Anniversaries

The positive part of it is the persistence of memory.

It’s admirable how Americans refuse to let the more than 3,000 who perished in the attacks at the Twin Towers 10 years ago this Sunday go the route of the forgotten dead. Their lives have been chronicled in tributes, in documentaries that have appeared on TV, in movies that have extolled their heroism, notably those who fought off the hijackers of United Airlines 93. But the recollection has not dimmed and has blazed forth again over the last few weeks.

Ten years after the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, the event remains fresh in the American mind. Certainly, it remains fresh in the American media which have resurrected it with a passion in time for its tenth anniversary. “How we’ve changed: Stories of a nation transformed,” says an article in Yahoo, which gathers the voices of individual Americans, from native to immigrant, from the man in the business suit to the man in the street. They tell the stories of how their lives were deeply affected by 9/11. The event takes on the aspect of a demarcation line between the before and the after, not unlike the gap that separates B.C. and A.D.

It’s admirable particularly from our perspective. We are a people who cannot sustain memory, whether of days of infamy such as the declaration of martial law or the massacre in Maguindanao or days of euphoria such as the two Edsas. Or those events no longer carry the tears of anguish or the shouts of joy that attach to living memory. Caused in no small way by a colonial legacy that has always bidden us to forget our past lest we remember our welts and become rebellious. And aided in no small way by our authority figures, not least our bishops, keepers of the faith, guardians of morality, who have urged us to leave everything behind and move on.

So we look on at the renewed American burst of angst and we are awed.

The negative part of it is its disconnect.

Ten years after 9/11, much of the world’s commiseration with America has been razed down as thoroughly as the terrorist planes razed down the Twin Towers. Courtesy of an American government that chose to respond to it in ways that blotted out the tragedy of it, that obliterated the ignominy of it. Instead of running after Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida, George W. Bush and company went after Saddam Hussein and invaded Iraq. By the most savage of ways, raining death and destruction on the population to shock and awe them to submission, and by the most devious of means, lying to the American public about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the deed.

Truly the invasion shocked and awed – not just Iraq, but the world.

If America has changed 10 years after 9/11, if America has been transformed 10 years after 9/11, it has only been in that it has become far more disconnected with the world. At the very least, the disconnect lies in not knowing, or sensing, how the world feels about it. Or so with the citizens, not with its leaders: Its leaders know perfectly well in what esteem they are held by the world. Not that they particularly care.

It can’t help that all sorts of batty right-wing groups like the Tea Party and Fox are on the rise, rumbling with undertones of racist rhetoric. Europe for one may not look at that without a quiver of fear. The last time they saw someone exploiting the economic woes of his country, its apparent victimization by other countries, and the need to purge the world of inferior races, raving like a madman and cheered on by his audience, the world fell into a long and bitter war.

Far more than that, the disconnect lies in a spectacular ability to feel one’s pain and wallow in it but an equally spectacular capacity not to see the pain of others and be moved by it. Except for countries like the Philippines, most of the world will not see the gut-wrenching and chest-beating and flag-waving that have accompanied the American march toward the 10th year of 9/11 as self-affirmation. It will see it as self-absorption.

The self-absorption was already there in the wake of the Vietnam War, when America produced no end of books and movies and documentaries about it. Doubtless many of them were critical of the war, conscience-wringing, soul-searching, investigations into what it took to produce that tragedy. But it was an American tragedy, not a Vietnamese one. The books and movies and documentaries saw the anguish of the American parents who saw their children brought home in body bags, and the dark nights of the soul the American leaders went through to soliloquizing “to war or not to war.” They never saw the millions of dead Vietnamese, or knew their names.

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 resurrects the dead in more ways than one. It resurrects that self-absorption along with everything else. No small amount of books and movies and documentaries has been produced about it, the dead having come to haunt the living, the dead having come to walk among the living. We know their names, we know their faces, we know their lives – which is all well and good.

But not if it comes with a dead silence about the kids in a children’s hospital in Baghdad the smart bombs sent to their Maker, the victims shocked and awed that the Great Protector did not come to protect them. Not if it comes with a deathly indifference about the men and women who too were sent to their Maker while they cringed in their abodes, too shocked and awed that their liberators should liberate them in this way. Not if it comes with a deep scorn for captured enemies who were made to run for their lives in the desert while US soldiers made bets on who could bring them down first.

What were their names? What were their faces?

Who will mourn their deaths?