I fell into reading some more of the National Review Online as I perused John Derbyshire’s columns. One of them led me to this piece by Jed Babbin on “The American Mood.” His basic argument is that our enemies and our friends have misjudged us, as they so often do, and if another terrorist attack should happen our reaction will make the war on terrorism to date look like a pleasent negotiating round at some safe location where diplomats meet. The money quote is:
These nations also need to realize that our impatience will boil over if there is another 9⁄11. Many of them will refuse to believe it, but in many ways we under-reacted to 9⁄11. If there is another, no American president will have the luxury of a patient investigation about how it happened. The Afghanistan campaign will seem like Sunday school to whomever had harbored or helped the perpetrators. And those nations — again, Saudi Arabia is the best example — who talk peace but pay for terror may not survive.
But even more interesting to my mind is the wonderful revelation that country music is a better guide to our mood, in the heartland of America, than any column Maureen Dowd might pen for the New York Times.
This new American mood is something I haven’t experienced before. Out in Real America — where Maureen Dowd is unread, CNN unwatched, and the Dixie Chicks held to a higher standard of loyalty than Democratic presidential wannabes — Americans are thinking in muscular terms. You don’t read it on the op-ed pages, or see it on the network news. Some of it seeps into talk radio. But the one place you hear it loud and clear is in country music. The world would be a better place if Ayatollah Khamenei, Bashar Assad, Kim Jong-il, and their ilk tuned in. They might begin to understand.
I’m not sure either Dowd or Willie Nelson speak better for the ‘mass’ of Americans, but such is the art of the opinion column. One must look somewhere for a fact to infer the ‘mood of the nation.’ I personally don’t pay much attention to country music but I don’t discount that there are some people very angry about 9-11; people who think we’ve been too soft on the terrorists. And I can see where they are coming from. Thinking to myself what I would do if another major terrorist attack were to occur I try to imagine multiplying the whole-body despair I felt on that day two years ago as I watched the towers fall. I didn’t see the live pictures because I was at work. Instead I remember the photographs that were posted to the internet.
And I remember reading the weblog entries. If another attack comes I can imagine myself joining the fight in some way more direct than my continued spending as a consumer has helped America to date.
But even the horrors of photographs can be selectively remembered and elided. I read about the people jumping from the buildings after the attacks but when I got home to see the actual television images of the new war I was surprised to see no pictures of falling bodies. As Tom Junod writes in a recent Esquire article “The Falling Man,” within hours after and during the event itself the media and ourselves were already eliding the memory of the people who jumped to their death from a situation all of us could too easily imagine. What would we have done standing 70 or 80 floors above the ground, leaning out of a broken window trying to get a breath of fresh air as smoke and fire burned hotter and hotter at our backs. It’s easy to say we would never give up. In fact it’s necessary to say such things sometimes in order to go on living, else the despair will swallow us whole. Some images just cut to close to the bone.
But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after 9:41 a.m., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky—falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soldiers everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.
