War Requiem

I read this article. Then I read it again.

Imagining 9/11

Roger Cohen - NY Times

. . . I remember that. One thing 9/11 teaches, a decade on, is that memory is treacherous. It is ever shifting and unscientific, close to imagination, as distinct from history as emotion from form.

How many times since that day have I listened to people around the world expound on their theory of what really happened, based on what they believe they saw. No conspiracy has proved too outlandish or too foul to entertain. I’ve had to restrain myself.

Tell me your 9/11 and I’ll tell you who you are.

Joseph Brodsky once wrote: “If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.” That’s not a bad definition of what the best journalism does: restore intimacy. The Portraits of Grief that appeared in The New York Times for months after the attack hit home because they undercut, through the particulars of single lives, Stalin’s formula: Murder en masse and loss becomes a mere statistic.

There followed the nation’s loss — of direction. The early 20th century was a period of giddy American expansion. The early 21st century has been a period of gathering American doubt. The American Century is behind us; this one still seeks its epithet among the emergent powers. What role the attack played in this reshaping of the globe, and what part of it is attributable to the inexorable currents of history, is an open question.

I’d say the power shift was inevitable but accelerated by 9/11 and by chance. Hanging chads contributed. The United States found itself with an accidental president. He took the nation into two wars without preparing the nation for sacrifice. His righteousness brooked no questioning. Irresponsibility was allied to conviction, a heinous marriage. Self-delusion is the mother of perdition. Wars killed. Wall Street made killings. “Whatever” became the watchword of maxed-out Americans; and in time things fell apart.

When they do, extreme ideologies thrive. There must be an enemy within. Scapegoats must be found, compromise crushed. The most devastating effect of 9/11 has been the polarization of America and the incubation of hatred.

The national interest has lost out to settling scores or whipping up bigotry. It is the manipulation of memory — not fit remembrance — that has turned an attack by a band of fanatical Muslims into grounds for the grotesque attempt to ban Shariah law in several U.S. states, and to scurrilous imaginings about President Obama and Islam.

There is a coda to this decade: Hope. Arabs have risen up by the hundreds of millions to claim a dignity and freedom long denied them. The kleptocratic tyrannies they lived under were production lines for the fanaticism behind 9/11; the hypocrisy of Western support for those tyrannies was a great propaganda tool for terrorists. As America has learned of late, change is hard. It will be uneven in the Arab world. But in this transformation a constructive answer to 9/11 is at last being traced.

***

Everybody remembers where they were 10 years ago today . . .

Today, we have the honor of a special invitation to attend an event to be held in Brussels commemorating the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U. S.

The program for the event reads . . .

Benjamin Britten composed his War Requiem in 1962 to commemorate the bombing of Coventry by the German Luftwaffe 20 years earlier. Its mood, though, is anything but vengeful: the sombre and sublime score combines with the Latin Requiem text harrowing verse by World War I poet Wilfred Owen to transcend historical circumstance and offer one of the most universal and poignant anti-war manifestos in the history of music. The Brussels Philharmonic conducted here by living legend Sir Neville Marriner, presents it on the 10th anniversary date of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The evening begins with an aperitief, ends with dinner, and I suspect the in-between will not soon be forgotten.