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Lileks: Friday, September 11th
...Within a few minutes of watching the first episodes, though, I was reminded of something else, something that had attached itself to the show. The mood of the Early Oughts. The show was shot in 2001, and hit the states the year after. It wasnt that the show had anything to do with the mood of the Early Oughts it seemed an example of an exhausted culture that had painted itself into a corner where irrelevance, bureaucracy, and impotence were the dominant tropes, but the tone of the show and its hovering unspoken criticism editorialized nicely against the smothering effect of life in the cubicle world. No, it was who I was when I watched it. What I felt. The fact that I was switching from the hot red feed of the TV news to a DVD, unplugging for a while from the incessant imperatives of the crawl, the words at the bottom of the screen that scraped the screen with the latest events. In those days I turned on the TV as soon as I got up, and read the crawl. I muted the TV during the day, but kept an eye on the crawl. When I finished an episode of the Office I switched back to the dish, and checked the crawl.This lasted a few years. The internet took over, and I think I stopped watching TV news the day Saddams statue came down. In the most simplistic and emotional sense, it was a tonic chord that provided resolution. But every so often every week, really I remember the event in some odd echo of the emotions I felt on September 11. It might be the closing credit music of a BBC comedy, or an old movie about New York, or driving past a building designed by the architect of the WTC, or just standing in the spot where I stood when I saw the towers fall. Or more: for Gods sake, the Gallery of Regrettable Foods publication date was 9/11; half the time I look at the book on the shelf I recall being in the shower, thinking of the interviews I had lined up, turning off the water and hearing Peter Jennings on the radio, wondering why they were replaying tape of the 91 attack on the towers. I remember what Natalie was doing a happy toddler, she was digging through her box of toys and handing me a phone with a smile as bright as the best tomorrow you could imagine. I remember Jasper on his back, whining, unsure. I remember these things because I picked up my camera and filmed them, because this was a day unlike any other. Today I answered the phone in the same spot where I stood when I called my Washington bureau, told them Id be rewriting the column obviously and wished them well. They were four blocks from the White House. Impossible not to imagine the Fail-Safe squeal on the other end of the line. On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasnt diminished a joule. This doesnt mean anything, by itself anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivod, and the day is bright and real and true again. Or not. Its all so far in the past, isnt it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, theyre like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesnt even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) Were used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they wont rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We havent forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in in the pictures shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow. Right after the towers fell, people whod never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasnt happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, theres still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldnt stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours. Posted by: Mike 2009-09-11 |
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