11 Thoughts on September 11th (2023)
On no longer needing to remember.
Washington Square Park, this morning
1.
From the time I moved back to New York in 2012 until 2020, I followed the same ritual every morning of September 11th: I bought a bouquet of bodega flowers, usually carnations, and took them to the firehouse on Great Jones Street (Engine Company 33, Ladder Company 9) where there’s a wall niche with plaques honoring the firemen from those companies who died in the towers.
Then I stopped. On the 20th anniversary, I found myself deciding not to do it any longer. Twenty years is an obvious time to let go of a mourning ritual, but I didn’t feel myself “letting go”; I felt a wave of bitterness and disgust, in some ways delayed disgust, associated with that day and in particular with the act of remembering it.
2.
In Susan Sontag’s much-derided (and later, much praised) New Yorker statement on 9/11, the most controversial line is probably this one: “In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”
I’m less interested in the question of whether the hijackers were cowards than her initial observation, about the nature of courage. Do we even know what courage is? It’s a word that feels slightly anachronistic, though less anachronistic than “coward.” Both words point toward manliness and masculinity. To me, they also point toward The Wizard of Oz.
3.
I can’t think of a work of art produced by an American in response to 9/11 that’s widely admired or embraced now, 22 years later. Maybe there are examples I’ve forgotten. Among English-language novelists, my sense is there’s a distinct sense of embarrassment about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Emperor’s Children, Let the Great World Spin, Terrorist, Saturday, Falling Man. In my second book of short stories, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, about half the stories are directly tied to 9/11, and I’m embarrassed about them too.
(There are books about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that have had a longer lifespan, by Ben Fountain, Phil Klay, Anthony Swofford, and others, to be fair.)
4.
On the other hand, I remember what it was like to be alive in the decade after 9/11, when it felt like there was nothing else important to write about. I also tried to write a novel about catastrophe in the historical sense, dealing with a Biblical scholar who’s obsessed with Lamentations, the acrostic poem written in Hebrew shortly after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. (The novel was first called Lamentations, then Orphans.) It too was a disaster. It was weighed down with performative grief.
5.
Obviously part of what Sontag was trying to voice was her disgust that so many people who knew better were refusing to say the obvious: al-Qaeda was a political entity with a well-known agenda; it had arisen out of circumstances created by the US, particularly the arming of the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s anti-Soviet war. 22 years later, we know this to be true in much greater detail than we did then, but anyone who had followed the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing knew the fundamentals. The “non-partisan” 9/11 Report echoed everything Sontag said about US intelligence and policy failures.
But in hindsight that matters much less than what she says about the moral neutrality of courage. Courage is emotional, not analytical. It wasn’t until years after 9/11, reading Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, that I grasped how much of our feelings about American patriotism and national belonging are infantile or at least pre-adolescent feelings. 9/11, it could be said, returned America to a childlike state much like the period between Kennedy’s assassination and the fraudulent Gulf of Tonkin incident, another era of intense national vulnerability and mythmaking followed by entry into a trumped-up war.
6.
For all its other failures, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, not a work of art but an excellent work of agit-prop, summed up the feeling of deep uncertainty that descended over the US after the 2000 presidential election and Bush v. Gore, and how that foreboding gave way to panic and terror on 9/11. I always think of the two events as inextricably linked—not by some vacuous conspiracy theory but by the theorists and strategists of the right, who were able to use them to such great effect. The US today—an unstable and teetering democracy, militarized, paranoid, apocalyptic—is precisely what the most prescient Republican strategists and ideologues, like Paul Weyrich, dreamed of decades ago.
7.
I taught for 15 years at the College of New Jersey, which drew a considerable number of students from the commuter towns where office workers in the Twin Towers lived. In the 2000s and 2010s, students in my classes often wrote about their memories of September 11th as young children, including quite a few who remembered classmates or neighbors whose parents (almost always fathers) died. Then, around 2016-17, those pieces stopped coming. My students no longer had conscious memories of that day. At the time I thought of it as a loss, a loss of “historical memory.”
8.
It’s hard to think of memory, per se, as unquestionably good or valuable. This is contrary to the prevailing view of the writer’s task—think of Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting—as preserving the lived experience of history, as witnessing and memorializing, all of which I also believe in. But I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by remembering September 11th. Or, rather, remembering it out of context.
9.
A few years after 9/11 I was engrossed in reading and re-reading Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” especially this line: “That things ‘just keep on going’ is the catastrophe.” In a way, living through the 2000s proved his point: 9/11 began a series of cascading tragedies that still haven’t ended, even if the wars it started officially ended with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
10.
On the other hand, in American political life, there’s a lot to be said for the effects of time. The political courage Sontag saw lacking on the American left in 2001 has come crashing back in the last decade and a half, driven by millennial and Gen Z activists and thinkers who didn’t have to witness September 11th themselves, and therefore see it, in my view, correctly, not as a discrete national tragedy but as a triggering event, like Pearl Harbor or the Gulf of Tonkin. The mainstream Democratic Party is as militarist as ever, but the dissenting voices have gained ground. If the war authorization granted by Congress in 2001 were passed today, there would be more than one vote—that was Barbara Lee’s vote—against it.
On the other hand, it would still pass.
11.
Analytically speaking, the US as a nation learned nothing from September 11th. Not how to protect itself, or conduct a more protective foreign policy, or engage with the Islamic world, or prosecute or define terrorism or anything else. The nation is in every way worse off. On the other hand, it could be said that September 11th helped some of us disengage from an infantile optimism about the post-Cold War era or codify our thoughts about imperialism. That’s not a silver lining.
“Let’s by all means grieve together,” Sontag wrote. “But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen.” I wonder if there’s any way of saying “us,” or “we,” or “you,” meaning Americans, without being stupid. It may be that 9/11’s most lasting impact was that: the fracturing of the pronoun, the last time it was possible to say “together” with a straight face.