Owning 9/11

Shite in a shoebox, I haven't had this blog up 24 hours before I get a flame (which I've deleted) from some ball-less dimwit (who did not leave a valid e-mail) telling me that my blog has nothing to do with 9/11 and I should be ashamed of myself for just using it to drive traffic to my site. Now, I might be—ashamed, that is—if he/she/it were right, but there's a couple of tricky issues here that were not addressed in said flame.

1. What constitutes 9/11 content; and
2. Who's to decide what constitutes it?

I think it's obvious that Joe@yahoo.com (wow, is that an ironic alias) did not read read down far enough in my last post "Catching up, Redux," which was reposted from Blogorrhea as a kind of bridge, to reach #4: "Thoughts on Ground Zero and Highrise Fires." Or perhaps Yahoo Joe did read down that far and simply didn't feel it lived up to his expectations. Perhaps the whole site failed to live up to his expectations. Perhaps he was expecting a 9/11 Shrine (check out the splash page at Taylor Spence's page; perhaps that will do. Perhaps Joe only read the description under my Blog title and failed to see any connection anywhere else that was immediately obvious. Perhaps he failed also to click on Stories From the Ruins in the sidebar, or was not duly impressed with a handmade book of original poetry about 9/11. Perhaps selling it seemed too crass to him. Obviously, he hasn't been to my site and seen the actual 9/11 journal, which is not for sale, either.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I've just failed some kind of yahoo (small "y") test of reverence for 9/11 in Joe's mind.

I don't know who Joe is, since he neglected to really identify himself, or what his experience of 9/11 was, but I suspect he doesn't even live in New York, which leads me to another question that was not addressed, except obliquely in the previous entry: Do New Yorker's have the right to define 9/11? If so, do people who were in Lower Manhattan, right on the scene, have more of a right than the rest of us in the city? Does proximity confer the right to define and codify experience?

Well, yes, to a certain extent. In the previous entry I talked a little about how my friends in the midwest did not really seem to understand or empathize with what the hell had just happened here, only days after the towers fell. Similarly, there was a story my friend Laurie told me, about a friend of hers who was living near Ground Zero and wasn't able to leave until the power came back on because she was in a cast:

I also spoke with my friend, Nan, the woman who lives downtown. She was stunned when she a came to work today. “I had no idea” she said. “that life was continuing so normally up here. I saw my first fruitstand in a week today. I see cars on the street. Hell, I see people. You must understand. Whatever you see on TV, whatever you think you understand, whatever pictures are embedded in your mind—you cannot even begin to fathom what the reality is. It is nothing like what you are seeing. Nothing at all. Not in the slightest. TV makes it acceptable on small screens.” She lives two blocks away from where everything has been deserted. She speaks of how there is no dark at night because of the power of the search lights. She speaks of noise that continues throughout the night. A very quiet noise.

People who lived in the areas that were shut down and blocked off and without power certainly had a very different experience from people like me, who merely saw it from across the river, or even from someone like Em, who had the ash fall on her in Park Slope. People who lost loved ones had yet another experience. People who had near misses another. I think all of us in the metropolitan area, who could smell it and see it and experience the loss of the towers as a visceral hole in not just the skyline but in our view of the world have a shared experience though. We were here. We didn't just see it as a distant event interpreted by the press and packaged and filmed. It means, I suspect, something a little different to people who live here than to people who don't.

So Joe, if you live here, post a comment and tell me so. You're certainly entitled to your opinion of the content of my site, but unless you live here, keep it to yourself. Better yet, make your own site.

Comments

[DrEmily]

"There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science." -- Goethe