Gradually, the authenticity faded. The raw edges were eroded smooth, the open wounds sewn shut; they built myths and created heros, and covered them with sentimentality -- and then attacked the myths and pulled down the heroes, but that's life in modern America..

I don't like sentimentality. I'm probably too cynical for my heart's health (speaking strictly in a cardiologic sense). I still can't talk about 9/11 without choking up, and starting to weep. It's an interesting phenomena, and the fact that I observe it still is probably an indication that I haven't half dealt with my emotions from the day.

The studied, indeed rehearsed performances that the media is presenting are not comforting to me. For my own reasons, they infuriate me. However, they are not about me, just as the anniversary is not about the media. For many people they are an important part of recovering from grief

I'm staying away from the television and the radio for now. No need to seek out irritation. I wish that the media could be what it was those first few days, but it can't. People talked about how everything had changed forever. It hasn't for me. My life is just the same, except for the weight of the memories. I'd rather not have those memories rewritten by television or radio coverage. They aren't particularly valuable memories, I don't have any brilliant insights. I remember what it was like on the day, and I remember that all my friends are alive, and I remember that different people need different things, and I hope that is enough. If it isn't, it won't be the news media that will be able to fill the gap.

This nicely parallels the same-day (9/4) posts by bloggers James Lileks (a MN based columnist who can be awfully funny but lately has been awfully jingo) and Dan Perkins ("Tom Tommorrow"). Lileks reviewed a memorial DVD and smugged about people who were upset with all the media coverage. Perkins reply:

http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/archive/
2002_09_01_bloggera.html#81145724

I'm pretty sure Perkins read Lileks. I hope Lileks read Perkins.

Teresa: my thoughts will be with you and the others there I know, just as they were on that day. You and Patrick, Vijay, Vickie and Andy, Arthur, Bernadette, and Kevin, Avram, Michael, the whole gang. Hugs to you all.

MKK

A willingness to join our fellow humans in Solemn Civic Occasions is critical. Otherwise we're just atomized, alienated brutes.

Sentiment and emotion are real. And earnest. And the grave is not our goal.

--Robert Louis Matthew Arnold John Cardinal Ruskinson (Ret.)

In general, their coverage was superb. But one moment really stood out. Immediately after the first collapse, one of the reporters is shouting at a man. It's clear from their voices, from the way the volume rises and falls, and from background clatter, that they are both running. The reporter asks a standard intelligent news reporter queston--"Can you tell me what just happened?"

And the man's answer captures the day: "No. I can't."

When I write about the day itself, I write about taking my rats to the vet, and I write about watching X-Men on HBO between news reports. One measures a circle beginning anywhere, so let us begin by studying the frogs.

Hugs back to you, Mary Kay. They are much appreciated.

And here's a toast to you, William Perry Shunn, who brought so many of us so much heart's ease on that day that its total is incalculable. I may have been the one who said "Collect names and swap lists," but your check-in page was an order of magnitude better than that.

This whole thing is bigger and more abstract than I'm used to dealing with.

I have ordinary things I need to do today, but I'll be thinking about my New York friends, and my American friends today, and wishing I was within reach.

M.

In Robert A. Heinlein's collected letters, "Grumbles From the Grave," we see RAH's side of an exchange with John Campbell just after Pearl Harbor. Campbell was making some political point about how the U.S. should respond, and RAH said to Campbell; you just don't get it, do you? These were my friends who died at Pearl Harbor, the people I went to the Naval Academy with. For Heinlein, it wasn't a tasty morsel of news to be discussed, it was PERSONAL.

Also, Heinlein felt a sinking sense of shame and cowardice. Even though he'd been honorably discharged from his Naval service, he felt he should have been there.

And that's a little bit how I feel about 9/11. I've stopped reading Instapundit and Matt Welch and a lot of those guys. They're all caught up in whether the Right or the Left has the PROPER attitude of dissent in the war against Islamic fundamentalism. Even Lileks ... I think he's a brilliant feature columnist, and I am eternally grateful to him for awakening in me a love of the commercial design of the middle-20th Century, and I've exchanged just enough e-mail with him to feel like I like him personally ... I regularly buy his "Gallery of Regrettable Foods" as gifts ... but I read his 9/4/01 column and say to myself: he just doesn't get it. We New Yorkers and expatriate New Yorkers don't avoid talking about 9/11 because we're callous and above it all - we avoid it because it's fucking overwhelming to think about.

Yeah, I can't understand why people want to go on tv/radio/whatever and dump their reactions to that fucking overwheming event on everyone else. Why does someone who lost a loved one want to give the reporters another shot as asking, "Can you tell us how you feel?" That kind of grief and emotion are private things; to be shared only with family and closest friends. When people choose to get up and do that on tv with millions of strangers wagching, how can I not be suspicious of their motives? And I don't find American media awfully good at covering that sort of stuff without coming over as sanctimonious vultures.

Patrick: I'm willing to be solemn and observe Civic Occasions. I'm not willing to display my guts on nationwide tv nor to watch others do so. I don't think I'm a brute by any means but I often feel atomized and alienated. I feel that way now when any hint of 9/11 observance I find as I channel surf the news makes me press the channel button harder and faster. Funny you should use that quote. I've just finished rereading REAPER MAN and have been thinking about death and what it means. (And people think Pratchett's a humourist!)

And dammit all those emotions from a year ago are climbing back out of the cellar and choking my throat and prodding at my heart and the cats just aren't very good conversationalists.

MKK

1. I love you guys.

2. Teresa, may I please have permission to make half-a-dozen copies of this blog bit to give to some people at a place where I will be later today? I'm going down to hang out with the imam, the rabbi, and the minister and a bunch of folks from all over at First Universalist Church where I go, and I would really like to share the stuff you wrote with them.

3. I love you guys. Be well, OK? And know I'm thinking about you. (That goes for everybody on here, too. Wherever you are.)

Thanks.

E

Because that's how they cope with their grief.

Truth is, I *do* sometimes think about how I felt about 9/11 - how I felt that day, the day it happened, not how I felt a few days later or how I feel now a year later - and I talk about it occasionally. Like I did tonight. But I can't do it regularly or casually. I can't just turn on the TV, watch the towers fall down, and then say, nonchalantly, "Oh, honey, did the guy call about the car this afternoon?" or some other unrelated thing. The emotions overwhelm me when I feel them. I haven't watched any of the 9/11 video for a year. I've set up the HBO special to tape and I'll watch it ... sometime.

But tomorrow I have a full day of work ahead of me - so I updated my blog tonight with links to Patrick's and Teresa's posts and Dave Barry's column and a lovely photo of the WTC taken in 1972 or so. And now I'll put my feelings aside and tomorrow it'll be a normal day for me, because that's the way it has to be.

On a frivolous note: Can we come up with a better national slogan than, "Let's roll"? Even "Let's do it" would be better. Nathan Hale's biographers understood that sometimes last words have to be ghost-written.

"That kind of grief and emotion are private things; to be shared only with family and closest friends. When people choose to get up and do that on tv with millions of strangers watching, how can I not be suspicious of their motives?"

You know I'm fond of you, but I completely disagree on this.

I'm not generally inclined to public displays myself, but I recognize that I'm over toward one end of a big bell curve in this regard. I certainly can't agree that a willingness to display strong emotion in public is reliably a sign of phoniness. That's just plainly not the case.

As Mitch Wagner points out: this is often exactly how people cope with grief.

Which is what I've been trying to say in several imperfect posts, here, on Electrolite, and elsewhere. There are worse things in the world than Americans, including media-industry Americans, getting all fussed and demonstrative about the anniversary of upsetting events. Getting fussed like this is actually rather human. I have a lot more sympathy with the media having a week-long seizure about the 9/11 anniversary than I have with a lot of things the national media does. This particular thrash seems, to me at least, like entirely understandable, even authentic, human behavior -- a reminder that not everything we see on our screens is a result of heartless calculations. Yet.

Mary Kay, some people cope by talking, some by not talking. As Lydy said (and wasn't that a good set of comments?), different people need different things.

Big hug for Christopher Hatton, sometimes known here as Xopher, who a year ago today was late for work, and I am so glad that he was.

Another one for Michael Weholt, whose account of that can still be read, but only if you speak Italian.

And one for Jim Macdonald, because I spent the first half of 9/11 wondering whether I'd gotten him killed. He was in the area, taking care of his mother, and I called and told him the news without remembering that he's an EMT. He rang off almost immediately so he could find out if he was needed. Shortly after that I lost my email, cellphone, and all but local phone service. I spent the next seven hours trying to figure out whether he could have gotten into the city in time to get caught in the collapse.

And so many others.

I love you guys.

Excuse me, I have to go climb out onto my roof now.

The commentary is even more so.

I'm gonna give it to my shrink. It could save WEEKS of talking. Besides, I'm trying to entice her to get online, and writing like this is the best lure I can think of for someone who likes to read intelligent and heartfelt commentary. (C in a circle, and all that, of course.)

I thought I was going to let all the "times" just go by, but of course I just HAPPENED to look at my clock at 8:46 and again at...9:11. The latter has been happening to me all year, though.

Today, I'm at home with my wife and new son. I stopped watching the memorial broadcast on CNN a few minutes ago when the pressure behind my eyes became too much to bear.

I remember the feeling from last year as I hurriedly dressed for work, muttering rage-filled inanities at the mirror, after seeing reports of the first tower's fall.

For me, 9/11 was a dark day spent at local schools asking students what they thought about the tragedy and a dark night watching CNN to try to understand the horror that had befallen so many people I'd never met and now never would.

Afterwards, came the attempts to assess just what the tragedy meant to us in Maryville. Even our small community has links to NYC. I spent days trying to reach the son of a local school superintendent, who was working at St. Vincent's at the time. I talked with a high school principal whose daughter watched the towers fall from the roof of her apartment.

9/11 marked something else personally, too. That's when the well went dry. Once upon a time, I might have been able to wring some columns out of the tragedy. I might have penned some stirring and ultimately hypocritical missive about my feelings on the horrors of the attack.

But I didn't. I couldn't. It was too big and too horrible and the words wouldn't come. They still don't, really.

Not every reporter is a faceless cog in a soulless media collective. Sometimes we're parasites, but we aspire higher than that. I spent 9/11 damning my choice of career and wishing to be a paramedic or a rescue worker or something, anything, rather than a scavenger on the outskirts of tragedy.

In the end, all I could do was tell a few stories. It's not enough, but it's all I could do. That may count for something, but it doesn't feel like it.

May you find peace.

Joel Davis

The thought that keeps coming back to me is "Twenty years of the Troubles in one morning." I spent the first twenty years of my life varying degrees of just down the road from Belfast, and one of these years I really hope I can articulate how 9/11 felt to someone coming from a background that was part of the West, but where terrorist attacks were a continuous presence. There's certainly a large amount of guilt in there, along the lines of "I always wished more Americans understood what it was like to live with terrorism but I didn't mean _that_."

The other thought that came to me in the Oratorio this morning, looking at the several different school trips that had come for the Requiem, was that there's a notable generation gap at about three to five years younger than me, depending on where one goes - I was born in 1973 - at which people's worldview suddenly changes because they never had the absolute certainty that there was no future, that the Cold War was going to go nuclear and kill us all, nor the rush of hope that I felt when that set of axioms changed. I greatly hope that there will not be a similar gap with people in the West for whom the emotional realities of life before 9/11 are not firsthand, because the range of possible axioms they might grow up holding includes some scary ones.

Okay, different people cope with grief differently. I promise to stop being suspicious of carefully organized, orchestrated, choreographed and televised displays of grief just as soon as they quit thinking I'm cold, distant, and unfeeling. Yes, I should be better and stronger and extend the courtesy first, and maybe tomorrow I will. But I haven't got the wherewithal for it today.

MKK

Some parts were deliberately manipulative in ways that made me uncomfortable. Some of the interviews seemed ghoulish, and it was a clearly a product of the modern NBC approach to news as a "story." I think, it will be a focal point and initiator for more emotional processing of these events for a lot of Americans.

It also presented a lot of facts, many of them potentially uncomfortable if one thought about them, in a timeline format that will probably lead many Americans to think more about how our nation's people's flaws and virtues both led to deaths that might have been avoided.

I hope none of my friends in New York felt compelled to watch it, but for people who did not live through the actual events, it will be a start to a lot of emotional and intellectual work. It had the potential for unintended consequences for years to come, as well as being blatant commercial exploitation of a tragedy.

I have been and will be thinking of my friends there in New York with warm thoughts, wishing you all well, hoping that you are kept safe and able to find good ways to move forward in your lives.

Being kind is the right thing to do: what happened was a great evil, one we cannot heal, but at least we can oppose it with the day-to-day good things we do. Best wishes to you, my friends and loved ones.

I feel lucky that I live in California, where the reminders of that day are less omnipresent than they are in many places. This may seem callous and selfish to people who were more personally affected by September 11th than I was. If so, I'm sorry. The way we feel about public events is bound up with the events of our own lives, and I'm just trying to get through the next week without going mad. That's why I resent the media saturation. I considered going to hear the Mozart Requiem performed by a local choir this morning (part of the "rolling requiem" that Emmet mentions). I thought it might be a memorial that would feel appropriate to me. But I decided that for me a requiem is not the right symbolism because my own situation is balanced on a knife's edge between joy and disaster. I'm not yet ready to sing a requiem.

This morning, as I did last year on September 11th, I caught a casual carpool into San Francisco. Last year, I first heard about the disaster on the radio in a stranger's car. This year, I sat wishing belatedly that I had taken the bus instead, because the driver had the radio on and the names of the people who died a year ago were being read. I sat with these people I didn't know and would probably never see again, in silence without a feeling of camaradarie, and did my best not to break down.

He is, but he works in all four humours. (I'm currently reading Carpe Jugulum.)

But your blog made me cry.

All I can say is, "Thank you."

Fran Wolber

But I tell you, it gets to be hard. The first few times it's sort of exciting - you're a REAL REPORTER AT LAST! COVERING CRIME NEWS! But after a while you begin to notice that there's real people involved. Most crime reporters bail out and find some other form of journalism - or another line of work entirely - as they begin to approach age 30.

I think I said this before on the Internet, but I'll repeat myself - when I left daily newspapers to join the computer trade press in 1989, I had some misgivings. But one thing I was glad for - I was never again going to have to inform a wife that her husband, who just went out for a few drinks with the boys a few hours ago, was dead.

I didn't even bother to ask your permission—I just pasted a couple of paragraphs from your beautiful piece into my weblog—for which I'm now apologizing if I should have asked first. I usually blog first thing in the morning before the daily meetings, so there's not a lot of time...

I've enjoyed Mary Kaye and PNH's discussion. Normally (being an ex-TV producer) I too am very cynical about public displays, but I think Patrick was entirely right about this event.

I'm in Boston. The closest worry I had to the event was wondering where my brother, USA Today reporter, was, when it happened. Turned out he was headed toward the towers for coverage when they came down. He was okay.

I watched the footage just like everyone else and felt angry and shocked—but nothing I'm sure to what you all in NY went through.

That evening I'm watching Fox News and I see the Queen Mother order the guards or whatever at the palace to play the Star Spangled Banner. I'm looking at all those wonderful, hobbit-like, round, wrinkled English faces pressed up against the gates; they're all crying. My wife in the next room asks me what's going on; I get about two words out before I started blubbering like a baby; my 1-year-old daughter sees me crying, and she starts going off too. And all because I saw those wonderful Brits, many of whom remember the Blitz, no doubt, anguishing over the event.

I remember thinking afterwards, that I needed that. To get it out. Some things just happen that do....

I'm inordinately fond of you two and am very glad that you are still around.

Just wanted to say that, especially today.

I would have called, but was sure you would be busy. I knew that P. was having lunch with Ellie, as she was on the agenda for a phone call in the later afternoon, for needed distraction.

Have missed seeing ya'll since Elric and I haven't been down since last Nov when we brought Ellie and the cats home.

T's post was ... just right. Just what I needed to read this evening. I'm moved to comment and unlurk. Hugs.

I hope everyone here made it through the day intact, without too many of those awful oh-my-god moments.

So, my 9/11/02:
I knew in advance exactly where I would be at 8:46 AM on the 1 year anniversary of the time the 1st plane hit: waiting for the school bus with Peter, the little girl next door and her mother, and a Pakistani mother and daughter who moved in across the street about a month ago. What did we talk about? The tree work going on in the yard behind our nextdoor neighbors' and how late the afterschool bus had been since school started.

At 9:30, when I was driving David to the train, I said, "I'm glad I wrote it all down last year, so I don't have to try to remember it now." That may have been the only conversation about the anniversary I had all day, except occasional discussions with David about the details of my intended media blackout. I thought about emailing someone "Here's your opportunity to get posttraumatic-stress-disorder from your TV all over again," but decided that this was an impulse to be suppressed.

At the time the second tower had collapsed, I found myself driving past the very same spot I'd been at a year ago, thoush this time the no old man who cuts the grass with scissors was not in evidence.

I occasionally listended to WFUV over the course of the day, which had been a great comfort a year earlier. They were trying to serve a similar function, playing what people wanted to hear on the 9/11 anniversary. But as a planned event, it just didn't work for me, so I turned it off and played CDs instead.

In the afternoon, I got a call from a mother of a little girl in Peter's class, who had volunteered to make sure all the parents had turned in their emergrancy evacuation forms (a post-9/11 innovation of the school district). Her family moved in in June. They bought their house from Mrs. Schwarzstein, a WTC widow. The house in question is, as the crow flies, 3 houses away from ours. I didn't know until May that we'd had a WTC death in the neighborhood. Such are the lines of communication in suburbia.

There was to be a small memorial service in Chappaqua that I might have gone to, but Peter had a doctor's appointment opposite. Driving home from the appointment, I saw the volunteer firemen, in full formal dress, returning in their fire engines from the service.

I worked on our Year's Best volumes all day, not unaware of the anniversary, but not seeking "catharsis" either. The later it got, the more relieved I got that Nothing Bad Had Happened.

Like Teresa, I feel in no danger of forgetting.

But long before the morning of the 11th, I'd realized that what the organizers of such events wanted, and what the news media seemed to be striving for, was a memorial so thorough that we'd finally be able to stop hurting. And such a thing can't exist.

The year since 9/11 has been one of trememdous pressure for us all in my business. Now us workers bees are getting blames for the institutional shortcomings of our superiors in not sharing and passing along information. What gets failed to mention is that 'The Wall', as it has been referred to by FBI types, was put there for very good reasons in the beginning, but as the years went on it became more and more rigid and unyielding. The reason FBI and CIA agents didn't share with each other is simple: they kept being told by their superiors that they would go to federal prison if they did. And so a well-meant law meant to protect American citizens from government harassment helped protect murderous thugs. In the watches of the night I sometimes wonder what those higher-ups may be thinking to themselves now...

I don't do fieldwork any more. Getting too old, and my health is not exactly the best, and so I hung the flak jacket and kevlar helmet a few years ago. That sort of stuff is for the young and filled with hormones and piss-and-vinegar, and I wish them well...

As for me, I'll be doing what I can from behind a desk, getting swivel-chair spread...