Let's All Get a Piece of the Action!

It's coming. Do you know what's coming? Another anniversary, that's what's coming.

Before I talk about disturbing qualities of that anniversary, I have to say: what happened on that day truly was terrible, and the thousands of people who died certainly didn't deserve what happened to them. Nor do their survivors deserve to go through what they've had to go through (for details, read Gail Sheehy's over-long and under-edited Middletown, America). I've inserted that caveat because I have no desire to become Ward Churchill.

Matt is always after me to not let tragedies that have no connection to me have control over my thoughts or life. He's right, of course. It's so easy to want to grab a piece of the tragedy of others because those of us who have middle-class white collar lifestyles tend to live a very even existence, punctuated only by the change of seasons, annual vacations, and the occasional death, birth, or wedding (we're going to one next week!). This vacuum--and of course, I realize that billions of people would love to have our humdrum lives instead of the poverty- and disease-stricken lives they lead, never thinking of it as a vacuum--shows itself in the popularity of shows like "Storm Stories" on The Weather Channel, or the umpteen-thousand shows on Discovery and its spinoff networks about tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, failures in human engineering (collapsing bridges and dams), and other juicy events (some of which haven't even happened yet, we're so jonesing for disaster).

But the ultimate collective juicy event, the ur-event of American life in the twenty-first century, happened nearly four years ago on a sunny September morning. Those two little ones--forming the numeral 11 in some sort of weird symmetry to the towers--pop up everywhere because everyone wants a piece of the action. If you're at all a visual person, you can see 9/11 by glancing at a page of text for just a second or two.

Lately I've been playing a little game. Before I read a book I think: will this author mention September 11 or not? What on earth about the subject matter of this book can be tied into September 11? How will this writer tie her- or himself into what happened on that day? I play this game because the odds are, if it's a non-fiction book with a copyright date of 2002 or later, September 11 will be mentioned.

Examples:

1. Linked, a summary of the new science of networks by a Hungarian mathematician called Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. Networks are a new way of looking at previously un-connectable phenomena, and it's a very interesting concept, and the book is a highly-readable summary of what math and science have discovered over the past several years. Near the end, looking for examples, Barabasi starts talking about terror networks, and sure enough, I spotted those two little ones in my peripheral vision before I came to the actual paragraph.

2. Call of the Mall, by Paco Underhill. This guy is fun to read--his big book Why We Buy came out five or six years ago, and is a must-read if you're a retailer. This book came out in 2003 or 2004, and sure enough: malls no longer have lockers for people to put packages into while they continue to shop because of September 11.

3. Subwayland, by Randy someone-or-other (I'm too lazy to go looking for the book upstairs). Okay, this one is obvious--a book about the New York subway system has to have an entire chapter devoted to what happened to the 1 & 9 lines on that day.

4. The Science of Good & Evil, by Michael Shermer. This book by the editor of Skeptic magazine is about how ethics are a product of evolution, not religion. I read it in January, but don't remember all of the details. But I looked just now, and sure enough there's a reference to September 11 in the index.

5. What's the Matter with Kansas, by Thomas Frank. This political bestseller from last year is another obvious one.

The point is: it's fine to talk about September 11 if you're writing about George W. Bush, about American foreign policy, about fundamentalist thought, and a host of other subjects directly related to the causes of what happened. But can we please give it a rest everywhere else, unless we're writing a detailed sociological examination of the day's effect on the American psyche?

What happened on that day was horrible. But so was what happened in London recently, in Madrid last year, and in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, and a lot of other places in 1945 (those nuclear anniversaries are coming up--hooray!). The list of man's inhumanity to man is endless and it's not yet complete. But too many Americans think that the event was unique. Sorry, guys and gals--it wasn't. And unless you were there, shut up already.

In another posting perhaps I'll get into American Exceptionalism, which is probably the root cause of all this, but this one is long enough....