This is one of the limits of mere memory; it remains as sensation or fades as sensation. But this is what commemoration is supposed to transcend. Commemoration provides interpretation; it offers a public meaning that survives the event. It surpasses private experience and continues to provide significance even when memory is long gone. Commemoration is not a matter of healing or feeling; it is a matter of meaning.
The problem is that no other event I can think of has proved so resistant to public commemoration. The record has been dismal. Ground zero itself is still contested ground wrestled over by competing interest groups. There has also been wrangling about a planned memorial in Liberty State Park in New Jersey.
And in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, plans for a US$58 million memorial for the victims of United Flight 93 have focused not on the heroic acts of those who confronted the hijackers but on the creation of a sacral "healing landscape." The public realm has been swallowed up in the private and meditative, as if nothing but memory mattered; commemoration becomes a form of therapy.
But therapy is beside the point. The events of Sept. 11 did not arise out of natural disasters. Sept. 11 was an attack. That is why it merits public commemoration, not a pastoral meditation space.
As the photos at the Historical Society demonstrate, seeing Sept. 11 as an unjustified attack has always caused discomfort; it would require confrontation and combat. The preference for many, within hours of the "tragedy," was self-blame. A few of the photos, of course, show the kinds of reactions that have always followed acts of murder: "No mercy. Let's go to war!" proclaims one T-shirt.
But anxious protests are far more plentiful. "Peace is the answer. No fascist war," reads one poster.
"Don't turn tragedy into war" is yet another moral highlighted in one of the photos, which is strange, since we have ended up with both. In describing Sept. 11, the word tragedy has been used again and again. But tragedy implies a drama in which flawed beings are slowly drawn into their awful fate, the consequence of their all-too-human failings. Many apparently still see Sept. 11 in that light.
But an attack is something else, as later events and accumulated evidence have shown. And a reluctance to see it this way, along with the continuing problems of how Islamist terror is to be countered, is one reason why six years later we are left with many memories but no real commemoration.
RSS