by John Allen Paulos

What can I say or recall about 9/11 that hasn’t been said or recalled at least 911 times? Not much. Despite the incessant and synecdochic repetition of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11 (or maybe because of it), I find it very hard to project myself back into the state of mind I had on that date. I know that my reaction wasn’t special – the usual combination of astonishment, fear, sadness, anxiety, and revulsion at the ubiquitous images of planes, buildings, and falling human beings. Relieved when we finally reached our children, who were in NY at the time, my wife and I spent the day in front of the TV. Our shell-shocked kids managed to get on an Amtrak train out of NY late on the night of the 11th, and I remember dazedly picking them up at the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia well after midnight. I also remember playing basketball with them sometime later and feeling queasy at every plane that passed over. And, yes, I felt very American.

What else did I feel? So much has transpired since 9/11, so much has been “justified” by it, that my memories of that week are fuzzy and inextricably colored by the Bush Administration’s policies and actions since then.

A recent poll suggests that one thing likely hasn’t changed over the past five years, and that is the strangely symmetric misconceptions about the instigation of the 9/11 attack. Just after September 11th, there were countless news stories about the “Arab street” believing that Israelis knocked down the World Trade Center or at least knew about the bombings beforehand. This belief was widely and rightfully mocked and decried. But the companion belief held by 70% of Americans shortly thereafter was that Saddam Hussein was behind the WTC bombings, and this belief was at least tacitly encouraged by many who knew better. Probably an unhealthy fraction of Arabs continues to believe the nonsense about Israeli involvement in 9/11. Even now almost half of all Americans, according to a Zogby poll taken over this past Labor Day weekend, believe there was a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks. And 65% of Republicans still believe this. Many Arabs have an excuse for their benighted beliefs. Most live in overtly repressive regimes with tightly controlled media. Americans don’t have this defense, at least to anything like the same degree.

The last paragraph illustrates the claim made above, namely that I can’t easily think about the nightmare of 9/11/01 without thinking about the ongoing disaster that persists on 9/11/05. Ah, but the memory of the rampant number madness that surfaced just after the attacks does manage to come to this mathematician’s mind through the miasma of the last five years unfiltered. It was a kind of madness that was clean and bracing. There were the myriad amateur numerologists online and elsewhere who began by pointing out that Sept. 11 is written 9/11, the telephone code for emergencies. Moreover, the sum of the digits in 9/11 (9 +1+1) is 11, Sept. 11 is the 254th day of the year, the sum of 2, 5, and 4 is 11, and after Sept. 11, there remain 111 days in the year. Stretching things even more, they noted that the twin towers of the WTC looked like the number 11, that the flight number of the first plane to hit the towers was 11, that various significant phrases, including “New York City,” “Afghanistan,” and “The Pentagon.” have 11 letters, and that many other attack-related words have 9 letters.

I also recall bogus Nostradamus quotes (as if the original version’s weren’t bogus enough). One of the most popular was “The big war will begin when the big city is burning on the 11th day of the 9th month that two metal birds would crash into two tall statues in the city and the world will end soon after.” Seemingly prescient, this verse was simply made up, supermarket tabloid style. But these numerological excrescences were nowhere near as pernicious as the unthinking responses (excepting Afghanistan) to the WTC attacks and the twisted rationale for our completely unwarranted and massively counter-productive invasion of Iraq.

No matter how you play with the numbers and banal coincidences, no matter how you reckon the intervening years or evaluate the risks of terrorism, September 11th, 2001, has to be counted as a bleak and heartbreaking day. Obviously much more can be, will be, and has been said, but I never liked such anniversary reminiscences (despite participating in one now). Why pay such homage to the calendar anyway?

And They Were Like Wild Beasts                        Is This What You Were Born For

Bury Them and Be Silent                                        It Will Be the Same

Francisco Goya y Lucientes, The Disasters of War. 1810-20. Published posthumously 1863.

Goya’s series of 85 etchings based on the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, speaks universally of the sheer senselessness of war, violence, violation, brutality, misery, devastation, and abandonment of humanity and moral values.

Do look at some of the others here and here.

Thanks to Heidi Katz & Carl Chiarenza for the suggestion.

This is possibly the most powerful photograph from 9/11/01 that I have seen.

Tom Junod in 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.

More here.

[Thanks to my friend Tom Jacobs, who posted this in 2004 here at 3QD as part of a characteristically brilliant post. Go read it.]

Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books:

By coincidence, the way in which what happens becomes the story of what happens—another way of putting this is to say, the way in which history becomes drama—had been much on my mind earlier that morning, because the play I was going to be teaching on Thursday that week was a work I typically teach when introducing students to the subject of Greek tragedy, Aeschylus’ Persians. First produced in the spring of 472 BC, Persians is noteworthy in the corpus of the thirty-two extant Greek tragedies in that it is the only classical Greek drama that dramatizes an actual historical event. That event was the improbable and glorious defeat, by a relatively tiny force of Greek citizen-soldiers, of the immense expeditionary force sent by the Persian monarch Xerxes to conquer Greece: the first global geopolitical conflict between East and West that the world would see.

This remarkable event had taken place a scant eight years before Aeschylus’ drama was staged, and it is tempting to wonder just what the Athenian audience was expecting, that spring day, as they walked in the pre-dawn light to the theater of Dionysus. The treatment of historical material on the tragic stage had, after all, brought disaster to playwrights in the past.

More here.

Will Self in the New York Times Book Review:

In Tom Stoppard’s play “Travesties,” a hostile inquisitor asks James Joyce what he did during the Great War, to which he replies: “I wrote ‘Ulysses.’ ” The same question might have elicited from Louis-Ferdinand Céline the answer: “I gathered the material for ‘Journey to the End of the Night.’ ” Yet on reading Céline’s notoriously emetic novel, you could be forgiven for wiping down your lapels and observing that not more than a twelfth of it is actually set in that hellish conflagration. Further, Céline’s war is not the familiar, muddy charnel house sketched by Remarque or the British war poets but a free-form affair, characterized by delirious mobility, the garish illumination of burning villages and chance encounters between renegade and cowardly combatants. It is a Goya etching animated in the style of a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

More here.

“The latest of Barry Unsworth’s vivid historical novels brings to life a golden age of Muslim-Christian partnership. Boyd Tonkin meets him at his home in Umbria.”

From The Independent:

With his ability to make remote events into distant mirrors for our times, and a gift for excitingly believable period drama that shuns the twin pitfalls of archaism and anachronism, Unsworth has no superior among historical novelists at work today. After such masterly recreations of a credible European past as Pascali’s Island and Stone Virgin, he shared the Booker Prize in 1992 (with Michael Ondaatje) for his sweeping slave-trade epic, Sacred Hunger. At the same time, he moved to this green and rolling patch of Italy with his Finnish wife, Aira.

More here.

“Tariq Ali admires Lawrence Wright’s reconstruction of the lives of the main characters in the 9/11 horror show, The Looming Tower.”

From The Guardian:

Forty years ago, in a scathing and prescient manifesto against consumer capitalism and celebrity culture entitled The Society of the Spectacle, the French situationist philosopher Guy Debord described everyday life as “a permanent opium war”. Modern capitalism was an “immense accumulation of spectacles” and what was once “truly lived has become mere representation”.

This is helpful. We can better understand the impact of the sensational counter-spectacle of 9/11, described by its principal inspirer as an “America struck by Almighty Allah in its vital organs”. Vital, of course, only because of their symbolic importance. Might Allah have been reading Debord? The events transformed Osama bin Laden into a global celebrity, a sinister Darth Vader figure who is an object of fascination for friend and enemy alike. Even though al-Qaida itself is clearly in decline, the world is preoccupied by wars and occupations old and new and a new triumvirate of Muslim leaders has emerged (Ahmadinejad in Iran, Nasrallah in Lebanon and Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq), while the global publishing empires continue to produce books that take us back to the events of 9/11. Another example, perhaps, of ways in which the military-ideological-cultural dominance of the United States can provincialise the rest of the world.

More here.

19 February

Yesterday (late afternoon) I went to my first Paris cocktail party, at Jean Wahl’s — in the disgusting company of Allan Bloom. Wahl [a philosopher] very much lived up to my expectations — a tiny slim birdlike old man with lank white hair and wide thin mouth, rather beautiful, like Jean-Louis Barrault [actor] will be at 65, but terribly distrait and unkempt. Baggy black suit with three large holes in the rear end through which you could see his (white) underwear, + he’d just come from a late afternoon lecture — on Claudel — at the Sorbonne. Has a tall handsome Tunisian wife (with a round face and tightly-drawn-back black hair) half his age, about 35-40 I’d guess, + three or four quite young children. Also there were Giorgio de Santillana [historian of science]; two Japanese artists; lean old ladies in fur hats; a man from Preuves; middle-sized children straight out of Balthus, in Mardi Gras costumes; a man who looked like Jean-Paul Sartre, only uglier, with a limp, and was Jean-Paul Sartre; and lots of other people whose names meant nothing to me. I talked to Wahl + de Santillana + (unavoidably) to Bloom. The apartment, it’s in the rue Peletier, is fantastic — all the walls are drawn + sketched + painted on by the children and by artist friends — there is dark carved North African furniture, ten thousand books, heavy tablecloths, flowers, paintings, toys, fruit — a rather beautiful disorder, I thought.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

A secret society of the créme de la créme of French mathematicians epitomized the shift in the mathematical zeitgeist of the early 20th century. Writing under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbakis, the collective set out in the 1930s to rewrite the history of mathematics in one grand mathematical treatise, and perhaps the most distinctive feature of their work was the absence of diagrams.

The Bourbakis espoused mathematical rationality and rigor. They believed the subjective and fallible visual sense was easily led astray, falling victim to impressionistic reasoning. In 1959, at a conference in France addressing the need to overhaul the French education system, Jean Dieudonné, a founding member of the Bourbakis and the group’s scribe, infamously proclaimed: “Down with Euclid! Death to Triangles!”

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Amid all the squabbles and revisions, it’s unsurprising that so many people who once cared passionately about Ground Zero have simply lost track of the developments there and have stopped caring. This summer, the success of the first movies about 9/11, and acclaim for a clutch of important novels dealing with the subject, showed that the public is still hungry to make sense of the tragedy and what it means for America. But they are no longer looking to architects, contractors, and developers for answers. By the end of the day on September 11, 2001, it was clear that the terrorists’ act had enormous symbolic power in the eyes of the world, and, in the months that followed, a consensus arose that whatever happened at Ground Zero should make a powerful symbolic statement of our own—of the values that America, and New York, stand for. Five years after the terrorist attacks, the saddest thing about all the many absurdities surrounding the rebuilding—the personal wrangles and group rivalries that have obscured any sense of commonality, the pious statements masking an utter lack of conviction, the maxed-out budgets and cut corners—is that they may say a lot more about us than we’d like to think.

more from The New Yorker here.

From The Washington Post:

HOTHOUSE KIDS: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child By Alissa Quart

We blast our developing fetuses with Mozart to give them a leg up in life. We park our 6-month-olds in front of “Baby Einstein” and “Brainy Baby” videos, whose bells and whistles are supposed to kick developing neurons into overdrive. We drag our toddlers to early-childhood “enrichment” classes and subject them to IQ tests as preschoolers to ensure that they get the best “gifted” education, if we’re lucky enough to live in a place that offers it or rich enough to pay for private schools and tutors.

Not only does this deprive kids of the proper fun of childhood, Quart argues, it can kill the drive to master something for its own sake. Too much early pressure can jeopardize kids’ ability to become successful, self-motivated adults. She offers up a number of cautionary tales, such as the one about the pianist whose father drove him so hard that he gave up the instrument by the time he was 7 years old. And then there’s the sad case of Brandenn Bremmer, a “profoundly gifted” 14-year-old who killed himself in March 2005. He apparently left no note to explain the act, but “the earth is not a happy place for PGs,” as a mother of gifted children put it.

More here.

From The Guardian:

So, to repeat, we respect Islam – the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history. But Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination. More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a tragic development in Islam’s story, and now in ours. Naturally we respect Islam. But we do not respect Islamism, just as we respect Muhammad and do not respect Muhammad Atta.

I will soon come to Donald Rumsfeld, the architect and guarantor of the hideous cataclysm in Iraq. Secretary Rumsfeld was unfairly ridiculed, some thought, for his haiku-like taxonomy of the terrorist threat: ‘The message is: there are known “knowns”. Like his habit of talking in ‘the third person passive once removed’, this is ‘very Rumsfeldian’. And Rumsfeld can be even more Rumsfeldian than that. According to Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, at a closed-door senatorial briefing in September 2002 (the idea was to sell regime-change in Iraq), Rumsfeld exasperated everyone present with a torrent of Rumsfeldisms, including the following strophe: ‘We know what we know, we know there are things we do not know, and we know there are things we know we don’t know we don’t know.’

More here.

Tomorrow, meaning Monday, will be completely devoted to a commemoration of the attacks of 9/11/01 at 3QD. Many of our regular columnists will be publishing pieces, as well as several new guest contributers. Look for them on Monday. Tell your friends. Alert the authorities.

The Situation in Iraq

It’s clear we’ve entered a new and critical phase in the Iraq war. We can still win this thing, but only if we carefully read the signals coming from the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions, and tailor a response that promotes our strategic interests.

This is where I fault the Bush administration. It seems the administration never understood the divergent interests of Iraq’s political players, and compounded that error by pursuing an ideological fantasy at odds with real-world geopolitics. It’s even possible to argue—and I stress “possible”—that the invasion itself was a monumental and unsalvageable foreign-policy catastrophe.

But whoa, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s still time to pull this one out. It just depends on those in power doing absolutely the right thing based on the information they have, taking into account our interests, and the interests of others in the region. I can’t put it any more clearly than that.

more from McSweeney’s here.

At Harry Kreisler’s Conversation with History, an interview with Ian Lustick (Real Player) on his new book Trapped in the War on Terror. From the transcipt.

[Kreisler] This sense of a threat that this war is addressing shows up in all the opinion polls when you look at the attentive elite and when you look at the broad population?

[Lustick] Yes. As a political scientist you don’t just look at public opinion, and you don’t just look at the answers that people give to opinion polls, because the answers that people give to opinion polls are very much driven by how the questions are framed. So, what social scientists do, what I like to do, is to look at the questions that are asked. If you look at the questions that are asked of elites, whether by the Pew Foundation or the American Foreign Policy Association [to see] what opinion leaders in the United States think, or if you look at the Harris polls and Gallup polls of mass opinion, what questions are asked and how are they asked? The type of question that’s always asked since 9/11 is, “Is the government prosecuting the War on Terror well, or not? Are we winning the War on Terror? Are we losing?” No one asks, “Should there be a War on Terror? Is there an enemy that could be fought effectively with a war?” No one asks that question publicly.

That’s the sign of how deeply embedded the expectations are, and if those deeply embedded expectations are wrong, the country has a hard time correcting its course. Here’s why: our government is built on a Madisonian system. Every interest group and every ambitious politician is supposed to go out in the arena and fight for everything they can get based on what’s good for them. Even if they talk about what’s good for the national interest, the way you get ahead in American politics, whether you’re George Bush or anyone else, is to fight for your constituency and build coalitions and fight for those constituencies. The Madisonian system assumes that the whole country will go in a direction that is the outcome of everyone doing that, so it will never lurch too far in one direction, because everyone has an interest that’s slightly different than mine, and we tend to cancel one another out.

NEW YORK—Days before the fifth anniversary of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center by terrorists, city officials gathered on the site where the Twin Towers once stood to dedicate the newly completed 9/11 Memorial Hole.

“From the wreckage and ashes of the World Trade Center, we have created a recess in the ground befitting the American spirit,” said New York Governor George Pataki from a cinderblock-and-plastic-bucket-supported plywood platform near the Hole’s precipice. “This vast chasm, dug at the very spot where the gleaming Twin Towers once rose to the sky, is a symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together.” . . .

“Let this circle of flowers—brief, beautiful, and too soon gone—symbolize the respect we have shown for the memories of those innocents who lost their lives on that sorrowful morning by creating this great hole,” said the Reverend Charles Bourne of Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Chapel as the flowers sank into the brown, debris-strewn runoff at the bottom of the cavity. “I firmly believe, as does every person here, that this deep, empty hole has come to stand not only for the New York City of today, but also for the transformation of the entire United States since Sept. 11, 2001.”

more from The Onion here.

Via Crooked Timber, which got it by way of Political Theory Daily Review, an essay by Timothy Sexton on Gang of Four (the punk band, not the uber-Maoist leaders of the Cultural Revolution) as Marxist cultural theory–and now I know where the fascination started, long ago when I was a teenager.

On their second album Solid Gold, the postpunk rock group Gang of Four openly assert their intention to approach pop music as critical theory with a song titled, appropriately enough, “Why Theory?” In answer to their own query of why critical theory should have a place in rock music, the band sings “Each day seems like a natural fact / And what we think changes how we act.” The critical theory that Gang of Four present in their music is a Marxist one centered on the premise that before revolt can take place, one must first penetrate through the consciousness that is determined by capitalistic ideology in order to understand why a revolution is necessary.

Gang of Four locate their Marxist theory in the Althusserian notion of expressing resistance through the contradictions inherent in the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) of the corporate-controlled rock music industry, and the way in which Gang of Four express their theory of Marxist thought is by inducing in the listener an alternative consciousness achieved through contradictions and disorientations that serve to mirror the very sense of disorientation and contradiction that capitalistic consciousness creates.

A Neanderthal wandering around Chelsea might feel at home at Michael Heizer’s show — but then again, he might not. The forms in Mr. Heizer’s eight “stone sculptures” will seem familiar to him, as they are near-exact reproductions of Stone Age tools, a range of Paleolithic and Neolithic implements from disparate parts of the world. But the function could not be more remote. Pointed up with precision from minute user-friendly originals, (made by and for the hand, the tools were an inch or so long) these have been blown up to as much as 16 feet, to confound the hardiest neanderthal.

“Prismatic Flake” (1989) is the longest at 197 inches; some kind of cutting device in its original usage, it is suspended on a steel base, an open cube with welded bracket supports. The sheer, elongated form has the graceful menace of a Samurai sword. Like the other tools, it is reconstructed in modified concrete around a hollow interior. Whatever one’s response to the works aesthetically, technically they are a tour de force.

more from artcritical here.

In The Nation, Liza Featherstone on the class action suit against Random House for James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

Back when watching Bill O’Reilly was still fun — before he became a creepy, obsessive nativist — I enjoyed a feature called “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.” (He’s become such a sour, humorless ideologue that this segment now falls flat.) Allow me to steal the concept for a moment. Today’s most ridiculous item, hands-down, is the report that readers are suing James Frey — the author of the (partly) invented rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces — and his publisher, Random House, for “defrauding” them. Even sillier, Random House has reached a settlement with these whiny opportunists, and any reader who can show proof of purchase will receive a refund for the full retail price of the book ($23.95 for the hardcover, $14.95 for the paperback). The plaintiffs’ lawyers who scored this one must be laughing their heads off and planning their next Ibiza vacation.

Talk about “frivolous lawsuits.” Stunts like this give a bad name to class action suits that seek to redress genuine wrongs, like race or sex discrimination in the workplace, or pollution. The action against Random House also reflects an absurdly consumerist attitude toward reading: when the book — or author — isn’t what you expected, demand your money back! Bob Woodward presents himself as a crusading muckraker — can I get a refund for the book in which he acts as a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration? And how about all those novels and memoirs that are billed by publishers as “poignant” and “evocative” when they’re actually tedious tripe? Can we send in our receipts for those, too?

Whenever Roald Dahl’s stories come into a conversation, someone will mention, with laughter and a kind of horrified amazement, “William and Mary”, in which the brain and single, lidless eye of a once-domineering, tobacco-hating husband are experimentally preserved with the help of an early life-support invention. Visiting William in the lab, his widow-wife, Mary, lights a cigarette and blows smoke into his furious eye. “I just can’t wait to get him home,” she says. Over the 45 years of his career as a writer, Dahl’s fictions changed in tone, subject and audience, but the points of view of both characters in “William and Mary” typify his approach. The writer’s stare is unblinking, and most of his tales are irritants, provocations. Fantastic as Grimm, neat as O Henry, heartless as Saki, they stick in the mind long after subtler ones have faded: incredible (literally), unforgettable and vengefully funny.

more from Guardian Books here.