- Harper's Magazine editor Lewis Lapham has written boldy
and eloquently questioning U.S. President George Bush's war on terrorism.
-
- "The boundaries of my language are the boundaries
of my world." - Ludwig Wittgenstein
-
- For six weeks I've been reading through a list of events
scheduled to take place in New York City on Sept. 11 - a long list, updated
and augmented every 24 hours - but I'm still at a loss to know what purpose
the sponsors have in mind. Apparently they intend a ceremony of innocence,
but does one celebrate or mourn? Toss hats in the air, or stand around
wearing expressions of brave and quiet dignity? Is America the milk-white
maiden or the sacrificial bull? If a funeral service, who is the deceased
- 3,000 fellow citizens, a work of architecture or a flag? If a ritual
of purification, for what hideous sin or crime does America seek ablution?
If a tribute to the dark and terrible power of Osama bin Laden, why no
prayers to Allah?
-
- The confusion follows from New York's municipal command
that, above all else, everybody must "feel comfortable." Having
gone to considerable trouble to provide a program not unlike a Super Bowl
half-time show, the authorities can't afford to run the risk that in the
midst of all the commemorative observances somebody might say something
worth remembering, and they have enough mawkish sentiment on hand to suppress
with the rhetorical equivalents of tear gas any sudden outbreak of meaning.
The permits issued by the parks department require strict conformity to
the codes of political correctness - no angry polemics or tasteless jokes,
nothing that might offend the sensibilities of a six-year old girl visiting
the ruin of the World Trade Center with candlelight trembling in her tiny
hand. The television networks have agreed to a sparing use of "traumatic"
or "assaultive" images; big-name corporations like Coca-Cola
have forsworn all forms of advertising between sun-up and sundown on Sept.
11; important department stores stand ready to decorate their display windows
with murals painted by nursery school children. It isn't that anybody objects
to the marketing of grief as a consumer product, but nobody wishes to be
thought vulgar or exploitive.
-
- _____
-
- `Between dawn and dusk on Sept. 11 the mindless coverage
of everything and nothing will sit every demographic division of the audience
in the warm bath of its own tears, and if the media are themselves the
message, then by filling up the dome with enough of the stuff ... surely
we can go back to sleep.'
-
- Lewis H. Lapham _____
-
- Consistent with the tone of bleached and antiseptic pathos,
the entertainments scheduled for Victims' Day can be relied upon to serve
as inoculations against the disease of thought - solemn processions of
bagpipes and muffled drums, buglers playing taps, moments of silence interspersed
with the tolling of church bells, sacred dances performed by ballet companies
in Brooklyn and Queens, free museum screenings of The West Wing and Sesame
Street, inspirational readings, numerous exhibitions of inspirational quilts,
the timely appearance of helpful books (Chicken Soup for the Soul of America),
the New York Stock Exchange suspending operations in the hours before noon
and Broadway theatres dimming their marquee lights for one minute at 8
p.m., a PBS documentary that asks, Where Was God on September 11th? and
answers the question in words suitable for a throw pillow.
-
- Citizens unable to join the mourners in the art galleries
or the revellers in the streets can turn to a long day's festival of television
programming, 90 hours of it continuously recycling the message that arrived,
on a bright September morning out of a clear sky remembered by the writer
Erica Jong (in a phrase colour-coordinated with the spirit of the day's
events) as being very, very blue, "as blue as Alice in Wonderland's
Victorian pinafore." The promotions for both the cable and the network
shows embrace the theme of death and transfiguration, "The Day America
Changed," "The Day That Changed America," "The Day
That Changed The World." I think it's safe to guess that the producers
will find themselves hard-pressed to make good on the Wagnerian hyperbole.
-
- During the first months after the disappearance of the
trade towers the newspapers burbled with predictions of America on the
verge of a moral and political awakening, forced to new ways of thinking
not only about the world on the far side of its once protective oceans
but also about itself. Now that a year has passed, the prophecies have
been proven false. Still bound by our presumptions of grace - still dependent
on Arab oil and indifferent to the news from abroad, still content with
a sham democracy and the lullaby of fairy-tale celebrity - the country
chooses to stay in bed. It's too much trouble to get up and open a window.
Accustomed to the climate-controlled atmosphere under the dome of brightly
packaged images placed over the stadium of the national imagination, we
can rely on the technical staff to repair structural damage caused by low-flying
aircraft or the weather - to plug the holes, fix the leaks, seal the cracks
with quilts and Mozart's Requiem.
-
- The sophistication of our communications technology provides
us with what the late Swiss playwright Max Frisch recognized as "the
knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
Between dawn and dusk on Sept. 11 the mindless coverage of everything and
nothing will sit every demographic division of the audience in the warm
bath of its own tears, and if the media are themselves the message, then
by filling up with a President George W. Bush exclusive to CBS, groundbreaking
for the Garden of Healing on Staten Island and an afternoon of reflection
with Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman at the 92nd St. Y, surely we can go
back to sleep.
-
- What we lose, of course, is language. New York Mayor
Michael Bloomberg was careful to confirm the point. He obliged the politicians
appearing in public on Sept. 11 to say nothing in their own voices - lest
they be thought vulgar or exploitive, their remarks mistaken for tasteless
electioneering. At a moment when the country supposedly stands in peril
we thus can look forward not to new and needed words with which to tell
ourselves a new and truer story but to a sanctimonious recitation of the
country's sacred texts (Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address) by politicians (New York Governor George E. Pataki,
Mayor Bloomberg) little noted nor apt to be long remembered either for
their honesty or their prose. The audible silence comes as no surprise.
We've lost the tools of eloquence, and for the last 50 years no prominent
American politician has written his or her own speeches. Why bother? To
say what?
-
- No law of nature holds that a society must come forward
with acts of the political or moral imagination. But if it is no disgrace
for any nation at any particular time in its history to rest content among
the relics of a lost language and an imaginary past, it is a terrifying
failure in a country that possesses the power to poison the earth and yet
possesses neither the desire nor the courage to know itself.
-
- _____
-
- Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Harper's Magazine. His book,
Theater of War, will be published by New Press Sept. 11.
-
- Copyright 1996-2002. Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
All rights reserved. Distribution, transmission or republication of any
material from www.thestar.com is strictly prohibited without the prior
written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.
|
