Bryan Joiner

(Eiffel Tower, obviously, on left. Ground Zero construction on right.)

Sometimes people are attracted to things that are not there. I learned this recently when my brother did a day stop in the city on his way from Arizona to Massachusetts. The only two places he wanted to see were Times Square and Ground Zero. I thought about this yesterday when I heard that there was a bomb scare near the Eiffel Tower. I am going to Paris tomorrow, and my first reaction was that I hope nothing happened. Then I had a thought that could be classified as natural or perverse, or both. Since I knew that the tower had been evacuated, I thought, if the Eiffel Tower is going to be destroyed, would I want to happen right before I got there? I would, after all, “get” to see something few people had seen before—just like the people who saw the complete Eiffel Tower for the very first time, before images of it were transmitted around the world, right? Well, no. It was a false equivalency, borne of my own attraction to the void. Something destroyed is not simply the negation of something created. It is more than that.

I moved to New York City for the first time exactly one week before the attacks, and remember looking up at the lighted towers in the cab ride back to Queens on the night of September 10^th, fresh of watching Monday Night Football at McFadden’s, or Bar None. Some East Village shithole. The Broncos pasted the Giants. I saw the towers briefly between buildings as we sped up 3^rd Avenue. In my newness, I hadn’t gotten a good glimpse of them yet, so I was craning my neck looking for the buildings I thought were odd, ugly and kind of funny, planted like a tuning fork at the bottom of the island.

Every year since then I have felt different on 9/11, but this is the year where everything felt different, like the city had finally, slowly, begun to turn the corner. The actual progress at the site itself has a lot to do with this. The site has remained a hole in the ground for far too long. We dishonored, well, everybody by prolonging a process that should have been completed long ago.

The protests surrounding the proposed Park51 Islamic Cultural Center two blocks from Ground Zero, also, showed that a corner has been turned. Those opposing the center have exercised their Constitutional right to turn Ground Zero into a place of hatred, which had not happened in the last eight years. Too scarred by the events of 9/11, people had too much dignity, fear, or complacency to do it. Even Rudy Giuliani, whose campaign platform was 9/11, all the time, didn’t do it. It would have been his right, but he didn’t exercise it.

Last year I moved to Brooklyn, where I’m a 15 minute walk from the Brooklyn Heights promenade. I go down there to read, run, and if I’m feeling like it, get Mister Softee cone. I’ve spent a lot of time sitting on the benches, looking at Lower Manhattan, New Jersey, Governor’s Island, the water, and other people.

I don’t know when the first time it hit me that the actually 9/11 attacks took place where I was looking—certainly I knew it, all of it, but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, I often forget and discount the fact I live within view of and in and around the only place in American soil that’s been host to an act foreign war in the last 50 years. This week, I watched two shows about the attacks: Inside 9/11 on the National Geographic Channel, and the MSNBC real-time rebroadcast of NBC’s coverage the events. Inside 9/11 pulled no punches, for which I’m grateful. The one thing you don’t often see is the images of people falling from the buildings, and that brings the memories, thoughts and emotions flooding back in a way that few things cannot. Those images are kept under wraps for to spare us the horrors of war, but I’m not sure that being spared is always entirely healthy.

Barely a year after 9/11, I was a reporter at the Queens Courier newspaper and I got an interesting story tip. An artist had been commissioned to put up an exhibit in downtown Jamaica, and her exhibit consisted of white silhouettes of falling bodies on the outward facing windows. They were representations of people falling from the World Trade Center. Some locals were angry that they had to walk past this display—angry enough to call me, anyway, and once I started making phone calls the dominoes started to fall toward the exhibit being closed. The exhibitors insisted that I talk with the artist, who was mortified. She was Israeli, and she had forgotten that Americans had taken for granted that wars do not happen on our soil, and that, beyond that, we had inured ourselves from thinking that they ever might—or, in the instance of 9/11, might happen again. She said, with an honest deference toward our way of life, that if she had known about it, she would never have put up the exhibit.

All of this leads up to a big question, which David Foster Wallace somewhat famously asked after 9/11:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

Let’s use the word “comfort” to jump to MSNBC’s real-time coverage of 9/11, because it was the moment that comfort, as we once knew it, ended. The idea of an attack on America was so unthinkable that Matt Lauer—understandably—continued to underplay what was happening on the very screen that he was watching, speculating idly and somewhat casually about what type of plane may have hit the first tower while people pretty obviously burned alive. When the second plane hit, he continued odd speculation about the type of plane before he said that we had to “start thinking about terrorism.” I do not mean to sound angry or critical of Lauer, because I’m not any more critical of him than I am I would be if I paid him any regular sort of attention whatsoever, which I avoid. What I mean to say is that we’re falling into a comfort again. For all our follies overseas, for the lives that have been lost, we’ve again lost the ability to see in front of our own faces. There are protests and shouting matches two blocks from 9/11. How quickly they forget.

This is, if you can see it, the beauty of America: no matter how many licks it’s taken, both in war and in the courtroom, the Constitution keeps on ticking. That’s also the folly of the anti-Park51 protesters. They’re missing the forest for the trees, and it’s easy to see why. They have the American flag wrapped tight around their faces, hoping to obscure the fact that to argue against free expression of religion is the most anti-American sentiment there is. The people who complain that liberals push their politics on the rest of the country have come to America’s most recent battlefield to fight a battle they have no hope of winning. They just want to be here, and to take pictures of the wreckage.

The problem is that wreckage breeds wreckage. I suspect if the WTC site had been completed or even near-completed, there wouldn’t be a furor over Park51. People are projecting their fears into the emptiness. France has enough problems of its own, with the passage of its absurd ban on burqas on the same day as the threat against the Eiffel Tower. Can you imagine if it lay in wreckage? It would hardly matter if it was the work of Muslim terrorists or not. Muslims in France would be screwed more than they already are. Terrorists exploit this emotional gap in otherwise reasonable people to sow fear and anger. Our responsibility to voids is not to fetishize them, but fill them as quickly as possible, and to remember that every action resonates far beyond our personal experiences. We are never alone, but the voids make us feel like we are.