I’m hardly able to write about that day as its memory is still raw. Also now with hindsight there is the realization it hastened what had already been underway: economic and political forces tearing away our society from within. Today we are left with things spiraling out of control and now we are even unable to come together to fight a virus that has claimed the lives of three hundred times the number of people who died on 9/11, almost as many American lives who died in all wars since the American Revolution. We have a vaccine and the ability to impose mask mandates, yet corrosive politics and culture wars have weakened American resolve and unity, an attribute that was in full bloom during WW II and briefly, oh so briefly, after that fateful day of 9/11.
As I am so disheartened by the reality of what is and what might have been, not to mention, where we are going as a nation, I prefer to borrow and edit some of my prior writings about this day and its consequences, including a small portion of my book Waiting for Someone to Explain It: The Rise of Contempt and Decline of Sense.
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| World Trade Center Bicentennial 1976 |
Although it seems like yesterday, we all (of a certain age) remember where we were at that moment. The only comparable instant in my life is remembering where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated.
On Sept. 11, 2001 Ann and I were on our boat in Norwalk, Ct., a clear somewhat breezy day with a deep blue sky. We had the TV on and, in complete disbelief, the tragedy unfolded before our eyes.
Although we were fifty miles away, we could see the smoke drifting south from the Twin Towers. To this day I still feel that sense of incredulity. Did this really happen here? My son, Jonathan, had been interviewed only a couple of weeks before by Cantor Fitzgerald, and offered a job to work on the 102nd floor of One WTC. They lost 685 employees on that fateful day. Jonathan decided to take another job. Is it merely coincidence and accident that governs life’s outcomes? Or is it simply Shakespeare’s more cynical line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.”
My older son is the poet of our family and this is what he wrote on that very day. One line in particular resonates: “If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life, it could not compete with what witnessed, I.” May we never forget:
“9/11/2001
By Chris Hagelstein
Terrorist troops and bodies strewn
in Twin Tower screams, destruction loomed.
News stations on a journalistic mission
under our Flag's lost transmission:
America's Death.
Judgement of Religious Decree
driving Boeing bombs with air fuel
circulating vultures from above the sea,
smashing their prey
on this plain sun-filled day.
Television digital debris rained on video,
Looping the same sequence of carnage.
The surgery of media controlled the flow
but the State of Blood remained unknown.
Prayers beneath each citizen’s eyes
were blessed wells now, for those who died.
No ceremony or speech could render a conclusion:
Those wired images played seemed like an illusion.
An Eye of some god was seeing us All
for each one's Blindness, was another’s Call,
and in the skies above Manhattan, masked in smoke
exhumed old gods of hatred and hope.
If Hell opened up, and swallowed my life,
It could not compete with what witnessed, I:
Buildings falling and heroes crushed:
As day burned to night
and life --- to dust.
Still, yet, in my hearts dismay,
Born here, I stand, no less bleeding
than those who survived this day:
For America is my body and my sea
executed on the stage of history.”
His poem is a first-hand emotional account of the horror and the hope. This is how we all felt and I remember our country briefly coming together. Unfortunately, Trump “remembers” it divisively, saying,” Hey, I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering….It was on television. I saw it.”
I give President Bush credit for going to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. less than a week after the tragedy to deliver a speech "Islam is Peace" to the American people and to reassure Muslim Americans. It is the easy path to foment racial hatred after such an event as Trump did and still does, but Bush had a different message: “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.“
By the time President Obama was elected the economy was already deteriorating and political divisiveness, such as the rise of the Tea Party, was beginning to build to a crescendo and that’s about the time I innocently started my writing, more for personal reasons, but it quickly morphed into a mission to present the observations and views from the grassroots. I’ve written it for 14 years now, albeit with decreasing frequency.
Since 9/11 I’ve deliberately avoided films, documentaries, non-fiction and fictional works about that day. It and its consequences are just too terrible to relive. But nonetheless, it was unavoidable that my reading would lead me to that day, this happenstance out of the blue. And it was from an unexpected source, my favorite writer, John Updike. What I didn’t know, but found out later, that he was visiting family in Brooklyn Heights, and watched the event unfold from there. Typical Updike, his real life experience became conflated with his fiction in his last short story collection, My Father’s Tears.
So it was with some trepidation when I realized that his story “Varieties of Religious Experience” is about that very day; beginning with “THERE IS NO GOD: the revelation came to Dan Kellogg in the instant that he saw the World Trade Center South Tower fall.” The protagonist was from out of town, visiting his daughter and grandchild at their apartment in Brooklyn Heights. To get through this story, written from various perspectives (including a woman on the ill fated flight that crashed in PA), I had to continually take deep, slow breaths, just to control my anxiety. Not that Updike capitalized on gruesome details, but there is the constant unreal undercurrent of the lunacy of that day. One knows where it is all going, and if this is what God is all about, anyone’s God, religion seems to be a source of justifying anything. One brief paragraph from the story encapsulates its essence:
Dan could not quite believe the tower had vanished. How could something so vast and intricate, an elaborately engineered upright hive teeming with people, mostly young, be dissolved by its own weight so quickly, so casually? The laws of matter had functioned, was the answer. The event was small beneath the calm dome of sky. No hand of God had intervened because there was none. God had no hands, no eyes, no heart, no anything. Thus was Dan, a sixty-four-year-old Episcopalian and probate lawyer, brought late to the realization that comes to children with the death of a pet, to women with the loss of a child, to millions caught in the implacable course of war and plague. His revelation of cosmic indifference thrilled him, though his own extinction was held within this new truth like one of the white rectangles weightlessly rising and spinning within the boiling column of smoke. He joined at last the run of mankind in its stoic atheism. He had fought this wisdom all his life, with prayer and evasion, with recourse to the piety of his Ohio ancestors and to ingenious and jaunty old books – Kierkegaard, Chesterton – read for comfort in adolescence and early manhood. But had he been one of the hundreds in that building – its smoothly telescoping collapse in itself a sight of some beauty, like the color-enhanced stellar blooms of photographed supernovae, only unfolding not in aeons but in seconds – would all that metal and concrete have weighed an ounce less or hesitated a microsecond in its crushing, mincing, vaporizing descent?
As Friedrich Shiller’s Ode to Joy concludes -- the basis for Beethoven’s massive choral addition to the symphonic form -- “Do you sense the Creator, world?/Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!/Beyond the stars must He dwell.” And no doubt the hijackers on that fated day believed they were performing a sacred duty for their “Creator.” How does one reconcile the destructive events of 9/11 with the creative force of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony both coming into being in the name of God?
