 Reflecting on Terror |
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By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
THE BATTLE CRY is: America
at War! Lately it almost seems that America has just been itching
to go to war. We’ve been gearing up the last year or so
by watching training films like “Pearl Harbor” and
HBO’s “Band of Brothers,” and by poring over piles
of World War II books led by Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest
Generation” (nicely promoted into bestsellerdom on “The
NBC Nightly News and Book Talk”).
-- Add to that the countless documentaries reliving the last
really good war that we won, not to mention continual TV documentaries
on Hitler and Japanese internment camps; for all I know, there
may even be a Third Reich cable channel.
So, finally we get to go to war again, or to carry on as if we
were at war--or maybe just extras in a war movie, acting like
plucky Londoners during the Blitz. It’s all partly been
fanned by the media going on a military footing. The media has
got itself another great war story--the Gulf War was just a preview
of coming attractions--and won’t let go “until it’s
over Over There,” wherever “there” might be. As
some general noted, a twinkle in his eye, “This could be
the hundred years' war.”
-- The current flag mania has turned into a kind of fashion war,
to see who can fly the flag the most flamboyantly, as if to proclaim
that you’re more patriotic, more caring, than the house
next door. How else to explain a woman I saw last week wearing
a blouse made from a flag, or all the ways that people have chosen
to display a flag--not just in their lapel, their window, and
theirs cars, but probably by now tattooed on their chests. Someone
painted his lawn to look like a flag. A recent San Francisco
49er game featured a flag that covered the entire field. And
in a slick coup de jock, Sammy Sosa carried a little flag
around the bases during a home-run trot. Homeless guys are waving
flags on street corners--will salute for money? Cristo is no
doubt designing a flag to wrap around New York City.
-- And what of the trendy ribbons sported by celebrities, now
adopted by ordinary citizens to express--well, what exactly?
That they’re against terrorism? In favor of America?--two
fine causes that I think we can all pretty much get behind. Have
the faddish red AIDS ribbon and the pink Breast Cancer Awareness
ribbon been retired or superseded? Will people now be forced
to make the difficult choice of which ribbon to wear? Folks will
soon be sporting a different ribbon every day of the week, and
in time be loaded down with a rainbow of ribbons, like an old
decorated Russian commissar.
-- Now let’s go to the audio portion of patriotism--the
songs and anthems, with singers looking for a chance to turn
a perfectly nice national anthem into “The Star-Strangled
Banner.” It’s been wrenched into a gospel song in which
the singer stretches out each note as long as possible, calling
attention not to the song’s genuine sentiment but to the
singer’s innovative ways of re-styling it, upstaging the
anthem and grabbing more face time for the singer.
Hollywood agents, meanwhile, are working the phones to snag the
best available “God Bless America” gig for clients,
even those who can’t sing. At one event, Kevin Spacey was
heard gurgling through “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.”
-- We’ve also got all these platitudes to cope with--Life
in American Has Changed Forever, We Have Lost Our Innocence,
Ordinary Things Now Have New Meaning, Americans Always Come Together
in Times of Crises, We Must Continue to Live Our Lives or They
Will Have Won, Nothing Is Ever Going to Be the Same. Perhaps
after the mourners have been helped, the government could provide
cliché counselors.
One enduring cliché of Operation Enduring Coverage is:
“TV is such solace in troubled times, indispensable during
a national crisis.” Yes and no. Yes for a few days and then
No thereafter. Already, TV news has begun to milk this tragedy,
as it does all tragedy, by squeezing every last teardrop of cheap
sentiment and corny irony out of the victims and their families--searching
for any poor soul willing to break down in front of a camera
and pour out his torment. Organized displays of emotion slide
neatly into place in well-drilled unison--candlelight vigils,
peace rallies, petitions, prayer-ins. In my neighborhood, when
someone on a bicycle was killed in a car collision, the corner
was strewn for weeks with flowers and scribbled messages for
the departed cycler, mimicking the hordes who had bought bouquets
in memory of Princess Diana and John Kennedy, Jr.
-- The public, long weaned on TV coverage of plane crashes, earthquakes,
hurricanes, and the death of celebrities, seems almost too adept
at displaying their personal sorrows for the viewers at home.
The tabloid TV shows have provided daily staging areas, improvs
for the real deal. TV newscasts and magazine shows are full of
Uriah Heeps wringing their hands for the troubled and grief-stricken:
Kindly tell us your story, ma’am, and try to ignore the
camera as it slowly zooms in on your quivering lip and moist
eyes. Sob all you like, just let it out--but first, these words….
Anchormen and reporters are no doubt genuinely moved, but the
presentation feels so pre-fabricated--so staged--that it’s
been hard, even in these horrid days, not to be maybe just a
tad cynical about the theatricalization of tragedy. When TV isn’t
parading this or that fresh disaster, it is busily marking the
anniversary of a former disaster with grisly file footage (“It
was only 17 years ago this week when little Ginny Sue Dunleavy
fell down a mine shaft, never to be seen again… Tonight
we bring you an exclusive interview with Ginny Sue’s parents
and playmates, who recall that terrible day. Details after sports.”).
-- Each story or interview in the days following the terrorist
attack, was accompanied (mainly on CNN, but also elsewhere) by
gruesome replays of the airplane slamming into the World Trade
Center, like watching the Challenger spaceship being blown up
a thousand times in the weeks following that disaster. Replaying
the World Trade Center crash was, presumably, the only way news
producers felt they could capture viewers’ attention when
confronted with mere talking heads. Stations would rerun the
ghastly flight several times in succession--just to be on the
safe side. TV news directors consider this re-informing the public.
-- As to the touchy racial profiling problem, it sounds glib
to be debating academic fine points about personal liberty and
“privacy issues” in the literal wake of 7,000 deaths.
Racial profiling is a very bad thing, agreed, but then these
are very bad--very extraordinary--times. It sounds like whining
when people who resemble the terrorists are detained and dare
to complain, “But I’m an American!” Precisely.
Lucky you. Most Americans claim they’re willing to give
up two percent of their freedom to help stop terrorism, so Americans
(or even aliens--temporary Americans) of Middle Eastern descent
might tolerate being profiled as their good-citizen sacrifice.
It isn’t an Arab-American’s fault if all the terrorists
resemble him, but if a hundred people who looked like me (ugly
thought) had killed 7,000 of my fellow citizens, and if I were
stopped for questioning at the airport, I wouldn’t enjoy
it but I wouldn’t get huffy about it. If you’re Arab-American,
you’re as good a target as any blond, blue-eyed Protestant
from Duluth.
-- Earlier, it was bad form to suggest that the World Trade Center
was a monstrously scary building even before the attacks. I was
there once, for the obligatory drink at Windows on the World,
and couldn’t wait to get back to the lobby. The whooshing
ride to the top was a harrowing experience, and the view much
overrated--like all skyscraper views. The towers were twin monuments
to swaggering macho architectural excess, built mainly to titillate
tourists and to satisfy the red-blooded all-American craving
for bigness at all costs. Even people who worked there were uneasy
about the place. The best memorial would be not to rebuild it
at all, to plant grass and trees on the ground, with a small
tasteful testament to the victims, and make a vow to build no
more such grotesquely inhuman towers in New York City, or anywhere.
-- It’s hard not to be impressed by the incisive Wednesday
morning brilliance of terrorist experts, if that’s not now
an oxymoron. Where were they all Tuesday morning? With a multi-billion
dollar budget, and with tens of thousands of agents fanned out
across the globe, it boggles this inquiring mind to wonder how
it was possible for one guy with a cane to remain standing after
a decade or more of worldwide “surveillance.” You can
never find a cop when you need one. Where is Columbo, Perry Mason,
or even Inspector Clouzot? Maybe it’s not so hard to figure
how all this occurred when you consider how easy it was for that
clever bunch of computers and files to give the FBI the slip.
-- So it’s good that Larry King is on the case once more.
Larry couldn’t quite crack the Jon-Benet Ramsey and Chandra
Levy capers, but give him a year of nightly probing on his CNN
show and he should have Osama bin Laden in hand in no time.
© 2001 by Gerald Nachman.
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