9/11 The Culture of Commemoration - David Simpson

This book wrestles with a difficult and complex topic, the way our society commemorates its tragedies. It starts with a brief history, which is predictably sad and leads up to the present day project of commemorating the events on 9/11, and beyond.
The analysis of the reaction the U.S. citizens had to the attack is very interesting. I hadn't really thought about it, or noticed its narcissistic and somewhat immature behavior. I guess that is to be expected on some level. We all deal with tragedy differently, even nation-states. We don't behave our best when grieving or angry.

The writer David Simpson brings to light the questionable use of the word "hero" to describe the people who died in the towers that day. Normally the word means someone who willingly gave or risked their life to save another. There were some heroes that day, for sure the emergency workers and the people on the planes who over-powered the terrorists, but the totally unaware people in the towers did not choose to give their lives and given the choice they may have decided otherwise. The janitors, porters, window washers and cashiers whose lives were ended so abruptly didn't know, and might not have cared for, the meaning and symbolism that has been heaped on their names since they died. (p. 48)

There is an interesting discussion about Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" on pages 49 and 50. These are the lives that a government may deem disposable, the people who die for "necessary" reasons. The power to designate such a group is specific to governments and in the wake of 9/11 there seemed to be a huge move to show that those who died who more than sacrificial or disposable. the media surrounding their death has been spun more and more toward a nationalist view that they "died for a way of life and not in vain." (p. 51)

The analysis for the memorials, how they were chosen and what they are supposed to mean was a bit lengthy and dry for me. However I see his point that whatever is built there, "can hardly avoid sinking into a morass of signification of the most contrived and hortatory kind." (p. 61)
After all the various emotions that I have had about the event I admittedly found the "strident call for triumphalism, for an economic and patriotic display of national and local energy that canpass muster as embodying the spirit of America and, inevitably, of capitalist democracy itself," to be highly distasteful. (p. 61)
I would have preferred something more quiet, more reverent, something for the dead. Instead I see that we have chosen, and predictably so, something that looks like a "sore thumb (or a raised finger)" and that strikes me as more of that same kind of arrogance and egoism that incited the attack in the first place. (p. 61)

Since the attack I have watched in horror and fascination as our governments behavior went from bad, to worse, to unforgivable. The way in which this tragedy was used makes me sick, quite literally. Simpson is right to note that, "there have been no limits on the immodesty of nation-states and their interests in their determination to harvest every possible legitimation effect from the deaths of their citizens." (p. 65) I personally think it's disgusting.
At least there will be the PATH station and the underground memorial, which seems to be the only really tasteful, meaningful and reverent part of the project. I spent some time looking at it online and I like it very much. I see that it is able to represent a "passage between places, in time, and between the upper and lower worlds" and like Simpson, I am glad it is not being called Freedom Station. (p. 74)

The crux of this book for me is the discussion about how we make our enemies to be "other" and how we find it so necessary to divide us from them. The goal of the memorial, the media and the government seem unified in the intent to frame this attack as one in which "the enemy is wholly other, the foreign element that is completely outside and beyond America." (p. 78)
This oversimplification is echoed and compounded by the need to completely ignore the "diverse nationalities" of the victims who died in the attack, and instead to frame this as a "uniquely American tragedy." (p. 94)

Like some kind of brilliant poetic justice the Abu Ghraib photos surfaced and suddenly shone light upon the whole deceptive venture. The photos clearly depct us acting like them, and further "show us what we already knew: that the torture and abuse of prisoners go on, and have gone on everywhere..." (p. 107) If we waged the war against them because we thought we had some moral high ground, then these photos kill our case. There we are, inside of their prison, doing exactly what we accused them of doing. It means "that the neat distinctions between them and us, between civility and barbarism, cannot be mouthed as confidently as they once were." (p. 110)
This is the division that we make whenever we want to justify killing or destruction. It is the time honored tradition of setting up sides. The saddest part of this whole book for me is the description of the Iraqi mother standing outside the Abu Gharib prison with a photo of her son, disappeared into the prison 9 months earlier. She has a name, her son has a name, they a human beings who have suffered greatly at the hands of American soldiers and they are like us, they are like the people who stood around the Trade Center with photos of their own missing loved ones.
Even more bitterly, my tax money paid for it, and every time I fill my gas tank I know that it is with blood.

For me the most important message in this book is summarily stated on page 136, "Every imagining of the other is an encounter with the self: they are us."