Commentary, Nov 2002 v114 i4 p56(4)
Mourning without meaning. (Observations). (commemorations on the anniversary of 2001 terrorist attacks, 2002)(Column) Michael J. Lewis.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 American Jewish Committee

ANYONE WHO followed the ceremonies marking the anniversary of September 11 would have been struck by the exceptional dignity of the coverage. In every medium--from television networks to major newspapers to newsweeklies--there prevailed a tone of sober and respectful solemnity that for the most part refused to cloy or to pander. In media that have long sought to put themselves on a congenial first-name basis with their audience, and have contributed mightily to the pervasive informality of modern life, this was a welcome return to reticence.

The tone was most conspicuous on television, which has also been the worst offender--and was the medium through which most Americans experienced last year's attacks. This is not to say that the networks turned overnight into models of self-effacement. Competition by means of relentless product differentiation remained the order of the day, complete with titles, logos, musical themes, and other devices essential to brand-name recognition. If Fox Network gave us The Day America Changed, on MSNBC the spare caption 9.11.1 transformed itself into 9.11.2 to the ominous accompaniment of string music.

Since the Gulf war, such bits of graphic and sonic cleverness have been part and parcel of the coverage of major news stories, and an unavoidable artifact of around-the-clock news. But as if to compensate for the unseemly assigning of musical themes, however subdued, to episodes of human agony, there was at least a moratorium on commercial advertising during most of the commemorative broadcasts, and by most advertisers throughout the day.

Despite all the documentaries and retrospectives already aired over the course of last year, some of the coverage was also surprisingly fresh. An episode of 60 Minutes II on CBS stood out, a terse and moving account of the day of the attacks as experienced by President Bush--tracing his peregrinations from the first whispered reports during his visit to a kindergarten class in Florida to the endless, halting odyssey back to the White House that afternoon. By a happy stroke, the President was interviewed on board Air Force One; this gave his account an unusual vividness, as when he gestured through the window where he first glimpsed the belated arrival of his fighter protection, dispatched after an erroneous warning that he had been targeted by a rogue plane. The image of this airborne command center, adrift in the fog of war and barraged by contradictory and panicked reports, brought one jarringly close to the essential solitude of command.

In producing such forensic accounts, including first-rate documentaries on the construction and collapse of the Twin Towers shown on the History Channel and the Learning Channel, television rose to the occasion. Apart from an occasional lapse (like the Learning Channel's Inside Flight 93, a hastily written effort that failed to take the true measure of that heartrending, passenger-led uprising), the quality was generally high. And this was also true of the print media. Especially notable was "Towering Ambition," which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on September 14 and drew a brilliant set of connections between the financial and technical decisions that shaped the towers and the precise chain of physical events that toppled them.

Here, as almost everywhere in the media coverage since September 11, one could hardly complain about what was there. The problem lay in what was not there. For all the microscopic analysis of melting girders and terrorist funding networks, a troubling void remained at the center of the coverage--and thus, given the pervasive nature of electronic communication, at the center of the collective national experience.

The main event of the week was the cycle of ceremonies at the three battlegrounds of attack. They were strikingly different. At Shanksville, Pennsylvania--a site that is poignantly random, the fortuitous endpoint of the airborne struggle aboard United Airlines flight 93--there was no institution to give the proceedings an organized character. Instead, the surviving relatives of the dead, along with their small-town hosts, gathered in what had the feel of a family service. Still, through memories of the heroic final stand of the passengers, we were given glimpses of a group of remarkable citizen-soldiers, perhaps the first important ones since the Revolutionary War itself. Of all the ceremonies, this one offered the most solace, as well as the greatest degree of realism about the what and the why of September 11.

At the Pentagon ceremony, too, it was possible to view the attacks less as a series of cold-blooded but essentially incomprehensible massacres of innocents and more as vicious acts of war--in which, as occasionally happens in the tumult of war, the headquarters became the front line. It was this perception, indeed, that had given a bracing solidarity, to the Pentagon's repair effort over the previous twelve months; its "hard-hat patriots" completed their work within the year and without conspicuous hand-wringing over the defiling of consecrated ground. Even the question of an appropriate memorial had been resolved with military efficiency: the anniversary marked the due date for proposals for a modest monument, to which the public had been invited to contribute.

But of course it was the proceedings in New York that formed the real focus of the day. Unlike in Washington, there was no speechifying, the only formal addresses being the readings that opened and closed the ceremony: the Gettysburg Address read by New York Governor George Pataki and the Declaration of Independence by New Jersey Governor James McGreevey. Otherwise, the ceremony was movingly laconic, consisting of a recitation of the names of the dead by a variety of family members, politicians, and celebrities, among whom former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani fittingly came first. The background was a quiet musical dirge in which the cellist Yo-Yo Ma assisted.

Four times the roster of the dead was interrupted by a moment of silence, marking the precise instants when the towers were struck and when they fell. The simple litany of names achieved its effect not by means of elevated language but through its inexorable rhythm, as in those itemized inventories of goods or casualties that interrupt the narrative flow of the Iliad. Through the two interlocking rhythms, the toll of names and the larger structure of the silences, the proceedings took on something of the formal order of a requiem.

Indeed, the vocabulary of religious observance pervaded the entire array of gestures on display in New York: the lighting of candles, the tolling of bells, the clasping of hands, the standing in reverential silence. Here was a national version of funeral rites, carried out on the largest scale and experienced collectively through the medium of television. And the fact that religious gestures should have marked this occasion, even in our secularized public life, is understandable, for there is no alternative. Or rather the only alternative, the culture of commercial entertainment that has come to dominate our public life, has nothing useful to say in the face of human tragedy.

IN ONE aspect, however, the three ceremonies and their countless counterparts throughout America differed fundamentally from a religious service: they could offer little consolation to the living. The rites and rituals of the world's great religions provide a set of measured and incremental steps by which the business of grieving gives way to the business of life. Human feeling--of the most agonized sort--is an accompaniment to this process, to be addressed with kindness and sympathy; but it is not the primary object.

Our modern public rites, by contrast, pivot about our feelings, and tend mainly to ratify, them. They are conducted in such a way as to promote and encourage emotionality rather than to restore a sense of divine or cosmic--or national--order. In this sense, our bout of grieving has been therapeutic rather than spiritual in character. And like therapy it must be repeated to be effective, which perhaps accounts for the waves of improvised and largely identical ceremonies that have been held over the past twelve months.

It has become a commonplace to contrast the response to the September 11 attacks with the response to the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, whose first anniversary was noted, if at all, only in order to renew a fierce sense of national resolve. At that time, the negatives of grief and loss were viewed in their relation to positives--that is, action and purpose. Death in general was seen as pointless or meaningful, tragic or heroic, depending on its relation to larger things.

Clearly, we now have a very different sense of what it means for a nation to grieve. And that different sense has to do with our loss of those same "larger things," which have become a subject of great embarrassment to enlightened American opinion in the intervening years. Patriotism, sacrifice, democracy, idealism--for many college-educated Americans of a certain age, these are mawkish shams. Rather than uniting us, they divide us. The great debunking of the cardinal American ideals over the last decades has left us little on which to agree, especially when it comes to war. That may be one reason why so much importance attaches to mourning, one of the very few exceptions and, it seems, always and everywhere a proper response to meaningful public events.

The Vietnam war produced no uplifting monument to mark the flawed but noble idealism of that enterprise. But it did call forth a great unifying memorial: Maya Lin's 1982 black marble wall and gash in the earth, the first crystallization of a new form of public ceremony from which all hint of moral uplift had been banished. Her bleak and somber wall remains moving, but it set an example with pernicious consequences. Thus, while there was no formal attempt to memorialize the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America, and certainly nothing on the grand and stirring scale of the Chicago Columbian Exposition a century earlier, the date was marked by self-abasing gestures of regret and repentance on the part of educators, intellectuals, and public officials alike.

By the 1990's, it seemed that mourning itself had come to take the place of patriotism. Nowhere was this more egregiously on display than during the presidency of Bill Clinton, whose alacrity in seeking out sites of tragedy and disaster deservedly earned him the sobriquet of mourner-in-chief. And nowhere was the Clintonian influence more vivid than in the dirge-like but ultimately evasive character of the New York services on September 11. Instead of providing a positive charge to the living--a peroration--the ceremony at Ground Zero left it to the spectators to puzzle out the connection between the recent attacks on their country and other situations in which the nation had been put in peril.

The very decision to recite the Gettysburg Address indicated just how nervous politicians were about saying anything that might be deemed "divisive." And yet, aside from the fact that Lincoln's great address deals with the consecration of a battlefield as a national cemetery, in no other respect was it appropriate to our present circumstances. The soldiers who fell at Gettysburg were fighting in a war whose aims had been articulated with great eloquence on both sides, and which they clearly understood. Those who fell in the World Trade Center were not soldiers but civilians, and most could not have known in their final private moments why they were dying. If the ceremonies in New York sought to do anything, they ought to have articulated those reasons. To invoke Lincoln's sublime rhetoric instead of making a statement about today's war, and about radical Islam, may have been understandable, but it was also an act of dishonesty.

The elevation of collective mourning over collective purpose accounts for another aspect of this past year: the extraordinary solicitude and reverence shown to the bereaved. Inevitably, this has led to muscle-flexing by some of the politically empowered mourners. Survivors' groups were given a prominent voice in the decision-making process both for the commemoration of September 11 and for the reshaping of Ground Zero. In the latter case, the results have not been happy.

While the jagged hole in the Pentagon is no longer visible, even a schematic program for rebuilding Ground Zero remains to be finalized. In large measure this is due to the recalcitrance of survivors' and victims' groups, many of whom would prefer that the entire site be made over into a great park, a necropolis upon what was the cradle

and apex of American capitalism. And so the fate of the site, especially the "hallowed ground" of the buildings' footprints, is as uncertain as it was last April when the first tentative moves toward rebuilding were announced. It will be grotesque if the bereaved are allowed to exercise a veto over the reuse of the site--a veto, in effect, of the dead over the living.

It may be because of this same deference to the bereaved as a single undifferentiated class that more has not been made of Todd Beamer, Tom Burnett, and Jeremy Glick, the heroes of flight 93, whose names deserve to be as universally known as those of Jimmy Doolittle or Sergeant York in wars past. These men took actions that they knew would result in their certain death, and they did so in the most American way imaginable, by holding a vote on whether to make their fatal charge. Here, for once, Americans did literally what the final verse of the Star Spangled Banner calls for: "when free men shall stand between their loved homes and the war's desolation."

But such heroism assumes its meaning only in the context of defending the nation, and here the media, and many ordinary Americans, turn squeamish. In place of a collective national identity, cemented by shared political and cultural ideals, we have been told that the real bond among us is our variegated heterogeneity, the diversity that is "our strength." In place of the nation-state, we have the "gorgeous mosaic."

It was to the great chagrin of this viewpoint that the attacks of last year fell not on the mosaic but on the nation-state. Of course, a jury-rigged explanation was promptly provided. The real object of attack, it was said, was our openness and tolerance--in short, our diversity. But considerable verbal sleight-of-hand is required to keep such a gross fiction aloft. Hence the euphemisms that have surrounded the attacks, characterized neutrally as "tragic events" rather than as a massacre or an act of war. Hence, too, the taboo that fell on the depiction of the most horrific images from the World Trade Center--people leaping voluntarily to their deaths in preference to being burned alive.

In one of these, a man and woman are said to hold hands as they plummet together, but I have not seen it. Nor am I likely to. Within a day of the attacks, there arose a popular outcry against the showing of such images, whose numbers are legion. And the media, normally keen to justify their own sensationalism by invoking the public's right to know, have deferred to this day. As a result, we have been left with a peculiarly sanitized version of the event which gives us only the colossal fireball and the slow-motion implosion of the buildings, making their destruction the subject. As in an action film, with its lurid explosions and computer-generated special effects, one is comfortably detached from the human dramas taking place within.

Whether intentional or not, the tendency of this self-censorship is clear; those things that cause us to weep will be shown, those that might prompt rage or justifiable anger will not be. Indeed, the one serious attempt by an artist to grapple with the unspeakable horror of the atrocities emerged, as if by unerring instinct, as the opposite of an image of atrocity. This was Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture by Eric Fischl, which depicts a single nude woman, upside-down and legs drawn forward, at the precise instant when her head meets the ground. Fischl deftly manages to convey every aspect of these gruesome deaths except the moral (let alone the physical) universe in which they occurred. Even so, his statue, installed at Rockefeller Center during the week of remembrances, was removed after a near-universal outcry. *

The violent attacks of last year occurred on television, and it is on television that America, one year later, sought catharsis. But ceremonies alone, however noble and touching, will not set right what has gone wrong. Without a sense of purpose, we are left to grieve alone, fumbling our way to an internal resolution that will not come. Until we can fit our grief into the larger scheme of things, we weep in an existential void.

* The reluctance on the part of artists to do anything smacking of patriotism, let alone jingoism, is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the past, such varied names as Window Homer, Frederick Church, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell happily worked to mobilize the public in times of war. But for at least a generation, explicit political activism among artists has been the province of the Left, and the task of rallying national resolve has fallen by default to those stalwart reflectors of populist sentiment, country music and tabloid cartoons. See, for example, the songs of Charlie Daniels ("The Last Fallen Hero") and Toby Keith ("Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue") and the wickedly inventive cartoons of Scan Delonas of the New York Post.

MICHAEL J. LEWIS is chairman of the art department at Williams College and the author most recently of The Gothic Revival (Thames & Hudson). His "War Comes to Williams" appeared in the November 2001 COMMENTARY.