Over 9/11?

[jenk]

From The New York Times Sunday Magazine, emphasis mine:

September 12, 2004
Forget It?
By WALTER KIRN

A friend of mine said something horrible recently: ''I'm just so over 9/11.'' We'd been watching TV -- a fluffy gossip show featuring models as reporters -- and during a long commercial break I'd picked up the channel changer and happened across a cable-news discussion of the war on terrorism. One of the experts used the phrase ''twin towers.'' Another mentioned the ''hunt for Osama.'' Their language seemed dated, musty and faintly embarrassing, and I quickly switched back to ''Extra.'' That's when my friend made her comment, adding this: ''I'm ashamed of myself, but it's true. I'm totally over it.''

I told her she was right to be ashamed, but as our evening of TV viewing wore on -- a succession of Darwinian reality shows and lurid explorations of Britney's love life -- it occurred to me that my friend had merely been honest about an undeniable phenomenon: through some gradual process of cultural mummification, the attacks of three years ago have become a symbol, a cluster of stuffed and mounted official images, and as such they must now compete with fresher images for the country's interest and attention. I don't live in New York now, though I used to, and I understand fully that for those who do, such an attitude may seem blasphemously insensitive. But it wouldn't shock me if the attacks and their iconographic halos were soon the stuff of magazine ''in-out'' lists. In: ''Fahrenheit 9/11.'' Out: 9/11.

Just as the arrival of the wedding photos represents the formal emotional terminus of the celebration itself, the publication of the 9/11 commission report marked the end of 9/11. On the surface, the aim of the report was to find out exactly what happened that bloody morning and offer sober suggestions for preventing similar attacks, but at a deeper, more fundamental level the goal seemed to be to box and wrap the whole big mess so that it could be psychologically mothballed. The report became a best seller, I suspect, not because people truly wanted to read it but because they craved the satisfaction of physically placing the volume on a bookshelf and then going into the kitchen to fix dinner.

In the months that followed the attacks, when the president was advising people to dust themselves off and head out to the malls, I consciously resisted complacency. I understood, of course, that the day would come when my brain would stop flashing on scenes of burning skyscrapers, plummeting bodies and smoking, twisted girders, but I hoped that it wouldn't happen for a long time and that I would be one of the last people it happened to. The sense of pure victimization I felt back then, untainted by guilt and uncut with self-reproach, was powerful, pervasive and oddly intoxicating. I suspected that I'd miss it once it passed.

And then it did pass, sometime last spring, after John Kerry won the primaries and the presidential campaign kicked off in earnest. The visceral memories of falling buildings were supplanted by thoughts on the ''issue'' of terrorism and which candidate could best confront its ''challenge.'' A little later, when Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism official, pointedly blamed the Bush administration for taking the threat of Al Qaeda too lightly, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the lost unity of a couple of years before. The war in Iraq had made such unity hard, of course (which was one of the reasons I resented it), but I was disappointed nonetheless. I liked it better when everyone was crying together and when the rest of the world was crying for us.

From tragedy to policy. How sad.

What pained me most, though, was how unfocused I'd grown, how frivolous, how silly, how distractable. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, I'd made a number of somber resolutions that I now had to admit I'd never make good on. I hadn't stopped going out to fancy restaurants and sent the money I would have spent in them to a charitable fund for Afghan orphans. More damningly, I hadn't stopped watching MTV, which I was too old to be watching anyway. The brain cells in which I'd vowed to store the names of the heroes of United Flight 93 were occupied now by the face of Jessica Simpson.

If this was the healing process, it felt sinful. It felt more like the betrayal process, in fact. Couldn't my mind, and the media that feeds it, preserve just one sacred space, one permanent prime-time slot for tragedy?

But wouldn't you know that just when I'd moved on, the presidential candidates (especially one of them) would ask me to rekindle my memories? Once, it had been my duty to calm down and re-enter the economic hurly-burly; now it was my duty to get worked up again before re-entering the voting booth. So which was it? Forget? Remember?

The signals were mixed. What the politicians wanted, it finally seemed, was the right to revive 9/11 on command, whenever it served their own ambitious purposes. If they could, they'd implant a 9/11 chip deep in the limbic region of my brain and activate it by remote control.

Getting over the attacks is my way of refusing them access. Sure, I feel guilty about it, but so be it. Some emotions, some memories, some pictures are just too combustible to walk around with, especially when certain people are waiting to toss a match into my soul. That's why I've begun to bury that awful morning in a spot that only I can locate, under layers and layers of pop ephemera. I'll dig up those images if and when I choose to, but not before then. The passage of time has made them truly mine -- mine to bring out and mine to set aside.

- Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is the author, most recently, of ''Up in the Air,'' a novel.

To which I add, "Amen".