What We Lost: Remembrance As Narcotic
by Abby Zime
September 11, 2011
There is much to grieve today. First, the act itself, and its losses. Legendary war photographer James Nachtwey happened to be there; his previously unpublished photos of the day capture the surreal horror, almost too beautifully. Then, the first responders, and what we have failed to give them. Next, the tchotchkes, the crap born of America's ceaseless need to trivialize, vulgarize, profit in the name of remembrance. Finally, and most grievously, there is the cost of that willed but so deeply flawed national remembering - the 10 years of wars, and lies, and numbing. We are, nonetheless, still here. Mother Jones: Pray for the dead, fight like hell for the living.
From New York Magazine's 9/11 edition:
"Remembrance became a narcotic that turned a prosperous nation at peace into a debt-ridden wayward giant lumbering around the world, willfully ignorant of its folly, its speech slurred and incomprehensible to anyone but itself. It sedated Congress and the press, which failed to ask the most basic questions about our military adventures. It fogged the minds of once-lucid liberal intellectuals, who grafted their fantasies of liberty and justice for all, down to the last tent in the last village in the last desert, onto a cynical ploy by anti-liberal intellectuals to take their revenge for Vietnam and “restore American greatness.” And it anesthetized Middle America, which developed a taste for media demagogues and cornpone politicians who ignored the messy details of our foreign entanglements and the questionable bookkeeping that masked their real cost."
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2011/09/10