|
|
Daniel Silliman
|
|
|
| 31.5.02 |
Remembering September 11
Prelude
Seraphim wrote that we don’t remember the terrorist attacks and because of that we have failed to prepare. I disagreed, though not as well as I could have. He responded to my post and substantially missed my point. My hopefully thorough, persuasive and
clear response follows in three points.
First, I attempt to clear up his understanding of what I said and meant to say. Second, I have a list of questions in response to his statement. Third, I attack the idea that we do not really remember the attacks of
September 11.
At another point I will post about the questions about how we ought to prepare. For now I concede that we are unprepared and contest only that this is a result of our failure to remember.
My Reaction to His Reaction
Seraphim reacted to my post and substantially missed the point. Okay maybe I wasn’t clear; perhaps that was the problem and I'll try to fix it here.
Let me set a few things in order:
1. Guilt by association (and as a poor association as attempting to connect me with Chomsky) and a statement about his reaction to my post (“TERRIFYING”) are not arguments and are generally pretty lame.
2. I didn’t say that September 11 wasn’t a big story (that is patently absurd and doubly so from a reporter) but that we are
attempting to make it the only story. The example of the “baby boom” story and the “camping up because of terrorism” story were to show that is being stretched until it is silly, childish and pedantic. In some cases, we’re just trying to hard.
3. What is annoying about some of the memorializing—the type I urgently wish would end—isn’t the media’s work on the dead, the fighting, the attack or any of that but the attempt to make it the cause of every petty thing in life. People will dig clams because they want to and this doesn’t mean the terrorists have won.
4. I didn’t say we had a current ethos of constant memorializing created by a media frenzy. If I did say that I didn’t mean it. What I was attempting to express my reaction of “What do you mean we don’t remember? We remember really well and are trying to remember so hard and in so many ways that sometimes it sometimes squeezes out of the
corners.”
5. To set up a national failure of character based on an idea, an impression, of how others are responding, seems a very inaccurate and sloppy way to go about determining such an monumental claim. What are we
looking for to convince us that we everything is okay and we do remember? I wonder if anything short of a mass conversion to his Eastern Orthodoxy would appease Seraphim.
Questions
Hoping this brings clarity: I have some questions to ask in response to this complaint (by Seraphim and by others like him) that we don’t remember.
1. What does it mean to remember?
2. What kind of remembrance would be good?
3. How different should everything in out daily lives be?
4. How do we know that we have failed to sufficiently remember?
5. If another terrorist attack is successful will it be the fault of poor remembrance?
We Remember
At root, I think Seraphim and disagree because I do not think we have failed to remember. We have remembered. We do remember.
Some concrete examples:
1. Attendance at Memorial Day ceremonies on the North Olympic Peninsula where I live was significantly larger than any year in the last decade.
2. Two large television specials on the events of September 11 were aired and they were watched with devotion with many talking about the depth and the meaning of the events in their lives. A third is planned for the anniversary and is being greeted the same way.
3. Todd Beamer and Danny Pearl are heroes to my little brothers. My 9-year-old brother is closely following the news of their families on the radio.
4. I cry every time I think about the events of Flight 93.
5. Rolling Stone Magazine ran an in-depth piece on Flight 93 and a letter writer called it the most moving story she had ever read.
6. Everyday in the last week a major news outlet has run a major memorializing piece on the events.
7. My 11-year-old cousin has saved the newspaper from September 12.
8. I know a long-time, self-described Socialist who has bought an American flag and prominently displayed it for the first time.
9. A friend of mine with anti-military Libertarian leanings who has been tempted toward Pacifism is now seriously considering joining the military.
10. The CIA has been flooded with applications.
11. Anti-Americanism is very unpopular and people like Chomsky have been clearly delineated as out of the mainstream along with the likes of David Duke.
12. Many, many, many people have gone to Ground Zero, including myself, to mourn.
I don’t like Seraphim’s proclamation that we do not remember because the “we” is really a generic and accusing “they” that cannot be
substantiated. This is the common wisdom that everyone is certain of and no one can prove.
I don’t like Seraphim’s statement that we don’t remember because, as far as I can determine, remembering is a really airy concept to him. I don’t have a picture of remembrance when I read his post and I do when I look around me.
I don’t like the idea that everything must be drastically different. We should not demand that every detail be endued with new depth and meaning because of the events nor that such details and daily affairs should be discarded. Similar to any death or tragedy, life goes on and that is a good thing. This is part of my problem with the news coverage I originally mentioned. We can and ought to go camping, dig clams, conceive children, pray, play, educate ourselves, plan our futures, do all the frivolous things the way we do for the good, solid, Christian reasons we have always done them.
We remember.
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
The Strange World of the Newsroom
Watching television footage of a rescue helicopter crashing somewhere over Mt. Hood while trying to rescue some hikers, the Managing Editor consoles the staff:
“Well,” he said, “we get our share of lost hikers every year in the Olympic National Park.”
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
| 30.5.02 |
Baptizing the Infants
Read this nice piece on the Christian tradition of infant baptism.
To avoid infant baptism forces a lot of pushing and pulling to make things fit and a lot of ignoring things inconvinient to the doctrine.
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
Bush for Abstinence
The Nation has a hack piece trying to link Bush and conservative Christians to Muslims, terrorists and two-bit despots in this oddly encouraging article.
Being pro-life in the deepest way and as a Protestant in agreement with the Pope’s statements on contraception, I was heartened to read this indignant article about how the administration is backing these Christian views as policy.
Sometimes you have to read those diametrically opposed to your position to realize how well off your position really is.
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
Checking out The Nation online, I think it is a lot more readable on the web than in the magazine.
But then, this isn't saying much.
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
What does it mean to remember?
Seraphim worries that we are not prepared for future terrorist attacks and that we will not make the sacrifices to prepare because we (or maybe they) don’t really remember the horror of September 11.
I’ve heard this a few places and confess myself a little puzzled by all this. In a way—a tiresome and annoying way—we remember too well and insist we must remember in a constant and vivid way.
Everything must be dominated by the memory. Everything must be different. This is the media frenzy that produces hackneyed stories about a baby boom and a recommitment to love and life. This is the constant memorializing.
An example of this believed necessity. Yesterday I was working on a story about the beginning of the camping season (which, mercifully, died in the newsroom) and had the spokeswoman for the Olympic National Park tell me that camping was up because of the terrorist attacks of September 11. People, she said, are looking to reconnect with the peacefulness of nature and the things that make America great, like the Grand Canyon and the Olympic Mountains.
I tended to agree with the manager of the local state park who said: “No, I think people are camping for the normal reasons. A lot of people just came here to dig clams.”
A few questions. What would it mean to “really remember”? Is this a profitable thing and is this a practical thing?
I propose that the reason we are not prepared for the coming terrorism is that we do not know how to prepare and live the way we are know.
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
| 29.5.02 |
My Faux New Journalism
This weekend I worked as a reporter—a reporter at the bottom without a beat and with every bum story that had to be covered but wasn’t much as news. Sometimes these are called the “sows ear—silk purse” stories, after the country saw. That’s a pretty accurate description.
I covered a birthday party of a 92-year-old Native American from the Klallam tribe. I covered an annual arts festival. I covered Memorial Day services that were short, simple and annual.
It’s pretty hard to know how to cover stories like these. All reporters have trouble with them. If it has the word “annual” attached to it then you can be sure it is the worst assignment you can get. You have to write something and there isn’t really anything. You can’t write the inverted pyramid/hard news story because there isn’t enough substance—these stories are as mushy as they come.
Such a story is terrible because few people will care enough or be interested enough to read your story and it requires a lot as a reporter and a writer to turn out anything that doesn’t scream “BORING!!!”
So, I pulled from my resources and tried something: faux New Journalism. I figure it is halfway between a normal feature and a Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson wild ride of a story. It might just be toned down New Journalism or an outrageous feature, but basically you step out and accept the stories color and you write a bit more like the novelist and less like a reporter.
An example of what I’m talking about can be seen in the lead for my arts festival story:
PORT ANGELES -- Four children whirl green and orange hula hoops around their waists.
Two men sit on lawn chairs in the street and catch up on what's happened since last year.
Seven belly dancers shake the metal jewelry hanging from their wrists, necks, shoulders and waists as they are cheered on by a crowd of about 130 people.
It seems to have worked. The stories weren’t boring and that was a significant accomplishment and I received a number of compliments on my stories in a newsroom that sees a lot of stories every day. This isn’t generally a complimenting place so I take my five compliments—covering all the stories—as tokens of a bad job really well done
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
| 27.5.02 |
Nowhere to Go:
Hemingway's Modernism
Listening to Hemingway’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech on audio cassette today, I was again impressed by how much he is the quintessential Modernist man.
To Hemingway loneliness is vital to his writing and I wonder how much of that can be rightly interpreted to read that to write well one must be alienated, separated from the natural community, lost.
In A Clean Well Lighted Place—and excellent short story and an excellent work on the plight of Modernism—he writes of the loss of meaning by writing about two waiters in a Spanish café and an old man staying to long.
The café is clean. It is a nice place to sit, doing nothing but thinking and smoking and drinking. It is better that the raucous bars. It is warmer than the street. Like our faith and our myths and our poetry—it is comfortable. But the old man has overstayed. He must leave; he must find another place even though the waiters know there is no other place and man is being turned out into the darkness and cold.
The one waiter is young and busy and restless and impatient. The other is older and slower and more observant yet still aware of the busy and impatient realities that will force the old man into the dark and cold. He can delay them and he can with they were not there, but he cannot stop them.
In the moving close to the three page story he takes two prayers—Our Father and Hail Mary—and strips them of meaning. “Hail nothing full of nothing,” he writes, leaving the form without content, showing us the plight of the man without faith. He, the quintessential Modernist man, forces us to face the emptiness of mythlessness. He makes us feel that we have to find a replacement—we must hail something. We are the old man being pushed along and we know that like him leaving that clean well lighted café, there is nowhere for Modernist man to go.
by Daniel Silliman @
: Comments 0
|
|
Get blog templates like this one from BlogSkins.com |
