about the cause and meaning of 9/11.” I share his disappointment in the persistence of fallacies and delusions — that the attacks were an inside job, for example, or that the suicide attackers were on the CIA payroll. But there is no shame in, ten years later, still being “befogged” about 9/11’s meaning. Meaning is a shifting, slippery thing, and as the ripples caused by that day in September 2001 propagate throughout the years, it will have to take into account thousands of changing inputs. It cannot be summed up in a blue-bound commission report or a PBS documentary — and certainly not in a three-page article in a magazine.
. . . So Well Read. . . 