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Subject line is this one Ani DiFranco quote I've never been able to get over, even as I've gotten over massive amounts of chunks of the rest of her deal (woman needs an editor and an image consultant), but it hits on my "What was wrong with the 9/11 content at the RNC, and in particular last night's 9/11 content at the RNC".
This is emotional stuff I'm writing about, which seems fair as it's an emotional issue, personally, nationally and strategically. That said, please note that I'm not even focusing here on how without the ability to talk to us credibly about basic aspects of tangible security (jobs, healthcare, housing), the RNC leaned on 9/11 to remind people that they are scared not just in their gut and in the minds, but in their hearts. Dirty work, if you ask me. Strategically logical, although ultimately not as effective as they would like, I believe, but dirty work (and this from a woman who enjoys the sniping of political campaigns a great deal, but image making is something of a recreational sport for me).
As much as I am a big proponent of saying 9/11 happened to all of us, and easily angered in general and specific by any situation in which people decide they have the right to determine how much grief another is entitled to, let's make one thing clear.
9/11 happened here, in New York City, in Washington DC, and in Pennsylvania.
I know that people all over the world have friends and relatives here and were scared. I know that New York is a symbol, the way other places are symbols for me, and that we can love places we've never seen with all our hearts in a way that these events can and do shatter us no matter who or where we are.
But that doesn't change one thing, and that's that it happened here. That it transpired in the daily fabric of our lives. That we heard the sounds, felt the heat and knew the smells. That we saw it on something larger than a 19" or 27" or 36" or whatever television. It was out our windows, under our feet and in our hair. And while it was out of your frame of reference, we only had time to make a new one.
It happened while we were going to work, dressing our children, cooking breakfast, holding our lovers. It stopped lives, but it didn't stop the life of this city, just wildly, heartbreakingly redirected it.
So when I hear rhetoric like "where buildings fell, a nation rose" or "New York has come back" I am outraged. WE LIVE HERE. We never stopped. We never went away. We didn't flee the city despite everything. Despite all the things all the other people say in all the other places; we don't say "we know who we are now."
If New York is nothing else, it is a place where people know who they are. Before the end of the world, and after we realized that for everything, it wasn't. The end of the world, my friends, looks even worse than that, which is a luxury of imagination it seems most of the rest of the country has yet to come to.
I want to relate two brief stories from the days immediately following 9/11, which speak to really nothing more than the nature of this city and our recent adventures in history.
When 9/11 happened, I lived in a different appartment, with a view of the Chrysler Building that I got to see every day, every morning a silver sheet in memory of early dreams of our science fiction future. It was one of those things that made living in New York worth it, even as I was coming out of a relationship roughly, even as I was struggling with finances and unemployment. And I made, not an offhand comment in my journal, but an emotional comment that I didn't really expect to cause a brouhaha, that thank God they didn't take the Chrysler building instead. I love that building, and it is a symbol to me of the history and mythos of New York. It was also closer to my house, and in the center of the island, instead of on its edge. Well, a whole bunch of people unfriended me, because how dare I -- because how dare I talk about the whole of the city as an organism for just one second, I had to say certain things a certain way all the damn time. This was from people who didn't live here. This was from people who insisted their feelings, thousands of miles away were exactly the same as mine. This was from people who insisted I wasn't allowed to feel as much grief as I was, and they were somehow entitled to more. I listened to people wail outside my window for weeks (I lived by the original family center), and I was lucky. So how dare people tell me how I should feel, and how I should express that feeling, about a wound on the only home I have ever known.
When it was possible to return to Manhattan (I was in Queens at a bf's house), I went like others to the West Side Highway to donate water and supplies to workers. The RNC talks about the scene there a lot when talking about he rise of New York and the national community spirit engendered by 9/11. And the way they describe it is entirely accurate -- people holding signs and cheering the iron workers and the health and safety and fire works. People silent, as huge wrecks of metal and vehicles were carted up the road in the other direction. It was a beautiful day, but hot, and the smoke was thick, even up at 23rd, and it stung out eyes and our throats.
I bought water at a supermarket a few blocks away and went to bring it. People stood around uselessly wishing they were doctors or nurses or had some skill that would let them do _something_. I wound up running into a group of women I knew. Some of them were unemployed, quasi-employed or underemployed, and some of them had the types of jobs you don't tell your mother about -- because they were actresses, or because the dot.com thing had bit them or whatever -- those are other stories. But I will never forget standing there with them, watching all of this, and all of us having very little to say, but keenly aware that we too represented the real and secret lives of New Yorkers, and of this moment that would all be swiftly rewritten.
New York beckons people from all over the world for a myriad of reasons. Commerce. Theater. And possibility. The sea and the rivers having done so much to make us what we are, and yet, living here, we rarely see them, surrounded as we are by our buildings and our people. People come to New York City to be the most famous and visible person in all the world. But people also come to New York City to disappear, by choice or by accident, to finally be ordinary, to finally have community or home. We are a city of pride and secrets, of the fallen and of the free. People have always been broken by New York, and people have always been healed by her. Sometimes it just comes in a cataclysm.
And that's what the RNC doesn't understand. That's what the RNC has never understood. That's what the RNC tried to witlessly exploit. New York endures, neither despite ourselves nor despite the things that happened here. New York endures, simply because that is what she does, and it is what she has always done. And that's a thing simple, extraordinary and honest. It's the most American thing about her, and yet we were only ever believed to be real Americans just like anyone else when the fire rained down, so uselessly... so usefully.
The school I went to growing up had served as a boarding school for British girls fleeing the bombings during WWII. One of my computer classrooms had been the site of one of the dormitories, and I know that some girls were also boarded with teachers. I wonder sometimes, what it was like to be from London then, what it was like to be these girls, here in a strange country, and whether their own country had ever questioned their Englishness merely for being from a place that was also of the imagination.
This is emotional stuff I'm writing about, which seems fair as it's an emotional issue, personally, nationally and strategically. That said, please note that I'm not even focusing here on how without the ability to talk to us credibly about basic aspects of tangible security (jobs, healthcare, housing), the RNC leaned on 9/11 to remind people that they are scared not just in their gut and in the minds, but in their hearts. Dirty work, if you ask me. Strategically logical, although ultimately not as effective as they would like, I believe, but dirty work (and this from a woman who enjoys the sniping of political campaigns a great deal, but image making is something of a recreational sport for me).
As much as I am a big proponent of saying 9/11 happened to all of us, and easily angered in general and specific by any situation in which people decide they have the right to determine how much grief another is entitled to, let's make one thing clear.
9/11 happened here, in New York City, in Washington DC, and in Pennsylvania.
I know that people all over the world have friends and relatives here and were scared. I know that New York is a symbol, the way other places are symbols for me, and that we can love places we've never seen with all our hearts in a way that these events can and do shatter us no matter who or where we are.
But that doesn't change one thing, and that's that it happened here. That it transpired in the daily fabric of our lives. That we heard the sounds, felt the heat and knew the smells. That we saw it on something larger than a 19" or 27" or 36" or whatever television. It was out our windows, under our feet and in our hair. And while it was out of your frame of reference, we only had time to make a new one.
It happened while we were going to work, dressing our children, cooking breakfast, holding our lovers. It stopped lives, but it didn't stop the life of this city, just wildly, heartbreakingly redirected it.
So when I hear rhetoric like "where buildings fell, a nation rose" or "New York has come back" I am outraged. WE LIVE HERE. We never stopped. We never went away. We didn't flee the city despite everything. Despite all the things all the other people say in all the other places; we don't say "we know who we are now."
If New York is nothing else, it is a place where people know who they are. Before the end of the world, and after we realized that for everything, it wasn't. The end of the world, my friends, looks even worse than that, which is a luxury of imagination it seems most of the rest of the country has yet to come to.
I want to relate two brief stories from the days immediately following 9/11, which speak to really nothing more than the nature of this city and our recent adventures in history.
When 9/11 happened, I lived in a different appartment, with a view of the Chrysler Building that I got to see every day, every morning a silver sheet in memory of early dreams of our science fiction future. It was one of those things that made living in New York worth it, even as I was coming out of a relationship roughly, even as I was struggling with finances and unemployment. And I made, not an offhand comment in my journal, but an emotional comment that I didn't really expect to cause a brouhaha, that thank God they didn't take the Chrysler building instead. I love that building, and it is a symbol to me of the history and mythos of New York. It was also closer to my house, and in the center of the island, instead of on its edge. Well, a whole bunch of people unfriended me, because how dare I -- because how dare I talk about the whole of the city as an organism for just one second, I had to say certain things a certain way all the damn time. This was from people who didn't live here. This was from people who insisted their feelings, thousands of miles away were exactly the same as mine. This was from people who insisted I wasn't allowed to feel as much grief as I was, and they were somehow entitled to more. I listened to people wail outside my window for weeks (I lived by the original family center), and I was lucky. So how dare people tell me how I should feel, and how I should express that feeling, about a wound on the only home I have ever known.
When it was possible to return to Manhattan (I was in Queens at a bf's house), I went like others to the West Side Highway to donate water and supplies to workers. The RNC talks about the scene there a lot when talking about he rise of New York and the national community spirit engendered by 9/11. And the way they describe it is entirely accurate -- people holding signs and cheering the iron workers and the health and safety and fire works. People silent, as huge wrecks of metal and vehicles were carted up the road in the other direction. It was a beautiful day, but hot, and the smoke was thick, even up at 23rd, and it stung out eyes and our throats.
I bought water at a supermarket a few blocks away and went to bring it. People stood around uselessly wishing they were doctors or nurses or had some skill that would let them do _something_. I wound up running into a group of women I knew. Some of them were unemployed, quasi-employed or underemployed, and some of them had the types of jobs you don't tell your mother about -- because they were actresses, or because the dot.com thing had bit them or whatever -- those are other stories. But I will never forget standing there with them, watching all of this, and all of us having very little to say, but keenly aware that we too represented the real and secret lives of New Yorkers, and of this moment that would all be swiftly rewritten.
New York beckons people from all over the world for a myriad of reasons. Commerce. Theater. And possibility. The sea and the rivers having done so much to make us what we are, and yet, living here, we rarely see them, surrounded as we are by our buildings and our people. People come to New York City to be the most famous and visible person in all the world. But people also come to New York City to disappear, by choice or by accident, to finally be ordinary, to finally have community or home. We are a city of pride and secrets, of the fallen and of the free. People have always been broken by New York, and people have always been healed by her. Sometimes it just comes in a cataclysm.
And that's what the RNC doesn't understand. That's what the RNC has never understood. That's what the RNC tried to witlessly exploit. New York endures, neither despite ourselves nor despite the things that happened here. New York endures, simply because that is what she does, and it is what she has always done. And that's a thing simple, extraordinary and honest. It's the most American thing about her, and yet we were only ever believed to be real Americans just like anyone else when the fire rained down, so uselessly... so usefully.
The school I went to growing up had served as a boarding school for British girls fleeing the bombings during WWII. One of my computer classrooms had been the site of one of the dormitories, and I know that some girls were also boarded with teachers. I wonder sometimes, what it was like to be from London then, what it was like to be these girls, here in a strange country, and whether their own country had ever questioned their Englishness merely for being from a place that was also of the imagination.
