An artist imagined Lisbon before and after the quake..

9-11 vs. 11-1

by Elinor Hoefs

9-11: Déjà Vu All Over Again
Some weeks passed after 11-1-55 before word (and some pictures) reached the world to show what had happened to Lisbon. On 9-11 the whole world watched the World Trade Center collapse in real time. And watched. And watched again as the pictures were replayed endlessly.

No delay. No respite. If on 9-11 the people at or near ground zero suffered primary trauma, the entire watching world suffered secondary trauma. Probably no single event has ever imprinted so fast and so deeply on so many minds at the same time.

The initial local reaction, once search and rescue was finished, was clean-up, which happened with astonishing speed. Eight months later the ruins were gone, leaving only a neat, gaping 16-acre wound in lower Manhattan.

The initial national and international reaction was vengeance. A global posse was quickly formed and went after those whom the sheriff, having himself divided the world into good and evil, chose to call "the evildoers."

The posse, to all appearances, worked swiftly and—all things considered—well. Lots of evildoers were killed. Others were captured.

Along the way, a few—or maybe more than a few—civil liberties fell by the way. But, as the sheriff kept reminding us, this was no mere pursuit of a bunch of criminals. This was war.

Now, the war continues and bids fair to erupt in other campaigns of aggression.

As Candide came to see, such is the way of the world. And the only peace Voltaire was willing to give his hapless young hero after many painful misadventures was in cultivating his own garden, where he might hope to avoid the three great dangers of the world: poverty, vice, and boredom.

Things of course may get much worse, given the cowboy mentality presently (still) loose in the world. Further human-concocted disasters are easily conceivable at this point which would render that of 9-11 almost insignificant.

Let’s try to think the best of ourselves (even though we may not inhabit the best of all possible worlds) and assume that we somehow stumble through the 9-11 aftermath without vast atomic, biological, or chemical destruction. If we do, then 9-11 will remain with us for quite some time, imprinted, just as 11-1 remained with Europe.

What might the medium- and long-term cultural effects of 9-11 be?

The immediate trauma came of course from the horror of the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, the glimpses of people jumping, and the knowledge of others trapped inside.

Surely the longer-term trauma is centered on the simple, utter fact of the disappearance in a few seconds of two great monuments. One minute they were there. Next minute they were gone. Utterly gone.

Disappearance. Transience. Ephemerality.

Is that what 9-11 is to be, a memento mori? Another reminder that all is vanity, that all passes? Perseverance may further for a while, but death is always the elephant in the room.

Even when death strikes close, when a loved one or a friend dies, we grieve, and then we go on, and universally we go on in denial, as if the impossible hadn’t happened (didn’t continue to happen all the time every day): a person disappeared. Here, and then gone, utterly and totally gone.

On 9-11 we watched 3,000 people die, but even then we could only infer their deaths, from awareness that people were in the buildings and from the words and pictures of those left behind to grieve.

But on 9-11 we also watched as two of the largest structures people had ever built vanished. First one, then the other. Fifteen seconds each, and they were gone. Utterly and totally gone.

Denial becomes difficult in the face of such vivid, visual proof.

What will the world—that means us—do with this cognitive disjunct: the wish, the need, the long habit of denial of death and disappearance vs. the imprinted visual reality of the abracadabra vanishing act of the World Trade Center towers?

All that—hedonism, the diplomacy of belligerence, tyrannical religion—is busywork, further embroidery on the old, well-practiced pattern of denial: the buildings were there, then they weren’t. Denial in disguise.

Maybe such disasters have no long-term cultural impact. Maybe we’re looking for an effect without a cause. Maybe they’re only wounds to the body of humanity, which heals and goes on.