A Day of Remembrance, Politics, and Kardashians

The Tribute in Light in NYC (Gary Hershorn/Reuters)

You could almost be forgiven for forgetting that today is the anniversary of 9/11 — or perhaps just for wanting to forget. In a sharp contrast to last year’s largely backward-looking and high-minded coverage of the 10th anniversary, the 11th passed in an underwhelming show of media blase and political bickering. Far from rising above partisan sentiments, this year’s September 11 was less a solemn commemoration than just another day two months from an election. The unhinged far-right doubled down on its crusade against Islam, accusing President Obama of handing jihadists the keys to the country and lambasting universities for daring to sponsor “tolerance” programs like “The Future of Islam: Beyond Fear and Fundamentalism” instead of, who knows, deporting all their Muslim students to Guantanamo. The left buzzed about a New York Times op-ed by 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars author Kurt Eichenwald that laid out the pre-attack intelligence ignored by the Bush administration, and the Times itself resorted to what the Public Editor called “anniversary journalism.” “Every year, the anniversary of D-Day, the commemoration of Veterans Day and other important dates cause journalists to try to find the right balance between what readers think is appropriate and necessary and the lack of any actual news to drive the coverage,” wrote Margaret Sullivan. “Often, other than the local events surrounding an anniversary, there isn’t always much to say that is original.”

The Times certainly succeeded on this note, delivering an unoriginal story about financial infighting at Ground Zero and slapping up a link to the list of victims’ names on its splash page. Politico devoted its lead story to “the Kerry-ization of Mitt Romney,” describing Democratic attempts to paint the Republican candidate, who failed to mention Afghanistan in his convention acceptance speech, as weak on national security. NBC’s “Today Show” caught flack for declining live coverage of the 9/11 Moment of Silence (ABC and CBS cut away to the live feed), opting instead to continue its discussion of Kardashian mother Kris Jenner and her breast implants.

In the political realm, things were even worse. The president marked the anniversary with a ceremony on the White House lawn, a visit to the Pentagon, and a check-in with wounded soldiers at Walter Reed, while the vice-president traveled to Shanksville, PA, to speak at the Flight 93 memorial. In Obama’s defense, Ground Zero was declared off-limits to politicians this year “to avoid politicizing the moment,” and both campaigns pulled their negative advertising for the day. Still, the Times reports that the candidates “made no effort to duplicate the show of unity that Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain, then his Republican opponent, staged in 2008 when they appeared together.” Romney addressed a National Guard convention in Nevada in an attempt to regain the traditional Republican advantage on national security, an edge which recent polling shows has disappeared. He offered standard praise for the troops and personal accounts of meetings with members of the military but revealed nothing further about his plans for Afghanistan; it was not a speech that will likely erode Obama’s 51-40 lead on “handling terrorism.” It was also a typical Romney speech, purporting to “eschew politics” yet criticizing the current administration for finding an “excuse to hollow out our military through devastating defense budget cuts” and warning that “we cannot cancel program after program, we cannot jeopardize critical missions.” (Like . . . those programs that even the Pentagon — but not pork-hungry House Republicans — want to cancel?)

Outside the presidential campaign, partisanship reigned supreme. Dick Cheney, whose post-9/11 push to invade Iraq probably did more to divert attention from the hunt for Al Qaeda than than any other Bush-era malpractice, told the Daily Caller that, “if President Obama were participating in his intelligence briefings on a regular basis, then perhaps he would understand why people are so offended at his efforts to take sole credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden.” Stay classy, Dick. (And perhaps remember that Bush, who took intelligence briefings six days a week, dismissed one on Aug. 6, 2011 titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”) House Majority Leader Eric Cantor released a dog-whistle statement — “Our national security must be a priority and we must protect against efforts that would undermine our ability to prevent or respond to another devastating attack” — suggesting that the president is undercutting the safety of America. (How ’bout those sequestration defense cuts your party voted for, Eric?) Mostly, business on the Hill continued without pause, with Rep. John Mica holding a hearing on Amtrak subsidies (too generous, natch) and Congressional negotiators attempting to pin down a deal to keep the government open past Oct. 1. The Ways and Means Committee will gavel open the millionth hearing on repealing the Affordable Care Act. Dana Milbank’s Washington Post column hit the nail on the head: “On 9/11, Washington as usual.” Among the sundry activities Milbank finds on the capitol’s calendar:

The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts is having its fundraising gala at the Mayflower Hotel. A launch event is scheduled for a provocative new book, “The End of Men.” Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies is having a forum on “The Business of Sanitation.”

In short, “there is something for every taste in the Washington area on Tuesday” — unless your taste happens to run toward remembering the 3,000 people killed 11 years ago today.

Amid all this depressing lack of interest, the best “coverage” of 9/11 comes not from a major newspaper (no interactive, heavy-on-the-visuals commemorative package from the Times this year) but from the Stamford Advocate, a smallish Hearst paper in the Connecticut town of 122,000. In a moving story about a note recovered from the World Trade Center debris, reporter John Breunig focuses on the attacks’ impact on one family who originally thought its father died instantly when the plane hit the second tower. His office was close to the impact site, and his wife says, “I spent 10 years hoping that Randy wasn’t trapped in that building.” This changed after a note with a spot of her husband’s blood, identified through DNA tests, was found in the wreckage. Of the scrap of paper, Breunig writes:

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, these five words and two numbers have changed the picture completely for Scott’s family . . . .

In a steady tone, their mother explained the power of the note. “You don’t want them to suffer. They’re trapped in a burning building. It’s just an unspeakable horror. And then you get this 10 years later. It just changes everything.”

“84th floor

West Office

12 people trapped”

It took a decade for the note to make its way to the Scott family. It moved from a vault at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to the National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, which is still working to identify fragments — more often biological fragments — from the debris. Advances in DNA technology allowed a match to be made shortly before the 10th anniversary. Breunig describes Denise Scott’s reaction to the news:

“I said, `What kind of fragment?’ ” Denise recalled. “She said, `No, it’s not a fragment. It’s something written.’ And that’s when I just fell apart.”

Denise also brought a sample of Randy’s handwriting [to the museum], thinking she would need it for identification.

“The minute I saw it I didn’t need to see the DNA test,” she said. “I saw the handwriting. It’s Randy’s handwriting.”

She agreed to let the museum exhibit the note, but only after talking to the families of Scott’s coworkers.

They knew it had changed not just their father’s narrative, but that of the 11 other people referenced in the note.

“Everyone hoped that it was right on impact. That he didn’t suffer,” Alexandra said. “Because not only to know that he was trapped but what he was going through? And we knew the guys in his office too. And they had kids and they had families, and to think that they were terrified.”

“It tells people the story of the day,” Denise said.

In just five words and two numbers.

It’s a powerful story, worth reading in full at the Advocate’s website. The best piece of journalism to come out of 9/11 is still, bar none, Tom Junod’s 2003 Esquire article on attempting to identify the figure in the “Falling Man” photograph, but Breunig’s piece is a worthy entry, especially in a year otherwise devoid of significant coverage.

“This is never an easy day,” Obama said in his Pentagon address, but he is in some ways incorrect. For many of us, maybe most of us, today came and went far too easily.

A Sad Story, Badly Told

What is it about momentous occasions that brings out the Edward Bulwer-Lytton, of “It was a dark and storm night” fame, in reporters? Maybe it’s tacky to grumble that the articles about the 9/11 anniversary are poorly written, but I’m lodging a complaint anyway. The Associated Press offers multiple takes on the anniversary, as if to give its network of newspapers several options: maudlin, saccharine or lugubrious. I find it insulting that the AP thinks this sort of high school essay writing appeals to the average American. It smacks of what conservatives call media elitism, because it presumes that the only way readers will grasp the significance of a situation is to bang them over the head with it. It offends my intelligence in the same way that laugh-track sitcoms that crack stale, misogynist jokes offend my intelligence. Just as Hollywood assumes no one will pay to see a thoughtful movie about real people, but will fork over eight dollars to watch a cariciatured romp-fest, the AP assumes that its readers will choose melodrama over straight news.

There is nothing particularly unusual about the writing style on display in the AP’s 9/11 stories. Far too many of the news service’s articles are almost willfully bad, in that there is no real excuse for the overly colloquial, casual language. It does not come off as rushed or written on deadline, as one might expect from a wire service. I could understand if the sentences were hastily composed or the metaphors slightly mixed, but that isn’t the problem. The reporters choose their words carefully; it’s just that they choose the wrong ones. Still, the AP’s 9/11 reporting is especially bad. The melodramatic tone suggests that the only way to commemorate a tragedy is through weeping and gnashing of teeth. It is a mistake to assume that a slew of colorful adjectives is the only way to telegraph sincerity or grief. Other publications — the Times, to cite my personal favorite — have produced authentic, compelling 9/11 stories that are vastly more moving than the AP’s stylistic glop. There is a place and time for dramatic devices like repetition; that time, as Tom Junod’s “Falling Man” article proves, is after the author has spent six pages proving he can write. In other cases, Junod is a notorious abuser of repetition — see his 2011 profile of Pixar chief John Lasseter — but by the end of the wrenching 7,000-word “Falling Man,” he has earned his sign-off: ” . . . We have known who the Falling Man is all along.” The AP, by contrast, has done nothing to justify these opening lines:

At churches, we prayed. At fire stations, we laid wreaths. At football stadiums, hands and baseball caps over hearts, we lifted our voices in song and familiar chants of “USA!” – our patriotism renewed once more as we allowed ourselves to go back in time, to the planes and the towers and the panic and the despair, to the memories that scar us still.

Not only does the writer begin the first three sentences with “at,” but she subjects us to “the planes and the towers and the panic and the dispair” as well. Pick one, please. I don’t doubt that the reporter was sincere in her desire to convey the indelible nature of the memories, but the result is overdone and exhausting to read. Just two paragraphs later, the rhythmic list-making returns, as we are told of gatherings “on small-town main streets and in courthouse squares, in big-city parks and on statehouse steps.”

Another article begins with a smattering of descriptions that sound just slightly off:

Determined never to forget but perhaps ready to move on, the nation gently handed Sept. 11 over to history Sunday and etched its memory on a new generation. A stark memorial took its place where twin towers once stood, and the names of the lost resounded from children too young to remember terror from a decade ago.

The nation “gently” handed the day over to history? Its memory was “etched . . . on a new generation”? You can etch a memory into someone’s mind, perhaps, but on an entire generation? There’s nothing explicitly wrong with this sentence, but it sits awkwardly on the page, like a chair with one leg an inch too short. Likewise, the image of names “resound[ing]” from children” doesn’t quite work. The whole paragraph is an exercise in overwriting.

The AP article that my local newspaper chose for today’s front page includes the following:

Close your eyes and picture Sept. 11. The memories are cauterized, familiar forever. The second plane banks and slides in, the fireball blooms, the towers peel away as if unzipped from the top . . . . No one knew exactly what was happening, or how vast, or at whose hand. No one knew, for a time, that the instruments of destruction were not prop planes but jumbo jets. At the very first, almost no one knew there were planes at all.

September 11 isn’t an event that requires embellishment or fancy language. What the AP reporters don’t seem to realize is that the story is horrific enough to stand on its own. Joe Biden once accused Rudy Giuliani of composing sentences from “a noun, a verb and 9/11.” In some cases, that simple noun-verb formula may not be such a bad idea.

To be fair, the AP isn’t the only media outlet guilty of melodrama. Even the vaunted Gray Lady ran a column on September 6 by Roger Cohen that contains some pretty purple prose. Describing the post-9/11 era, Cohen writes:

Irresponsibility was allied to conviction, a heinous marriage. Self-delusion is the mother of perdition. Wars killed. Wall Street made killings. “Whatever” became the watchword of maxed-out Americans; and in time things fell apart.

Scan the rest of the column and you’ll encounter “scurrilous imaginings,” “kleptocratic tyrannies” and ” inexorable currents of history.” That’s quite a mouthful. If you’re looking for SAT-prep words, Cohen is your man.

Not all of the 9/11 coverage was poorly written. It’s just a shame that the AP, which provides content to newspapers across the country, didn’t hold itself to higher standards.

 

Beware Pundits Bearing “Meaning”

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.