Arya Stark by Mustamirri/Anita. At deviantART; at tumblr.
So, I work at a high school, and every year, around September 11th, I get some kind of memo from my boss–the school’s principal–reminding the teachers to “talk to the kids about 9/11.” Each year I get roughly the same version of a 9/11 narrative from the kids. The following phrases are pulled from actual past narratives, and are chosen because they represent the basic thrust of most of the writings. Occasionally a narrative will be of some interest–maybe a kid from New York or D.C., or a particularly thoughtful or sensitive kid–but on the whole, the following is pretty standard:
“They turned on the TV. My teacher was crying. I didn’t know what was going on. I was in middle school [ed. note–in the past couple of years, depending on the grade I teach of course, the kids tend to be in elementary school–this years batch were about ten years old in 2001]. I was scared, but then I was happy because I got to go home. It didn’t really effect me. I didn’t really care. We should get school off every 9/11.”
The memo this year likened 9/11 to life-changing “I remember where I was when _____” events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Apollo moon landing, the JFK assassination, and (no kidding) the 2004 World Championship of the Boston Red Sox.
On one hand, I have no problem with this: I will never forget where I was on the morning of 9/11 (asleep and hungover in my brother’s old bed in my parents’ house) or what I was doing (nothing; I was unemployed; I was supposed to move to Tokyo the following week) or how I felt (shocked and scared and weirded out and secretly selfishly ashamedly worried that my international plans were now in jeopardy). I add my own experiences parenthetically, because the are of no importance; still, the spectacular disaster of 9/11–no matter what your take on the whole thing is (how it happened and who did it and why it was done, etc.)–the spectacular disaster of 9/11 exists as an ideological construct demarcating a social shift: hence the term post-9/11 and all things post-9/11, etc. etc. etc.
And so well this is my problem: what are we doing when we mark the day to these children; specifically, what am I–a teacher–doing when I affirm the ideological significance of 9/11 to my students, despite the fact that they clearly–repeatedly–have no interest beyond self-interest in the whole thing (“We should get the day off school”)? This is not a rhetorical question; this is an earnest and most sincere question, one that I don’t have an answer for. My students display the same distanced ambivalence toward 9/11 that I might hold for, say, the U.S. exit from Saigon or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s something that I’ve been told I should care about for a range of historical reasons beyond my personal control or personal range of power; somehow, it should inform my identity (“American”) and my ideology (“good American”). I accept these ideological markers as “historical facts” and neglect the margins of history in favor of a much easier story to follow.
I’m not railing against the “importance” of 9/11 or whether or not 9/11 is important: I go back to my question in the previous paragraph: what am I doing when I affirm the ideological significance of 9/11 to my students? Exactly what ideology is being affirmed? Why is 9/11 like the Apollo moon landing or the JFK assassination? By transitive property of its I-remember-where-I-wasness? Clearly this has to be a public where-I-wasness, a shared where-I-wasness; nobody is going around comparing 9/11 to the day they lost their virginity or the day their child was born (although undoubtedly people got laid for the first time and children were born on 9/11/01). But this need to make sure our children recognize 9/11 as an ideological marker cannot simply be rooted in a shared where-I-wasness, can it?
My gut feeling is that the post-9/11 ideology may seem vague and amorphous, and may seem to be as-yet-undefined and up for grabs and still under debate, but in reality, there are forces at work shaping this ideology: the grand spectacle of 9/11 insured a public where-I-wasness that has honestly marked me. Now that mark, that trace, is something that I am expected to re-mark on, to pass on, to send down into my students. Only I’m not sure exactly what the mark means, and their vacant eyes affirm what I think I fear: my personal experience of where-I-wasness is just a symptom of acute exposure to spectacle, and nothing these kids really care about. And should they care?
Biblioklept 