The tragic imagination

Five years ago today someone at work told me that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center in New York, and that the Pentagon was on fire. This had little emotional effect on me. My mind was elsewhere.

My wife Kay was in the hospital having been diagnosed with acute leukemia 11 days before. I had just come back to work, and only during the mornings. The rest of the day, and the nights, I was spending at the hospital at Kay's bedside. She had just started chemotherapy. There was still a chance that she could die very quickly from the progression of the disease, before the chemo began to work, assuming it was going to work at all. She could also die from the chemo itself. It was kind of touch and go.

So, as I said, my mind was elsewhere.

I excused myself from work and went to the hospital. Kay had a TV in her room, which was--uncharacteristically--on. The twin towers were burning. There was some confusion as to what was going on in Washington. The TV talkers were frantically excited. The green sticky plastic reclining chair I spent so many nights in was beside her bed and faced the TV set, and I sat down beside her and watched.

It seems like we watched a long time, Kay and I. Days, maybe. Like anyone and everyone else. The only difference was that Kay was dying, although she didn't die that day, or during the next few days--it was 8 1/2 months later--and we were both trying to adjust that that possibility. Actually, possibility was the wrong word--near certainty was more correct. I had been doing some reading, and discovered that the oncologist, whose social skills were inversely proportional to his expertise (which is not as bad as it sounds, social-skillwise, as we were to discover WRT his expertness), had perhaps failed to be convincing in claiming Kay had a 50/50 chance of eventual recovery, because, in her case, those were not the true odds. The odds, in reality, were much, much worse than that.

I guess he thought it would make us feel better to lie, and it would have, had he been a better liar. He would probably have been correct in saying that Kay had a 50/50 chance of surviving the week, and in fact Kay turned out to be in the lucky 50 percent, that week. But we didn't know that in advance.

Anyway, this sudden threat of death, which had come out of nowhere, gave us an odd detachment as we watched people jump out of windows, some of them holding hands. We held hands as we watched. I think we both felt like we had a kind of empathy that other people did not. On the other hand, we felt distant from it, with our own very real worries.

We watched the fall of the towers over and over--like everyone else. But it was not my main focus. It's in the background, for me, in my memory of that day, and the days afterwards.

Though we did talk about it. It wasn't that day itself, but it was very soon after, that Kay began to feel troubled about the talking heads' use of the word tragedy. I remember her saying something to the effect that it's not tragic for America. Not for us. It's only tragic for the people who jumped, and who died in the buildings, and for their families. For people who knew them. Not for the rest of us. You are watching this on TV, for God's sake.

I think she sense an orgy of false emotion being unleashed, or being deliberately stirred up. It was terribly real, and it was also a media event. It was all very confusing. Still is.

In retrospect, I think Kay was wrong, in a certain sense. It has turned out to be America's tragedy, exactly to the extent that genuine feelings of horror and empathy--which legitimately existed in the hearts of those of us who watched only on TV--have been contaminated, polluted in some way by the media, and most of all, of course, by the Bush administration.

Those people have stolen what was a real and terrible catastrophe for 3000 people and their families and friends, and turned it into a different and needless tragedy for all of us. For the world. And they have done it without thought or remorse or shame or regard for the payoff awaiting those who are thoughtless and remorseless that always comes at the end of a classical tragedy. And I fear the play is not over.

And we should remember Katrina, too

George Bush's scheduled grandstanding on this Sept.11 as we approach an important national election appears in stark contrast with his behavior on the same day five years ago, when, after being filmed in a state of paralysis clutching My Pet Goat with that deer-in-the-headlights look he gets when faced with crisis, whether it be a national tragedy or a hostile question in a press conference, he then disappeared for the rest of the day to hide in a hole in Nebraska.

Meanwhile, of course, Mayor Giuliani, a man whose political ideology is nearly as deplorable as George Bush's, showed himself to be a leader and a mensch--everything our so-called president is not. It serves to remind us that there are Republicans who, unlike our so-called president, deserve our respect even if we disagree with them. Let us hope that someday such Republicans take their party back from the Gadarene swine who have taken it over and who, unless stopped, are rushing as fast as they can to their destruction, which would be well-deserved if it did not include, as it unfortunately does, (sorry, the metaphor breaks down here) our own destruction as well.

The depths to which this beyond-belief and beneath-contempt psychopath and his co-conspirators have dragged our country is illustrated by watching a few minutes of Fox News, where the alternative-reality world of the Bush gang finds its truest expression--which I did recently by accident when it was unavoidable without impolitely demanding that my host turn off his tv.

On Fox News America learns, and a good part of America has apparently come to believe, that we are winning the war on terror, that George Bush is a personal friend of the weary and smoke-begrimed fireman Bush draped his arm over in a photo-op when he did show up belatedly at the scene of the tragedy five years ago, and that Democrats are responsible for 911 after all. These are but a few of the many other equally absurd notions that a regular viewer of Fox would imprint on. If you tell the public the world is flat long enough, I would guess that 24 percent would come to believe it, which I believe is the exact percentage of our people who strongly approve of our President. Watching Fox news is like taking LSD without joy or insight. A bad trip.

I mean, anyone with any remaining expectation of a molecule of civilized behavior from the Bush-Cheney-Rove bunch is going to be perpetually pole-axed with astonishment and disbelief at their effrontery. The balls-out cynicism of their using a national tragedy to gain political advantage is still hard to come to terms with.

But they have used it for five years, and plan to use it, as best I can tell, for the next fifty.

And they show every sign of lining up another war-of-convenience, this time against Iran and/or Syria, to take people's mind off the fact that our war in Iraq has turned to shit and the reasons for it have turned out to be fiction--not that watchers of Fox are aware of either fact.

And now, before our very eyes, ABC is turning into Fox News, with a planned 5-hour miniseries which is packaged as a documentary but which is full of events which never, in reality, happened. In the miniseries, Clinton is to blame for 911, having called off our on-the-ground forces at the point they were about to capture bin Laden.

This is complete fantasy, like the weapons of mass destruction. But millions of people who know nothing of actual history and who do not attend closely to the fine-print that might clue them in that the miniseries is no more a documentary than the west wing is, will come away believing it's true, and will, naturally, forget that someone actually did let bin Laden get away when we had forces in place who could have captured him at Tora Bora.

That someone was George Bush. Why would George Bush try to capture his greatest political benefactor, after all?