An Extended Editorial -Conclusion

Rod Amis - Unbound

We still feel very little need to engage in serious historical analyses of the causes of international conflict(s) or be more than parrots of the usual MM, white, talking heads trotted out by the Fox News Channel or the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour respectively. ABC can still boast that "Most Americans get their news from ABC News" without being challenged. That certainly hasn't changed one iota.

We still believe that shopping is some sort of cultural religion. In fact, immediately after the tragedy, our politicians and business leaders insisted that our best way to stand up to terrorism was to show the evil-doers that we were going on with our lives as normal by going out to the Mall and buying things. (!) Only in America would that notion of how to evidence normal life NOT seem absurd.

One thing that has changed is that now 1.5 million Americans have been unemployed for over six months. But is that more a result of the tragedy of a year ago or of a spate of corporate scandal-implosions and a tax cut for the rich that has wiped out the budget surplus our government assured us existed a scant two years ago while knowing that it had itself cooked the books?

Immediately after the tragedy, the people of hard-hit New York City tried to be more civil towards each other as they suffered a state of shell shock. But "the healing" appears to have come quickly. A recent cartoon caption quipped that you can tell everything is okay because people are rude again.

We are the country of "Just get over it!"

How have we changed? Is there more compassion for, say, the recent typhoon victims in South Korea? Are more of us taking the millisecond to click on the Hunger Site button on the cover of this Web site or many others to effortlessly feed more hungry people around the world? Couldn't prove it by me.

Our concern continues to be totally self-centered. And we continue to broadcast our self-absorption to the rest of the world on 200+ satellite and cable television channels around the globe, as we plan to do this September 11th. One of the few times we'll show the world our news and entertainment without that cloying bombardment of advertisements for our multiplicitous choices of commercial geegaws will be on that day we mourn ourselves.

How have we changed?

Well, we now have a justification to be in a state of perpetual war. That certainly is a big change. No need to explain attacking any other country really. It's about terrorism. We are at war with terrorism and we can decide unilaterally who is and is not a sponsor of same. Just as the International Court of Justice can unilaterally be invalidated by us, we can make a list and check it twice and decide which countries are deserving of a few cruise missiles. That's how we make the world safe for democracy in the 21st century. It's our right. Terrorists bombed our World Trade Center so now, in the interests of civilization, we must go anywhere and do whatever we deem necessary to eradicate terrorism from the face of the earth.

Oh, there will be a bit of collateral damage in your country. Very sorry but war is Hell.

The cynical master of this flimflam is oft-celebrated, by the star-struck MM, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And I quote:

The message is that there are no "knowns". There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well, that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns... There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

That's "Rummy" on the progress of the War on Terrorism after a NATO meeting in Brussels.

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THERE ARE TWO THINGS I NEED TO BE CLEAR ABOUT. In this typically Jeremiad rendering of my reflections on the year after the tragedy, the basis of my thesis is that a nation, like a person, has a soul. So there are two things I feel I should be clear about before I continue:

1. We should be genuinely humbled and hopeful for humanity in the face of the genuine heroism of those firefighters and others at Ground Zero who risked their own lives -- in fact, unselfishly forgot about their own lives and the concerns of their families -- in an effort to save the lives of others a year ago.
2. We should also be genuinely concerned about the hyperbolic reactions of people far from the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and Pennsylvania who rushed in front of the cameras to talk about how their lives were changed forever by the tragedy.

My first point is self-evident and speaks well for the state of certain precincts of America's national soul. My second point should give you cause for concern.

The firefighters, doctors, nurses, paramedics and other rescue workers who were most at risk were too busy to navel-gaze about how they were traumatized by the tragedy.

But there were no dearth of people, completely safe and unharmed, who never missed a meal or came near falling concrete, who were throwing themselves into a froth of hysteria and "everything's changed" as if they were on an episode of Oprah or, more pointedly, Dateline NBC.

Listen: Days after the tragedy, I was working one of my construction jobs down here in New Orleans, hundreds of miles away from any of the events of that day. On the radio some woman who lives in the suburbs called in to talk about September 11th and its affect on her life. She said that she was now afraid to drive across the Causeway for fear of a terrorist attack. One of our local "shock jocks" had the common sense to exclaim: "Lady, come on! I'm sure Osama bin Laden is sitting in some cave saying, 'Gee, I know how to terrorize America! I'll blow up the Causeway and ruin the commute to New Orleans!' Get real!"

But that was the nature of things. It sickened me. Like high school children all wanting to be somehow a part of what was going on, too many Americans acted as if what happened in New York to lots of people they didn't really know and (before that day) would disparage had somehow changed their own personal lives. And that was garbage. That was too much of "the American Way" for me to stomach.

It was a definite tragedy, for the people and families involved, but it was NOT the bombing of Dresden or of Srebenica.

How could so many people blithely ignore the million people dying in Rwanda , I had to wonder, and now claim that everything had changed when 3,000 died in New York? Was it because only American deaths are worth mourning?

The waving flags, the "these colors don't run", the sackcloth and ashes, in this view, seemed like the reaction of an over-coddled child to scraping its knee and seeing its own blood flow for the first time. The same child who laughed uproariously moments before when one of his fellows broke his arm falling from a tree.

That, to this editorialist, spoke to a disease of the soul. And concern for that disease, not disrespect or undervaluing the tragedy itself, is what is at the heart of this jeremiad.

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I am certain that there are some people in this country who are genuinely and profoundly grief-stricken as a result of last year's tragedy, not least of which are the families of those who perished.

Nonetheless, the grief was not so profound for a number of those surviving families that it precluded their licensing a Florida man to reproduce the likenesses of their lost loved ones on the equivalent of trading cards in exchange for 8% of gross revenues.

I, personally, find the notion of people selling the images of their dead relatives for profit ghoulish. But I'm not as inured of lucre as some people.

What certainly has not changed, as this Florida "entrepreneur" illustrates, is that Americans will find a way to make a profit from anything, even the deaths of their fellow countrymen.

What's disturbing to this editorialist is that the families of the victims would go along with the idea in exchange for a "cut".

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Everything has changed, the MM insisted to us last year. "We will never be the same again..."

So I must continue asking, how are we not the same one year later?

Are we less fixated on celebrity? Well, let's see, one of our television channels, MTV is giving that inspiring intellectual giant Ozzie Osbourne millions of dollars to broadcast his wit and wisdom to us again this year. I believe that's the same Ozzie famous for visiting San Antonio, Texas, and urinating on one of our national monuments, the Alamo. He's surely an inspiration to our youth. Another of our television groups has just signed on the inspiring and chemically-enhanced (I'm speaking of her brain here, folks) Anna Nicole Smith to give our young women something to aspire towards.

Nah, I guess the tragedy has gotten us over that celebration of celebrity-for-its-own-sake problem.

If I recall correctly, immediately after the tragedy a number of psychologists were trotted out in the broadcast and print arms of the MM predicting that we would become more involved with our homes and our loved ones and more serious in our concerns and conversations.

Hmnn... I suppose that's why Steve O's videos aren't selling like hotcakes anymore and the divorce rate has gone down. Wait a minute! Steve O's "Jackass" antics are still selling like hotcakes. The divorce rate gallops along apace. Were these "experts" completely wrong about us? Have we become so callused by our nightly dose of violence, be it from television, movies or PlayStation, that even a tragedy as enormous and horrendous as last year's doesn't actually phase us at all?

When my tongue is not firmly planted in my cheek as with the foregoing, I accept that one of the other mantras we chanted for ourselves last year was that a true triumph over the attackers would be for us to demonstrate that they could not succeed in changing us by this act of violence.

I did not and do not entirely agree with this reasoning. Firstly, because if violence of that magnitude fails to change us in some way, we have become monsters indeed. Secondly, because a change for we the people of the United States -- whether as a response to the tragedy or not -- is needed and long overdue. We not only need to change how we think about money, race, gender and politics, we also need to change how we think about the rest of the people, species and nations with which we share the planet. If last year's tragedy nudged us a bit in that direction, then we might have pulled some level of triumph out of that tragedy.

But I fear, as you have read, that it did not and that we are quickly devolving to a lower level of consciousness than obtained prior to that tragedy, hectored on by the forces of right-wing paranoia and cultural imperialism. Thus, for this editorialist, one year after, we may be worse, rather than better, off. We are more willing now to trade security for liberty, and more, not less, accepting of humiliating degradations of our personal sovereignty and that of our fellow human beings. In that sense, quite a lot has changed -- for the worse.

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LONG-TIME READERS of these Glass House entries are aware that the image which has most often emblazoned them over the years has been that of a butterfly. Thanks to the ancient Roman writer Apuleius, we have inherited the myth of Psyche, whose domain he represented as the Soul. The butterfly was her symbol. Part of the mission of this space in our magazine over the last few years has been to expose certain aspects of how one soul wrestles with the mundane and sublime elements of our time here. As the name of this column has implied, that presupposed showing the weaknesses as well as the strengths, the trials as well as the triumphs. Sometimes, I've gathered, it's been affective and others it has only served to make me look an utter fool. But one message, I hope, has always been clear. According to Apuleius, Soul strove on earth and in the heavens after Love...

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What I Need This Week

1. A roof under which to rest my head. I don't think urban camping will suit these old bones.

2. A real job.

3. Money.

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Thanks for coming back this week.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching..."
Rod

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

This year he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. (Think: The Boy.) Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Right now he's in the unenviable position of looking for both a job AND a place to live. Couch-surfing sucks! He is not a happy camper. In his spare time, he chases women.

Rod lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, right now. This town is seducing him the way a spider seduces a fly. He wants to live somewhere civilized when he grows up. Wish him Luck.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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