by Mark Slouka
When I wondered aloud to another acquaintance how it was possible for a man’s faith to sail over Auschwitz, say, only to founder on the World Trade Center, I found myself quickly taken to task for both my myopia and my callousness—the product, he implied, of my excessively European sensibility. He himself had been in a state of crisis for two months. He slept badly, struggled with depression. His children were afraid to get in the subway or walk past a tall building, and there was nothing he could tell them. He was considering leaving New York and moving to Mexico. “How can you not see that everything is different now?” he concluded. “And anyway, who are you to decide when it’s right for someone to have a crisis of faith?”
The answer to the second question was easy enough: no one, though I did reserve the right to wonder at the minister’s timing, or where his faith might have been hiding when half a million human beings were being massacred in Rwanda, not a few of them in churches. But the first had me stumped. Simply put, I did not believe that everything was different now, particularly not in the ontological sense in which my friend intended it. Nor did I understand his apparent eagerness to proclaim it so.
Everywhere I turned that eerily cloudless, almost crystalline September, I encountered a similar dissonance. A few days after the attack, for example, Auden’s “September 1, 1939” had blossomed in the vast, virtual fields of the Web:
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
Even on the most superficial level, Auden’s poem struck me as uniquely unsuited to the times. Rather than clinging to our average day, we seemed to be fairly trampling one another in our haste to assert that nothing would ever be average again, that the lights had indeed gone out and our homes become a haunted wood. Art? Music? Please. Colleagues in the School of the Arts at Columbia, where I teach (few writers, interestingly enough), seemed prepared to duel for the opportunity to testify to the Frivolity of Art in Times Like These. “It all feels so absurd,” one said to me, referring to his own work. “What’s the point?”
To which I couldn’t answer, any more than I could have answered if he had been arguing the redundancy of beauty, or breathing. What could I say? That in June 1945, workers reclaiming the Reich’s prisons in Moravia had found poems, folded into thick squares, stuffed up into the electrical wiring? Or that it seemed curious to me that a person locked in a cell, awaiting interrogation or death, would choose to write a poem on a piece of toilet paper, while another, arguably as safe as any human being has ever been in this world, would come to see art as a kind of decorative garnish, a sprig of parsley on the cultural plate? Should I have pointed out, perhaps, that art had always been an act of affirmation and resistance that, by its very complexity, worked against the shameful reductivism of fear, or that to believe otherwise was a luxury only the truly swaddled could afford? No, this seemed too obvious. Something else was at work here. I didn’t understand it.
I understood it no more than I understood the poster that had appeared in a store on my corner the week of the attack bearing the slogan “Never, never, never, never give up!” “Give up what?” I wanted to ask the sober crowds on Broadway. “To whom?” A horrible thing had occurred, certainly. And those directly affected by the tragedy, like all victims of unspeakable things (like the mother of the teenager killed in a traffic accident the afternoon of the eleventh), deserved all of our compassion. But this was not London during the Blitz. Or Stalingrad in the winter of 1943. Or Sarajevo in 1994. Thousands of innocent people had died, true. But innocents had been dying for a while now—millions of them, mostly children, as quietly as melting snow each and every year. Surely we didn’t think that just because…
Ah, but we did. How else to explain it? In our national heart of hearts, just below the global crust (with its multi- and poly- and inter- prefixes), the conviction that we were different, apart, a City upon a hill, remained untouched. Why was this “the biggest news event in the history of the world” (my own, stunned italics), as the administration of New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School told its students? Simple. Because it had happened here. To us. And, lest we forget, we Americans had been commissioned by God himself to bear the light of liberty and religion throughout all the earth. Rwanda? Bosnia? Couldn’t help but feel sorry for those folks, but let’s face it: Rwanda did not have a covenant with God. And Jesus was not a Sarajevan.
Hardly anyone outside the tattered fringe of the religious far right would have articulated it so bluntly, of course. And yet the fact remained: although the specifically Christian foundation of American exceptionalism had been largely buried by the years, the self-conception built upon it—however secularized and given over to mammon—remained intact. Our tragedy had exposed it, laid it bare, and torn it badly. Now I understood how we had managed to endure the slow disintegration of Bosnia with such fortitude: we had simply filed it, along with the events in Rwanda and Chechnya and Sierra Leone, under the rubric “Bad Things That Happen to People Who Are Not Americans.” We seemed, on the whole, capable of bearing untold amounts of other people’s pain and very little of our own. My brother-in-law’s jokes about the famine in Ethiopia had been making the rounds before the dying there was even properly under way; by the summer of 2002, he had not told me a single World Trade Center joke. Humor, I realized, clearly had its limits—or borders, more precisely. The tribe still came first.
So much for globalism. What bothered me, however, was not so much the bald fact of our tribalism (which I found natural and excusable) as the hypocrisy with which we had denied it. What troubled me, specifically, was the kind of Benetton tokenism that allowed us to parade our global sympathies because we had eaten in a Sudanese restaurant last week, or featured a woman from Senegal in one of our ads. If we were going to weep for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center and not for the dead of Srebrenica, it seemed to me, then we should have the courage to admit where the frontiers of our allegiance lay.
How close did tragedy have to come for us to bleed? Did we have to smell the smoke to have our imagination and our compassion activated? Did the victims have to be American? Or speak English? Was that enough? Or did they, perhaps, have to look like us as well? Was it possible, in other words, that our reaction to the tragedy was not wholly about those who had died—whom 99.9 percent of us had never known anyway—but about us? That what moved us, what woke us up to the fact that people had died—unexpectedly and tragically—was the uncomfortable thought that we might? It was a bit of a shock. Here in America, under the protective eye of Jesus, we could die. Now that was worth a crisis of faith.
Let me be as clear as possible here; I have no wish to be misunderstood. I believe that in this hyperbole-driven age, when the word heroism has been devalued to the point that men are deemed worthy of it simply for not abandoning their families, or for effectively smacking a leather ball with a stick, September 11 showed us not one but multiple examples of the real thing, unadulterated and potent and pure. In the last few moments, as the terrified crowds were streaming down the stairwells of the World Trade Center, men were running up, determined, in their minutes of allotted time, to save as many as possible. Ordinary human beings risked their lives (and, more than this, the unspeakable pain of those who loved them) to help others. This cannot be reduced, or contextualized. It can only be acknowledged, humbly, and perhaps with some bit of pride that this too our species is capable of.
This I believe. I believe as well, however, that a legitimate distinction can be made between those who, in one way or another, were directly touched by the tragedy and those who, like myself, were not. Who were never in a
ny real danger. Who never missed a meal. The former are exempt from criticism. The latter are not. The former deserve either our reverence or our compassion. The rest of us merit neither, automatically. Courage, in general, is directly proportional to actual risk. Those who rushed in just after the buildings folded like great slabs of cake into the Manhattan pavement were the ones we heard from least. Those a hundred blocks north, meanwhile, cushioned even from the smell of the smoke by the grace of prevailing winds, scurried about, eager to bear witness to the suffering.
Their own, mostly. It didn’t take long, alas, to note the disconcerting prevalence of the first person in these litanies: “I’ve been horribly traumatized. I’m terribly upset.” A woman interviewed by the New York Times explained how she trembled every time she walked into a tall building, which could make for a lot of trembling in Manhattan. Others seemed to have found themselves, overnight, in a Samuel Beckett play: “A city block. A tree. Nothing to be done.” They were thinking of moving out of the city, or maybe the country. And the three thousand souls still buried in the rubble just five miles south? Or the rescue workers, staggering with fatigue, trying to dig them out? Oh. Right. Them.
The solipsism in all this, the eagerness with which some individuals appropriated the tragedy for themselves, fascinated me. I’d seen its like before, though writ small. Among the pack I’d run with as a boy—a motley mix of runny-nosed urchins from Irish and Italian and Anglo-American families—there had been a big, soft kid I’ll call Tommy Kelly. Outwardly no different from the rest of us, Tommy had a quirk we never tired of exploiting. When the pack turned inward—as it invariably would, less out of malice than sheer boredom—and began to pelt him with snowballs, he would not react as the rest of us did. He would not hunker down behind someone’s mailbox and take his hits, knowing that soon enough it would be someone else’s turn to draw the short straw. No, he would, in his own, entirely predictable way, fall apart. First he would select the smallest, scrawniest tagalong in the group and accuse him of starting it. Working himself into a froth, he would thrash this one unfortunate for a time, hoping thereby to draw the fire away from himself. When this didn’t work (we knew what we were about, after all), he would eventually begin to pummel himself. Eagerly. Outdoing what was required. Picking up blocks of snow and ice, he would gleefully crack them over his own head; scooping handfuls of gritty slush, he would mash them in his own face. Sometimes he even managed to hurt himself, and ran home crying.
It took the Tommy Kellys of September 11 exactly three days to find a scapegoat. A well-educated, appropriately liberal friend called with some “disturbing news.” “They” were leaving, he said, abandoning the country in droves. JFK was packed. But that was not the real news. He had it “on good authority,” from a friend connected to the New Jersey Department of Education, that “they” had kept their children out of school on the morning of September 11. Hard to believe? Sure. But records don’t lie. And a nearly 100 percent absence rate allowed for only one conclusion: They had known. All of them.
I’m ashamed to say that, taken by surprise, and momentarily hamstrung by our friendship (this was a decent man I was talking to), I said little at the time beyond a few general expressions of disbelief, and thereby contributed, in some small way, to the proliferation of that idiocy. As is so often the case, I thought of a great many things to say after I’d hung up the phone. How, I might have asked (overlooking the patent absurdity of the entire accusation for a moment), were Muslim children identified on the school rosters in New Jersey? And were the political sympathies of their parents evident from their surnames? And why, if they were all in on the plot, and knew, therefore, that the planes would hit lower Manhattan, did they keep their children out of schools in New Jersey, for God’s sake? And what of the wives and husbands and children of the Muslims who had died in the attack? And wasn’t it a miracle on the order of the loaves and the fishes that this plot, so tightly controlled that it had slipped past the porous but still formidable radar of the information-gathering services of the United States government, had been common knowledge among twenty or thirty or fifty thousand Muslims, none of whom had let slip a word until the deed was done and they were getting into the cab, bound for JFK?
To our considerable credit, this brand of clumsy scapegoating (which might easily have gained in strength and virulence in a less heterogeneous society) quickly died. Which should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. Lacking a convenient coven of witches to burn, disoriented by the fluttering of American flags, we simply jumped two steps up the conjugation and transferred the locus of our suffering from “them” to “us.” We began to pummel ourselves. Life as we had known it was now effectively over, we declared. Nothing would ever be the same again. The ship of state was taking water. Best, therefore, to throw a few civil liberties overboard. Captain Ashcroft said so.
This eagerness to punish ourselves, to drag ourselves about in an ecstasy of suffering, would have been more explicable, more typically American, had it been coupled with some redeeming notion of our own sin. Throughout much of our history, after all, when hard times had hit, we had turned inward, assuming that the fault was ours and that we were being punished. Castigating ourselves for our shortcomings, we would flog ourselves into righteousness, thereby renewing our covenant with God and, by extension, the promise of America.
But this was something different. We felt as pure as the lamb. We had been struck for no reason. How could God do this to us? The result was a cultural mutation—a half jeremiad. Self-flagellation without self-scrutiny. Suffering without the need or capacity for atonement. We still flogged ourselves (we had that part down) but without quite knowing why.2
Which is not to suggest that the old rituals had lost their power, only their ability to make us uncomfortable by suggesting that we were somehow complicit in our fate. Although shorn of its reflexive element (any mention of our own role in this was, quite simply, verboten), the jeremiad’s power as a form of jingoistic exhortation and national renewal remained undiminished. Just as earlier crises—from colonial famine to the Civil War—had been quickly folded into the rhetoric of America’s mission, so in 2001. The enfolding, of course, was slightly different now. Less than forty-eight hours after the attack, commemorative T-shirts and postcards were already for sale on Spring Street. From WTC chocolate bars to personal alarm systems (“Because, in trying times like these, one can’t be too careful”) to Estée Lauder’s “America the Beautiful” compacts (with Austrian crystals for stars), the marketplace did its work: blurring the edges, dulling the pain, melding everything into the familiar lingo of dollars and cents. We felt better. History was once again back on the reservation. America was open for business. Evil would be punished, as our commander in chief assured us, though we would have to sign a very large check, and do exactly as he said, to make it so. The paradise of shoppers had replaced the other one as the telos of the American experiment, but the ability of the myth to regenerate itself, to seamlessly cover over any event, remained eerily intact.
Back to Egypt
A slightly narrower aperture. In August of 2001, my family and I, like tens of thousands of fellow Americans, traveled to Europe. The fresh green breast of the New World (a bit of a stretch for Jamaica Bay, but let it go) fell away below us, and eight hours and two movies later the clouds opened out on the half-harrowed fields and slate-roofed villages surrounding Prague. I had spent a good part of the journey staring at the global-positioning screens overhead, watching them calculate and recalculate precisely how far we had traveled and how much farther we still had to go. Would that it were that easy.
I spent the month that followed tripping over history, dogged by death. A personal thing, I suppose. My mother and, later, my father had chosen to return home after their forty-year sojourn in the New World. Czech had been my first language, Queens a suburb of Brno. In my head, I carried a wonderfully muddled version of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—Czech rather than Greek, American rather than Roman, but par
allel all the same: on the one hand, Tomáš Masaryk, fleeing into exile; on the other, George Washington, already somehow triumphant, crossing the Delaware. On this side, Edvard Beneš, betrayed at Munich; on the other, Franklin, reeling in the thunderbolt on a key. All seemed to reinforce a series of binary oppositions, neat as the base pairs on a double helix: tradition versus self-determination; the humility born of experience versus the flushed triumphalism of power; the profound, almost filial attachment to place (the x coordinate to history’s y) versus the freedom of the open road. Tragedy versus optimism. Death versus life.
I spent a good part of our vacation fighting against that inevitable sense of constriction, that horrible thickening of the atmosphere, that is the Old World’s answer to the thin, boundless air of the West. Here they were again: the ubiquitous monuments, the unnumbered dead. Here were the generations from Adam down, staggering under the piled weight of the centuries. As I was—bearing history like an anvil. It hardly helped that my struggle itself was absurd, based on a cliché of continental identity more appropriate to Henry James’s world than my own. I was indulging in a kind of double generalization, I told myself, ignoring not only the determined vapidity, the at times unbearable lightness of the new Europe, but also the historical shadows we Americans had grown since Nathaniel Hawthorne had argued we had none. Still, for all that, a generalization to be reckoned with, difficult to deny.
What was I supposed to do with this knowledge, these layers of grief, like strata in stone, this constant folding-in of death? In every village a graveyard, dense with color; in every graveyard, tending their dead as if they were kohlrabi or turnips, the generations of the living: snipping, pruning, tossing the dead blooms into the tilting wooden wagon by the gate. It was to escape this infernal fussing, this easy familiarity with death—the three-year-old running down the path to bring her mother a trowel—that I’d gone west, to California, where no one seemed to die at all. Where once, while hunting bugs with my daughter in an overgrown field just outside the high desert town of Lone Pine, I had stumbled over a fallen gravestone and realized I was standing in the middle of a vast cemetery that no one, but no one, knew was there. That had been erased from the memory of men as surely as the wind had erased the lettering on its tablets. “You must understand,” my mother had told me throughout my childhood, praising the communal business of caring for the dead (hoping, I suppose, to inoculate me against my culture’s lack of respect for doneness, for gravity, or rather its inevitable issue, the grave), “the less you know of death, the more it frightens you.”