![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Malleability of Symbols
Sep. 12th, 2012 01:18 amI've never felt even the slightest emotional connection to 9/11. Even at the time, this struck me as odd. The planes took off from Logan, and were routes my Dad flew a lot. He was also often in the World Trade Center, and lost friends there. Similarly, I had friends who worked in and across from the Pentagon. I called a lot of people to make sure they were okay. I was relieved.
But I feel more distant from 9/11 than I do from the Blitz, from the Holocaust, from even things like the Boer War. More distant than from everyday plane crashes. I think it's because 9/11 immediately became a symbol, and in small-town Texas where I lived then, a bludgeon. I got death threats for not having an American flag sticker on my car. When I wondered how the Patriot Act was going to get around its unconsitutionality, I was told to get out of the country.
I think that made my brain file it away as "historical event" instead of "human narrative," and specifically historical in the way of the Zimmerman Telegram or the XYZ Affair. Historical in the way of game pieces, not historical in the way of not enough supplies at Valley Forge. To this day, if somebody says 9/11 to me, my brain immediately responds with "Remember the Maine." It's Pavlovian.
Friends on facebook linked today to a 2003 Esquire article, "The Falling Man," by Tom Junod, about a photograph taken of one of the jumpers during the World Trade Center collapse, and the later suppression in most American media of all photographs and video of jumpers from the World Trade Center Collapse. It seems there were probably 200, about a sixth of the people who died. It is hard to get an accurate count, because nobody wants to say that anyone jumped. It has been mostly suppressed.
Successfully, so, I would say, since I had very little idea there was so much jumping. Jumping so far it created booms when bodies hit ground.
I am disappointed by the suppression. It seems careless with the historical record. It's important to see pictures of lynchings, for instance, the photographs of lynchings people used to pass around. It removes your ability to imagine subtleties where there weren't. It makes culpability much clearer. But I am willing to agree to disagree on this, taking the long view that it will be sorted out in a few generations. The data is there.
However, I'm shocked by why the photos were suppressed. It seems that most people at the scene and afterward agreed that it was inhumane and exploitative to shoot photos of the jumping people. It also seems that people were ashamed by the jumping people, because it seems jumping in this situation is universally agreed to be cowardly, to be a sign of giving up. The martyrs of 9/11 are heroes and therefore not cowardly and therefore did not jump. They were blown out of the building. They waited their turn to be blown out of the building.
It's always a shock when I realize how far outside of the dominant view I am on issues I didn't even realize were contentious.*
To me, jumping is, in this situation, an assertion of the humanity of the jumper, a "fuck yeah!" triumph. "You didn't kill me," the jumper says. The jumper is Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff. The jumper is Luke after the Vader duel in Empire. 200 people decided that instead of choking on smoke or being crushed by masonry, they were going to take the opportunity to leap the leap we've all wondered about. They made a choice. A choice in which I can see myself. A choice I would have wanted photographed, watched, and remembered. The jumpers are the first thing that has made me feel any kind of link to 9/11, any kind of belief in heroes.
I've been reading To Open the Sky, by Robert Silverberg. There's a throwaway line - the book has a lot of great throwaway lines, a real surplus of notions - in which a character wonders what would happen to Christianity if archaeologists discovered that Jesus was real and pretty much as the Bible said, but was beheaded instead of crucified. Would this be a triumph, or would this destroy the faith?
I wonder. Beheading in place of crucifixion wouldn't make any difference to me, but I am seemingly not the same as most people, as relates to symbols.
* As a sidebar, I took one of those "which presidential candidate do you agree with most" voter guide quizzes today, and it seems I'm pretty close to both Obama and the Green Party candidate, which is not surprising. What is surprising to me is that I align something like 95% with the Democratic party, and agree with Mitt Romney only 9% and the Republican Party 2%. This is amazing to me. I knew I did not see eye-to-eye with the Republicans, and that I kind of thought they were acting crazy, but it seems there is genuinely no overlap at all. And yet I am in agreement with 59% of the country, and am a centrist, a utilitarian. Who for instance believes in science. All the people talking about compromise and the need for both sides to stop acting polarized: I will not compromise on the fact of evolution. You believe in science, or I hate you. My middle ground is that you can also believe in God if you want. That's as far as I'll go.
But I feel more distant from 9/11 than I do from the Blitz, from the Holocaust, from even things like the Boer War. More distant than from everyday plane crashes. I think it's because 9/11 immediately became a symbol, and in small-town Texas where I lived then, a bludgeon. I got death threats for not having an American flag sticker on my car. When I wondered how the Patriot Act was going to get around its unconsitutionality, I was told to get out of the country.
I think that made my brain file it away as "historical event" instead of "human narrative," and specifically historical in the way of the Zimmerman Telegram or the XYZ Affair. Historical in the way of game pieces, not historical in the way of not enough supplies at Valley Forge. To this day, if somebody says 9/11 to me, my brain immediately responds with "Remember the Maine." It's Pavlovian.
Friends on facebook linked today to a 2003 Esquire article, "The Falling Man," by Tom Junod, about a photograph taken of one of the jumpers during the World Trade Center collapse, and the later suppression in most American media of all photographs and video of jumpers from the World Trade Center Collapse. It seems there were probably 200, about a sixth of the people who died. It is hard to get an accurate count, because nobody wants to say that anyone jumped. It has been mostly suppressed.
Successfully, so, I would say, since I had very little idea there was so much jumping. Jumping so far it created booms when bodies hit ground.
I am disappointed by the suppression. It seems careless with the historical record. It's important to see pictures of lynchings, for instance, the photographs of lynchings people used to pass around. It removes your ability to imagine subtleties where there weren't. It makes culpability much clearer. But I am willing to agree to disagree on this, taking the long view that it will be sorted out in a few generations. The data is there.
However, I'm shocked by why the photos were suppressed. It seems that most people at the scene and afterward agreed that it was inhumane and exploitative to shoot photos of the jumping people. It also seems that people were ashamed by the jumping people, because it seems jumping in this situation is universally agreed to be cowardly, to be a sign of giving up. The martyrs of 9/11 are heroes and therefore not cowardly and therefore did not jump. They were blown out of the building. They waited their turn to be blown out of the building.
It's always a shock when I realize how far outside of the dominant view I am on issues I didn't even realize were contentious.*
To me, jumping is, in this situation, an assertion of the humanity of the jumper, a "fuck yeah!" triumph. "You didn't kill me," the jumper says. The jumper is Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff. The jumper is Luke after the Vader duel in Empire. 200 people decided that instead of choking on smoke or being crushed by masonry, they were going to take the opportunity to leap the leap we've all wondered about. They made a choice. A choice in which I can see myself. A choice I would have wanted photographed, watched, and remembered. The jumpers are the first thing that has made me feel any kind of link to 9/11, any kind of belief in heroes.
I've been reading To Open the Sky, by Robert Silverberg. There's a throwaway line - the book has a lot of great throwaway lines, a real surplus of notions - in which a character wonders what would happen to Christianity if archaeologists discovered that Jesus was real and pretty much as the Bible said, but was beheaded instead of crucified. Would this be a triumph, or would this destroy the faith?
I wonder. Beheading in place of crucifixion wouldn't make any difference to me, but I am seemingly not the same as most people, as relates to symbols.
* As a sidebar, I took one of those "which presidential candidate do you agree with most" voter guide quizzes today, and it seems I'm pretty close to both Obama and the Green Party candidate, which is not surprising. What is surprising to me is that I align something like 95% with the Democratic party, and agree with Mitt Romney only 9% and the Republican Party 2%. This is amazing to me. I knew I did not see eye-to-eye with the Republicans, and that I kind of thought they were acting crazy, but it seems there is genuinely no overlap at all. And yet I am in agreement with 59% of the country, and am a centrist, a utilitarian. Who for instance believes in science. All the people talking about compromise and the need for both sides to stop acting polarized: I will not compromise on the fact of evolution. You believe in science, or I hate you. My middle ground is that you can also believe in God if you want. That's as far as I'll go.
