Deep Thoughts: this is what I wrote 5 years ago after 9-11 - never published until now

MEGACIDE
Notes on How to Read, Write and Talk 9-11

1. The Megacide and the Soweto Massacre.

Minutes after the start of the event a consensus of language became available.

“This is the end of irony.”

“The world will never be the same.”

By the afternoon the disaster was promoting itself in clear slogans, logos and images. The confining paradigm we call the world was well on its way to being spun. Gone was the brief moment when ontology had eclipsed epistemology, when there was no language to wrap around what had happened.

Three weeks after that Tuesday, I recalled a catastrophe from the past that, unlike the megacide, provoked a Babel of language instead of a consensus.

It’s July 16, 1976. The place: Johannesburg, South Africa. My office is on the top floor of the tallest building. Word comes over the radio that the black schoolchildren of Soweto are rioting. From my lofty white perch I watch plumes of smoke rise from the black ghetto. The next day the black newspapers contradict the radio: the police have been rioting. Hundreds of innocent children lie dead and bleeding. This wakeup call, I tell co-workers, will surely soften the heart of the Afrikaner regime. Then the Prime Minister, John Vorster, speaks. His rhetoric is markedly different from the official line and from the rhetoric of the oppressed.

“This is a storm in a teacup,” he says.

Instead of 9-11’s sorrow and unbelief, July 16 brought a rush of rage: all Afrikaners must die, I said to myself; come Sunday I’ll go and gun down my father. Such is the jihad of the writer, whose battles take place in his mind.

2. The Megacide and the Holocaust.

Every cataclysm casts a shadow in which a new rhetoric is minted. Adorno’s dictum, “Poetry isn’t possible after the Holocaust,” points to one of the key tropes of this most ultimate of genocides: the request for “silence.” In the face of such unspeakable horror, the job of the artist is to remain quiet. Language itself should back off.

But there are always those who find ways to say the unsayable. Most famously, Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi.
In Primo Levi’s books, for example, we encounter a project of heroic restraint. An implication of silence hovers over every precise, dry-eyed syllable. Perhaps this is what extreme horror calls for: the driest eye. Emotion can’t measure up.

Conversely, a trauma often renders its victim without expression, as we know from the affectless style of traumatized court witnesses. The act of remembering costs the one who remembers. I once asked a New York cab driver who survived the death camps what he thought of Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” He gave me a scornful look. Then he burst out: “It wasn’t like that! It wasn’t like that!” His voice cracked with outrage before he caught himself and said softly, “Nobody can describe what it was like.”

Our megacide demanded a narrative at a bipolar remove from the one the New York cab driver wanted but knew he’d never get. The melodrama of 3,000 innocents dead called for a response of equivalent melodrama: bold action, fiery words and absolute outrage. There was a collective need for the energizing power of large, loud, big-time bathos.

Not long after the catastrophe I went to see Ingmar Bergman’s “The Silence,” a movie as austere and dry-eyed as high art gets. Around the same time I shared an afternoon of intense emotion stirred by the memorial service at Yankee stadium. Bette Midler’s interpretation of the song “Wind beneath My Wings” brought tears. The audience roared their approval. It was a much-needed display of wet-eyed support.

3. A Suggested Post-Megacide Glossary.

Megacide: the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in an act of terror.
Megacidal personality: Osama Bin Laden; Hitler; Stalin; Pol Pot; anyone who uses mass murder to further an absolutist program; anyone who espouses megacidal intolerance.
Terror bloat: when you’ve had your fill of terror.
Dueling demonizers: two groups who demonize each other (e.g. the Palestinians and the Israelis) and whose demonizing solves nothing.
Post-megacide spin: using the disaster to sell an agenda.
Response handicap: how the code of a civil society hobbles its response to terror.
Brutality gap: the advantage enjoyed by terrorists because of their ability to be more shockingly brutal than any punishment or response.
Post-megacide world: the aftermath of our defining event; post-post post-modernism.
Wet-eyed: the appropriate mass response to the disaster.
Dry-eyed: the unpopular response to the disaster.
Terror chic: wearing sneakers under your evening dress so you’re ready to run.
Terror truth victim: a socialite who says she’s too traumatized to shop but has found treasures in her closet she’d forgotten she had; anyone whose articulation of suffering trivializes it.
Post-megacide reconstruction: what the world needs now; the mass solace of bathos.

4. Kitsch as Patriotic Duty.

Being a TV addict, I don’t own one and only get to watch when visiting friends. A first encounter after 9-11 with this medium came a week into the war. It was a shock, not because of the prevalence of the drumbeat, but because of the fake, TV-bright tone from anchor people, pundits, politicians and performers alike, interrupted by one exception: a few gritty lines from the only guy who sounded real in five hours of kitsch: Rudy Giuliani.

In all cultures the consumption of corn is immensely enjoyable. Streisand is so artful at providing it she can step close to art. Kundera ironically incorporates kitsch into his novels and makes art. Spielberg constructs kitsch-driven action-spectaculars of stupefying energy. His ‘serious’ films (“The Color Purple,” “Saving Private Ryan”) are less effective. They let the kitsch come at us unmediated, instead of being laced with irony and gusto, like in his fun movies.

In the aftermath of 9-11, kitsch has become a patriotic duty. And rightly so: it brings us together. Yet there’s something creepy about how this works. The disaster demands that we consume kitsch like the schlock in a ‘serious’ movie by Spielberg. There’s no wink of irony. No gleeful, smiling gusto.

We all make a bargain with TV, to enjoy its shallowness despite our smarts, because some of the crap we like doesn’t smell as bad as most of the crap we don’t. Plus we’re trained by a lifetime of viewing to bring our own irony to the party. The disaster has suspended that bargain; it wants us to swallow the corn-driven bandwagon whole. We have to stand united in kitsch.

When The New Yorker published some first reactions to the disaster, there was a riveting exception to the wet-eyed prose the tragedy required. Susan Sontag’s reaction drove many people crazy. Why? Her language flew in the face of the emotional response demanded by the disaster. She dared to have a dry eye. Example: “The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public…Those in public office have let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: confidence-building and grief management. Politics, the politics of a democracy—which entails disagreement, which promotes candor—has been replaced by psychotherapy. Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together.”
Ms. Sontag was accused of everything from being un-American to being callous towards the victims, despite the fact that she was obviously sorrowful and deeply concerned about the body politic. What enraged many people was her refusal to be wet-eyed. Everyone else was in a serious movie by Spielberg and she was watching Bergman.

5. Those who Want Consolation from Art don’t Want Art.

The Bergman movie I saw was actually introduced by Ms. Sontag, who set up the film with a talk about the tough bleakness of the Swedish literary tradition. She mentioned Strindberg and told us the plot of a Swedish novella written in 1905.

The main character in this novella is a young doctor. He’s in love with a young woman, who’s married to a man twice her age. The doctor’s love for the young woman is one of those sad, unexpressed Chekov things. The young woman tells the young doctor that her repulsive husband is sexually demanding. She’s very unhappy, because she’s in love with another man her own age. The young doctor, who has the old husband as a patient, murders the old man with medication. Now the young woman is free to marry her young paramour.

Ms. Sontag told us that such a novel could never have been written in English in 1905, unless the doctor went to jail or committed suicide. The Swedish story ends with the murder undiscovered and the murderer burdened by two feelings: the satisfaction of having made his beloved happy, and the frustration of not having her for himself.

After the Bergman movie was over, Ms. Sontag told me that this tough little tale is a perennial school classic in Sweden, frequently given to children to read.

Compared to this aesthetic, our Anglo-American insistence on the consoling, healing, and moralizing function of art seems self-indulgent. Why can’t we be as tough and dry-eyed as the Swedes? Why are we, artistically speaking, such sissies?

6. The Eternal Struggle to Turn Down the Bathos.

Many writers revel in wet-eyed sentiment. Dickens is a genius at it. Others fight to stay dry-eyed. Auden removed a stanza from his poem “1st September 1939” in later editions, because this stanza was, as one critic says, “too explicit and facile.” Auden’s poem was often quoted after 9-11. Here’s the offending stanza:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie;
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the state
And no-one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Whenever the poem was read on National Public Radio, its readers put this part back in and recited it with a grave, moist emphasis. They weren’t going to let Auden stay dry-eyed. In the aftermath of the disaster, we want our art to be wet-eyed. Some wet-eyed masters: D.H. Lawrence, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Salman Rushdie. Some dry-eyed renegades to beware of: Bertoldt Brecht, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Harold Pinter.

7. When Violence Ends Happily Ever After.

The minute it happened, 9-11 inspired three ways to describe itself: as an act of war; as a heinous criminal act; or as payback for acts committed by the US.

Accordingly, the language went three ways to define how we should respond: with a war; with a criminal investigation; or with a drastic re-examination of our foreign policy.

No leader could’ve avoided the first option. The megacide demanded war. You don’t kill 3,000 people without getting a war. When the South African police killed 600 people they had a war on their hands from powerless children, who didn’t stop until they defeated the regime many years later. It didn’t take the children a mini-second to figure out that non-violence wouldn’t work. The conclusion of our leaders was similarly instant, even though their cause was different.

Some of our war vocabulary harked back to long-ago times. “Dead or alive.” Some phrases were familiar from previous battles. “Collateral damage.” Some were new. “Special operations personnel,” later shortened to “special forces.” I heard a journalist say these guys knew how to do “nasty things.” There was a grim glee to much of the talk about the business of war. This was very new; undoubtedly provoked by the megacidal character of the attack. When pundits pointed out that the object of a weapon or a strategy was “to kill people,” one heard a hard-nosed chuckle in their voices. After the bombing caused such surprises as the Taliban’s “early” abandonment of Kabul, “the military outpaced the political” became the phrase with which the pundits spun the egg off their faces. The combination of “special forces on the ground” who directed “targeted bombs” introduced a promise that bombing could be made discriminate. The introduction of the idea of military tribunals pitted “an assault on civil liberties” against “supplying ammunition to our enemies.” A new slur was spun from the right and the left: “unpatriotic.”

And yet, against all odds, the competing rhetoric of “antiwar protest” soldiered on, albeit on a miniscule scale (unlike the Left in the rest of “the West,” our Left is doomed to be “marginal,” since it cannot do the one thing it takes to go mainstream in America: hire a big right-wing advertising agency). In the “peace” minority, the majority were women. One chat-show caller said she’d stopped discussing the war with her husband because her pacifism made him too angry. Here’s a sample piece of rhetoric from an email about Afghan women: “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it…In fact, violence merely increases hate…Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

The tragic irony is that violence often works. If the S.A. youths who were radicalized by July 16 had not “necklaced” informers in hideous public executions, the network of police informers wouldn’t have been destroyed, and the white police wouldn’t have been rendered ineffective, and the white regime wouldn’t have been driven to make deals instead of shooting children. The very coinage “necklace” is a grim joke: a stab of ha-ha rhetoric full of terrifying warning. Those acts and that language helped clear the way for Nelson Mandela’s release.

Back in 1792 Gracchus Babeuf wrote some of the early language defining terror as good politics. “All means are legitimate in the fight against tyrants.” Frantz Fanon bluntly affirmed that killing the oppressor purifies the oppressed; absolute repression requires absolute violence, producing absolute healing. Mandela himself spearheaded the decision by the ANC, after half a century of ineffectual, peaceful protest, to try terror. Eventually the ANC ousted the white regime, and Mandela went on to become one of the few statesmen of our time with unqualified moral stature.

Of course, the tyrant’s violence also works. Since his early twenties, long before he came to power, Saddam Hussein has modeled himself after Stalin. In his own small way the man has tried to live up to the standard set by his hero.
The Afghanistan bloodletting remains mired in paradox. The language of “we’ll smoke them out” and “this is an act of war” has opened up opportunities for Afghan women to be in the government. It has also opened up possibilities for continued bloodletting.

8. The Power of a Cultural Bomb.

The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o regards the English language in Africa as a “cultural bomb” that erases memories of pre-colonial culture and installs a new, more insidious colonialism. Language and culture are inseparable; lose the language and you lose the culture.

What has our megacide erased? Besides the confidence of invulnerability, something else equally fundamental: the dry eye of cool-headed debate and reasoned discourse. We now have an indomitable relish for unthinking patriotism and cringe-making bathos. That’s what the megacide demands, and that’s what the megacide gets. One example: the so-called death of irony bandied about from day one. Most pundits can’t get their shinola together about any event, let alone a tragedy this unprecedented. But here was a wet-eyed response required by the disaster, and hence dutifully spun by all concerned.

On hearing the first TV announcer say on that awful day, “This is the end of irony,” I protested inwardly at the box, “Don’t tell me what to think, there are people dying in there.” It’s now many months later, and I know I’ll never know what I might’ve thought, because the public language took away the possibility of a personal experience. Today we all own the disaster together. Our individual feelings and language about it never had a chance.

There are countless boys on the other side of the world who don’t stand a chance either. In tens of thousands of Pakistan madrassas financed by the Saudi royals, a wet-eyed “cultural bomb” of “fundamentalist” bathos schools them to hate women, the West, and America.

9. Can We Forgive the Terrorists?

Forgiving megacidal enemies is humanly impossible. Besides, one of the global narratives we’re raised on, driven home in one action movie after another, is the archetypal kitsch of righteous vengeance. I was once told that a rabbi who survived the death camps had, as part of a healing group many decades afterwards, come to forgive Hitler. Such generosity of spirit is beyond us, as was Nelson Mandela’s gesture of wearing the hated rugby jersey of the white Afrikaner captain in South Africa’s final game against the top-rated Australians in 1994. With this poignant, canny stratagem, Mandela showed his people that it was possible to throw a bridge across the abyss between black and white.

There’s a lot the West might forgive ourselves for, and not only because we’ve propped up Islamic thugs. The financing of an arch-killer like Mobutu, for example, represents a particularly grisly instance of Western primitivism. Here’s a man from the people who stole all his people’s money because, he said, “They wouldn’t know how to shop if they had money, so it would be wasted on them.” The West supported this despot for most of his life, after we helped to blow away his democratically elected predecessor.

There’s a great deal that Islam could forgive itself for, too. If Islam’s thug elites don’t face up to the fact that they treat their people like bugs because of their contempt for and fear of their people, and if their people don’t face up to the fact that an infidel-killing brand of Islam can’t compete with Disney or Coke, let alone solve problems of poverty, underdevelopment, and female oppression, they’ll remain stuck in thugocracies, and will probably need another century before they experience the glory of Islam – a faith which has, over the centuries, treated Christians and Jews far better than Christians ever treated Muslims and Jews. “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled,” wrote the Christian commentator Radulph of Caen of the Crusaders in 1098. By the 20th Century, these narratives had been erased from our history books.

How can Islam renew itself? Often a class can make a difference. Peasants revolt. Merchants organize. The young people of Iran have soccer riots. Many are fed up with the oppression of the morals police (something our own fundamentalists would welcome). The most fundamental rebellion is the revolt of the secular.

Sometimes a powerful individual, surrounded by other strong individuals, will change the course of a nation, or speed up an inevitable historic process. In our century Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela spring to mind. One might imagine a Muslim hero or heroine rising in the East and living just long enough to leave a lasting legacy of change. Such individuals create a space of grace in the midst of great suffering with the power of their language. As absolutists like Hitler and Bin Laden spin language to mobilize individuals into blind obedience, so great moral statesmen like Gandhi and Dr. King use language to undo the damage of the nation’s disaster, and to heal the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

10. The Future of the Megacide.

A blizzard of words about the tragedy awaits us in how-to books, pulp novels, TV series, Hollywood movies, pop histories, post-modernist tomes, videos, installations, poems and tracts. Unfortunately the First Law of the Disaster will not be broken: every artifact about the catastrophe will be wet-eyed. Many a year will have to pass before the megacide can allow a dry eye to have its way with it. The wound is too deep. Don’t expect anyone to shed any tears for this aesthetic either. Literature and the arts will experience their own September 11: the silence of the megacided muse.