Remembering
: John Ellis sends us to Leon Wieseltier’s essay in The New Republic on remembering September 11 (you have to register to read). I agree with him in spots (and don’t agree with his dissection of William Langewiesche’s pieces on the aftermath at the World Trade Center). In any case, the piece is filled with good and smart and smartly written observations and I’ll quite unfairly reduce it to its best soundbites:
A society that is notorious for its inability to remember is about to do nothing else. America eats the past…
…The yahrzeit is here, and the least lachrymose country on earth is devising its rituals of commemoration. The interesting question is whether the memory will have life outside the media….
…Most of us will be remembering an event that we never saw, which is precisely the character of collective memory: knowledge made so immediate that it feels like experience…
…It was a measure of the horror that the media were too weak to interfere with our consciousness of it. In American existence, this counts as an epiphany. For the managers of meaning, the anchors and the reporters and the commentators, were themselves too shocked to set to work…
…The American heart is the bouncer at the door of the American mind….
…The media is greedy for tears. I expect also that what will be commemorated on television will be the coverage of the catastrophe as much as the catastrophe itself. Many reporters have an unattractive tendency to believe that an event that they have covered is an event that has happened to them…
…They are tourists in history…
…There is nothing that anybody can say or show on television that will be as crushing as what one may oneself imagine about what it must have been like to perish at the World Trade Center a year ago. Imagination is television’s mortal enemy; and mourning is, to a large extent, an activity of the imagination…
…What we will be commemorating on September 11, after all, is the beginning of a war…
…A shallow mourning is a hideous thing. Or so I reflected the other day, when I came upon the perfect mourner’s accessory, a Judith Leiber bag that portrays, in black crystals on white crystals, the World Trade Center. For under $4,000 evidence may be given of a broken Manhattan heart. Otherwise the terrorists will have won.
More memories
: Rossi has survivor’s guilt:
The thing is
