Countersuggestible
By amba | Related entries in History, In The News, Media, WarI hate to do what the media says I should be doing, and to stop doing what I’m doing when the media says to stop. (I hate being seduced into using “media” as a singular word when it’s plural, dammit! One medium, collective media. Even just knowing that is a generational marker, on a par with gray hair.) So I’m not going to watch TV on September 11, 2006, and I’m not going to read or blog about that blasted ABC docudrama which I regard as exploitative from the get-go.
I like Callimachus’ take on the whole thing:
- We only make such a big deal of five years and its multiples because nearly all of us happen to have five digits on each extremity. It’s so biologically arbitrary.
- This is not the real Big Anniversary. That will be next year. Because is has to be a Tuesday. Every workday has its own distinct personality, and Tuesdayness was a big part of September 11.
On one level, I suspect Cal is just finding a rational-sounding reason to be countersuggestible and not to be obediently affected by this anniversary, in unison and on cue. But I found his observation fascinating. As someone who has not had a normal job for 35 years, I am not very aware of the different personalities of the weekdays, but it struck me immediately as something every working person would understand.
What I’ll remember, this and every September 11 and a lot of times when it’s not September 11, is the taste of ashes, bitter and burning. And the downtown-dwelling psychologist at our health club who told us in those first days that his wife had dreamt of a man sitting on their couch, covered in ashes. “I know I’m dead,” he said. “I just need to rest here a little before I go on.”
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September 10th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
I watched that blasted NBC docudrama and I’m glad I did. I didn’t find it exploitive at all. My preference would be to completely forget about all the terrorist stuff that happened over the past 20 years. Yeah, that would be great to shut it all out and pretend things were really wonderful. No stress, no worry, nobody hating us with a passion so great that I can’t understand or even comprehend.
But reality bites. I had to watch. What this film did for me was to pull all the incidents that I had isolated as singularities into a continuous story line. I think the continuous scenario puts the current events into a more accurate light. My singularity view was an attempt on my part to hide from the ugly truth that 9/11 wasn’t the beginning, nor is it the end. 9/11 happened because good men did nothing and evil triumphed. Is there more and worse coming, or will good men finally stand up to true evil, unafraid, unashamed and do whatever it takes to stop it.