A Quiet Place
And then the world held its breath.
What to discuss, here in this quiet place between horrors? Last week's nightmarish attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. and the inevitable "war on terrorism" to come (which could take hours, weeks, months, or even years), will someday serve as bookends to this time, when not much seems to be happening, and yet, of course, the wheels are grinding ever onward toward...what?
We face an uncertain future, still dazed by the events of the immediate past. I think most of us, at this point, have tried to return our personal lives to some semblance of normalcy. It is, of course, a normalcy of the most temporary nature. Those of us not directly affected by last week's events, which is of course most of us, were unable to go about our normal business for most of last week. We stopped listening to music, we stopped crusing eBay for bargains, we stopped reading comic books or watching baseball games. Instead, we stayed close to our radios, televisions and computers, riveted and stunned by each new nugget of information.
It occurred to me late Wednesday or early Thursday of last week that the constant repetition of videotape of the destruction in New York and Washington had long since ceased to be informational in nature, and had descended to the definition of pornography:
"Art that moves you to desire is pornography," said Joseph Campbell. Without a doubt, the images of the World Trade Center's destruction are an artform unto themselves. And I think we all know what the desire they inspire is: A desire to revenge ourselves on the instigators of this monumental outrage. To avenge the men, women and children whose lives were brutally ended in the name of...well, we really don't know for sure, yet, do we? Those who want to move us to war (something I am not necessarily opposed to, by the way) are happy to point the finger at Osama bin Laden in specific and religious extremists in general, but until we know for sure, how can anyone really know what to think? And ironic, of course, that last week's horrors are being explained to us (in spirit, although not in so many words, to be certain) as a faith-based initiative.
Does anyone really doubt that videotapes of last week's events won't soon be for sale at your local Wal-Mart? Sure, they'll be slugged "A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this videotape will go toward relief efforts" blah blah blah, but you and I know that a good portion of those tapes will go to people with the Die Hard Trilogy proudly on the top of their entertainment center and the vast majority of profits will benefit no one who really needs relief (and yes, I own the first two Die Hard movies on VHS). Sure, it's cynical, but I always have been. The attempts by mainstream news organizations to give a name and theme to the coming war have done nothing to relieve my cynicism, and I sigh and regret, deeply, that the media could really only deliver straight information without the usual bullshit for about the first 36 to 48 hours after the destruction began.
So, here we are, in the middle. The middle of...something. The quiet eye in the center of the storm.
I bought some comic books last week. I bought The Authority, Transmetropolitan, Magic Pickle, Haw!, Atlas, and something called Screaming Kitty. None of them were bad reads, but none of them took me out of this strange middle place and to that other place comics usually do, a place of timeless peace and (sometimes) boundless delight.
None of them blew my mind enough to think they were worth writing much about. Even if I felt like it, chances are you aren't terribly interested in what I have to say about them. Yes, Transmet is getting good again. Yes, Ivan Brunetti is a sick fuck. Yawn.
And yet, I keep writing. My fellow Galaxy contributors keep contributing. The impulse is to say "We're Americans, it's what we do," but that strikes me as a bit jingoistic and trite. I'm hearing a lot of similar sentiment in the mainstream news broacasts, but the fact is, it's humans that keep on going. Hell, even limiting it to homo sapiens strikes me as anthropocentric. Even worms regrow as best they can and keep on keepin' on when sliced in half.
Life persists. We are alive, and we persist. We "Keep on Truckin'," as R. Crumb once sarcastically wrote.
As long as we are alive, you and I, I imagine we will remember these days. In the (hopefully likely) event that someday our lives really return to normal (whatever that means anymore), we won't ever forget the day history slammed straight into our collective consciousness at 600 miles an hour, killing thousands of Americans, and probably dooming thousands more people in a foreign country. That death is to rain down on innocents abroad seems inevitable. It's only a matter of when, and who.
One thing is clear, though, as we ponder the likely fate of those innocents. They will die in reaction to the death of American innocents on 11 September 2001.
A lot of innocent people have died, and more certainly will. The only remaining question, it seems, is when will the guilty begin to suffer?