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Dear Matt, I’ve been seeing this woman for a couple months now. She’s great except for one problem: she’s completely obsessed with 9/11. She watches all the documentaries, pores over articles and pictures, talks incessantly about the memorial, and has a commemorative box set of silver coins she purchased from a late-night TV channel. She wasn’t even there when it happened. She’s from Albuquerque. As the 10-year anniversary approaches, I’m wondering if it also has to be our 3-month (and final) anniversary. Is there any way she can Never Forget while I simply Tune Out? How can I make this relationship work? — Thanks, Richard Jance
I sympathize with your lady friend. September 11 affected each of us in different and strange ways. As I wrote in one of the many poems on the subject that poured out of me in a fever in the days that followed, so that I, like so many others, could internalize this senseless tragedy in order to make it about me:
Nine-one-one
Was no nine-one-fun
For months afterwards, all I could do was watch news coverage around the clock, while collecting 9/11 commemorative dolls — Bernie Kerik being my favorite. Combing his walrus moustache brought calm in the face of the New Uncertainty. The party was over. After years of decadence and rampant materialism and Internet IPO gluttony, that fateful day in many ways ended the innocence that we’d all been guilty of, giving way to an illusion-shattering solemnity and a creeping sense of vulnerability. America realized she was no longer an impregnable fortress. We now saw that any ill-intentioned imposter from some distant shore could slime his way in (Mohammad Atta, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Piers Morgan), thus changing our way of life forever.
No longer were Muslims considered benign figures, admired for their plaintive folk singing (Cat “Yusuf Islam” Stevens) or for their awesome sky hooks (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). They came to be feared, as we were now locked with their hardliners in a clash of civilizations, since our religions of peace seemed unlike theirs, as Presbyterians don’t evangelize with suicide bombs. Sometimes, it was hard to tell who was on which side, even amongst our so-called own. As my good friend Greg Gutfeld once editorialized on the Huffington Post: “Last night, Scott {Gutfeld’s flight attendant roommate} played me a song called ‘9/11 is a Joke,’ by a rap band called Public Enemy. I don’t know about you, but I don’t find terrorism of any kind to be ‘a joke.’”
A reader named Tom responded that perhaps Gutfeld was being ironical, but the song was released long before the attacks, and was actually a protest song about the slow response time of emergency personnel in black neighborhoods after 9-1-1 is called. But Gutfeld wasn’t being ironic — irony had died. So Gutfeld vigilantly thundered, “Thanks Tom, but the fact that the song was released long before September 11, 2001, makes it even more chilling, for it suggests perhaps that there was prior knowledge of the terrorist attack.” For a while, that’s the way it went: Greg vs. Tom. Jesus vs. Muhammad. Brother vs. brother. We no longer knew who we were. We just knew that we’d never be the same again.
That lasted until about 2002. We’re back to normal, now — with the exception of your girlfriend. She’s an odd duck. But while she’s busy collecting 9/11 cigarette lighters, she’s probably failed to notice that she’s several 9/11’s behind. From protracted unwinnable wars, to our never-ending recession, to our future-threatening debt crisis, practically every day these days brings newer, lesser 9/11s, as anyone who has watched a Ke$ha video can attest.
I’m not minimizing what happened. It was a colossal horror show, and I saw the heartbreaking toll firsthand, as I reported here and here. But before you pack it in, try to make your girlfriend understand that there’s no percentage in getting permanently mired in past misery when there are so many new miseries to be endured. Variety is the spice of life. That’s the thing about tragedies — you don’t have to fixate on any one of them for too long. They’re pretty good about making more.
