I watched some of the 9-11 tenth anniversary ceremonials taking place at the World Trade Center site, and I found myself curiously unaffected by it, in fact I was somewhat put-off by it. That is not to say that the act itself did not have an effect on me at the time; I remember I was working a temp job when it happened: it was break time, and I noticed a gaggle of office workers gathered around the television in the break room. On the screen were the Twin Towers, smoke billowing out of both. I remember that it was difficult to register what exactly was going on; I felt the same way on my first day home after a seven-year stint in the Army: CNN was broadcasting live a routine launch of a space shuttle, and while the voice of a mission control announcer was blandly reciting telemetry readings, viewers were trying to register what exactly was going on with that huge white cloud in the sky that the shuttle disappeared in barely a minute into the launch. Something terrible must have had happened, but your mind just couldn’t register the reality of it until the authorities confirmed the terrible truth. In the case of 9-11, that happened when the towers collapsed; an “accident” that was at first seemed insufficient by itself to cause permanent damage, had turned into a calamity of the first magnitude—it was like the supposedly unsinkable Titanic, suffering what appeared to be a grazing, survivable wound inexplicably come crashing down, to be no more. It was not that the towers were struck that had its lingering effect, but that they had come down. If the Twin Towers had survived the attack, the sense of vulnerability would be much less.
So why was I put-off by the ceremony? Whenever the television cameras panned the crowds, all that touched my eyes was a sea of pallid faces, with nary a dark or even Oriental countenance in sight, except when the Obamas made an appearance. Once or twice a black commentator appeared on the screen, perhaps inserted to obscure the possibility of anyone making the same observation that I was making. 3,000 people died from the tragedy, yet it was only to white people, apparently, who were “harmed” by this event—forgetting, of course, the subsequent national scapegoats and whipping boys, particularly Muslims and Latinos. Why was it that only white people came to mourn and commemorate—or were allowed to be seen as such? Because this crime was against America, and the only “real” Americans are white? Because the “enemies” of America are non-Caucasian and their “liberal” or “socialist” friends? Because right-wing politicians, commentators and the media have broadcast the drumbeat of hate against Muslims and Mexicans, which many Americans apparently find difficult to distinguish empirically? That they believe that those groups who have been isolated from white society either physically or psychologically nurse a special grudge, and lie in wait for their opportunity to seek revenge, because they “hate” that America? Because hating a government that represents a “leveling” force in society, as many so-called “real” Americans do, is really an expression of “loving” America—one that prefers a society based on separation and inequality? That their very presence at the event would expose the lie of their definition of what America is?
People should be allowed to mourn for the victims of an unspeakable tragedy, but not use it as an excuse to differentiate themselves in an “us” versus “them” context. The 9-11 “commemoration” in New York merely reinforced the divisions in this country, one of which pits white American against the dark-skinned “them.” This is nothing new; as Richard Slotkin, wrote in his classic study “Regeneration Through Violence,” white America through its mythology has always “regenerated” itself by finding new enemies to coalesce against, and always those enemies are of the “dark” races. The chain from Indians to Mexicans to Spaniards to Filipinos to Japanese to Vietnamese to Panamanians to Afghans and to Iraqis (the Germans were the only “chink” in this chain), the American myth lived on in the national psyche. “But their apparent independence of time and consequence is an illusion; a closely woven chain of time and consequence binds their world to ours. Set the statuesque figures and their piled trophies in motion through space and time, and a more familiar landscape emerges—the whale, buffalo, and bear hunted to the verge of extinction for pleasure in killing and “scalped” for fame and the profit in hides by men like Buffalo Bill; the buffalo meat left to rot, till acres of prairie were covered with heaps of whitened bones then ground for fertilizer; the Indian debased, impoverished, and killed in return for his gifts; the land and its people, its “dark” people especially, economically exploited and wasted; the warfare between man and nature, between race and race, exalted as a kind of heroic ideal; the piles of wrecked and rusted cars, heaped like Tartar pyramids of cracked, weather-browned, rain-rotted skulls, to signify our passage through the land.” It wasn’t enough to exploit the land; the black and brown people –save for those who “entertain”—are left on the peripheries, to serve as “proof” of their inferiority, useful only as reminders of who the “enemy” is.
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