Two years ago
I remember seeing this image in 2001 (September? October?) on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and being struck by how eloquent it was. It still strikes me that way. I’m glad this, the first organized tribute and memorial — the spontaneous ones, the ad hoc ones, had been posted on the walls of the city since the evening of 9/11 — moved from an artist’s rendering into reality. The web is full of links to Tribute in Light. For example, here’s a nice QT VR of the lights at the base. And here’s a Flash slide show. I saw a beam of light last night as I walked home from the dojo downtown. They weren’t supposed to turn on the Tribute in Light until tonight — and only for tonight — so I guess this was a test of the equipment that I happened to see by looking up and south on St. Marks. It was a surprising thing, a good thing, and perhaps the best that public art can be.
Such art may be more necessary in this city than elsewhere. 9/11 is woven into the fabric of daily existence here. Every day, on the way to work, I ride the 1 train, past temporary partition walls where a station used to be on the unusually long stretch between Chambers Street and Rector. There are snatches of conversation you overhear: some guy a coworker thought had died that day because he hadn’t heard from him in two years had actually made it out. A few weeks ago, the New York Times’s metro column had noted this phenomenon: 9/11 pops up casually in conversation here. And so we may need these tributes more than elsewhere.
But tributes are one thing — an echo of 9/10, perhaps — and the ongoing war is another. Christopher Hitchens notes that we shouldn’t commemorate 9/11, at least in the mawkish way we sometimes do:
The French had a saying during the period when the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were lost to them: “Always think of it. Never speak of it.” (Yes, Virginia, we can learn things from the French, even if not from Monsieur Chirac.)
This steely injunction is diluted by Ground Zero kitsch or by yellow-ribbon type events, which make the huge mistake of marking the event as a “tribute” of some sort to those who happened to die that day. One must be firm in insisting that these unfortunates, or rather their survivors, have no claim to ownership. They stand symbolically, as making the point that theocratic terrorism murders without distinction. But that’s it. The time to commemorate the fallen is, or always has been, after the war is over. This war has barely begun.
And, in this war, we’re perhaps at the end of the beginning, with a decades-long struggle in our future. We didn’t even realize that we’ve been at war for perhaps a decade already, until two years ago. The bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 was designed to create the same disaster, and we didn’t know it was an opening shot of this war. I remember reading the newspaper in disbelief during the trial: these people actually meant for their truck bomb to knock one tower into the other, killing tens of thousands. Why would anyone want to do this? We found out two years ago: they belong to a cult of death, where maximal slaughter is performed for its own sake. We must remember that if they could have killed more people, by whatever means, they would have. There is nothing holding them back.
The world has changed. The primary change has been that America has realized that it’s at war. Much has been accomplished. Much more still has to be done. The war will run hot and cold over the coming years, and will span administrations. Small wars will happen at the periphery of vision. Historical events will happen suddenly in the middle of ordinary life (what were you doing on 9/11?). This is because this isn’t a war of territory or possessions, where some sense of progress or regress can be sensed from lines on maps. It is instead a war of ideas, fought through the accumulation of impressions and thoughts acquired over generations, and sometimes supplemented by JDAM to remove the barriers to liberty. The battle lines of this war are in the hearts and minds of the people living in the only region of the world not yet touched by liberal democracy. These lines are invisible, and we cannot directly see where they are. We can only see the choices they make over time. Secular democracy or medieval theology? Liberalism or obscurantism? We will have won this war when a vast swathe of this planet adopt the former. We will remain at war, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, while the choice for many is the latter.