In tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, Blue Man Group has created an eloquent video. The usually explosive performance artists do not appear in it; there are no blue-painted heads in sight. Instead, pieces of white paper drift down in front of a pure black background as percussive music plays. All these papers were found in Brooklyn, where they floated across the river from the World Trade Center, and as they gently tumble from the top to the bottom of the screen some become legible: a sheet with scorched edges, filled with Japanese calligraphy; a letter that begins "Dear Recruiter," a cover sheet that says "Exhibit 13."

At other times a cascade of falling papers suggests birds or snowflakes or bodies. This video is everything the gargantuan television coverage coming in the next days is not: it is poetic, imagistic and simple; it draws viewers in, inviting us to reflect rather than telling us what to think; it is three and a half minutes long. (Called "Exhibit 13," the work will be played on the little-known music-video channel muchmusic usa, available on digital cable systems around the country.)
— Television's Special Day of Pain and Comfort, Caryn James

Watch Blue Man Group's "Exhibit 13"

Now more than ever
By Amy Reiter
September 11, 2002

Amy Reiter contemplates the fate of gossip in the wake of Sept. 11.

Last year, cultural observers declared irony dead... again. They must have willingly forgotten that irony and its other siblings (antisolemnity, sarcasm, escathology, et. al.) are like the cockroaches of the human spirit: once Armaggedon rolls over, the last man (or woman) on Earth will have a laugh at the expense of those he (or she) beat to the cosmic punchline.

And once the dust settles down, he/she will probably start talking (to him/herself?) about them behind their (no longer existant) backs. Gossip was also pronounced dead last year, but there might not be a better palliative to the feeling of communal fracture. It is under such light that Salon's Amy Reiter proposes gossip as a way to heal the scars opened last year.

Never did we need the reassurance of gossip -- the normalcy and the community -- more than we did this year. As we read about which stars refused to fly, which worried about their kids, which expressed renewed commitment to their city or our country, we found them echoing our own responses.

And as they moved on and began to babble the inanities we'd come to expect of many of them, we found that we, too, were able to begin to move on, and to heal.

September 11, 2002
by Michelle Cottle
September 11, 2002

One year later, the need to grieve—and to get on with life.

Did you attended a memorial service for last year's victims? Went to church and pray? Made like a couch potato and followed the whole day-long coverage on TV? Or just stayed indoors, hoping Tom Ridge's traffic light didn't jump from orange to, uh, neon pink?

However you marked the occassion, most people must have been relieved just to make it through this day. The New Republic's Cottle reflects on the conflicting impulses riding "a nation that [doesn't know] how to mourn. We are experts at rowdy celebration, righteous anger, and fierce patriotism. Confronted by disaster... we are most comfortable when in motion, responding to the emerging need with bravery and surprising selflessness. It is in the long, still aftermath of grief that we lose our way."

This is where we find ourselves today, in a little puddle of time where neither noise nor action feels quite right. And even as we try to come to terms with this day as a moment for looking back, we must also accept that it can never be wholly about the past. If this dark anniversary means something to us, it means just as much to those who supported and celebrated our slaughter. In their obsession with wounding America, Islamicists have displayed a fondness for cheap symbolism. Soaked in our blood, this date has assumed a terrible brilliance in their twisted psyches. And just as we have pondered how to commemorate (or aggressively ignore) this bitter day, our enemies have been searching for ways to infuse it with even more pain.

The sun will rise tomorrow, and with it the first year of many to come will have gone by. For many the grief might not be over, but time soothes, and time is all that lies ahead.

Culture Clash
The War Issue

Andrew Sullivan may have taken issue with Susan Sontag declaring the war on terrorism a metaphor, but the editors at PopPolitics couldn't agree more with her:

Conventional wisdom asserts that war stopped being a metaphor for the developed world the moment the World Trade Centers were hit. Well, conventional wisdom is wrong. While the 9/11 terrorist attacks certainly brought a moment of war reality, the representational response to the attacks -- Fox News wrapping itself in red, white and blue, musicians making patriotic benefit albums and tempering some of their usual cynicism, the incessant replaying of terrorist-themed movies on cable, etc., -- has quickly transformed this moment into a wide-ranging and ever-deepening metaphor for, among other things, the foundational values of America. The struggle for those values is being played out on the popular culture battlefield.

Perhaps Mr. Sullivan has more "random stupidity coming from... the left" to deal with than he expected. Let him sweat it for his next Salon paycheck.

PopPolitics will be publishing throughout the month "[attempting] to unravel the various metaphors of war... So be alert, lock and load your rhetorical weapons and enjoy."

Securing Freedom's Triumph
By George W. Bush
September 11, 2002

In great tragedy, we have also seen great opportunities.

Did the fact he is Bush fils helped him get his byline in here? Writing an Op-Ed for The New York Times, the Commander-in-Chief declares the future of America is so bright...

The terrible illumination of [the Sept. 11 attacks] has... brought new clarity to America's role in the world. In great tragedy, we have also seen great opportunities. We must have the wisdom and courage to seize these opportunities.

Bush being the US of A's CEO, he should have realized the hard sell is better done these days using PowerPoint-like bullets:

America's great opportunities

• Create a balance of world power that favors human freedom.

  "We will use our position of unparalleled strength and influence to build an atmosphere of international order and openness in which progress and liberty can flourish in many nations."

• Build a world where great powers cooperate in peace instead of continually prepare for war.

  "America needs partners to preserve the peace, and we will work with every nation that shares this noble goal."

• Extend the benefits of freedom and progress to nations that lack them.

  "Through the Millennium Challenge Account, the United States will deliver greater development assistance to poor nations that govern justly, invest in their people and encourage economic freedom. And we will continue to lead the world in efforts to reduce the terrible toll of AIDS and other infectious diseases."

Or you could always read the piece yourselves, but really, I might have saved you 3 minutes of geopolitcal arguments written just above Dick and Jane reader level.

George W. Bush is the 43rd president.

The Pentagon's Strangely Festive Ceremony
By David Plotz
September 11, 2002

Reporting from today's ceremony at the iconic building, Slate's Washington correspondent describes it as "less like a memorial than a celebration," with the victims of last year left lingering on the background at the festive event. While the tone at both Ground Zero and Pennsylvania was solemn, the military decided against mourning their dead and instead getting back to work at the tune of the "Let's roll" mantra. Plotz muses this is part of the secretive, we're-a-world-apart nature of the military.

...the Pentagon is a culture of privacy (and secrecy). It didn't want public mourning. It didn't welcome the public to today's ceremony: This was "Pentagon family" only, with soldiers barring the uninvited. The Pentagon is its own world, and outsiders are outsiders. Though I've never lived in New York, I have been to the World Trade Center half-a-dozen times. I have lived in Washington for 32 years, but I had never been to the Pentagon till I picked up my press badge yesterday. The building exists for its corps of workers—tens of thousands of them—but it intentionally ignores everyone else. National security requires that; the proud, wary military culture ensures that.