September 11, 2003
WE CAN NEVER SEE IT OFTEN ENOUGH (via Buttercup)
The Falling Man (Tom Junod, September 2003, Esquire)
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else—something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears. [...]
THEY BEGAN JUMPING NOT LONG after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.
From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called "jumpers" or "the jumpers," as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, "We're in uncharted waters now." It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, "God! Save their souls! They're jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!" And it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was "like a movie," for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of—if these words can be applied to mass murder—mass suicide.
IN MOST AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS, the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again. Papers all over the country, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Denver Post, were forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man's death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography.
One of the many ways in which we are too decent a nation for our own good is the refusal to continue using the images of that day. I don't know about you, but every time some Leftist nitwit complains about the War on Terror or about Guantanamo or about John Ashcroft rounding up illegal aliens or about Zaccarias Moussaoiui, John Walker Lindh, and the "Lackawana 7" being victims, I want to strap that person in a chair, clip their eyes open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange and make them watch these poor benighted souls jumping to their deaths. There are thousands of people, dozens of organizations, and more than a few governments that would like nothing better than to repeat 9-11. Unless you're volunteering to be in the building when the next bomb hits, kindly shut the hell up and let the adults deal with the threat. And if you don't like the country we've become as we respond, the door swings both ways--though, curiously, no one ever seems to leave, they just keep coming. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 11, 2003 8:37 AM
Orrin:
What you said.
However, there are far too many on the Left (not in absolute numbers, perhaps, but in terms of influence--the PBS "mockumentary" was full of them) who see in 9/11 the "sad poetic justice" of the "symbols of globalization" being destroyed and burning paper raining down on the city "as if in mockery of the kind of business that was done at the Trade Center."
Who cares about the people, you see--it's the abstract symbolism that matters! The dialectic!
This is just one more manifestation of the dehumanizing--nay, anti-human--mindset of those who claim to be our betters.
Posted by: Mike Morley at September 11, 2003 8:53 AMWhat strikes me is that this image did not at the time and still would not penetrate the defenses of the anti-war left. I get the impression that Sept. 11th was in no way real to the left, that it represented no threat to them personally. I just read Jonathan Schell's article in which he blithely hopes that we lose the war. He can only say that if he thinks that losing will have no consequences for his life. He has absolute, but unconscious faith in American security, not realizing or caring to realize how that security was created or is maintained. It is a massive failure of imagination.
It is also childish, reminding me of the teenager who despises his father for being a VP at a large capitalist corporation, all the while insisting on enjoying the lifestyle that that job makes possible for him.
Posted by: L. Rogers at September 11, 2003 9:58 AML. Rogers said everything I wanted to say, with more eloquence.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at September 11, 2003 10:38 AML. Rogers - Yes, but the failure is not due to lack of imagination, but too much and too undisciplined an imagination.
They live in a fantasy world, in which they gloriously fight a running battle against their evil enemies, rich Republicans and conservative Christians. To allow foreigners into the fantasy, or to unite with their fellow Americans against foreigners, would disrupt the fantasy. Islamofascist enemies and Republican comrades don't fit the script, therefore they have to be read out of reality.
Posted by: pj at September 11, 2003 11:45 AMpj:
I agree with you about the fantasy world of the left; however, there is no attempt to understand the threat or imagine what could happen if America fails to act against it. It all seems so academic to them.
I think this is another effect of the Vietnam War. After we lost that one, American life did not change materially. People went to their jobs, they raised their families, they felt secure except from rising crime, etc.
Probably, Schell unconsciously believes that the loss of the War on Terror will be the same. He will still be able to "do lunch" with his distinguished colleagues, travel to international leftie conferences and gloat that Bush had been humiliated. He does not really imagine that his own life could be affected. If he did, he could not write the way he does.
No one who had lived through a real loss, such as the Japanese or Germans endured, could so cavalierly hope that one's own nation lose a war. That is why the anti-war left's position is so fundamentally unserious. They just don't get it. They are blinded by ideology.
Posted by: L. Rogers at September 11, 2003 12:52 PMIt always comes back to the concept of man's fall from grace.
The Left believe that people are inherently good and that it is our own actions that are to blame. If we simply give other people what they want and affirm whatever beliefs or deviancies they have, they will do the same for us.
This is a Utopian view that obviously clashes with the ground truth, but is clung to and supported by its adherents. I wonder how many 9-11's it will take before they realize the truth.
Posted by: The Other Brother at September 11, 2003 1:01 PMI'm not sure it reduces to that, Stephen. For instance, I think they're very conscious of their own greed, but they want to put a fig leaf over it and believe themselves superior to others; so they accuse Republicans of greed and justify their own takings (through taxes and legal privileges) as justified restitution for Republican greed. Similarly, when blacks respond to the NAACP's ad arguing that George Bush supported the dragging of James Byrd behind a pickup by giving 93% of their votes to Democrats, it's because they believe Republicans are likely to commit murder. They fear our depravity.
What attracts the left to government power is, in part, great fear of the actions private persons will take if unrestrained by government; and this fear is enhanced by their introspective knowledge of what they themselves are capable of.
So I don't think it's Utopianism which motivates most of the left. I think it's more often an extreme Hobbesianism that sees people as depraved and hopes an authoritarian government can preserve order.
L. Rogers - I agree.
Posted by: pj at September 11, 2003 1:22 PMI haved saved this picture and posted it as my computer wallpaper on both anniversaries so I will never forget and never forgive.
Posted by: Rick T. at September 11, 2003 1:26 PML.R. -
Certainly, we convinced ourselves we had lost the Vietnam war, and allowed Vietnam to fall. Viewed as a campaign of attrition in the cold war, or even from a strictly military viewpoint, it is not at all clear that Vietnam was a US defeat. If it had been from those standpoints as well, life in the US and world may well have changed.
Which doesn't actually contradict your point... but I must say, I really wanted to reach through my radio this morning and grab by the lapels the US newsman who was explaining how Iraq was just like Vietnam.
Posted by: Mike Earl at September 11, 2003 3:41 PML.R.'s hits the mark with his comments about Schell, who was signing pretty much the same song when he went after Ronald Reagan's nuclear weapons build-up in the pages of The New Yorker during the 1980s. People like that -- if they can imagine themselves in those towers or on board those hijacked airliners at all -- have the ability to allow their established world view to wipe away any possible connection with those 3,000 victims, since to do that would mean changing their entire mindset. Whatever empathy they have for the victims is coupled with the idea that it's the U.S.'s fault in general and Bush's in particular that 9-11 occured in the first place.
They really think this could never happen to them, unless their domestic enemies (Bush for now, Reagan 20 years ago) were either direcdtly to blame due to their policies or even deliberately caused it. They're also certain in the knowledge that if their own beliefs were put into practice, al Qaida, Saddam, Kim Il Jong and all the other threats would disappear, because they no longer would be suffering under the yoke of the United States' hubris and/or global imperialism.
Intellegence and common sense often are not the same thing. The people who try to shoehorn their Vietnam-era beliefs into a post-9/11 world may have a lot of the former, but very little of the latter.
Posted by: John at September 11, 2003 4:00 PMLooking at that picture is horrifying. Remembering back to the people jumping from the buildings that day makes me sick to my stomach. Reading your rant about "Leftist nitwits" at the end though is just about as disturbing.
I generally just lurk here to see how the "other half" lives, but I had to respond to your unwarranted implication that those of us who are troubled by an unjust war, or question the methods being employed in the "war on terrorism" are somehow naive, or even worse, anti-American. I love this country too. Your vision of America is no more valid than mine. The idea of just leaving because I don't like the direction my country is taking is simple-minded and offensive.
In general I have found the commentary on this blog to be reasonably civil although diametrically opposed to most everything I believe in. Those comments were cruel and stupid.
Posted by: BJ at September 11, 2003 5:56 PMBJ:
Sorry, but go watch a Democratic presidential debate and tell me about getting sick to your stomach. When Democrats get us mired in stupid wars, Republicans stay in the fight while the Left bails (a la Vietnam). It's not too much to ask that the Left support a war once we're in the middle of it, instead of rooting for quagmires.
Posted by: oj at September 11, 2003 6:00 PMOr actually hoping we lose:
http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=16720
Posted by: oj at September 11, 2003 6:07 PMI generally just lurk here to see how the "other half" lives, but I had to respond to your unwarranted implication that those of us who are troubled by an unjust war, or question the methods being employed in the "war on terrorism" are somehow naive, or even worse, anti-American. I love this country too. Your vision of America is no more valid than mine. The idea of just leaving because I don't like the direction my country is taking is simple-minded and offensive.
In general I have found the commentary on this blog to be reasonably civil although diametrically opposed to most everything I believe in. Those comments were cruel and stupid.
When your actions, individually and collectively, hurt the morale of our troops engaged in deadly combat during our time of war, give succor to our enemies' cause, stand for a dictator like Hussein as human shields and garnering thanks and recognition from one of the world's most notorious terrorists, then the least you can expect is verbal abuse. Your right to dissent does not trump our national security and your shameful actions are as thoughtless as the last time your ilk stained our Nation, during the Vietnam War.
Posted by: Ransom Danegeld at September 11, 2003 6:43 PMI tend to think the appeasers, which is what they are, have both too much and too little imagination.
During the '30s, the appeasers were greatly influenced by imaginary visions of London aflame, while they were unable to imagine what it was like to be a Jew in Germany.
Phil Ochs once said something along the lines of, "Here's to liberals -- 10 degrees to the left of center most of the time, 10 degrees to the right when it affects them personally."
One thing Orrin and I agree on is the irrationality of much behavior. After all, when the housewife shells out $1.50 for the latest issue of Weekly World News with the cover promising miracle garlic-and-vinegar cures (for the 100th time), is she expecting to get $1.50 worth of medical advice this time?
(That's my inoffensive example; for another audience I would have used going to Confession.)
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 11, 2003 7:01 PMYour vision of America is no more valid than mine.
One of the great advantages of conservatism is that we don't concede this.
Harry -- As far as I can tell, confession is perfectly effective.
Posted by: David Cohen at September 11, 2003 7:16 PMIf I were speaking to Jacob right now,
I would say,
I've always loved the story of your ladder,
with the angels going up and down,
Once, when I was a child, I even dreamed I saw it.
I was in a field, and the clouds parted, and there it was.
And it looked like a long crowded highway,
the red lights were the angels going up
and the white lights were the angels going down.
But it was only a dream.
But last week, I wasn't dreaming, and I saw it.
I saw your ladder, its silver poles, and rungs of glass,
and I saw the angels falling down,
and they were so fast
fleeting,
and they were so beautiful … and terrible.
and I saw in a cloud of white and gray,
thousands of angels going up, up, up...
And if I could, I would ask Jacob
if he wishes he could forget the vision of his ladder,
the way I wish I could forget mine. (Zoe Klein)
Does everybody in the top floors of the Sears Tower or Empire State Building have a hang glider?