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Dick Cavett doesn't think much of all this 9/11 brouhaha in the media, and I am inclined to agree, though this is the tenth-year anniversay, which might call for greater notice. One does hope that we might cool it when it comes to the 11th, 12th year and so on, maybe doing something bigger for the 20th year. However, if this is the pattern, maybe we should follow it with the other big historical events, such as winning World War II or getting out of Vietnam, or when the Constitution was ratified, though after a hundred years, I can see cooling it down to 25-year celebrations.
Let more of our history have such vitality in our cultural memory. 9/11 was historic and it's not exactly dead history, I understand, but it can seem odd that we should be so focused on it, as though this macabre case of mass murder is what most defines us as a people and a culture, and I hope that's not true. The more likely outcome, of course, is that we will grow tired of 9/11 eventually and then just forget about it, like everything else.
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Have you, perchance, decided — as I have — not to spend the weekend re-wallowing in 9/11 with the media? Aside from allowing Saint Rudolph, former tenant of Gracie Mansion, to trumpet once again his self-inflated heroism on that nightmare day, the worst feature of this relentlessly repeated carnival of bitter sights and memories is that it glamorizes the terrorists.
How they must enjoy tuning into our festival of their spectacular accomplishments, cheering when the second plane hits and high-fiving when the falling towers are given full-color international showcasing for the tenth time.
Who wants this? Surveys show people want to forget it, or at least not have it thrust down their throats from all over the dial annually. It can’t have to do with that nauseating buzz-word “closure.” There is no closure to great tragedies. Ask the woman on a call-in show who said how she resents all this ballyhooing every year of the worst day of her life: “My mother died there that day. I’m forced to go through her funeral again every year.”
-- Dick Cavett at The New York Times
Let more of our history have such vitality in our cultural memory. 9/11 was historic and it's not exactly dead history, I understand, but it can seem odd that we should be so focused on it, as though this macabre case of mass murder is what most defines us as a people and a culture, and I hope that's not true. The more likely outcome, of course, is that we will grow tired of 9/11 eventually and then just forget about it, like everything else.
_ _ _
Have you, perchance, decided — as I have — not to spend the weekend re-wallowing in 9/11 with the media? Aside from allowing Saint Rudolph, former tenant of Gracie Mansion, to trumpet once again his self-inflated heroism on that nightmare day, the worst feature of this relentlessly repeated carnival of bitter sights and memories is that it glamorizes the terrorists.
How they must enjoy tuning into our festival of their spectacular accomplishments, cheering when the second plane hits and high-fiving when the falling towers are given full-color international showcasing for the tenth time.
Who wants this? Surveys show people want to forget it, or at least not have it thrust down their throats from all over the dial annually. It can’t have to do with that nauseating buzz-word “closure.” There is no closure to great tragedies. Ask the woman on a call-in show who said how she resents all this ballyhooing every year of the worst day of her life: “My mother died there that day. I’m forced to go through her funeral again every year.”
-- Dick Cavett at The New York Times
