911 During the afternoon of September 11, I became one of the millions of Americans imprisoned in a gorge of unreality, held captive by the mind-warping replays: A jetliner tearing though a building and the resulting exit wound, a ferocious orange burst, human figures plummeting as though their wax wings had melted from flying too close to the sun, and then, the Twin Towers' collapse. The sky above Manhattan appeared as a shallow pool of water clouded by the sandy billows of disorder, evidence of a disruptive foot thrust down too hard. Fettered by a malfunctioned imagination and tormented by an inability to understand the terror, I thought, for a moment, it might be normal not to understand at first. I was freed from my captivity during the twilight hours of September 12 when the wind shifted to the north and the acrid scent of burning flesh spread over Manhattan, a detail that was omitted from CNN's coverage. A gap remains, though, and its inhabitants, members of the news consuming public, are sinking farther way from the world-palpable and actual-as it exists at the foot of Manhattan, pulled deeper by the televisual representation of reality presented in the 10-second sound clips and tight camera shots that are fed into millions of homes 24-hours a day. Calling from the suburban Massachusetts town that we grew up in, my best friend presented the most unambiguous evidence of this gap when he told me that he was unable to image the wreckage extending any farther than the borders of his 36-inch television screen. Forty years after surviving the death campf at Auschwitz, writer and chemist Primo Levi warned that the danger of using "approximative books, films, and myths" in depictions of historical events resides in the tendency to push popular perception away from the truth and toward the stereotype. This phenomenon, the movement toward generalization, "is not confined to the perception of near past and historical tragedies," Levi wrote. "It is much more general, it is part of our difficulty or inability to perceive the experience of others, which is all the more pronounced the more distant these experience are from ours in time, space or quality." I am not suggesting any type of historical parallel between September 11 and the Holocaust, only that the misrepresentation of third-party depictions is not exclusive to any particular experience. Levi's warning, which was a reaction to the general misunderstanding of the Holocaust experience, should be heeded in the context of September's terror. It's a reminder that in order to understand another person it may be necessary to inhabit his version of reality. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the media constructed a bridge designed to pull the public from the depths of the imaginative gap. On a recent Sunday afternoon one television station presented an editorial during the commercial break of a football game. I cannot remember the name of the news anchor that delivered the 60-second statement, but he was dressed in a well-tailored suit and his hair was perfectly combed and parted. The segment-presumably to enhance the dramatic effect-was taped on black and white film. I braced myself for the kind of soft-pedaling melodramatic wisdom and high-pitched sentimentality that cheapens tragedy, but this anchorman did not address any "hopes and dreams" or "hearts and minds." Instead, his monologue reminded viewers quite simply that the victims and the heroes of the World Trade Center disaster were ordinary people, normal in every way, "just like you and me," he said. He spoke of the strength and resilience of New Yorkers, and concluded with a plea that as we struggle to reclaim our everyday lives we should remember those "normal people and their extraordinary deeds." Oversimplification is central to the function of that Sunday editorial. The underlying reasoning of the network producers and writers projected by the message is that manufacturing and reinforcing a sense of connection between the viewer and the victims will assuage public grief and help us so that we might be able to understand the attacks. But as Levi suggests, perceiving the experience of others is a function of the imagination, and as the meaning of "normal people" shifts to meet our own self-perceptions, so does the phrase itself change from an already vague, sweeping generalization into a bloodless metaphor that widens the distance between the experiences of the living and the dead. It has become difficult to imagine any of the almost 4,000 people as they existed in the world, for they have been reduced to a stereotype, a faceless single-cell organism. Soon viewers may be left unable to recognize that the tragedy does not reside in the uniformity of the victims, but in their uniqueness. The ideal representation of victims is in the work of A.J. Liebling, a 1940's journalist who chronicled the Second World War by writing about people who were not available for interview. Gathering information and writing about the dislocated and dead appealed to Liebling as a creative endeavor because, as he noted, "you think more about people when they aren't there, and because you can be your own Sherlock Holmes and reconstruct them in accordance with your own hypothesis." Liebling's dispatches, printed in The New Yorker, complemented the coverage of military movements and fatality statistics published in daily newspapers. In April 1943 while reporting from La Piste Forestière (the Foresters' Track), a dirt road in Tunisia where American soldiers fought alongside members of the Corps Franc d'Afrique, Liebling began investigating the life of a dead soldier that he spotted lying dead on the side of the road, the victim's head covered as if by a blanket from a morgue. Over a two-year period Liebling peels back the shroud of anonymity from the dead soldier. He learns first that the soldier was called Mollie, and then begins the process of gathering the fragments of Mollie's past, painting a portrait of his subject so that the reader is able to imagine his subject not just as a soldier, but also as an actual person who existed in the world-perhaps somebody's neighbor. During his
investigation, which stretched from Northern Africa to
New York City, Liebling learns that before slugs from an
automatic rifle hit Mollie in the right eye and in the
chest, he had a plump face with high cheekbones and
square white teeth, and his curly, blonde hair was at
least six inches long. Liebling discovers that Mollie
created a reputation as a big-shot gambler, that
"Mollie" is the shortened version of
"Molotov," but Mollie's real name, as far as a
red-faced sergeant can remember, was Carl Warren. From a
sharp-faced Michigan boy named Sanderson and a pamphlet
called "The battle of Sened, 23 March, '43, G Co.
60th Infantry Dawn Attack on Sened, Tunisia,"
Liebling considers differing accounts of Mollie's role in
single-handedly capturing 600 Italian soldiers. A
rugged-looking Brooklynite named Shapiro tells Liebling
that Mollie did not wear a standard issue uniform,
"like a soldier out of some other army," and
that "the only thing he could ever do good outside
of combat was D.R.O.-that's dining room orderly at the
officers' mess. I've seen him carry three stacks of
dishes on each arm." Mollie's sister reveals that
his real name was Karl Petuskia, but he changed it to
Warren when he arrived in New York "because he
thought it sounded sweller." At Jimmy Kelly's, the
bar where Mollie worked before the war, Ray the bartender
tells Liebling that Mollie was known as Curly, that he
possessed an affinity for expensive clothing, and (sound
familiar?) that he could carry three stacks of dishes on
each arm. The secretary at the waiter's union tells
Liebling that Mollie is "the first member of the
Local No.1 to die in this war." On September 15 The New York Times began publishing short profiles of the missing and the dead. I have saved the profile of a woman, whose four sons remember her for the throat-clearing cough that she used to wake them up every morning, because I cannot stand to throw away the only evidence I have of such a woman's existence-my own mother calls me from sleep with a similar growl. Though such character sketches are approximative work, identically hagiographic, the spirit of Liebling's work is nevertheless present. It would be difficult to print in-depth profiles of 4,000 deceased men and women, but the Times has found a format that will effectively remind the public that the most important part in the history of the World Trade Center was neither the architectural accomplishment it represented nor its destruction, but the people who worked there. The alternative can be seen on television-a reliance on phrases like "inexplicable," "beyond words," and "incomprehensible"-phrases that are, like the construction "normal people," a result of our inability or unwillingness to try to understand events that make us feel uncomfortable. Such words tell us nothing about the world we inhabit-only that we cannot understand it or are incapable of speaking about it. I reject this line of thought-such accounts as Primo Levi's If This Be A Man (A.K.A. Survival at Auschwitz) are tangible evidence that the human mind is capable of understanding atrocity and language rich enough to accurately represent it. And in a sense, every human is a writer-the author of his own narrative. Murder is the grossest violation of that authorship. On September 11 thousands of people were murdered, stripped of their autonomy and individuality by the fist of terror. Dishonoring the individuality of the dead with faulty metaphors or vague representations can only lead to the erasure of their narratives and the death their individuality. These people have suffered enough. If we wish to remain silent, we ought not speak. Contributor: Alex French Comment on this story on our Message Boards
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