When I was 9, my grandfather woke the house up with his death-knell voice. It's an ominous, booming newscaster's voice — he used to be a weatherman during the Japanese Occupation, you see. "America is getting bombed" he said, wait, no, he proclaimed. On hindsight, what is now interesting to me is how I failed to respond with the horror that, say, Jennifer Aniston must have had as she clutched her tiny little heart and brushed her Rachel-era hair off her moist disbelieving cheeks while waking up to the news on CNN. I filed this piece of information in the part of my brain where phrases like "Gaza is getting bombed", "East Timor is getting bombed" and "Afghanistan is getting bombed" resided amongst other sinister half-truths. I guess growing up around one of the gray-haired horsemen of the end times had rendered me utterly indifferent to the suffering of others. Or perhaps I had perceived the suffering of others the way I perceived the suffering of Cinderella when her coach turned back into a pumpkin and she had to walk all the way home in uncomfortable peasant footwear. Whatevs, I was only 9. My only impression of that day was how black the front page was and how it inconveniently stained my fingers before I left for school.
The visual magnificence and scale of the horror will probably remain unmatched for a long time, but then again I may be speaking with the hubris of a stable present. Will anything come close to even echo the extent of tragedy, and so clearly and shatteringly demarcate an era in history with a single event? Many disasters remain a national or regional tragedy. I'm thinking of SARS or the Bali Bombings or The Tsunami. They don't really result in a pivotal change in anything other than an increased usage of words like "resilience", "vigilant" and "secure". This tragedy, on the other hand, proclaimed the end of the Happy Nineties, cast a shadow over the entire idea of being Muslim (or Jew, or Christian, or adopting any sort of religious identity for that matter), opened up a Pandora's Box of other issues that would be boring to talk about right now, and became a sort of irreducible proposition that provided the reasons for the shape of the geopolitical and economic world today. (Also, people just can't stop talking about it! But this is a consequence of its far-reaching effects, that a person in Asia, in Singapore, should feel affected by it. And not just affected by it, but self-reflexively questioning his own secondhand experience of the event.)
A decade has passed and I am looking back at this with a sense of the Kantian Sublime — that no matter how overwhelming a thing can be, there is a pleasure to be located within the idea that there is something that also overwhelms that overwhelming thing. What is overwhelming is again overwhelmed. (Very, very loosely. Sorry Mister Kant!) Yes, viewing pictures of the towers crumbling, and people jumping off the buildings is overwhelming and rightly so, but watching the two beams of light every night at Ground Zero overwhelms that original tragedy because it unmasks the horror and reveals it to be a triumph of the human spirit at its prenatal stage.
Somehow I don't feel comfortable with leaving it at that. I think the idea is that continued discussion and thought on this is the point of the triumph. To be content with calling it a "triumph, The End" is to miss the point of the sublime triumph over the tragedy. What did 9/11 (or in my circumstance 12/9) teach us? Is it debasing to call this a teachable moment, or is it contributive to the sense of triumph? And why "sense" of triumph?
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