Blogorrhea Junior

From a Certain Point of View

It's odd seeing your news from somebody else's perspective. It's something Americans don't get much of a chance to do, geography being what it is on this side of the world. To get a foreign viewpoint here, you really have to make an effort, even with the Internet. On newstands in Europe, foreign papers are everywhere, and the news comes in several languages. Each country puts a slightly different spin on their neighbor's stories. I'm as guilty of this as the next Yankee (if there's any real guilt involved), but every now and then, it's good to be reminded that not everyone frames the view in the same way it's presented by American media.

I had one of those Aha! moments yesterday, leafing through the latest issue of Kyoto Journal, a quarterly I've started picking up on a fairly regular basis. The journal's tagline is "Perspectives from Asia" and it covers more than just Japan. It's something like a cross between National Geographic, Orion, and a literary magazine. There's always amazing photographs in it, and articles about some aspect of Asian culture somewhere, and, often, about the cross-pollination of societies in Asia. This was in issue #59. I'd just seen the cover of the latest Time Magazine with a focus on Hiroshima, so that was somewhere in the back of my mind when I leafed through and saw a picture that looked vaguely familiar. It was a group of people walking along a dirty, paper-strewn street, all of them almost unrecognizable under a dark patina of filth. It made me stop because there were no Asians in the photo, at first glance. That's not unusual in Kyoto Journal; it's all in English and there's usually a feature on one Westerner who's had a special relationship with some part of Asian culture, but there was just something odd about the picture that made me really look at it.

It actually took several seconds of laboriously connecting the dots for me to put together that it was a photograph of people fleeing the World Trade Center on 9/11. Part of what threw me is that it was in the middle of an article on haiku, and we all know that context is everything, but it was also a photograph I hadn't seen before—and believe me, I've seen a lot of them, thanks to the Internet, not just the iconic ones used over and over in the media. (There are links to a couple of amazing and heart-wrenching collections on my 9/11 Blog.) And on second glance, there were a couple of people who might have been, oh, Filipino or SE Asian But right up front were two black women. The apparent cultural dissonance kind of rocked me back on my heels for a second and I had a weird moment of protectiveness, a feeling of "hey, that's our suffering being depicted there!" that was less recognition than it was a flash of outrage at the perceived appropriation.

Which is a patently ridiculous reaction and also interesting in light of the fact that there's another article in same magazine called, "Reporting Reality," an interview with Hirokawa Ryuichi, founder of the Japanese photojournalism magazine, Days Japan, in which there are also a series of pictures by him taken in Afghan refugee camps and Iraqi hospitals of the victims of U.S. bombing raids and the wars there. In the interview, he talks about covering the wars and yet not seeing the kinds of photographs he was taking—of the civilian casualties, the so-called collateral damage—strictly as reportage. Of course there are other news agencies besides our own reporting events. (Sadly, according to Hirokawa, very few of them will run stories on the civilian victims of war, but that's another issue entirely.) The point is that Americans don't see them often, and when it's someone else's viewpoint, in the context of someone else's culture, it's often startling.

It also sets the event itself in a different context. Americans see a lot of images of people in other countries suffering from the ravages of wars and natural disasters, but it doesn't happen on that raw scale to us that often, barring the odd tornado or hurricane. Even then, the cost in human lives is generally in the double digits, if that high. We have good warning systems and the densely populated places are generally evacuated before there's a huge loss of life. It's viscerally wrenching, and a little freaky, to find yourself viewed through someone else's eyes as a victim culture. Nobody likes to seem helpless or traumatized, no matter how much pity or empathy it evokes.

What that change in viewpoint really does, though, is make you realize that everyone suffers the same way. The expressions on people's faces are always the same, no matter who has taken the picture, or who is the subject.

How to Remember

The New York times editorials have beaten me to this, but I'm weighing in on the subject because I feel I have a right to as a New Yorker, and an obligation to as a believer in non-violence and education.

Almost four years ago, roughly 2,800 people died in an atrocious act of violence against non-combatant civilians. It was not as heinous as the bombings of Hiroshima, Dresden, or Nagasaki, or as appalling as the Nazi death camps, but it was shocking and brutal and senseless, and evil. Since then, the families of the victims, who have suffered just as the families of other victims of violence everywhere, have had a strong voice in shaping how their loved ones are memorialized on the site where they died, as they should. But the recent hue and cry by a minority of those families against the placement of the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center is misplaced at best and unflatteringly narrow-minded at worst.

These particular families object to the broad subject matter the museum would explore: the subjects of freedom—and lack of it—in other countries; of atrocities committed by governments against their own and other people; the myriad ways in which societies organize themselves for good or ill. If done thoughtfully and with a dispassionate eye, The International Freedom Center has the potential to be both highly educational and deeply moral, a place where people can examine both history and contemporary events and be reminded of the dangers of absolute political power. They also object to the presence of Soho's Drawing Center, which has a reputation for presenting controversial artwork, including some disturbing responses to 9/11.

About the latter, the NYTimes editorial says, "If the Drawing Center is forced to withdraw from ground zero rather than accept the censorship of exhibitions that are yet to be imagined, no other respectable arts institution will take its place." What would take up residence there instead would be merely a mouthpiece for one point of view, rather than a safe, open space for the expression of many viewpoints, or for the asking of hard questions. Is that kind of repression and censorship what should come of the events of 9/11? How would that repression of voices differ from what goes on in, say, Iran, right now? Or in the former Soviet Union, if you prefer a Cold War example.

And what, exactly, is objectionable about the agenda of the International Freedom Center, which intends to "feature exhibits on topics from civil rights to the Polish Solidarity movement," according to the New York Daily News? Apparently only that it is not focused solely on the victims of 9/11. But those victims already have a huge memorial consisting of the footprints and much of the grounds of the Twin Towers. This does not seem to be enough, however, for a small group of their families. They seem to want to claim all of the site as their personal memorials, as though the deaths of their loved ones were the only facts that mattered. This is a sentiment shared by others, including the founder of Story Corps, David Isay, which has installed a booth at Ground Zero where survivors and family members can tell their stories: "There's only one thing that's important about the site or September 11, and that's that people were lost," Mr. Isay said. "Nothing else matters."

But that's not true.

The attacks on the World Trade Center were not isolated. Nor were they attacks on specific individuals, although that is how we are memorializing them. There was also an attack on buildings in Washington that happened to take out part of the Pentagon, and one perhaps aimed at the White House or the Capitol as well. The 9/11 attacks, including the one here in New York, were attacks on symbols, on New York City and Washington, on the country, and above all, on the principles of free societies and the ideal of human equality everywhere. It's this kind of abstraction that allows ideologues to take the lives of others, and it's why it's important to include the individuals who died in the overall scheme of things in the rebuilding; destroying a symbol seems less morally reprehensible than taking the lives of 3,000 people. But the attack was also about ideology, carried out in the belief that violence will solve any problem. What better way to illustrate that relationship than to tie it to atrocities in other parts of the world? As the bombings in London have just reminded us, 9/11 was not an isolated incident, and its causes are complex and legion.

War, torture, terrorism, and the suppression of human rights anywhere are identically appalling, for whatever reason they happen, and they are an affront to humanity, not just to the individual victims or their families, or to one particular national group. If we reach out with these museums and say "our victims are just like yours; we are just like you in our suffering; we are just as appalled by such acts as you are," how much more likely are we to build common ground? To insist that our victims were special—somehow different from or more important than the victims of genocide in the Sudan, in Rwanda, in Croatia, or the bombings in London and Madrid, Israel, Palestine, Iraq is sheer arrogance—the kind of arrogance that makes us think we have the right to invade a country that has merely disagreed with our way of life, not declared war on us. The memorial should celebrate the lives that were lost, remind us of the senselessness and cruelty of the act and acts like it, and of the waste of potential and beauty that result from hate. It should not merely glorify the deaths of 2,800 people.

Update:

According to the New York Post, "No funds raised for a 9/11 memorial at Ground Zero will go toward a pair of controversial culture centers until the issue over their contents is resolved, officials said yesterday."

The Memorial Foundation's decision means that it will first raise the $500 million for the actual memorial to those lost in the terror attack, leaving the hot-button issue of the International Freedom Center and The Drawing Center on the back burner until Gov. Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. decide their fate.

This might be a good compromise, but it strikes me as caving in.

Debra Burlingame, who started the hue and cry in the Wall Street Journal, likens the putting the International Freedom Center near the WTC memorial to "creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona." Yet Japanese and American WWII veterans meet at this site all the time, putting the past behind them and coming away changed by the experience. Isn't that mutual respect what we're really aiming for? Or are we looking only for neverending condemnation that will only fuel a cycle of violence, as our invasion of Iraq is doing now? Does Burlingame want the memorial for her loved ones to foster peace or violence?

Why I Haven't seen "Revenge of the Sith" yet

Of course, it's not actually that simple. It's not the impending end of the story that worries me, or that there might never be another Star Wars movie. Good grief, six movies—at least two of those worse than mediocre—is enough. No, really. Besides, good stories, and this is one despite George's awful writing and directing, don't really end. They continue to exist in the minds of the people who've participated in them, whether by reading, viewing, or creating them. For one thing, as certain fans I know say, "There is no death; there is fanfic." And in Star Wars' case, there's also the massively "extended universe" body of work, which includes comics, radio dramas, cartoons, novels, RPGs and video games, a huge range of toys, prop replicas, and constantly updated reference books, all moving beyond the canon of the movies themselves. Merchandizing gone wild. Not to mention the DVDs in their various incarnations. Even without all the accoutrements, the story is firmly entrenched in the cultural unconscious. Phrases, characters, plot references all crop up from time to time even when there's no movie pending. This was true long before the second trilogy was more than an evil gleam in George's bank account. The appearance of three more movies has only implanted the viral meme more firmly in yet another generation. This is The Wizard of Oz for at least three generations. The Star Wars story isn't going anywhere, even after the latest movie leaves the theatre and the DVD is long forgotten.

No, I think the main thing that's keeping me from the theatre isn't even fear of George bungling it. It's the grimness of the story and the 9/11 parallels. Revenge of the Sith is a movie about destruction, despite whatever grains of hope may be sown throughout it. I mean, in the end (i.e., Return of the Jedi, which was originally called Revenge of the Jedi), the forces of good win, but there's a long, dark night of soul that precedes it: The Jedi temple with its population of initiates (children) is destroyed; Jedi are hunted down and killed; Obi-Wan loses everything and everyone he's cared about, including his life's vocation, and ends up in exile in hell's foyer. The cycle is basically about the fall and rise of civilizations, which is never pretty. It's a tragedy of massive proportions.

This particular part of the cycle is about the rise of an empire, and the parallels between Palpatine and Vader's Empire and W's Pax Americana are a little too close for comfort too. That the problem with empires: they all look alike in the dark. Trouble is, Palpatine is way smarter than W. Actually, Cheney would make a good Palpatine, if we're casting from Washington. And I like Rumsfeld as Vader, with his effecient, stripped-down, high-tech army.

And I'm just not in the mood for the fictional version right now. I've had enough tragedies of my own lately (not on this scale, obviously, but still tragedies); many of my friends are embroiled in their own tragedies of various kinds and scales; there's a new tragedy every day in Iraq (and way too many other places that I don't even know or think about), and the thought of watching the destruction of a massive complex of buildings with a tremendous loss of life just sort of makes my blood run cold right now. Especially on a larger than life screen like the Ziegfeld, which is really where this movie should be seen. I think, unfortunately, I'm going to have to wait for the DVD and watch it on my little portable where I can turn it off and walk away if I need to. This is a shame, really. It'll be the first of the series I haven't ever seen on the big screen. No doubt it'll be re-released sometime in the future, maybe all six of them together.

I've always been just a little too sensitive to the emotional manipulations of stories (and music, too), either in print or visual. I sometimes come out of a movie reeling (no pun intended), feeling emotionally battered. It's why as a general rule I like stupid adventure flicks and monster movies; sure, you can read them metaphorically if you want to, but you don't have to. With something like, say, The End of the Affair, or The Killing Fields, there's damn little metaphor for emotional cruelty. What I like about books is that I can put them down and walk away, then go back to it later without losing the continuity. With a movie, I always feels trapped in the seat for the duration, like a funhouse ride. I know I could get up and leave, but it's inconsiderate if you've come with someone else (and I hate going to the movies alone) and somehow disrespectful to the artists. TV has a tendency to suck me in the same way movies do and manages somehow to shut off my ability to find the off switch. I don't seem to have this problem with DVDs, oddly enough. And books are meant to be tackled piecemeal, even though I often don't. Movies, though, are like ice cream cones, to be consumed right now.

I told Livy last night that I thought I'd go to the Ziegfeld on Tuesday, and maybe I will. But right now I'm curling up with a book.

The Gates to the City: A Valentine

This Post is Brought to You by the Letter B and the Number 6 and by 9/11. Oh, and the color Orange.

The unfurling of Christo's The Gates was the big event this weekend, one I passed on, as I'm not generally a big fan of his work. Opinions seem to be mixed, so far, but one common thread runs through them: the specter of 9/11. Whether The Gates reminds reviewers directly of 9/11 or whether the art is seen as a sign of the city's recovery, the destruction of the Twin Towers looms over the installation.

Charlie Suisman writes in lyrical prose about both events in his daily Manhattan User's Guide:

"The Gates" is the first truly citywide event since September 11th, a malign and permanent transformation of space on the one hand, a benign and temporary one on the other. From people born outside our shores, one was done to us, one done for us. September 11th was a vertical event; this installation encourages you to see horizontally, to reframe the landscape with its proscenium arches and show curtains. Terrorists cast ashes over a golden morning, artists launched patches of orange under ashen skies.

Julie Lasky, editor of the design magazine I.D., can't help being reminded of emergency orange rather than the warmer saffron in Design Observer:

There were security vehicles, driven by park officials. And there was a sound that many New Yorkers can’t help linking to the events of 9/11, especially when it is coupled with flashes of emergency orange: the noise of helicopter rotors. Chop, chop, chop.

Yes, though Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park gates have been planned with awe-inspiring grit and dedication and are blameless in every way — though they will do no damage to the park and are composed entirely of recyclable materials; though they are constructed with paid, loving labor (except in the case of Jeanne-Claude’s late mother, who insisted on working for free); though they cost the city nothing and are estimated to bring in at least $80 million from tourists; though proceeds through the sale of souvenirs will nobly benefit the Central Park Conservancy and Nurture New York’s Nature; though the saffron-colored fabric is meant to connote peace and comes close to matching Jeanne-Claude’s hair — this miracle of efficiency, this triumph of persistence over municipal bureaucracy, this delicate orange grove, which an acquaintance rightly likened to an evanescent eruption of cherry trees in the spring, cannot overcome associations with hazardous conditions, at least not to my mind.

Tonight, a man in my building who had been at the unfurling (an interesting twist on the concept of an opening, I have to admit) explained to me as we waited for the elevator and then our respective floors that we needed snow, and that Christo and Jeanne-Claude had originally planned for that so the "saffron fabric would reflect pink in it." I have no idea whether this is true or not, but he was so earnest about it that it makes me want to see them. And it was the kind of conversation I found myself having with complete strangers after 9/11, about something momentous and public and yet very personal.

Nearly everything momentous that happens now in New York we seem to recast somehow in the hellish glow of 9/11, still traumatized by it, still mourning. We make comparisons, use it as a pivot point of "before" and "after," look for signs of transformation in its wake. It's not unlike the way we treat a loved one who's had a catastrophic illness and is struggling to recover.

How do you come to love a city the way you love a person? It surprises me, but that's what's happened, and I'm not the only one to have fallen into this kind of affair. Ask Pete Hamill, whose new book, Downtown: My Manhattan, I'm currently reading. New York is seductive, flashy, but neither easy nor cheap. "Love me or leave me" could be the City's motto, and you do. A friend who stayed with me several years ago never did get acclimated and finally left the city after four months of desperately trying to shoehorn herself into a life here. By contrast, though my first couple of years were hard so hard I wasn't sure I could live here either, once I got past the hazing, I felt I belonged here. I'd both earned the right and had a dream fulfilled. I've never lived anywhere that I cared about so deeply. After almost 20 years here, I feel almost as though the city and I are married. We have a relationship with each other, sometimes tender, sometimes combative, often vocal, always passionate, at least on my part. Anthropomorphically speaking, the City couldn't care less about me, or so you'd think. And yet there's nowhere else on earth where I've felt more welcome and more at home.

This begs the question of what, exactly, we're referring to when we say "The City." I think of the other cities I've lived in or visited  and only London really comes close to New York's character. Edinburgh made me one of its own the same way New York did, but much more quickly and easily. Come into the pub, lass, and we'll buy you a dram. Here, I've always bought my own, though occasionally the bartender might send one over. I never got used to Pittsburgh's steep hills, or the accent, or the smell and taste of sulphur in the air and water. I have fond memories of my garret room over the Ouse in old York, and the quiet, cobbled nighttime promenade outside my window, but after a week, the minster became this looming, oppressive presence to which all roads led. And Paris? City of Lights, my arse. Dirty, smelly, and rude, concerned only with appearances and its own Frenchness. Detroit is a sad and eerie vision of the half-deserted post-apocalyptic city, Chicago its bright and shiny antithesis. Toronto reminds me of a hive of brown worker bees, forced undergound in the cold, the streets fronted with nothing but cold, blank lobbies guarded by drones.

But London was a happy mongrel, a mad agglomeration of all the hamlets and villages it had swallowed up, a crazy geography of moors and tidal flats, skyscrapers and mews, filthy alleys that opened into tiny closes filled with boutiques and flowers and a ridiculous water clock, overrun with tourists, immigrants, crowds of every age and nationality, tall red buses and shiny black taxis, the Underground lurking below and massive train termini above. When I read China Mieville's Perdido Street Station years after first visiting, I immediately recognized London in his river city of New Crobuzon (Mieville was born in London). London has enough character to have a biography—Peter Ackroyd's London: a Biography—not just a history.

The identity of a big city like London or New York rests on so many things: the architecture, the layout of the streets, the various neighborhoods, the demographics of the populace and all their quirks, the collective energy, the nightlife, the public transportation, the roads and traffic, the prevalent industry, the geography and topography, weather, the city's age and history, the sheer size, the perfidy of its government, and of course, money.

New York was still down on its luck when I first moved here, but bootstrapping itself out of the bankruptcy of the 70's with the boom of the 80's. The subway was rickety and dangerous for a couple of years, but also spectacularly graffitoed, works of art on steel wheels, something that seemed indicative of New York's ability to make lemonade out of lemons. Streets were dirty and full of the homeless. In my first year, I saw a man frying an egg on a steaming manhole cover in the middle of summer near Penn Station. But on my first day here, I saw dozens of Good Samaritans run to tend and get help for a woman who had been hit by a taxi. Those two memories of my first year in the city are just the juxtapositions you have to live with here, and they all came together in 9/11 and its aftermath, all the pity and the horror and the beauty of spirit New Yorkers show more often than visitors realize. Odd dichotomies, oxymorons, peculiar concatenations and juxtapositions are commonplace in New York.

There is, in short, the physical city and the spiritual city. They influence each other in a continuous feedback loop. The spiritual city is composed less of its churches and temples than of the underlying philosophy that acts as social glue. In New York, that can probably be boiled down to "live and let live." Or as Brooklynites might say, Fuhgettaboudit, or Staten Islanders, Whut-EV-ah.

There is also the historical city. London has a long history and is the survivor of multiple disasters: fires, floods, wars, epidemics. New York's history is chronologically shorter but, I would argue, just as rich for the variety of lives that have passed through or settled in it. Few other cities have seen the constant influx of immigrants New York has. Each wave has left an accretion behind, like corals building up a reef. Here, you'll find Little Odessa; Little Ukraine, Little Poland., Little Brazil, Little India, Little Colombia, Little Hungary, Little Syria, Iraq (LeFrak City) and Kuwait (Queensbridge), Koreatown, Curry Hill, Little Germany, Little Bohemia, Little Rumania, the Irish Riviera, Little Africa, Quisqueya Heights (Washington Heights), and even Hollywood East. Isolated colonies of Little Italy can still be found in the sea that's now Manhattan's Chinatown, and that distinction must be made because there's now a Chinatown in Queens and in Brooklyn. The one in Brooklyn, in my old neighborhood, encompasses at least as many Vietnamese as Chinese and was once home to Norwegians, then South Americans with sprinklings of Koreans and Russians. Even the ethnicity and language of the Chinese coming over here has changed in the last 20 years. There's a strip of East 9th Street downtown that's quickly becoming Little Tokyo, thanks to the influx of Japanese students at NYU and the businesses springing up to remind them of home.

This is what strikes me the most after all the years I've lived here: how quickly New York reshapes itself. Go away for a couple of weeks, come back and your favorite restaurant has closed. Turn your back for a minute, the largest buildings in the city fall down. Even in that catastrophe, and the inevitable real estate rancor and political wrangling that follows the sudden availability of such a scarce commodity as land, New York renews itself, remakes itself, offering new vistas.

I thought when I moved to the Bronx from Brooklyn that I would miss unbearably the view of downtown and the Brooklyn Bridge from the Manhattan Bridge, a view I used to see nearly every night, coming home on the B Train. After 9/11 I couldn't bear to look at it for a long time and would turn my back to the northern view of the Williamsburgh Bridge instead. There are no bridges on my new route home, but different delights. Now, on the Number 6, I remind myself to look up from my book for the wonderful mosaics of neighborhood life at 110th Street and the more abstract ones going in at 86th Street, and to look up again as the train becomes an El.

At Hunt's Point you come up from the ground to daylight or night, to heat hammering the rooftops or rain slashing the glass; to see, in the dark, the twin of your own train winding along a mile or so away over another track camouflaged among buildings on Westchester Avenue. For a moment, in darkness or fog, you seem to be suspended on nothing, riding off into nothing as your train rounds the curve out of Whitlock. It's a cheap thrill, like riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. It's not the majestic, thundering leap over the East River that the B train affords, but it's a sweet view across the rooftops of the Bronx, especially in the morning when the air is bright and flocks of white pigeons are wheeling through it. Occasionally, a tug steams south down the Harlem River or a fishing skiff sits with lines cast into the murky water in the middle of all this urbanness, beside silos of salt for the coming winter. Charlie Suisman again: "Old photographs of Central Park freeze, say, a group of skaters (the lonely outpost of the Dakota in the background) and become part of our collective memory, an entry in the city's daily journal."

And that's why I live here, why I stay here: I want to be part of the city's daily journal too.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I sat down today to write about the kinds of personal changes 9/11 made in me, something I've been thinking about for the past couple of weeks, but I didn't know quite where to start, or what, exactly, to talk about. If you've been reading my blog, you know I've had an up and down year emotionally, and I've started to wonder if some of that isn't a delayed reaction from 9/11, if everything that's been going on this year is just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've been following the work at the World Trade Center site and all the controversies surrounding it so closely ever since it happened, both for work and for personal interest, that it still feels very immediate to me. I don't think there's a day goes by when I'm not reading something about it, or thinking about it. I'm not scared and jumpy and freaked out like I was when it first happened, but it's had a definite effect on my thinking.

As I was contemplating exactly what I wanted to say here and how I was going to say it, I got an e-mail from a good friend of mine, one whom I would never describe as a rabid patriot, that surprised, nay, shocked me. What she sent me was an ultra (and blindly) patriotic rant: that's been circulating around the Web, falsely attributed to Robin Williams. I almost hate to reproduce it to give it further publicity, but I think it's important to be reminded of what fear and lack of compassion can produce. Here's the meat of the purported "peace plan":

1.) The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic and the rest of those 'good ole boys,' We will never "interfere" again.

2.) We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don't want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No one sneaking through holes in the fence.

3.) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would welcome them.

4.) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

5.) No foreign "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home baby.

6.) The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing nonpolluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while.

7.) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don't like it, we go some place else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)

8.) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

9.) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island some place. We don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

10.) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer. The Language we speak is ENGLISH.....learn it...or LEAVE...Now, isn't that a winner of a plan.

"The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying 'Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.' She's got a baseball bat and she's yelling, 'You want a piece of me!?'"

Only the last paragraph is actually Robin Williams's words, and it was part of a comedy routine. The rest of it isn't nearly as witty or smart as he is.

The problem with pieces like this, regardless of who writes them or from what viewpoint, is that they're so simplistic, positing a world that is black and white: "the US does all these wonderful things for other nations, so screw you if you don't want what we have to offer." The flip side of this statement is, "The US imposes its will on other countries, so you all should just stay home and piss off." Even individual friendships don't operate on this level, let alone national diplomacy. Reading it over, I can honestly respond "yes, but. . ." to each of them. There's always two sides to any situation, sometimes more, and nobody ever knows all of them. Day to day life and ordinary relationships are complex; how much more so the relations between disparate groups of people who don't speak the same language?

Statements like these also beg the question of what, precisely, the US expects in return for its acts of generosity or national policy. Every act of generosity listed here—accepting immigrants, giving out military and monetary aid, hosting the UN, offering asylum—has an element of self-interest in it, as well as charity. Our economy is so intertwined with the rest of the world's that there's no extricating it without economic consequences here. Buying all that oil from OPEC makes all those SUVs possible. We're not doing them a favor. No national government, including the US, is a charity that gives without expecting some quid pro quo return, an "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" agreement. That's diplomacy. The 10-point rant above reads like a childish "I'll just take my marbles and go home" response to the difficulties of all of us getting along without offending or—worse—killing each other.

As a sort of balancing tonic to most of the above, Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International in an article in Foreign Policy, writes,

Anti-Americanism’s ascendance also owes something to the geometry of power. The United States is more powerful than any country in history, and concentrated power usually means trouble. Other countries have a habit of ganging up to balance the reigning superpower. Throughout history, countries have united to defeat hegemonic powers—from the Hapsburgs to Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.

For over 50 years, the United States employed skillful diplomacy to fend off this apparently immutable law of history. U.S. administrations used power in generally benign ways, working through international organizations, fostering an open trading system that helped others grow economically, and providing foreign aid to countries in need. To demonstrate that it was not threatening, the United States routinely gave great respect and even deference to much weaker countries. By crudely asserting U.S. power and disregarding international institutions and alliances, the Bush administration has pulled the curtain on decades of diplomacy and revealed that the United States’ constraints are self-imposed: America can, in fact, go it alone. Not surprisingly, the rest of the world resents this imbalance and searches for ways to place obstacles in America’s way.

This is yet another way to look at the position of the US in the world, just as much supported by fact as the 10-point rant. The fact is that the US is bigger and badder than anybody else in the world, now that the Soviet Union has fallen, and with this regime in office, the gloves are off.

Nobody likes to be forced to acknowledge this. No one likes to be grateful for handouts all the time. No one likes to be in the position of needing them, and no one likes to have to buy help with cooperation, to be reminded of their weaker position. When you're on the receiving end of charity or any kind of aid, whether it's troops to help you hold off invaders or food for your starving countrymen, you're forcibly reminded that you're not as capable as the country giving you aid. People as a group don't like humiliation any more than individuals do. And nobody likes swaggering bullies to rub their noses in it.

The thing with bullies is that they're usually acting out of fear of their own humiliation, which is something that 10-point rant reeks of, especially the parts dealing with immigrants. I don't know why it's so easy to forget here that everyone who's not a Native American is an immigrant. It seems that the point at which people begin to think ofl themselves as "native" is the point at which they feel their own position in that society is threatened. The history of immigration in this country is one of the last wave bitching about the next wave, and the Europeans bitching about the "yellow menace." I'm sure the various Gaels bitched about the Angles as they were being pushed into Wales and Scotland and Cornwall, and the Angles then bitched about the Saxons and the Vikings, until the Normans came over and they all had a common enemy. Now we're all picking on the Arabs, Muslims, or people who look vaguely like them. It's the Brown Menace.

Motivated, as usual, by fear and ignorance and lack of compassion. This is where the political becomes personal, and where what I've been writing about the public sphere becomes private.

I've been thinking lately how 9/11 became for some people an excuse for bigotry and aggression, and for others a reason for more compassion and empathy. Even now, I can't bring myself to hate the terrorists who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks. I think Osama Bin Laden is crazy and needs to be locked up somewhere out of harm's way, but I also think he's full of hate and fear, as well as, possibly, the passion of his relgious beliefs. None of that is a good emotional mix because the latter justifies the former. Still, I'm mystified by how so many of the terrorists could live here, pretend to assimilate, and still hate and fear what they saw so much. Were their neighbors not real to them? Could they only see the people they lived among as infidels, not individuals? The internal reasoning and psychology of it baffles me. The only thing I can think of to account for it is the way soldiers have to be brainwashed into dehumanizing the enemy so they can actually kill them without compunction. Infidels are not humans, just as any other nasty epithet we have for each other dehumanizes the person named. It's hard to kill people, less hard to kill gooks or roundheads or heretics.

I've also been thinking about the article I read about a year ago, which I blogged about in my first entry in Spawn of Blogorrhea that talked about how actually being in the vicinity of violence rather than just viewing it through the media provokes different reactions. With almost three thousand of our dead here, the last thing most of us in New York wanted was more dead, more provocation, though much of the rest of the country felt differently. When no one is aiming at you, personally, it's easier to be sanguine (in both senses of the word) about taking aim at someone else. When we're victims of a violent act, whether we protect or defend ourselves or not, we have two choices: we can either be brutalized by it and reduced to the level of the people responsible for it or decide that violence is no justification for further violence. Enough is enough. What anyone could do to convince Osama Bin Laden of this, I don't know. I doubt it's possible, anymore than it's possible to convince Dubya and His Minions of it.

But it is heartening to see the beginnings of a possible sea change in the Muslim world, if not in Dubya's. Some, perhaps many, Muslims are growing tired of having their beliefs associated with death and violence. It would be nice if Christians would start to feel this way too instead of using the tired, old "he started it" argument. This new round of violence has not, despite what Dubya says, made the world safer.

So how has 9/11 changed me, personally? I've become more outspoken, more militant in my pacifism, more aware of the need for kindness—and a bit more despairing over the human condition. I don't think I'm more afraid than I was of an individual act of terrorism happening again. I think I've always been somewhat surprised that it didn't happen sooner, so 9/11 was shocking and horrifying but not surprising. In some ways, I've always been a pessimist about humanity's ability to get along peaceably with each other, always believed that "it does not belong to man to direct his own steps," and the current situation has only further affirmed that for me. I'm deeply saddened (hate that phrase; it's so overused by politicians) by the loss of life everywhere, from 9/11 and from the wars that have followed.

I still haven't gone down to the site, though for all I've been thinking and writing about it, I might as well have. I remember not too long ago being downtown for a class and getting twisted around direction-wise coming out of the subway and realizing with horror that I was about to walk out onto Church Street where I'd be able to see the great gaping hole in the skyline and the shrouded Deutsche Bank building, and then scurrying away feeling almost physically ill. I find that I miss the view from the Brooklyn Bridge less than I thought of, probably because of 9/11. I'm strangely relieved to be out of Brooklyn itself, though I've always liked the borough. I don't know if I'll get over associating it with the smell of burning building and ash. The Bronx seems somehow safely removed, though that's just an illusion.

And this year the horror seemed a little fresher than it had on the previous anniversary, or at least more depressing than it had before. I don't know why that is, but I couldn't bring myself to write this last week. I couldn't, in fact, bring myself to do more than post the same thing I had the year before. In the year between, there's been so little to be hopeful of on that front.

It's a pipe dream in this world to hope that political leaders will ever act solely out of compassion or love of humanity. Power is too intoxicating and we're not altruistic enough animals to overcome it. Power is like crack, a one-hit, poisonous and ruinous addiction that's hard to break. The best of us can walk away from it or use it wisely, but they are few and far between. The best we can do as individuals is keep working on ourselves, seeking more compassion for others and practicing love, as if by sheer weight of numbers we might change the climate of fear and hate, and leave the rest to God.

Remembering, Three Years Later

The first time the memorial lights appeared:

Jacob’s Ladder

Look! Six months later
on a cold, almost-spring night
when the air holds breath like smoke,
two lances of light hurl themselves heavenward,
up and up
taller than the buildings whose absence they mark,
rising as those too too solid bodies fell,
converging finally to smash themselves as one
against the high and misty confines of earth.

“You can’t see anything from here,”
the woman beside me on the corner says.

I turn to show her, shake her

As I am shaken, weeping
as I walk through the park

seeing that light
behind where the Flatiron’s prow cleaves way from way,
But she has already turned away, unseeing.

Still the light rises regardless, scattering itself against the field of stars,
Warning, plea, gravemarker all at once.
I arrive home and find it looming where not long ago
the exclamatory comet hung like the omen
our ancestors thought it was.
I wonder if we have come that far, no matter
our light hides greater ones from our night gaze.
Who sees it out there? And what?
—two lights stabbing upward, joining finally, filled with souls and memory
a sign, a message:

Look what’s happened here.
Help us—we are lost and stupid and proud,
and we cannot climb out of our own darkness.

Help us. Make us see.

This will be the last time anyone but construction workers has access to the slurry wall and lowest foundations of the original towers until the new memorial is finished in 2009. The remains of anyone killed in the attacks have been atomized by physics or turned to smoke in the chemistry of fire three years ago, but the symbolism of place endures. Those of us in the city when it happened breathed that smoke and the fine debris and carry a tiny part of those people who perished with us in our own chemistry.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Requiescant In Pace.

The Root of All Evil

Marcia sent me this yesterday. I think it explains how people like Bush get elected, how major corporations manage to rape the environment, and so many other things. I'm not sure where she got it, but it's no doubt making its rounds on the 'net as you read it. It reminds me, in a strange way, of the post I read on F Train yesterday, probably because it speaks to my own fears about being borged at work, where my boss keep pressuring me to go full-time, or to at least work four full days a week, writing marketing copy. No, I say! No! Must . . . not . . . stop . . . thinking. . . .

Strangely enough, this also mirrors a NY Times editorial today, called "The Price of Incuriosity." Bush may look like Curious George, but he's really Incurious George.

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to "loosen up." Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a "social thinker." I began to think alone to relax, I told myself but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

That was when things began to sour at home. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

One day the boss called me in. He said, "Listen, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job."

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!" "But Honey, surely it's not that serious." "It is serious,"she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently. She exploded in tears of rage and frustration, but I was in no mood to deal with the emotional drama. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot with NPR on the radio and ran up to the big glass doors...They didn't open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night. As I sank to the ground, clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye.

"Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" it asked.

You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster. Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker.

I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

I think the road to recovery is nearly complete for me.

Tidying Up Too Much

I've waited a couple of weeks after the unveiling of the 9/11 memorial designs to write about them, mostly because I can't really decide what I think of them. None of them provoked that gut reaction of "this is it!" None of them even came close. The biggest problem with all of them is that so much of their structure is underground, sealed off from sunlight and air. In fact, the one that appeals to me most, Suspending Memory, is the only one truly open to the surface—and it looks like Arlington National Cemetery.

Although I didn't have that "Aha!" moment with it, this one works for me in a couple of ways. I like the glass markers with the victims' life stories engraved on them, better than the projections of their faces on glass, in Dual Memory. That seems a little creepy to me, and would, I suspect, make the space feel haunted, especially since it too is underground. But I like the fact that the little glass columns are shaped almost like miniature towers, with floors engraved on them. It's like the horizontal recreation of the towers planned at Fresh Kills and I like that tangible reminder of what they were and looked like. I think we need that, in the same way we need photographs to remember our own personal dead. People forget, and that site is eventually going to look entirely different than it did originally.

I like the space for contemplation that you go down a few stairs to, but that's still essentially outdoors, and I like the wall with stones representing the victims, especially the texture of it, which feels right.

I like the grass and trees, the park-like setting the designers have imagined, precisely because it does give it that cemetery feel, sort of like Green-Wood (which is right up the road from me). Mostly I like the idea that it's in sunlight, on the surface where the absence of the towers is most apparent.

I have two major problems with all the designs, which are probably not entirely the fault of the designers but rather have to do with the site itself: First, there's too much underground. Why would you develop a memorial to the death of people who worked in some of the tallest buildings of the world that "reads" like a trip into the underworld? You've got what used to be a majorly congested site suddenly open to the air (and the area around it is still going to be over-congested). Why not make more of the memorial visible, as Suspending Memory tries to do? Part of the reason for this is the Families' insistence that nothing ever be bulit on the footprints (a requirement I've objected to elsewhere).

But my real objection to all the memorials is that they don't remind anyone of anything but the victims themselves. And while those deaths were indeed a great tragedy, they aren't the whole story. The memorials don't remind anyone of the buildings, of the act of war perpetrated on them, of the fear we all felt, of the outrage, of the chaos that ensued. There's nothing to remind us that what took years to build can be wrecked in a few hours by madmen, or that we vowed this wouldn't happen again. They're all too damn tidy. What's missing is not just the backstory of the buildings themselves, and the horror and fire and chaos, but the subtext, which includes the Tower of Babel theme, as well as the loss of innocence and security, and the stark reminder that we're not very well liked by everyone in the world. Also there's no acknowledgement of the fact that buildings, as well as people, have a kind of life as well, and mean something to the people who see them and work in them every day.

In short, there are no ruins.

Instead, we have light and water and carefully controlled fire in neatly designed and contained squares. The site has been sanitized for our protection, and that's why the memorial designs have no power to evoke emotion. Gavriel Rosenfeld calls this "a reflection of an escapist impulse. Like the proverbial ostrich burying its head in the sand to evade its enemies, the memorials seem to prefer to hide from the traumatic past rather than confront it head-on."

By contast, when people look out from the new temporary PATH station that's sitting in the middle of the raw space of the South Tower's footprint, they find it very moving. I think the operative word is "raw" as opposed to the "processed" images that we get with the memorials. I, personally, would prefer to have that 7-story piece of facade somewhere on the site, or the steel crossbeams—something scorched and twisted from the wreckage to remind us how it looked before it was tidied up—or maybe "tidied away" is a better way of putting it.

Something like this has been done at a couple of other memorials, most notably the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. That stark and ruined building has become an international symbol of the horror of nuclear war. The Japanese and UNESCO both realized this. The Peace Park website calls it a historical witness, which is something the 9/11 memorials lack:

As a historical witness that conveys the disaster of the first atomic bombing in history, and as a symbol of the vow to pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons and enduring peace, in December 1996 the A-bomb Dome was registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List based on the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

In the same way, that chunk of facade from the WTC could become a powerful symbol condemning terrorism.

The 9/11 memorial should be something shocking and powerful. It should convey to the people who weren't here some of what we felt when this happened. I want people to look at that raw space, at least some of it, or even go into, and feel loss and anger and maybe some of our fear, too. I've been saying, along with other NYC residents, that you had to be here to know what it was like, and a monument that left some of that space undeveloped and dotted with ruins would help convey that.

New York's already got a lot of pretty parks for peace and contemplation. Let's have one for outrage.

Speaking for the Dead

Wait a minute, I have to get my flameproof gear on here . . . I'm about to write something really inflammatory, so be forewarned.

We got some very good news recently: There are 40 fewer people on the list of World Trade Center casualties than we thought. That's excellent. The number is still incomprehensible—2,752—but at least it's 40 fewer than we thought it was. Any reduction is miraculous, considering how many people were in the towers when they were hit and how many more rushed in to save those unable to rush out. The total is a little less than the number of people who will fit on two 10-car subway trains. Two rush-hour trains of the dead. About a third of the population of the podunk town I grew up in.

I follow the 9/11 tidbits in the news kind of obsessively, as I imagine most New Yorkers do. I check the Times every day, and for my job, I look at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s (LMDC) site to see what's happening today with the World Trade Center site. It's not surprising that there's contention over the final design of the site, with so many competing interests down there. First off, the site's owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The buildings were leased to Larry Silverstein, who's still trying to collect the insurance money on them, as soon as the cheapskate insurance companies will fork over for two separate attacks, one on each building (their belief is that it was one attack and they only owe for one building; go figure). That's where most of the money for the new buildings is coming from. But there's also federal money coming in for the permanent PATH station to replace the temporary one that's there now, and for the new Fulton Street Transit Center that will link the PATH and all the subway lines near there, and for the repair and finishing of the section of Route 9A/West Street behind the towers that was damaged when they fell.

So you have the Port Authority, the Metropolitan Transit Authority/NYCT, NYSDOT, the feds, Larry Silverstein, the Governor, the Mayor, a council of business people affected by 9/11, architects, civic organizations, ordinary residents, developers, green building organizations—and the families of the victims. I've been writing about this train wreck of organizations and competing interests for work, which is how I know this stuff and I have to say it's amazing that it's gotten as far as it has with so many cooks stirring the soup. This seems to be due in part to the amazing powers of mediation being practiced by the folks at LMDC (for whom I do not work, in the interests of disclosure). They're doing an incredible amount of public outreach, of the kind never seen before for any kind of project in the city, as well as coordinating between all these agencies and the interests of the ordinary citizens who live down there.

What amazes me (here it comes) is how much power the families of the victims are wielding in what goes where on the 16 acres of what used to be the World Trade Center plaza. They've basically dictated that nothing will be built in the footprints of the towers themselves, including the existing PATH tracks that run beneath what used to be the south tower, regardless of expense. The footprints of those two buildings are basically being treated as grave sites, although they have been stripped and excavated almost to the bedrock and anything that might have been vaguely recognizable as human remains was carted off to Fresh Kills to be sifted through, and then returned to next of kin, if possible, or buried there. So if there are any remains that aren't ash or organic molecules, they're in Fresh Kills, across the bay, or trapped in the the ductwork of adjacent buildings, or blown across the river or in the lungs of thousands of people who worked there in the aftermath.

To qualify how harsh this sounds, let me say that I understand these people are grieving and that I can't possibly understand their depth of feeling, because I didn't lose anyone. I acknowledge that. I'll also be the first to admit that I have a complete lack of sentimentality when it comes to the remains of loved ones. When the spirit of life is gone from the body, so is whatever made that person who they were. What's left is a collection of organic chemicals best used for fertilizer or as organ donations, where possible. I'm sentimental about what they've left in objects, things they've said to me, my own memories, not about the bone house itself. That's not them, anymore, as far as I'm concerned.

But given that, those footprints are still not the final resting place of those people. If it's anywhere, it's Fresh Kills, where there's going to be a beautiful memorial mound built, as the landfill is transformed into a nature preserve (that's another ironic story altogether). Working around their requests isn't a hardship, for the most part, and Libeskind's done a beautiful job of it. I'm sure whoever wins the memorial competition will, too. It only becomes a problem when you get to moving the PATH train tracks or figuring out how to accommodate all those visitors and their buses, and where to find enough land to make the site pay for itself without having it become so incredibly dense with retail and commercial space that it's worse than it was before. Then it starts to seem . . . well, like there's a bit of "big fish in small pond" going on.

To give this a slightly different perspective, too, I'll bring up the African Burial Ground. This was ten years in the making, and while it did finally involve the abandonment of the building plans for the site, there were actual, physical human remains involved, not just an empty space. I would argue that the footprints are being treated very differently than these actual burial grounds. They are, at best, symbolic, and are being treated as literal graves. This seems really conterproductive to me as well as counterintuitive.

In some ways, this goes back to some of the issues I wrote about in "Owning 9/11": does proximity to the event grant one special rights to interpret it? As I said there, yes and no. There's no denying that the more intimate one's experience with the event was, the more sharply felt it's got to be, and the more unchallengable that personal experience becomes for people who were more distant from it. In a sense, the people inside that event own it. But that doesn't make any other experience of it less legitimate. But what kind of power does that "first right" of interpretation give people?

First, there's the question of whether being the victim's families gives these people the "first right" or not. I'm certainly not saying it doesn't give them a special status. It does. Their loved ones were innocent victims of a horrendous act of war. What they're doing is speaking for people who can't speak for themselves.

I guess what I'm really asking is should the victim's families, in light of the facts that (a) they, by definition, weren't there on site when 9/11 was happening, and (b) that the site itself contains only minuscule amounts of, if any, actual human remains have so much say in what happens to the site? 9/11 affected everyone in the country, to varying degrees. How do we decide who gets to say how that site is treated?

I don't have any answers for this, it's just a question I've been mulling over while watching the negotiations and finagling and back and forthing. The site is a giant turf war of competing interests and I don't know how anything will ever get worked out there. If you're interested in following it, here are a few good places to look, besides the links at the top:

Gotham Gazette's Rebuilding NYC
The Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York
Imagine New York
New York New Visions
Rebuild Downtown Our Town (R.DOT)
Green Ground Zero

Art Imitates 9/11

And if Joe Yahoo thinks my site is disturbing, he certainly wouldn't get the 9/11 "game" (where you have to choose how/whether/where to jump out of one of the top floors) which has now apparently been taken down. Dr. Emily mentioned it in response to my "Catching Up" post. There's some interesting discussion of it in another blog, regarding its real purpose and the medium in which it appeared. Is it art? Is it a sick joke? Is it truly a game? Is it something else?

How to or even if one should represent a horrific event is always a question in the recent proximity to event. How soon is one of the first questions: when is it okay to start thinking of it as anything but history? I think it was Elie Wiesel who said there should be no poetry after the Holocaust. The first people to process it into art are inevitably roundly condemned because people grieve at different rates and in different ways. No matter what, someone is always going to be offended, either by the actual piece, when it appears, the interpretation, the content, the very idea. First there was the sculpture of the Tumbling Woman at Rockefeller Center that set everybody's teeth on edge. Working out an acceptable memorial at the site is going to be a nightmare.

If I look at this "game" (which I haven't seen and probably won't now, as the site's been taken down) as art, it's a fascinating piece in a kind of exciting new medium. If I interpret it as an actual game, it's just sick, like a variation on a video game that makes it a racist killing spree. As an intellectual exercise, the game makes me queasy, which is probably what it's supposed to do. Writing the poem about it made me queasy too.

But history can't be the only repository for events, otherwise, voices are lost. Em and I have argued before about how absolute and fact-based history is, and I won't start that one again, but I will readily agree that it's not the only way for us to remember or learn about or make sense of the past. Even if art only makes you think about something in a different way, or see it from another point of view without interpreting it for you, that's important. I think that's what the best art does.

I can't say that's the function of Stories From the Ruins. Putting this book together was a way of both grieving and bearing witness for me, and I think probably for Marcia too. I've always felt that once I put a piece of writing into the world, it's no longer just mine anymore. Even my own interpretation changes with time; with some distance, your own subconscious motivations become clearer.

So I'm endlessly interested to see what kind of fine art comes out of 9/11. I make this distinction because I think the mass media is largely hopeless as producers of anything that can make you think. They're the media of titillation, and not much else. Sadly, I think they're going to be the voices preserved for history.