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Responses
Since I am (or intend to be) a student of how language operates, I approached the news of September 11 by that avenue. I was almost immediately struck by how far beyond the capacities of customary speech we were forced to move. Even the inevitable question seemed clumsy. "Are you OK?" But who was, that day or the next or the next? "Were you affected at all?" Who wasn’t? "Did you have family at the World Trade Center?" Ah, but what of friends, working associates, ex-students, even passing acquaintances? "Did you know any of the casualties?" And yet what of the missing?
More centrally, what was the deed itself appropriately to be called? An event? Too bland. For many of us, Pedro Martinez having a good outing against the Yankees is an event. And buried within that small word are so many inapt positive connotations – parties, weddings, visits from children, all are events. Then perhaps disaster – surely a firm step away from the positive. But somehow on a wrong path. "Disasters" are tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, not produced by human agency (do insurance companies still refer to "acts of God?"). As the photographs began to haunt newspaper front pages, the immediate agents were all too evidently human. And as the face of Osama bin Laden became the new press-demon (supplanting Ho Chi Minh, Muhimar Khaddafi, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Timothy McVeigh, each of whom had his turn), agency was once more the issue.
Catastrophe? Too broad perhaps. Attack? Yes, but it led us too readily down the analogy trail to Pearl Harbor, a sad and incorrect and probably baneful route. In the end, the date itself came to serve.
It may seem trivial, to anguish thus over terminologies. But words are close cousins of metaphors, and metaphor is perilously close to a necessity of (psychic) health. A contemporary essayist, Chris Arthur, asserts that
"Metaphors are the bones of language which give it the strength to carry so much flesh of meaning. . . . Without the ability to compare that they afford, how could we withstand the endless hurricane of things, of happenings, which time ceaselessly bombards us with?"
A scholarly friend, Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, has written an entire book about the inability of our contemporary world to come up with a fully agreed-upon image of evil. He called his book The Death of Satan. We have, the book argues, abandoned all of the "archaic" and not-wholly religious images of the source of evil, but (tragically, even fatally perhaps) not the desire to demonize.
To put aside questions of verbiage threw us directly into a harder puzzlement. On the night of September 11, as I put her to bed, my daughter asked the anguished question, "How could anyone do this?" A few days later her history class was divided, at random, into three groups. One group – hers, as it turned out – had to write an explanation of the action from the perspective of a terrorist. One group had to take the position of non-terrorist Muslims. And the third had to speak in the mind and voice of the families of victims. "Was that hard?" I wondered. "Not really. The group that had the hardest time were the kids who had to be Muslims. They just didn’t know enough." I daresay that was one of the major purposes of the exercise. We have begun to use – or, in all probability, misuse – words that are new to us, like jihad.
And our leaders promise to track down and punish those responsible. But who in the end was responsible? Was it, at least to some degree, the CIA (as sometime trainers of the Taliban) or the State Department (as the promoters of what is perceived as a biased pro-Israeli, anti-Arab policy) or the military (who so proudly launched those scud missiles on Iraq) or George Bush, Sr., who ordered the launch, or the security guards at Logan who failed to screen out the hijackers, or the state government which seems not to have put any particular thought or energy into Logan security, or the whole Security Infrastructure, which surely ought to have caught wind of such a long-standing and complex plot in time to forestall it? Or even the designers of jet-liners which were, we were shocked to realize, so easily conceived as flying bombs? Or the citizenry at large, which had allowed so much to be done in its name?
The train of possibilities seemed endless, and seemed so often to lead back to our own doorstep. I even proposed to a cyberpal of mine, who teaches at a "polytechnical institute," that there had to be something amiss with the engineering of the towers, to allow them to collapse. "The towers were engineering marvels. It’s the human soul that needs work," he replied. Did I mention he was schooled by the Jesuits?
All our understandings baffled, our powerlessness is deepened. And we long to lash out - many of us are doing so, mindlessly, misdirectedly, at Hispanics and Sikhs and anyone who is perceived to "look Arab." In good John Wayne fashion, we call up the reserves, send out the fleet, plan an "appropriate response" (which somehow must translate into military: yet one more linguistic problem). No matter, really, if we mix in pb & j with the bombs; our "strike against our enemy" places us in a position of equality, in psychic and in moral terms, with those whom we would prefer to think of as sinister enemies. Bombs and guns, gelignite and guerilla attacks, are the favored tactics of the disempowered everywhere. And are Scud missiles that much preferable, on the ethical plane? Ah, but the sad truth is that, even now, after millennia of carnage, war sells. Consider "Saving Private Ryan" or "Band of Brothers." Or "Pearl Harbor." Culturally, we haven’t much outgrown "Sands of Iwo Jima." Why are we so surprised that the dispossessed living in desperate poverty in the wilds of Afghanistan aren’t any more level-headed?
Osama bin Laden, as opponent, has the advantage of being almost invisible (Tony Blair and NATO aver the proof is persuasive; but it is not just Missouri that is, or ought to be, a "show me" place). Are we in fact the villains, for having a life that is so enticing and yet seems so unfair to the disempowered and dispossessed of the world? Did we as a nation grow fat and complacent, and forget that the old Dylan song, "With God on Our Side" was bitterly ironic? I apologize if my Calvinist, self-lacerating upbringing comes to the fore. But I have this eerie feeling that it is, in fact, a problem of language. Even of pronouns. There is so much "us/them" thinking going on. Perhaps there is the fundamental engineering problem – how to rebuild an overarching "we."
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